"We’re absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention, or the people of Colorado." [Times]

Good morning, mysterious "weekend" readers! Where are you rising and shining from today? New York City? Kansas City? A garbage-strewn gutter somewhere in Mexico City, wondering what happened to your wallet and your dignity? Hey, at least you're not waking up in New Jersey, amirite? Zing. Apologies to those of you who are waking up in New Jersey. But not to fear: the reputation of postindustrial wastelands like Newark and Trenton is being revived. Not by reality itself, but by luxury real estate developers. Open your wallets! The Times examines how developers of luxury apartment buildings in Newark and Trenton are pushing their inventory. Answer: lots of lipstick for the pigs.

David Atherton, a British entrepreneur who sold e-commerce site Dabs.com to BT for $55.7 million in 2006, is going to need some of that money for his legal defense. A 49-year-old woman has accused him of abducting and trying to rape her in his $2.8 million home. Police also charged Atherton with "threats to kill, false imprisonment and possession of a Class A drug," which could be ecstasy, LSD, heroin, cocaine, crack, mushrooms, or amphetamines. Not, as far as we can tell, OC-40.

Very little has ever been revealed about the business dealings of Jeffrey Epstein, the shadowy money manager who will be spending the next 16 months or so in a Palm Beach jail cell after pleading to soliciting an underage prostitute in late June. Long described as "mysterious" and "reclusive," the only client of his who has been confirmed over the years has been Leslie "Les" Wexner, the billionaire founder of Limited Brands. Epstein once boasted to a reporter that he wouldn't even consider taking on a client who didn't have a billion dollars or more in the bank. You can now add a new billionaire to the list of Epstein associates: Leon Black, the co-founder of Apollo Management. Black recruited Epstein to serve on the board of his charitable organization, the Leon D. Black Foundation. Listed on the non-profit's IRS returns alongside Leon and his wife, Debra: Epstein's name and the address of the waterfront home where Epstein was accused of carrying out his sexual misdeeds with minors. More on this jaw-dropping revelation below.

It's the kind of story with all the ingredients for a great movie: a 30-year-old woman from Montana has pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft, which she undertook in order to attend Columbia University and, says her attorney, "escape a painful past." How intriguing. Since 2001 Esther Elizabeth Reed had juggled 6 different identities, and variously claimed to be a chess champion and in the witness protection program. She got into Columbia with a genuine SAT score of 1400 and by using the identity of a missing woman from North Carolina, whose disappearance investigators "don't think" Reed was connected to. Well, in the film she will be! And she won't face 47 years in jail either, but elude capture by always staying one step ahead of the feds.

Joe Francis, the creepy smutrepreneur who teased us all with promises of Ashley Alexandra Dupré footage, has taken to the Internet to demand his rights under the Constitution. Seems a judge and prosecutors in Panama City, FL abused Francis in all sorts of illegal and unethical ways. The sad thing is that I have to support Francis on this issue. And if you like your porn cheap and freely available, you probably should, too.

When former Varian engineer Wayne Cox reached out his driver-side window to push the dying Oralia Puga Ramirez, 75, and Enedina Oliva, 70 off the hood of his car, a 1994 Infiniti, did he have to roll down his window first or was it already open? I wonder, because that's a detail that matters — a detail that delineates between confused and calculated cruelty. You're driving along, you hit someone by accident, your window's already open, you reach out to see if the person is OK, they aren't, so you freak out and drive away — that's callous and wrong, but not calculated. Hit someone you didn't see, see they're dying, press the button to send your power window down, wait the three or four seconds for the window to sink all the way, then reach out and push two dying people from the car's hood? That's callous, wrong and calculated — criminal in a way you'd only expect from an engineer. Or least from an engineer like the nine bad guys we list below:

Last week, a corrections officer working as a bouncer died after being beaten by a patron at the microbrewery Southampton Publick House. This week, an 64-year-old Easthampton man killed his wife and then himself in a murder-suicide. [NY Post via Observer]

Back in the '90s, Wayne Cox earned $150,000 a year leading Palo Alto-based Varian Medical Systems's engineering department, at one point overseeing development of a profitable tumor-eradicating machine called the Multileaf Collimator. He lived in a $700,000 home with his wife and two kids. Then in 1996, Varian laid off Cox as a part of a company reorganization. 12 years later, Cox is divorced, homeless and in jail, arrested for running into and killing a pair of septuagenarians out for a Sunday stroll. A witness to the accident told the San Jose Mercury News that after the collision, Cox "reached out the window to push one of the dying victims off his hood, then drove away." Varian board member Dick Levy told the paper: "He must have gone through hell in his personal life to have dropped such a long way."

He's only 24 years old, but Michael Dolan of West Haven, Conn. has been slapped with the maximum sentence after pleading guilty to fraud and aggravated identity theft. Dolan and five accomplices spammed AOL users for four years with messages such as, "Due to a central server meltdown, your credit card information was lost." The prosecution claimed the scams had taken in at least $400,000 from 250 users who fell for it. Dolan's defense lawyer had argued that Dolan suffered mental illness, made worse by his father's suicide.

Our effort to catch up on the glamorous life of party boy celebutard flack Jonathan Cheban has yielded an entertaining nugget! In June, Jacob Arabov (pictured)-a.k.a. Jacob the Jeweler, the "King of Bling" and go-to jewelry maker for rappers and celebrities of all stripes-submitted a memorandum to the judge in his money laundering trial describing what a great guy he is, in hopes of getting a lighter sentence. Among those vouching for for the crooked diamond merchant: Jonathan Cheben [sic]!

Most teenage girls on Facebook and MySpace would ignore messages from a guy calling himself "jadedwasted." That's the nom de Web of Warren Nanney, a guy whom Idaho cops are investigating for allegedly approaching young women for sex on social networks. On Facebook alone, Nanney had "over 500 contacts, 500 people listed as friends and 90 percent of them were under the age of 18," according to local police. Nanney was also allegedly cruising MyYearbook.com, a site the investigators say they'd never heard of before. (It's one of Barry Diller's favorites.)A+ to Facebook for brand recognition? But it wasn't the profiles or messages that took down Nanney — it was after one 17-year-old woman who did meet with Nanney called the cops, fearing for her safety. As much as law enforcement relies on the open surveillance they can engage in online, it's still the girls themselves who best know when to sic the cops on a creep.

John Edwards mistress and new age nut Rielle Hunter had her humble beginnings under a different name: Lisa Druck. Growing up in Ocala, Florida (I've been there: grass, trees, Spanish moss, springs, that's it), her favorite pastime was riding show horses. But a tragedy befell her horse, and Druck eventually ended up as a drugged-out party girl in New York. Could this dark incident involving family, crime, and equine assassination have been the thing that eventually drove Rielle Hunter into the eager arms of John Edwards? If you're a new-age theorist like Hunter, the answer is a resounding "Yes!":

The Berkeley Police department responded to a call of a suspicious suitcase outside a building owned by Bayer AG on 7th street between Dwight and Parker. The pharmaceutical manufacturer has their biotechnology headquarters in the town and contributes grants to student research at the University of California. Officers cleared the area and the bomb squad detonated the suitcase — click for more photos from the scene. So the question is: Terrorist hippies for forgetful hobo? (Photo by vathryn)

Movie critic Elvis Mitchell (remember him? crazy-but-readable Times crit in those glorious pre-Manohla fucking Dargis days?) had $12,000 seized by U.S. border guards as he tried to go back home to Detroit from Canada. Mitchell was hiding the money in a cigar box, along with some Cubans, and he declared only $80. When asked by border agents why he had $12,000 in a cigar box, "Mr. Mitchell told the ICE agent the money in the cigar box represented money he (Mitchell) had withdrawn from bank automatic teller machines over a two year period." We're not sure how that explains anything, but there you go. Agents allowed Mitchell to keep $117 of the $300 he had in his wallet. He'll need that to get back to the Turner Classic Movie studios to interview Peter Bogdanovich, right? Excerpts from the criminal complaint attached.

David Malone wasn't scared of climbing the 52-story Times building last month. "It was like climbing a ladder and I knew I could climb a ladder," the 29-year-old anti-Al Qaeda activist told the Daily News, referring to architect Renzo Piano's inviting ceramic rods. But, with a court date looming Tuesday, he does sound nervous about New York City prosecutors, calling the climb "the biggest mistake of my life... It caused a public disturbance and put police officers potentially at risk." One wonders if Malone realizes the other two climbers got off with basically parking tickets. And one would assume the Times isn't putting any new pressure on the court, given its own passion for breaking certain legal directives in the service of free expression. Malone even showed an almost Times-esque caution in his civil disobedience:

A grisly beheading on a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg, Manitoba may well have been committed by an immigrant admitted under a skilled-worker program in 2001. While riding the bus, a reportedly unprovoked Vince Weiguang Li stabbed carnie Tim McLean twelve times, beheaded him, and began eating parts of the corpse. A laptop which Li sold to teenager Darren Beatty had a letter which said "he felt guilty for leaving China, and that everything in Canada was not as he expected," according to a Google translation. Why are we subjecting you, dear reader, to this gory tale?Because this is the same skilled-worker immigration program that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates praised at the 50th anniversary hearing of Congress's science and technology committee:

A famous megachurch pastor in a (racist?) airplane rage! An extortionate flight attendant! A sham psychologist-for-hire who will say anything for the right price! All the ingredients for a cheap, trite courtoom novel are present in the case of Victoria Osteen, the co-pastor (with her husband Joel) of the 40,000-strong Lakewood megachurch in Texas, which is often used as a convenient public symbol of the creepy huge-church trend. Is Victoria a benign blond brainwashed by Jesus, or a sinister undercover bigot set to explode at any moment? Here are the holy facts:

Earlier this week we brought you damning evidence that the new Seth Rogen comedy Pineapple Express may have engaged in the shocking, unauthorized theft of a t-shirt design from a small Brooklyn company called WOWCH. The scandal now threatens to swamp the movie's marketing efforts like a tidal wave of justice. James Franco, the shifty long-haired actor who was the wearer of the shirt in question, took a brief break from seducing swooning women in order to stammer a denial of the crime's very existence:

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and in a recent case at least some of that wrath is being directed at Google. Seems the managing director of Google's operations in Latin America, Gonzalo Alonso Pérez-Verdía was transferred to Buenos Aires by Google, and brought along his wife Mariana Alvarado Castillo and their two sons last July. Less than a week later, Pérez-Verdía found a new lover (pictured here) and demanded a divorce. As part of the resulting settlement, Pérez-Verdía agreed to pay alimony from the well over $2 million a year in earnings according to tax statements. But after three months and one check for $55,323.47, Pérez-Verdía has apparently stopped paying.