• Michael Targoff, the CEO of Loral Space & Communications, paid $10.025 million for a penthouse co-op at 778 Park Avenue, the building that was once home to the likes of Brooke Astor and William F. Buckley and, until last year, Vera Wang. [Cityfile]
  

Yesterday, we introduced you to the leaked chick-lit manuscript of mogul wife Leslie Zemeckis, who is married to Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis. Our publishing elf dubbed in "exhausting" as well as "derivative... clichéd and unpolished" in a reader's report. When we last left off, 24-year-old heiress/divorcee Natalie was sitting on the floor of her condo wearing a Juicy couture tracksuit, watching Entertainment Tonight and reading tabloids while spilling marinana sauce on herself. Now, we're introduced to Finn, the hottest young actor in town, who lives with his elderly Irish mother: "Finn took a swig from a 1992 bottle of Beaujolais and washed his mouth out as the blonde with the killer fake tits strolled by his bed..."

Estiatorio Milos on West 55th Street is one of New York's most upscale Greek restaurants. It's one of the most expensive, too. Since most of the prices on the menu are by the pound, that delicious piece of grilled tuna with oil and lemon can easily cost $50 or more. ("Unless you've worked at a carnival guessing weights, the bill is always something of a surprise," writes New York.) But it seems Milos's owner, Costas Spiliadis, isn't just engaging in a little deception when it comes to the prices on the menu. According to a class action lawsuit filed against the restaurant, Spiliadis has been refusing to pay servers minimum wage, denying them overtime pay, and forcing wait staff to share tips with the restaurant's managers. The lawsuit was filed by Franco Sukaj and Nikolas Tsikitas, who both worked as waiters at the restaurant. You can read the legal nitty gritty for yourself after the jump.

The voicemail recording on Leven Rambin's cell phone.

Remember that curious mini-trend of mogul wives and their literary ambitions? Not everyone has the talent to make it, despite their connections. A tipster forwarded us the manuscript for a chick-lit novel of dubious quality by actress Leslie Zemeckis—wife of Oscar-winning producer and director Rober Zemeckis, who's responsible for Back to the Future, Polar Express, and Forrest Gump. Leslie's manuscript is about "3 friends and their schemes to get on, stay on and survive the red carpet." But: the reader's report from this particular publisher says, "The writing that underscores Walking the Red's derivative plot and characters is cliched and unpolished. Grammatical errors appear occasionally. Zemeckis' obsessive cataloguing of the designer clothes her characters wear and the expensive things they own quickly grows exhausting, as do her attempts at name-dropping..."

Rudy Giuliani would like you to know he's really, really busy. So busy, in fact, that he hasn't had a single second to reflect on why his candicacy for president imploded. "I have three, four, five things all going on at once," he told the Times over the weekend, mentioning trips to London, Ukraine, Switzerland, Japan and Kazakhstan, his busy schedule campaigning for John McCain, and his efforts to bolster his consulting/security business Giuliani Partners and the law firm where he serves as a partner, Bracewell & Giuliani. But is Rudy really that busy? What happened to all the golf he was playing?

• Comedian Jack McBrayer, best known as NBC page Kenneth Parcell on 30 Rock, paid $1.374 million for a one-bedroom apartment at 200 West End Avenue, the new luxury condo development by architected Costas Kondylis. [Cityfile]

Pussy-smashing brew-guzzler and occasional blogger Tucker Max is hard at work on the Shreveport, Louisiana set of his comedic masterpiece film debut I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. The ideal situation would obviously be for Tucker to produce, direct, star in, and cater the movie himself, but due to demands on his valuable time he's forced to take on lesser mortals as his assistants. One of whom, surprisingly, has now quit in disgust and forwarded along his story to us! After the jump, the sad tale of woe, abuse, and poop. But Tucker has a warning for you haters: "I didn't get where I am today by being a moron.": The young man was a Tucker fan, and quit a real job to go be a paid assistant on the set of Tucker's film, where we pick up his experiences:

You would have thought, perhaps, that the embarrassing ad photo of the Spanish Olympic basketball team in the eyelids-pulled-back, "Slanty-eyed Chinese" pose was just a one-off thing. I mean, if they had done this before, they would have had a better apology ready, right? But maybe Asia-mocking is actually a favorite pastime of all Spanish athletes-because their 2008 Federation Cup Tennis team, which beat China to move into the finals, was photographed in the same god damn pose!: Photo from the Spanish Tennis Federation's site:

What's Hollywood producer Paula Wagner planning to do now that she's officially splitting from partner Tom Cruise and United Artists? Is a move to New York on the agenda? That might explain why Wagner and husband Rick Nicita, who recently departed CAA to join Morgan Creek Productions as a co-chairman and COO, just paid $4.5 million for a ninth-floor loft at 166 Duane Street, according to records released this morning. Wagner and Nicita's new home in the luxe Tribeca building—it's also home to Time Warner chairman Dick Parsons—is 2,241-square-feet and features beamed ceilings, tropical wood floors, and sweeping city views. They purchased the apartment from Carole Sadler, a senior VP and general counsel at Coach. Floorplan of Wagner and Nicita's new place after the jump!

Sad news for Hamptons residents looking to blow $350,000 on a Lamborghini this summer: Manhattan Motorcars Hamptons, the dealership in Westhampton Beach that caters to the rich and even richer, may lose its right to sell the insanely expensive autos in the near future. In June, Lamborghini's parent company, Automobili Lamborghini SpA, informed the dealership that they were no longer using the Lamborghini name with permission. (The legal threat was prompted by Manhattan Motorcars' move to a new location, one which Lamborghini, it seems, didn't approve of.) Now Manhattan Motorcars is fighting back. It's slapped Lamborghini with a $20 million lawsuit for breach of contract, among other things. The court records—and messy details—are below.

Answering machine at the Upper West Side apartment of Michael Moore and his wife Kathleen.

Answering machine at the office of Plum Sykes.

Tucker Max: blogger of beer and sluts, writer and producer of one of the least funny comedy movie scripts since Illegally Yours, and asshole in a dozen different ways. The most ridiculous of which is as the boss of his own mini-empire of blogs! And since last week, we've heard from several of his former Rudius Media employees, who expound on the gentle pleasures of working for one of America's foremost purveyors of racist poop jokes: He's a cheapskate. Last week we noted how Tucker scoffed at a former blogger who wondered why he only made $82 for six months of work. Other employees tell us the standard pay for Rudius bloggers is somewhere in the $80/ quarter range, with one noting "I got just a tiny bit more than that when my site was doing really well." Sweet. So Rudius must be making a lot of money. You work hard for the money. One Rudius employee was ordered by Tucker to move to a different, more expensive city because Tucker thought that they could better do their job elsewhere. Once the employee had gone to the trouble of packing up and moving and finding a new, more costly apartment, we hear, their pay was reduced to almost nothing. Which seems like the standard Rudius pay rate, now that we think of it. He's not popular with publishers. We hear that at least one book agent quit working with Tucker because he flaked out on book proposal deadlines. (Not true? Email us!) He's not popular with the bloggers that work for him at Rudius. The emails we've received from disgruntled bloggers alone are ample evidence of this. He attracts bloggers he's interested in with the promise of writing for a wider audience-though, as you can tell by their pay, not necessarily more money. But when bloggers tire of Rudius and leave the fold, we hear, they are bizarrely wiped from existence in Tucker Max's world:

• NYSE Euronext's Philippe Duranton has paid $4.6 million for a 3,000-square-foot condo at 32 West 18th Street (left). The best part? One of his new neighbors will be Atoosa Rubenstein. [Cityfile]

Former Right Media CEO and current Yahoo SVP Mike Walrath is moving offices from New York to Sunnyvale in October. He told Valleywag it's "a quality of life decision." If the move means a big promotion — a tipster tells us that's the rumor around Yahoo's New York office — Walrath wouldn't say. He's already in charge of Yahoo's advertising marketplaces group, requiring plenty of facetime at headquarters. But we think a promotion is likely, and deserved. So does a fellow Yahoo executive who told us Walrath is a particular favorite of Yahoo president Sue Decker and her closest lieutenant, Hilary Schneider, to whom Walrath currently reports.

The answering machine at Josh and Shoshanna Gruss' Upper East Side townhouse. (Bonus: The proper pronunciation of "Gruss" for those of you who have wondered.)

Blogger mentor Tucker Max runs a blog network called Rudius Media that is badass, bro. Earlier today we mentioned that one former Rudius blogger once worked for six months only to receive a check for less than a hundred bucks ($82, to be exact). Now that blogger, Brandon Woods, has helpfully forwarded us the email chain that ensued after he emailed Tucker-very politely, we might add-to ask how the hell he came to be paid such a paltry sum for half a year's work. Tucker Max's reply to him (which he also forwarded to six other people) is below. And, well, yea:

Rocker turned Broadway composer Duncan Sheik, who won a 2007 Tony for his work on Spring Awakening, has sold his Tribeca loft at 195 Hudson Street for $2.65 million. The 2,402-square-foot space is configured as an artist/musician loft, according to the Halstead listing, with one room set up as a recording studio. The buyer is listed as artist William Ryman. [Cityfile]

Bad news for all you vodka-loving patriots out there: that bottle of Skyy vodka you're planning to guzzle later tonight was not actually a "product of the USA." The vodka, itself, is made here, which is why is says it's made in the USA on the bottle. But those "distinctive cobalt blue bottles"? They're made in Mexico! At least that's what a woman named Jennifer Martin claims, who filed suit against Skyy after she picked up some booze for a Independence Day celebration but had insisted on only buying "American made" beverages, and then got fooled into picking up some Skyy. Martin has filed a class action suit and is asking for $75,000 for each plaintiff, plus $5 million in punitive damages. You can review the lawsuit below. And you can probably expect to see Martin make an appearance on Lou Dobbs next week.