08/17/08 Ferrari flambé - The Latest Ferrari Fire Involves A Greenwich 430 From Miller Motor Cars

Are Ferrari's The New Ford Pinto?

Here's A Picture Of Another Cherry Red Ferrari
That Also Caught Fire

The Dutch drivers of this Ferrari 599 GTB had stopped at some traffic lights when they saw smoke coming from the front of the car.

The smoke quickly turned into flames, and the driver and passenger made a hasty exit as the front half of the supercar was totally destroyed.

It's safe to say the damage probably didn’t polish out.

$150000 Ferrari goes up in flames in New City

Lower Hudson Journal news

Around noon today on Ridge Road, a salesman for a high-end car dealership was driving a Ferrari 430 to a prospective customer when the cherry-red sports car caught fire.

The driver from Miller Motorcars in Greenwich, Conn., got out in time to escape injury, but the car wasn't so lucky.

New City Fire Chief Mike Graff said that by the time firefighters arrived on scene, the whole back of the car - where the engine is located - was engulfed in flames.

"That's the definition of a bad day," Graff said.

By the time the fire was out, half the car was gone, with the front end still red and the back a mess of white extinguishing foam, blackened metal and carbon fiber.

"I think he was in a moderate state of shock," Graff said about the driver, who called 911. "It was amazing to see half of a Ferrari engine melted."

Miller Motorcars, which sells Aston Martins, Bentleys, Maserattis, Rolls Royces and Bugattis, listed a 2007 Ferrari 430 on its Web site in the preowned section.

The vehicle - a red, two-door coupe - has 1,568 miles on it, and visible through the rear windows - where passengers would sit in most other cars - it's all engine, a 490-horsepower V8. No price was listed, though Graff reported that the car was worth a cool $150,000, the operative word being "was."

Read more about this story tomorrow in The Journal News.

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FLASH BACK:

Before Richard Koppelman, the owner of Miller Motor Cars yells at the poor unfortunate driver of the latest Ferrari to go up in smoke, he should realize things could be much worse

Prestige Ferrari Dealership up in Flames...

47 Exotic Cars Destroyed in Fire
27 Ferraris burnt to a crisp in dealership fire.

A dramatic fire at the Ferrari-Maserati dealership Munsterhuis in Holland, saw nearly fifty rare and valuable exotic sportscars literally going up on smoke. Sunday afternoon saw the prestige dealership, which also includes Jeep and Konigsegg franchises, suffer a fire which quickly took grip. Fifty six cars out of the total stock of sixty were burnt to a cinder. The majority of them, forty seven in all, were exotic sportscars. Twenty seven Ferraris were destroyed.

Current models destroyed include the 360 Modena and Spider F1, Challenge Stradale, 575 M Maranello F1 and 612 Scaglietti. Famous past models include a 1971 365 GTB 'Daytona', a 1984 512BB, a 1990 and a 1991 F40, and a 1987 Testarossa. 308 GTB, 308 GTS, F355 GTS, F355 GTB, 348 GTS, 348 Spider, the list rolls on. Ten Maseratis were also fried. Other prestige sportscars to be destroyed include two Lamborghini's, a rare Konigsegg, as well as several historic racing cars.

A Dutch Fire Brigade spokesman confirmed that security precautions in place to satisfy the insurance regulations, which saw all the cars locked up, prevented the firemen from moving them, and with it the possibility of saving any. The insurance claim is expected to run into several tens of millions of euros. Joint owner of the business, Frans Munsterhuis Jr was at Monza for the Ferrari-Maserati 'World Finals' at the time of the incident, as the dealership's racing team were taking part in the Ferrari 360 Challenge races.

"I have not seen the mess yet," Munsterhuis commented. "My father and brother, with whom I built up the company, warned me not to come along. Mechanics and secretaries were crying at the flames. "Our life work has gone up in flames. All of our cars, and the customers cars were insured, but we have to start from scratch. We lost all of our collectables, unique photos, rare documents, signed books, the list goes on. Those are irreplaceable." This is the second major fire to hit Ferrari this year. Back in March a blaze at the Maranello factory destroyed several new prototypes, putting back new model development.

JOURNAL NEWS UPDATE:

$150,000 Ferrari goes up in flames in New City

By Ben Rubin • The Journal News • August 18, 2008

NEW CITY - Ever watch $150,000 burn?

Around noon yesterday on Ridge Road, a salesman for a high-end car dealership was driving a Ferrari 430 to a prospective customer when the cherry-red sports car caught fire.

The driver from Miller Motorcars in Greenwich, Conn., got out in time to escape injury, but the car wasn't so lucky.

New City Fire Chief Mike Graff said that by the time firefighters arrived on scene, the whole back of the car - where the engine is - was engulfed in flames.

"That's the definition of a bad day," Graff said.

By the time the fire was out, half the car was gone, with the front end still red and the back a mess of white extinguishing foam, blackened metal and carbon fiber.

"I think he was in a moderate state of shock," Graff said about the driver, who called 911. "It was amazing to see half of a Ferrari engine melted."

Miller Motorcars, which sells Aston Martins, Bentleys, Maserattis, Rolls-Royces and Bugattis, listed a 2007 Ferrari 430 on its Web site in the preowned section.

The vehicle - a red, two-door coupe - had 1,568 miles on it, and visible through the rear windows - where passengers would sit in most other cars - it was all engine, a 490-horsepower V-8. No price was listed, though Graff said that the car was worth a cool $150,000, the operative word being "was."

The cause of the fire is unknown, though it was not deemed suspicious.

What was left of the Italian sports car was towed back to Greenwich.

Reach Ben Rubin at bfrubin@lohud.com or 845-578-2420.

08/17/08 Greenwich Tire Slashing Contest

Tire slashings blamed on contest

NewsTimesLive.com

The Associated Press

Article Last Updated: 08/17/2008 04:09:22 PM

STAMFORD, Conn.—Stamford police say a rash of tire slashings over the past six months was part of a contest among teens from different city schools and neighborhoods.

Sgt. Peter DiSpagna, head of the police department's property crime unit, says the slashings became a team sport.

Police arrested a 16-year-old boy on Monday for his alleged role in 34 tire slashings reported in April. During the weekend of April 18, about 73 slashed tires were reported on vehicles in one neighborhood, but only 55 victims responded to police investigating the case.

DiSpagna says the tire slashings date back to 2006. He says teens from Greenwich would slash tires in Stamford. Stamford teens would go to Greenwich and retailiate. The Stamford vandals then began competing in their hometown.

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08/17/08 Greenwich Family Gets A Deal On An Aspen Mansion

The Ponds is an estate in the Aspen area.

Sunday Real Estate Round-Up,
Luxist

....In nearby Aspen, a mansion has sold for $20.75 million to a Greenwich, Conn., family, making it one of the biggest purchases in the area recently. You could say they got a deal though, after all the house was listed at $27.5 million when we checked it out as an estate of the day last year.....

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08/17/08 Did The Greenwich Time Webmaster Screwup? Why is this Hearst Media Story On The Norwalk Advocate Website, But Not The Greenwich Time Website?

READ TOMORROWS NEWS TODAY !!!!

This news story is not on today's Greenwich Time website.

Maybe it will appear on Monday.

Or maybe it will never show up on the Greenwich Time website

Who knows.......

Greenwich rallies around tree

Norwalk Advocate

By Neil Vigdor

Article Launched: 08/17/2008 02:37:53 AM

GREENWICH - Call them sappy, but a number of Havemeyer Park residents have developed an attachment to a giant silver maple tree in their neighborhood.

They say that the tree, which stands about 80 feet tall and measures 53 inches in diameter, provides shade during the summer, helps reduce noise and sequesters carbon associated with global warming.

The tree, which was planted at 38 North Ridge Road about 60 years ago when the subdivision was developed, has soothing qualities, according to its devotees.

"It's found that wooded settings lower blood pressure," Halsey Drive resident Helene Wilson said to laughter last week during a public hearing held by the town's tree warden. "It's true."

Wilson's blood pressure is on the rise, however, thanks to a neighbor's request to the town to cut down the towering maple because of safety concerns - the tree's massive limbs branch out over that family's house.

Now, she and several other residents are trying to fight the potential loss of the tree.

"Let's keep the green in Greenwich," Wilson told town tree warden Bruce Spaman during Thursday's hearing at Town Hall....

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08/17/08 How impostors like former Greenwich resident Clark Rockefeller capture our trust instantly - and why we're so eager to give it to them.

Confidence game

Boston Globe

By Drake Bennett

Lots of people trusted Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter. At least two women married him - though they each knew him by a different name. The members of elite social clubs in San Marino, Calif.; Greenwich, Conn.; and here in Boston embraced him and vouched for him. A series of investment firms offered him jobs as a stockbroker and bond salesman, even a vice president, despite his lack of credentials, experience, and, as quickly became clear, his at best rudimentary knowledge of finance. And over the last decade or so, neighbors and acquaintances have believed that he was Clark Rockefeller, a retiring, somewhat aloof man who implied, but never came out and said, that he was an heir to the Standard Oil fortune.

As he sits in a Boston jail cell, and police try to unravel the tangled trail he's left since coming to the United States from Germany 30 years ago, the question the rest of us are left with is how he got away with it for as long as he did. How could the people he befriended - and, in at least two cases, married - believe his fantastical stories?

The answer is that you probably would, too. Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.

But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone's reliability. Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.

As he sits in a Boston jail cell, and police try to unravel the tangled trail he's left since coming to the United States from Germany 30 years ago, the question the rest of us are left with is how he got away with it for as long as he did. How could the people he befriended - and, in at least two cases, married - believe his fantastical stories?

The answer is that you probably would, too. Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.

But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape

our sense of someone's reliability. Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close......

....The art of the con is based on a variation of this idea: that trust is more reflexive than skepticism. And research has suggested that, once people form an initial impression of someone or something, they seem to have a hard time convincing themselves that what they once believed is actually untrue - Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, calls this "unbelieving the unbelievable."

Indeed, what's notable from the facts that have emerged about Gerhartsreiter is how much he was able to get away with despite playing his roles, in certain ways, rather poorly. People who knew him in his various incarnations have remarked on how his perpetually unwashed clothes and junky cars didn't match up with the story he told about himself. He struck others as plainly ignorant about mores and business matters that someone of his background would know, and he seemed at times to go out of his way to antagonize co-workers and neighbors.

Trust games don't really explain how this congenital gullibility works. To do that, researchers need to observe the actual social world - a place where there is often too little time and too little information coming from too many different places to form a reasoned judgment.

When deciding who to trust, the research suggests, people use shortcuts. For example, they look at faces. According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton's psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone's trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot. By studying people's reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy......

....The country's first celebrity con man was a Bostonian named Tom Bell who was kicked out of Harvard in the 1730s for stealing some chocolate. Over the next couple of decades he took on a variety of guises. He posed as a member of the Hutchinsons, one of the leading families in Massachusetts. He convinced the inhabitants of Princeton that he was a famous revivalist preacher. He showed up in New York City claiming to be the rich survivor of a shipwreck. And he made his way down to Barbados, where he claimed to be the son of the governor of Massachusetts.

Stephen C. Bullock, a history professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who has studied and written on Bell, believes he may even have conned Benjamin Franklin. In 1739 Franklin put an ad in his paper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, reporting that a man using one of Bell's aliases had gained his trust with his refined manners and extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin, then made off with a fine ruffled shirt and an embroidered handkerchief.

In a sense Gerhartsreiter is the opposite of Bell. Rather than using his elite background to cheat people, he cheated people to acquire the elite background. That is not to say Gerhartsreiter was harmless - he is, after all, a person of interest in an unsolved disappearance in California - but fooling people seems to have been not merely a means but an end.

Con men have a term, "taking off the touch," for the point in the con when they take the mark's money. Gerhartsreiter doesn't seem to have had much plan for taking off the touch. When he finally did steal something, it was his daughter, and it's hard to imagine that was for financial reasons. His divorce settlement had given him enough to live on. But that, apparently, was not all he needed.

Please See:

08/15/08 FBI confirms former Greenwich Resident's Identity

Here Is Another Creepy Story:

08/14/08 WAKE UP GREENWICH TIME!!!

Where is the coverage?

Grenwich Time Reporters Are Out To Lunch

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08/17/08 Greenwich Jewelery Designer Starts Retail Partnership With Luxury Resort

Jewelry By Karen Lee Announces Retail Partnership with Winnetu Oceanside Resort

PRESS RELEASE

Greenwich, CT, August 17, 2008 ---- Fine jewelry designer Karen Lee has created a retail partnership with the acclaimed Winnetu Oceanside Resort on Martha's Vineyard. Through this partnership, the Winnetu's newly established boutique will feature the entire Jewelry By Karen Lee collection of fine earrings, bracelets, necklaces and rings.

Launched on August 1 with a highly successful 'trunk show', the Jewelry By Karen Lee collection received a strong reception from the discriminating Winnetu clientele. According to Winnetu Owner and Founder Gwenn Snider: 'We’re pleased to bring Karen Lee's line of casual yet elegant jewelry to the resort’s boutique. The relaxed style of her designs perfectly captures Winnetu and the island setting that surround us.”

The Winnetu is Jewelry By Karen Lee's first retail account and will be the collection's exclusive retailer on Martha's Vineyard.

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08/17/08 Greenwich Time News Links For Sunday

Boggers, Citizen Journalists and YouTubers Have Not Forgotten About David Bohrman Lack Of Journalistic Judgment

Bohrman still is often criticized, because the CNN political team choose the videos for the RubeTube debate and other incrediably stupid journalistic decisions.

Town man runs show at CNN

By Neil Vigdor
Greenwich Time Staff Writer

David Bohrman gets paid to make the big decisions at CNN.

When the curtain rises on the Democratic National Convention later this month, the 54-year-old Cos Cob resident will have a huge say in how much coverage presumptive presidential nominee and media darling Barack Obama gets from the network that pioneered the nonstop cycle of news coverage.

A few months ago, when the fate of the Indiana primary between Obama and rival Hillary Rodham Clinton hung in the balance, it was Bohrman to whom CNN anchors turned to make the call.

"I'm the one who tells Wolf, 'Hey out of the break we're going to call (Indiana). I'm sort of the final decider in the chain," said Bohrman, CNN's Washington, D.C. bureau chief of nearly five years and a senior vice president of the network....

...."We try to cover both candidates the same way," Bohrman said, cautioning, "Now, not every day is going to be the same."

Bohrman's comments come after a number of media critics questioned the decision by some other networks to send their anchors to Berlin last month to interview Obama during his historic visit there.

"We approached McCain's trip to Europe and the Middle East thesame way as we did Obama's," Bohrman said....

..."Both candidates are getting an awful lot of coverage. We're trying very hard to offer up large chunks on both of the candidates,"...

....Bohrman has already traveled to both convention cities to scope out the venues and logistics for the network's wall-to-wall coverage.

In Denver, the decision to move Obama's speech accepting the nomination from the indoor Pepsi Center arena outdoors to Invesco Field at Mile High, the home of the football Broncos, sent many executives at competing networks scrambling, Bohrman said.

"Well, now your control room is an irrelevant parkin lot," Bohrman said....

MORE:

CNN/The New Yorker's Jeff Toobin gives a bimbo a tour of the Magic Election Wall.

Tobin: "Lets go to the election map."
Bimbo: "Is Canada on that?"
Tobin: "Ahhh, no."

Tobin; "You can write in red or in green.".....

Bimbo: "Can I write my name on it."

Back to the Greenwich Time's glowing report

about how wonderful

David "I don't trust my viewers" Bohrman is....

...Bohrman stumbled upon the gizmo about two years ago at a trade show, bought one for the DC bureau and debuted the "magic wall" in December 2007. The wall allows anchors and reporters to zoom in on different states, counties and cities to show voting results and demographics.

"It's just a great tool for illustrating an explanation. Here's why we can't call Indiana," Bohrman said. "We're going to take it to the conventions with us. It'll be a main part of our November election coverage."....

....Bohrman said he and Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/U.S., had been wrestling with how to incorporate new media into the network's political coverage since the 2006 mid-term elections. At the same time, he said, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of YouTube parent Google, offered up his company's resources to the network.

"It's not often that you can get asked what can Google do for you?" Bohrman said. "I had this sort of crazy idea, 'Well, maybe all the questions could come from YouTube, the people.'" Bohrman said. "We both quickly determined that this was a perfect match."

With YouTube acting as a clearinghouse, Bohrman said the network received 5,000 to 6,000 video submissions that were winnowed to about 100 clips of about 30 seconds that CNN could draw from during its Democratic debate in July 2007. About 9,000 submissions were received prior to a Republican debate in November....

.....Through the years, the oddities and memories of many conventions are still vivid for Bohrman.

"I was at the Bill Clinton speech that took nine hours," he said, as he adjusted his Clinton News Network name tag.

David "My Shrinking Number Of Viewers Are

Idiots" Bohrman is such a name droper in this

Greenwich Time puff piece....

...As a Washington bureau chief for CNN and former NBC producer, he got to know perhaps the most popular DC bureau chief in television, Tim Russert, the longtime "Meet the Press" moderator who died of a heart attack in June. He also knew Tony Snow, the former White House press secretary and Fox News Channel broadcaster, who had signed on to work for CNN as a commentator for the upcoming election before died of colon cancer in July.

Please Read The Full Greenwich Time Puff Piece

Family to host softball game

By Meredith Blake
Greenwich Time Staff writer

It only took a moment for 17-year-old Cori Lantz's life to change forever. She and her boyfriend Dan Maymin, 18, were driving in a dark red Jeep Cherokee Sport on the Post Road in Cos Cob early one evening last February, when they collided with another car, part of a four car accident that left Lantz with a spinal cord injury that has paralyzed her from the waist down.

Twins fall short in Olympic final

By Tommy Hine
Special Correspondent

BEIJING - Connecticut captured its first win in the 2008 Olympics on Saturday, but the Gold Coast can't claim credit for this silver medal.

Michelle Guerette of Bristol hit the waters in Beijing on Saturday determined to row her "best race ever" in the women's single sculls. After the first 1,000 meters, she was in fifth place, her final placement in Athens four years ago.

For Greenwich's Winklevoss twins, though, there was no sprint in the last split, no miracle near the end, no drama at the finish.

For the fourth straight race, the twins were last after 250 meters in the repecharge race. Unlike their two previous races, though, they were still last at the finish this time.

Raise the Bar

To the Greenwich Time editor:

I am writing in response to TV and news reports on unequal educational disparities within communities. Having two children who attend Hamilton Avenue School, I have always been aware of differences just a zip code away, but it has never been as evident as it stands today. With the new Hamilton Avenue building inching closer to getting a temporary certificate of occupancy (we are getting anxious over a TCO only), I am amazed at what people are considering putting our children into. "Good Enough" has been the motto of the town, the Board of Education, the school administration, and, sad to say, even some of the Hamilton Avenue parents.

We have become this community that has fallen into the trap of feeling as though "good enough" is enough. Is a tree growing in the chimney of the new building, broken windows, structural cracks in the parking garage, mixing of old windows and new windows, old front steps mixed with new front steps "good enough" for our children? I say "No."

And for $31 million-plus we should all be saying "No"! I offer anyone to take a picture of Old Greenwich School's front steps and then take a picture of Hamilton Avenues' new front steps. Come back and tell me if there are no disparities and tell me we are not settling for less!

This school board, these town officials and school administrators are setting the bar at unacceptable levels and the students are meeting that level (testing scores are proving this). Every action these people take sends us a clear and direct message: "You are not worth it!"

When Hamilton Avenue students walk on those front steps to enter their new state of the art building, they will loudly get the message, "You are not worth it!"

I'm here to remind everyone that our kids are worth it and we need to insist that our building reflects that to our children so that they can go to their school with pride. I demand that the town officials and school board raise the bar to the same standards for all the other children in our town because I whole-heartedly believe that if we raise that bar, our kids will not only meet it, but exceed it!

Mina Bibeault

Greenwich

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