On December 23, 2010, the winning ticket for Iowa's Hot Lotto was purchased at a QuikTrip in Des Moines. No winner emerged—until just before the December 23, 2011 deadline. A lawyer from Bedford, NY claims he holds the winning ticket, worth over $10 million in cash payout, but now Iowa officials are considering a criminal probe. more ›

A day after revealing that he would be hit with a wrongful death suit, now it's believed that Rod Covlin may face murder charges from the Manhattan DA's office for the death of his estranged wife. Sources tell the Daily News "the Manhattan district attorney's office will seek murder charges against him before the spring." more ›

A 46-year-old babysitter with a long history of working with an Upper East Side family was arrested today after a mysterious odyssey that lead the baby's panicked parents to call the cops when the child wasn't home on time. more ›

Filmmakers Eric J. Roberts and Andrea Reeves are on a mission to discover where Thousand Island dressing came from, because (if you didn't already know) its origins are a mystery! One theory is that George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria, instructed a maitre d’ at the hotel's restaurant to make it. According to Wikipedia (mystery solved?), Boldt received the recipe from actress May Irwin, who first tried it in the Thousand Islands region between the U.S. and Canada. more ›

As the Morris County prosecutor's homicide division investigates the fatal shooting of a woman on a suburban NJ street, police believe that 27-year-old Pakistani immigrant Nazish Noorani was the intended target. Noorani was shot in the heart while walking a few blocks in Boonton with her husband, Kashif Parvaiz, 26 and three-year-old son. Parvaiz was shot in the ankle and shoulder, while the child was unharmed (but "splattered in blood"). Relatives of the couple say that investigators have been asking about a Brooklyn man who owns a towing business and now there's speculation that there was a love triangle-aspect to the violence. more ›

We haven't heard much from mysterious Malaysian party boy Taek Jho Low in a while, but just because the paparazzi hasn't snapped him pouring Cristal down Lindsay Lohan's throat lately doesn't mean he's been off his game—he was just saving up for his new $31 million penthouse in the Time Warner Center, bros! more ›

Hey, remember when New York was littered with drive-in movie theaters? Yeah, neither do we, because it was about 60 years ago, but take heart, nostalgia-loving cinephiles. You, too, can experience the glory of an old-fashioned drive-in, but with a modern-day twist: bikes! more ›

Last week, Princeton University senior lecturer Antonio Calvo was found dead in his West 26th Street apartment. The NYC Medical Examiner's office determined that he died of self-inflicted stab wounds, and his friends are suggesting that he was devastated after the school refused to renew his contract in the Spanish department. A friend told the Post, "[The firing] came after a long campaign was launched against him by a group of graduate students and a lecturer from the department." And a student says that Calvo had been forced to leave the Friday prior to his April 12 death. more ›

Remember the guy who cops picked up last March when they spotted a dagger popping out of his bag? The guy also had a loaded pistol, three more daggers, a stun gun, and a total of 305 additional rounds of ammo on his person? He made headlines earlier this month when the judge on his case called him "an ethereal figure" before refusing to drop his $4 million bail. Why was he ethereal? Because the cops couldn't confirm anything about him, not even the name and age he provided them (James Edward O'Donnell, 39) before he clammed up. That he refused to submit his DNA for testing only made him more mysterious. Sort of. Turns out his real name is, wait for it, James O’Donnell Jr. and he is 39. more ›

In March, cops picked up a guy on St. Mark's Place with a giant dagger poking out of his backpack. Upon further questioning, they learned he had a storage unit down at the South Street Seaport, where, the Post reports, police found a loaded pistol, three more daggers, a stun gun, and a total of 305 additional rounds of ammo. Hellooo, nurse. The bearded, bespectacled man identified himself as one James Edward O'Donnell, age 39, but then clammed up, and investigators have been unable to confirm that that's even his real name. In fact, they have no clue who this guy with the weapons cache really is. O'Donnell has no rap sheet, no drivers license, and no Social Security number. more ›

As you've wandered around the city on foot, trying to avoid the gum and the poop, have you noticed any blue and orange tokens paved into the ground? A tipster pointed them out to us, and wondered what they might be. They wrote: "I've seen them all over the city, and they seem to be permanent and not related to construction. This photo was taken on 65 and bway on the NE corner. The tokens have a number in the center and then a larger number on the surrounding ring, which looks to be an ID number." Could they be clues to some grand Freemasons-like conspiracy? more ›

[UPDATE BELOW] Yesterday afternoon we received this shocking photographic evidence of people looking up at a UFO in Chelsea. The tipster who sent it told us bystanders "saw two white dots that were just hovering. This seemed to convince them that it was a UFO because they were absolutely still. They were pointing east almost straight down 23rd. Myself and a number of other people were straining our eyes to see something, anything but no luck. One guy was like 'How can you not see it? It's right there!' While walking back to my work (and scanning the skies) I saw a white object hovering near the Empire State building but it looked like a balloon maybe catching the sun just right? I don't know. I want to believe." more ›

Ship expert Norman Brouwer said of the 18th century ship remains found at the World Trade Center site, "It could be a two-masted schooner, probably just a small merchant vessel. There are wormholes in the wood, so the worms would have come from a tropical location, possibly from the West Indies," transporting rum, sugar and molasses. He also added that the 30' by 20' remnant found may have been the ship's bow, "Sailors slept and ate in the bow of the ship. There is evidence there might have been a primitive place to cook." more ›

Have you seen the tiny 4-foot high doors on Dennet Place, the one-block stretch in Carroll Gardens? (Hint: If you've seen Spider-Man III you have.) Brooklyn Based takes a stab at unlocking the mystery behind what locals call the "hobbit doors" (though we all know hobbit doors are rounded!), but in the end can only enlighten us about the people who have held their keys. (In the past, Forgotten-NY has also wondered about the short doors.) more ›

On our way into the office this morning we came across this interesting scene on the corner of Jay and Front Streets. As you can see, police tape marked off a section of the sidewalk, where a bag stuffed with clothes (dirty undies? the whites?) sat by an open window at Egg Baby, the children's clothing store. Two NYPD officers were sitting there inside a squad car, and the cop on the passenger side very begrudgingly cracked open his door when we approached to make an inquiry. "Some guy got shot. He's dead," we were told. more ›

Since Banksy began putting up pieces in the city over the weekend, dozens of readers have emailed pictures of pieces they've seen around the city. Most of the time, these emails have come with a note that says "New Banksy piece discovered!" - but in every case, the art work in question was not actually by Banksy, but by other artists in a similar vein. Therefore, to spare you any further confusion, we've put together this helpful gallery of the most frequently confused pieces—it will allow you to amaze your friends with your street art sophistication. more ›

A Staten Island seaport received nearly 22 tons of frozen tilapia — valued at $49,000 — but the freshwater fish got away before the importers could pick them up, a new lawsuit alleges. According to the Staten Island Advance, Great American Seafood Imports LLC says it was wronged by the New York Container Terminal, where 43,500 pounds of seafood somehow went missing in 2008. The massive shipment of frozen fish arrived from China on Dec. 12, 2008. But when Great American Seafood tried to pick up the delivery on Dec. 16, the tilapia had already been given "to an unknown person and/or entity," according to court documents. It remains unclear what happened to the fish. more ›

Guess you can't just win millions upon millions of dollars and expect to keep a secret. The mystery man or woman behind the winning Mega Millions ticket is unveiling him or herself today and picking up the winning July 7th pot. The ticket, purchased in Jamaica, Queens, was the only one to have all 6 matching numbers, giving the winner the entire $133 million payout. The NY Post reports that the winner "will get a lump-sum check for nearly $83 million, before taxes, from New York lottery officials at Grand Central Terminal." The employees at Shiv Convenience, where the winning ticket was printed out, are anxious to find out which of their customers has been keeping their fortune a secret. Store manager Bharat Patel said, "It's going to be a surprise. But I'll know the person as soon as I see them." The store also gets a $10,000 bonus for selling the ticket. If this story is giving you lottery fever, tonight's Mega Millions jackpot is $60 million—if you win that's a $2,307,692 annual, or $35,210,000 lump-sum payout. Decisions decisions. UPDATE: The Daily News reports the winner is 49-year-old MTA worker Aubrey Boyce, who works (worked?!) as a collections agent making around $50K a year. He'll take home the lump-sum of $56.7 million after taxes. more ›

Now that the maple syrup smell mystery is "solved", maybe Mayor Bloomberg's weird-stuff-in-NYC team needs to work on the odd case of the Staten Island Sound. A noise, described as a "loud," "heavy and low," and an "explosion," that occurred on Monday night is being investigated. The Staten Island Advance notes that its SILive.com commenters have no shortage of ideas, suggesting "everything from a mortar to a meteor to a sonic boom, to an exploding meth lab to, as authorities believe, one heck of a king-sized firecracker." A police source said, "As of now we have no idea. Nothing exploded in anyone's home or anything like that, and we checked all the power lines. ... We think it's probably fireworks." Like fireworks in NJ at a fireworks factory? more ›

A reader sent in this video that he took last week, saying, "I filmed this girl (filming her music video?) on the train the other day and am dying to figure out where I can find her final cut, or even who she is. Any ideas?" Looks like a (really passionate!) lip dub in the making, yet can't be found on YouTube or Vimeo. Alas, will this lip dub fall in the forest? more ›

The man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller gave a jailhouse interview with the Today Show and did not admit to not being part of the famous clan, "I really couldn't tell you. Perhaps at some point we can do a DNA test and find out." But he does claim he grew up in NYC! more ›

As the mysteries around Clark Rockefeller, the apparent con man who abducted his daughter during a social worker-supervised visit, are still being unraveled, here's an definitely bizarre addition: The German national actually used the Son of Sam's Social Security number to get his stock broker's license. The NY Post reports that Rockefeller, born Christian Gerhartsreiter, was fired from his firm when it learned he used David Berkowitz's SS#. A German man, a friend of Rockefeller's father, described Rockefeller as "crazy, always crazy He was like Batman before there was Batman, always going into different roles." Some classmates in Bavaria, Germany suspect he fled the country to avoid military service. more ›

Finally! It looks like Clark Rockefeller, the mysterious con man who abducted his daughter (his wife had custody) and turned up in Baltimore a week later, is actually Christian Gerhartsreiter, a German national from Bavaria. When the Boston Herald handed Alexander Gerhartsreiter a photograph of Clark Rockefeller, he said, "It seems you found my brother." Gerhartsreiter said his brother admitted to changing his name to Christopher Chichester--who is wanted for questioning in the disappearance of a California couple. And Gerhartsreiter said, "As far as I remember, Christian was an open-minded and social person and he was able persuade people very well." more ›

After Clark Rockefeller abducted his daughter in Boston and went on the lam--through NYC-- for days, only to be found in Baltimore a week later, the mystery about who Rockefeller really is continues to rivet people. While he falsely claimed to be part of the famous clan, now it's suggested he might be a German national named Christian Gerhart Reiter. Reiter had stayed with a Connecticut family an exchange student in the 1970s (the family said he acted oddly). Rockefeller, who has not provided any passports or other information about his past (and claims not to remember anything before 1993), is also being questioned about the deaths of California newlyweds. A man named Christopher Chicester--who looks like Rockefeller--had been staying with them. more ›

The Montauk Monster is still in the news (and on the Colbert Report), with the East Hampton Star now reporting that the mystery carcass is missing! More disturbing than that and the fact that the nation has been staring at a dead, bloated dog for a week, is the fact that the two locals holding the remains were planning to profit from the dead body. The duo were planning on reducing it to bones, creating some sort of artistic piece out of it, and watching the money roll in.

"Someone came and took the carcass. Now I have to hunt for my damn creature," said Eric Olsen, a Montauk real estate agent and surfer who retrieved the rotting animal from the beach. more ›

This past week, the NY Times peeked inside the Vermont Market and Pharmacy in Carroll Gardens, which has been closed for over a decade...actually, owner Mark Stein wouldn't let them inside, but he does shed some light on the shuttered store. Apparently when it was open, it had a 1920s aesthetic and "was a combination drugstore and market, selling specialties from Vermont"; prior to that, and under the same owner, it was called Mark's Pharmacy. These days it serves as a look into the past, a frozen-in-time storefront sitting on Henry and Sackett Streets. Local lore is that the suspender-wearing Stein is a quirky genius and recluse who is perhaps unwilling to sell his piece of prime real estate. He recently addressed some of the speculation about the store's past with the Times:

He dispelled some of the rumors, though, saying that aliens were not the reason the store closed down. Mr. Stein said: “It didn’t quite work out.” more ›

Last week the NY Times' House & Garden section took a look at the mysteries planted by an architect in a ritzy Fifth Avenue apartment. This week, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety report that Paramount has purchased the rights to the article for a feature to be produced by J.J. Abrams. Writers Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky have already been hired to adapt the piece into a film. more ›

After released a "Wanted" poster and questioning someone who may have been involved with an escape, law enforcement officials doubt that hedge fund founder Samuel Israel killed himself. Israel, who was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for swindling $450 million out of investors, was supposed to arrive at federal prison on Monday, but instead his empty SUV was found the Bear Mountain Bridge. The words "Suicide is Painless" were written on the dusty hood, suggesting suicide. more ›

A bench warrant was issued for the arrest of Samuel Israel III, the hedge fund founder who was convicted of scamming investors of $450 million. Israel was supposed to report for a 20-year prison sentence in Massachusetts on Monday, but instead, his empty car was found on the Bear Mountain Bridge with "Suicide is painless" written on the hood. more ›

Last weekend a mystery surfer saved the life of Brian Jordan, who was struggling in the water 100 yards off the shore of Coney Island. The story surfaced with a photo on the cover of the Daily News late last week (a surefire way to crack the case) and lo and behold, the mystery man has been unmasked...or rather, outed by his family. Turns out the hero is humble, and just a bit shy of the spotlight.

Kevin Campion, a 30-year-old ship's captain from Seattle, doesn't mind if his lifesaving deed goes unrewarded. more ›