Our long national nightmare of not seeing justice done in one high-profile crime is over! OJ Simpson was just sentenced, and now journalists across the nation are trying to figure out all the fancy law talk to see just how much time OJ will spend in jail. The judge was very disappointed in the Juice, even though he was very very sorry, and OJ will be in jail for 5 6 years before he can make parole. The full sentence is 15, we think, though hopefully the AP or someone will let us correct that soon (oh hey). This means the world will finally get closure on a 14-year-old circus. We finally get to see OJ in prison! We never thought we'd see the day!

Former Buffalo Bills star running back O.J. Simpson has been out of the spotlight since retiring from football in 1979 (he's been playing a lot of golf), but fans of "The Juice" will be saddened to hear that he's run afoul of the law. Apparently Simpson was involved in a bit of armed robbery last year, taking back his own memorabilia from some questionable characters with the help of his trusty gun. So. He's been convicted of criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, robbery, and using a deadly weapon. It's sentencing day! Simpson faces between 6 years and life in prison. Click for video of him being very, very sorry. We'll let you know what the sentence is shortly.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has caught up with William "Boots" Del Biaggio, a venture capitalist once dubbed a "young financial god," on charges of defrauding clients and banks out of $65 million — in part so he could buy a sports team.

Good news for megayacht owners terrified to sail the seas this holiday season for fear of being attacked by rogue pirates. A company called Blackwater Worldwide says it has a 183-foot "security vessel" at the ready for any interested boatowners. The former Navy ship (left) comes with a helicopter, crew of 15, and three "commando-style inflatable boats," and has been used to protect cargo ships up until now. But we're pretty sure Blackwater will happily change course and link up Ron Perelman's Ultima III off the coast of St. Barts if he's interested. [NYP, previously]

The family of Jdimytai Damour, the Wal-Mart worker who was trampled to death at a Long Island store by a Black Friday mob hungry for discounts at any cost, has filed a lawsuit holding the company responsible for his death. And they're not just blaming the store's lack of security that morning; they're blaming Wal-Mart's ad campaign for turning sedate Long Islanders into a callous capitalist stampede of death:

Nearly 200 people died in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, but amid economic chaos and a presidential transition, the story is bound to soon fall off the front pages of American newspapers. How to keep readers interested? By helping them somehow relate to a despicable band of terrorists born in a foreign land and fervently devoted to an unfamiliar religion. Preferably in a way that simultaneously makes the perpetrators seem even more crazed an awful. Enter wild allegations of cocaine and LSD use, via the British press!

We can all agree that East African pirates are the new role models in a world with few economic options. But even though they have their own PR man, their wanton buccaneering is starting to give them image problems in some quarters. The media loves them, but world governments would like to blow them out of the water. Don't underestimate that old pirate savvy, though. They're going populist!

Eric Burns, NOT pictured, plays dreamy police officers on soap operas like All My Children and As The World Turns. To unwind, he sometimes likes to spend some time relaxing at a club — say, after a few cognacs and four shots of vodka, as was apparently the case one night in August at Club Mansion. Then, around 4:50 am (!), some real cops came along and things took a decidedly unsexy turn, police told the Times:

Did you know the Observer is subsidized by an illicit slush fund? It shamefully is, according to a lawsuit filed by the former president of one of the Kushner Companies. When developer Charles Kushner bought a $1.8 billion office tower, he routed $18 million back to himself as commission on the mortgage, then allegedly siphoned $5 million off that for son Jared's cash-bleeding weekly newspaper.

If we had to list the worst things a celebrity could do in a nightclub in order of ascending dumbness, they would go like this: 1. Bring a gun to a nightclub. 2. Get arrested for bringing a gun to a nightclub. 3. Get shot at a nightclub. 4. Get shot at a nightclub and also arrested. 5. Shoot yourself accidentally with a gun you brought to a nightclub illegally, and then get arrested for it. So New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress truly achieved the pinnacle of nightclub stupidity last weekend by accomplishing #5. And the felony complaint against him shows he damn sure can't claim self-defense:

Larry Langford, the mayor of Birmingham, has been arrested! For corruption, or something. The Justice Department finally nabbed him! It's on Drudge! Even though you've never heard of Larry Langford. Langford's terrible massive corruption involved country bond deals, the most boring possible way to be corrupt ever. But one thing the Bush Justice Department has been really good at is nabbing small-time Democrats on corruption charges.

Can hipster clothing conglomerate American Apparel and its balls-out CEO Dov Charney never have a normal, peaceful, lawsuit, which is settled quietly and forgotten about? Most recently, the company was fighting back against a lawsuit by ex-employee Roberto Hernandez by trotting out his ex-lovers and leaking documents showing that Hernandez himself recently defended Charney from the very charges he's now being sued for. And now AA is playing more legal hardball! The company is trying to prove to the world that Keith Fink, the lawyer for another ex-employee suing Dov for sexual harassment, is in fact an extortionate scumbag himself. Leaked internal emails below:

It turns out the news media had a pretty shameful weekend. A British couple came forward to say that while they were hiding from terrorists at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, CNN broadcast details of their specific hiding place in the facility, resulting in a fresh search by the gunmen in control of the hotel at the time. The Indian government blacked out local TV after claiming the terrorists were gaining tactical information from the broadcasts. And now David Carr weighs in via the Times with a column about how U.S. newspapers were complicit in whipping shoppers into the frenzy that culminated in a deadly Wal-Mart stampede:

Yesterday we pointed out that our nation's current idiot president, George "W" Bush, had made the unlikely move of commuting the cocaine-smuggling sentence of a rapper—a black man, with unruly hair!—because that rapper, John Forte, went to fancy prep school Exeter, and being a prep school cokehead is something Bush can relate to. Friends, we firmly believe in the accuracy of this macroanalysis. But even more amusing is the micro-analysis, because the chain of events that caused the union-busting Republican Mormon Sen. Orrin Hatch to become a fierce advocate of the (allegedly) coke-slinging producer of The Fugees is just what America is all about: Step One: John Forte goes to Exeter, makes friends with Carly Simon's kid, then makes friends with Carly Simon. Step Two: John Forte goes to jail. Step Three: Carly Simon records one of Orrin Hatch's soulful ballads and then is like "Okay now you owe me, old man."

What happens when you start laying off investment bankers and magazine editors? Bank robberies go up, naturally. [NYP]

Larry Mendte was the first male host of Access Hollywood before becoming a news anchor in Philadelphia, where he worked with Alycia Lane, a fellow anchor who punched an undercover cop and sent bikini photos of herself to the wife of a sports TV personality, all of which somehow made Mendte jealous, causing him to hack into Lane's email and forward the most salacious bits to gossip journalists, which ended up getting her fired, though his activities eventually came out and got him fired, and then got him sued by her as well as charged in a criminal case. Got that? Well now Mendte has been sentenced: He got six months of house arrest and three years of probation. At his sentencing he apologized, and said this:

Tanya Hollander, the "hooker booker" who set up appointments for clients of Eliot Spitzer's favorite escort agency, Emperors Club VIP, was sentenced to a year of probation today. [NYDN]

In 1996, Leslie Owen Collier pleaded guilty to killing three bald eagles. Naturally, President Bush has just pardoned him. Back in 1995, Collier, some sort of rabble-rousing anarchist farmer, crushed pesticides into delicious hamburger meat and left it outside to kill any adorable little animals that might cross his path. Naturally, after killing a red-tailed hawk, a great horned owl, an opossum, and a raccoon, three majestic Bald Eagles partook in some left-over poison hamburger, and promptly died. The Bald Eagle is our nation's bold fresh mascot, like the Pillsbury Doughboy of not getting tread upon. Naturally, the eagle was nearly extinct within 200 years of the founding of our nation, and it's been a crime to "kill" them since the 1940s. Why would Bush pardon this cold-blooded freedom-killer? Well! According to an anti-American "natural history" site hosted on Canadian servers, the Bald Eagle is not so much of a majestic predator, swooping down and pecking to death our nation's many enemies, but really more of a lazy scavenger, subsisting mainly on "what it finds cast onto the shore." So the Bald Eagle is the Original Lazy Welfare Queen of the Skies, which is why Bush pardoned this brave hero.

Who said George W. Bush is not a friend to the hip hop community? The president has gone and pardoned John Forte, a rapper (who got briefly famous doing tracks with the Fugees) who's been in prison since 2000 for a cocaine smuggling conviction. $1.4 million in liquid coke through the Newark airport, to be precise. I forgive Bush for the wars and everything now! Forte has always maintained his innocence, but so does everyone else in jail, and you don't see Republican Christian fundamentalist zealot politicians pardoning them. So why did W. set Forte free? It's those private school connections paying off:

Fallen former newspaper mogul Conrad Black—Baron Black of Crossharbour, to you—is currently serving out a 78 month sentence in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice, related to his looting of his own company's funds for his personal use. Or so the government claims. The martyred Lord used to write editorials decrying the injustice of his convictions in the New York Sun, but they folded. Now he's writing the same damn thing in the Times of London. And the man who was once the world's third-biggest newspaper magnate sounds like the second coming of Eldridge Cleaver: