Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

Veronica Hearst Now Getting Some Cosmic Justice | Oh, sweet irony: "The hedge fund that kicked Veronica Hearst out of her Palm Beach mansion and forced Elizabeth Taylor and Kathy Ireland to bankrupt their jewelry business through predatory financing is now in some trouble of its own." [Dealbreaker]

"Pawnshop" is such a loaded word: It almost immediately conjures up an image of a seedy, fluorescent-lit room with a clerk standing behind bulletproof glass and display cabinets full of tacky gold jewelry. Fortunately, if you happen to be rich, possess a reasonably large collection of art, and you're desperate for cash, you can call up Art Capital Group, which doesn't look anything like a pawnshop since it's located in the former Sotheby's building on Madison Avenue, and "looks at first glance like an art gallery," reports the Times. But bring Art Capital your collection and they'll do the same thing every other pawnshop does: They'll extend you a loan using your art works as collateral, and if you fail to pay back what you owe, you'll have to say goodbye to them forever.More

So you're looking to conserve cash now that you've been laid off from your job. You've even contemplated moving back in with your parents. A horribly depressing scenario? It doesn't have to be, says Page Six magazine, which reports that lots of twenty and thirty-something New Yorkers choose to shack up with their parents during career lulls, even glamorous social scenesters like Charlotte Ronson and Fabiola Beracasa. Both ladies, the mag points out, have since decamped to abodes of their own, although in Fabiola's case her move out of mom's Fifth Avenue penthouse probably had less to do with spreading her wings than another recessionary trend: the rising foreclosure rate. 

How did Veronica Hearst (excuse us, Veronica DeGruyter Beracasa de Uribe Hearst, aka Fabiola's mom), get through three rich husbands and still wind up $45 million in debt? As Vanity Fair's Vicky Ward discovers, the talents that enable one to ensnare wealthy old dudes don't necessarily include financial acumen. In 2000, Veronica persuaded her husband Randolph Hearst—whom she'd married in 1987 when he was 72 and she was a once-divorced, once-widowed, forty-something mother of two—to pay $30 million for Villa Venezia, a 52-room, 28,000-square-foot Florida mansion.More

• After living out of the Bowery Hotel for months, Ann Dexter-Jones has finally found her new home. The socialite mom of Sam, Mark, and Charlotte Ronson paid $1.795 million for a four-bedroom West Village duplex at 42 West 9th Street. The 2,200-square-foot apartment features four fireplaces and stained glass doors. [Cityfile]
• Mark and Jennifer Frissora—also known as Emma Bloomberg's in-laws!—have sold a fourth-floor apartment at 15 East 69th Street for $7.65 million. Emma's father-in-law is the CEO of Hertz. [Cityfile]
• Gallerist Stefanie Bortolami, the former business partner of Amalia Dayan, has picked up a third-floor condo at the Spears Building in Chelsea for $3.275 million. [Cityfile]
• Less than a month after we first revealed that Chase Coleman and his wife Stephanie were the mystery buyers of Veronica Hearst's full-floor spread at 4 East 66th Street, property documents posted today confirm they paid $36.5 million for the spread. [Cityfile]
• A 43rd-floor penthouse at 15 Central Park West has sold for $21.5 million to an unidentified buyer. The sale leaves just three penthouses remaining at the tony address, one of which is on the market for $80 million. [NYO]

Hedge fund manager Chase Coleman and his wife Stephanie have gone into contract on the sixth-floor, full-floor spread at 4 East 66th Street, the apartment that socialite Veronica Hearst was forced to put on the market to pay off her mounting debts. It's unclear how much the Julian Robertson protégé paid for the lavish spread since it was never formally put on the market, but rumors back in April suggested that Hearst was prepared to part with it for around $30 million. (The apartment, which Veronica inherited from her late husband, billionaire publishing heir Randolph Hearst, was also home to her daughter Fabiola Beracasa until recently.) Of course, a big bucket of cash wasn't all Coleman needed to get past the notoriously finicky co-op board, which once denied admission to billionaire financier Ron Perelman. Prospective buyers in the building that Sid and Mercedes Bass, Alan Greenberg, and Lew Sanders live in are expected to have at least $100 million in liquid assets to pass muster. We're guessing that wasn't a problem for Coleman, considering he's estimated to have taken home between $350 and $400 million in 2007. Although Chase and Stephanie will no doubt renovate the place to their tastes, you can see what it looked like when Veronica was ruling the roost after the jump. More