At the start of the year, the white two-piece suit which John Lennon wore on the cover of Abbey Road was auctioned off by Connecticut-based Braswell Galleries, and sold for $48,000. But it later turned out that the man who sold the suit owes a lot of back rent for his former Manhattan apartment. And yesterday, a judge ruled that the gallery had to pay more than $21,000 to the landlord of that apartment. "Now he's the one screaming, 'Help, I need somebody,'" the landlord's lawyer Adam Leitman Bailey quipped painfully.
Psychic Biond Fury, 67, stopped paying rent in July 2009 on landlord Mark Arrow's apartment in The Ansonia on the Upper West Side, and owed him more than $21,000 in rent. Fury asked Braswell to conduct the auction anonymously, but Arrow's lawyers tried to stop the sale, serving them with a restraining order which they ignored. "They never should have had the auction. They were completely in the wrong," said Bailey, and the judge agreed with him.
In 2008, Fury, a self-described metaphysician, music and film producer and publisher, infamously bought the North Carolina house where novelist Mike Peterson killed his wife inside the home in December 2001. It's too bad his psychic abilities aren't so sharp, or else maybe he would have realized he was going to lose half of the $46,000 he made at auction on a suit he originally paid $140,000 for.