Did you know that many mafia members are pretty much just like teenage girls? It's true! Because they gossip and pass notes and arrange for the deaths of their many frenemies! Vincent Basciano, former hair salon owner (see?) and boss of the Bonanno crime family, has been accused by his jailers "of having an 'unusual sophistication' at passing notes." And he's embroiled in a terribly complicated plot to pretend he wants to kill someone and having a list of people he's trying to put Voodoo curses on and then there's all this note-passing. What a girl! Does he write his hit lists in pink gel pens and keep them in Lisa Frank folders?

Hey, maybe those tourist-halting pedestrian traffic-impeding ground compasses will be a blessing in disguise if the NYPD keeps arresting dudes who stand around blocking the sidewalk. Maybe this is all a complicated sting operation!

New York Post nutcase Andrea Peyser is titillated by the sight of a humbled Foxy Brown arriving at a Brooklyn court (from prison) to plead not guilty to her third phone-related assault. Brown's drab jacket and plaid pants (H&M!!) and "matted" hair excite Peyser to a degree that few cut-down-to-size "divas" could hope to match. Also, this is maybe the single horrifying sentence written in any newspaper in America today: "She also carried no BlackBerry, no $1,500 Louis Vuitton satchel—and revealed nothing of the precious nipple we've come to know and love."

Because we're nothing if not charitable, here's some schadenfreude to cheer up former AOLers in Virginia. At least you're not a former Cisco employee in Brazil. While you're wallowing in your own drunken misery, a good number of ex-Cisconians are in a South American prison, reportedly accused of stealing $825 million from the Brazilian government. Details on Operation Persona after the jump.

Typosquatter John Zuccarini has agreed to give up $164,000 in revenue from ads served to misspelled domains. Zuccarini had previously served two years in Federal prison for serving porn ads to misspelled children's domains including teltubbies.com and bobthebiulder.com. (Remember John Ashcroft? Zuccarini always will.) This time around the ads weren't pornographic. But they violated the terms of a court order that barred Zuccarini from registering typo domains. In the old days, his porn ads allegedly made up to a million dollars a year. [InfoWorld]

Parents, your kids aren't safe anywhere, at any age. Toddlers put their fingers in outlets. Teens will act on their hormones. Twentysomethings will take jobs at Gawker Media. It's your responsibility to prevent such catastrophes from happening. Politicians will not help. Take New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, for example. Facebook today agreed to cooperate with Cuomo's office in an investigation targeting online sexual predators. This might make parents feel better about their children's safety. After the jump, why It shouldn't.

Second acts are hard, and who knows the cruelty of aging out of a profession better than a model? The day eventually comes when each fashion industry worker must ask himself, what color is my parachute? Some will answer: It is steel-colored! But "slashing" as a career, as one ex-model has just discovered, doesn't pay that well—and it upsets the tabloids.

When you have a restraining order out against you, you need to be careful when playing around on social networks. A 37-year-old British man had been given a no-contact order after harassing his wife with text messages and phone calls. When he joined Facebook, he checked the box that would invite his entire address book to join as well. In Silicon Valley, that's just an annoying social faux pas. But for him, it was a violation of his no-contact rule. He received ten days in jail, but served only seven after his lawyer petitioned the court that he had been "confused" by Facebook's sign-in procedures. Good thing he didn't poke her.

The Serious Organized Crime Agency (it's for real) led a multi-national operation — 60 arrests in the Netherlands, 16 in Nigeria, a few in the UK and one in Canada. Times Online reports that many 419 scammers aren't loners, but rather organized crime "gangs," often run by West African ex-pats in the Netherlands. Mock their bad English if you must, but it's a living. One government estimate says email scammers con seven billion dollars' worth of cash out of the Brits alone, every year. That's 23 times more than USA for Africa collected.

A lawyer for the family of Carole Anne Gotbaum—the daughter-in-law of New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum who died in police custody at the Phoenix airport—announced yesterday that an eyewitness reported seeing police carrying a "noncombative, not resisting" Gotbaum to the holding cell. "She wondered if she was dead," said attorney Michael Manning. For their part, Phoenix police are sticking by their original claim that an agitated, screaming Manning was left alone with her arms handcuffed behind her and somehow managed to bring her cuffed hands over her head before accidentally choking herself to death. Guess we'll wait and see what the autopsy report shows.

New Jersey's attorney general plays copycat, following New York in sending a subpoena to Facebook over allegations of sex offenders on the site. [Reuters]

Could Carol Anne Gotbaum—the daughter-in-law of New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum who died in police custody at the Phoenix airport—really have strangled herself to death while trying to lift her handcuffs over her head? Can anyone actually perform that maneuver? Slate investigates and says yes. Sorta!

Filmmaker and winemaker Francis Ford Coppola lost 15 years worth of data when thieves broke into his house and stole his computers. Luckily, copies of the script for his next film were saved elsewhere. "If I could get the backup back, it would save me years [of] all the photographs of my family, all my writing." Sorry, Francis, maybe next time, instead of expanding your wine cellar, you might think about investing in some offsite backup solutions. [BBC News]

One of the more bizarre stories this weekend concerned the death of Carol Anne Gotbaum, the daughter-in-law of New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. On Friday, on the way to rehab in Tucson, she arrived late to the airport in Phoenix and demanded to be allowed to board her flight. She was arrested for disorderly conflict, cuffed, and placed in an airport holding room. Half an hour later she was dead.

Times wunderkind Sewell Chan looks at a recent Urban Institute report entitled "Is There an iCrime Wave?" which speculates that "the proliferation of iPods helps account for the nationwide rise in violent crime in 2005 and 2006." (In 2005, violent crime rose nationally for the first time in eleven years.) But why would thieves target iPods and their owners?

Twenty-three years too late, Chicago is gussying itself up with Orwellian flair. In a bid to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, the Windy City is installing a state-of-the-art surveillance system. Beyond recognizing the sound of gunshots and automatically dialing 911, the system is promised to identify license plate numbers, notice forgotten packages, and even recognize cars that continually circle the block. The video-recognition system would always be on, and alert law enforcement of suspicious activity. Too bad there's no evidence that security cameras actually deter crime. Somehow it's fitting that all this being paid for by the Department of Homeland Security.

They've caught the infamous tattooed man — the dude who allegedly stole some laptops in Vancouver. After having his photo plastered everywhere, thanks to an inadvertent Flickr upload, he turned himself in. He claims he bought the computer off of a friend who bought it from a friend. [Canada.com]

Three men have been charged for the January murder of PC World editor Rex Farrance. According to the prosecutors, the men were after his son's medicinal marijuana plants, and Farrance was an innocent victim. [AP]

New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling on him to increase policing of sexual predators on the site. From all appearances, though, the police who performed an undercover sting operation on Facebook need a refresher course on the site's privacy tools, which allow users to refuse messages from strangers and report abusive users. [Internetnews.com]

Sometimes you really need to thank the Internet gods. Last week two guys broke into Vancouver's WorkSpace, an office collective, and stole four laptops and two iMacs. The culprits couldn't be identified by security footage. Luckily, as founder Bill McEwan noticed, they did most of the work for him. The new owner of his laptop apparently uploaded a picture of himself to the company's Flickr photostream. Now there's a Web-wide manhunt attempting to identify the tattooed man.