Straight Outta Battery Park

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Straight Outta Battery Park … an update on ‘Da Luv Shack.

A couple days ago we speculated about how Bernard Kerik could have afforded his second luxe Manhattan apartment, the one where he held his workouts with celeb publisher Judith Regan and Corrections Officer Jeanette Pinero (not simultaneously, but, it seems, and one rather hopes, serially).

Now the Times tells the story.

It’s buried pretty far down in Elisabeth Bumiller’s story in Wednesday’s Times. But there it is. The Luv Shack was “an apartment … donated as a resting spot for police officers at ground zero.”

I guess it’s like they say: 9/11 changed everything.

Another piece in the Times, by Charles Bagli, gives further details. It seems that once the 9/11 clean-up settled into a routine in the late fall of 2001, Kerik asked Anthony Bergamo, “a well-connected vice chairman of the Milstein family real estate company and a police buff,” if he could rent the apartment for his own use.

“Mr. Kerik paid for use of the apartment,” the article goes on to say, “but the amount was not clear. Many apartments that were available in Battery Park City after the attack on the trade center were rented at well below market rates for months afterward.”

The article goes on to say that Mr. Bergamo is quite tight with the NYPD. He was made an “honorary commissioner” a few years ago and the Department licenses him to carry “a Colt .45 handgun and two Smith & Wesson handguns, a .38-caliber revolver and a 9-millimeter pistol.”

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