British insanity escalates

Authorities refuse to publicly name 18 escaped prisoners they are seeking “because it would violate their right of privacy”.  There’s at least one murderer and one torturer among the bunch, but what the heck.

 

Park Avenue (Greenwich) sale

 

159 Park Avenue

159 Park Avenue has sold for $3.050 million, on an original asking price of $3.595. Wonderful old 1867 home, nicely restored, on one of my favorite streets in the “downtown” area.

Add an apostrophe and you have an interesting headline

 

Whoa Doggie!

NY Daily News:

Prosecutors in Aaron Hernandez case seeking help from tattoo artists who inked the ex-Patriots tight end  

We’ll be spending far more than that to house him here, albeit in less comfortable conditions

 

Don’t forget to mow my lawn and pick up the paper while I’m away

Terrorist family living high on the hog at British taxpayers expense.

CONVICTED hate preacher Abu Hamza’s family will continue to live in their taxpayer-funded £1.25million house – and receive £650 a week in state benefits.

Hamza was convicted of 11 terror charges earlier this week after fighting an expensive [taxpayer funded] 10-year legal battle against his extradition.

The 56-year could die in a top-max security jail after he was found guilty of aiding the taking of hostages in Yemen and seeking to set up an Al Qaeda training camp in the US.

But it has emerged that his wife and some of his eight children will continue to stay in the rented terraced house in west London where they receive benefits to the tune of £33,800 a year.

Despite Hamza’s conviction, Hammersmith and Fullham council are powerless to move them from the five-bedroom property.

Hamza also bought a £220,000 buy to let home in the city while he was in prison.

He was able to do so because the family home is in his wife’s name.

Two of his daughters aged 15 and 18 live in the house and it is thought one of his sons does too.

The council asked Hamza’s wife Najat Mostafa to move to a smaller property in 2012 but changed its mind.

They are unable to evict her because the tenancy agreement has no time limit.

Several of Hamza’s sons have also become criminals.

Mustafa Kamel, 32, and stepson Mohssin Ghailam, 33, were jailed in Yemen in 1999 for their involvement in a bomb plot.

On their return to the UK they were again jailed for a car crime scam in 2009.

Hamza Kamel, 27, was jailed for two and a half years for handling stolen goods while Imran Mostafa, 22, was jailed for 11 years for an armed robbery.

 

 

Some still don’t get the point

 

21 West End Avenue

21 West End Avenue has cut its price to $1.195 million and, given its location close to Old Greenwich, that seems like a pretty good price. But the agent clearly doesn’t fully understand the implications of the flood zone restrictions, or she wouldn’t add this to the property description:

Though in an AE zone, this home has never been damaged by flood in 34 years! Existing flood insurance has been grandfathered, with low premium. 

The real problem with being in an AE zone is that you’re restricted to 50% of the structure’s value in making improvements. Not the land value, but the house’s. In this case, according to the town, full, 100% value of the house is $126,200, while the land is valued at $887,900. Assuming the home is non-complying, and the agent doesn’t say that it is in compliance, then anything a future owner may wish to do to the structure is limited to a total cost of one-half of $126,000, which is $63,000. After cumulative improvements reach that threshold, the house must be brought into compliance, which means raising it an unspecified number of feet – that’s expensive.

None of which is to say that this house isn’t a good deal; my point is, the history of a house’s flood damage is irrelevant to the issue of being in compliance with the new code.

On the brighter side…

Old Greenwich’s own, Stephanie Whittle, West Point 2005 (?), has survived the sequester freeze and finally been promoted to Major. You may now call her a major pain in the ass – I wouldn’t dare. Steph’s father, by the way, is the renowned torturer Ernest J. Whittle, DDS, in Old Greenwich and her cousin is Bill Whittle, the genius behind Afterburner.

When Stephanie was admitted to both Harvard and West Point and she chose West Point, her relatives accused Ernie of pressuring her up the Hudson to save on tuition. Not so, and they should have just asked Pal Nancy and me, who watched Stephanie play with our son John, growing up. As early as five, it was Steph’s way or the highway, and she ordered John around as efficiently as she later commanded helicopter commands in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our country, in this instance, is in good hands.

Next up on the demand list: paid menstrual leave

 

The modern woman

Such fragile flowers. They can’t afford their own birth control, they can’t hold their liquor as well as boys so that they, but not the boys, can’t consent to sex, they require “trigger warnings” in college text books to alert them to disturbing words and images, and now they want to take a week off every month to deal with their menses. There was a time when “women’s liberation” was based on some kind of theory of equality – now it’s about entitlement.

Just in time for Father’s Day

14 Golf Club Rd

For the golfer dad, Leslie McElwreath has just listed 14 Club House Road, directly on the Greenwich Country Club’s course, for $8 million. It’s a custom build on an acre-and-a-half – the land itself cost $2.3 million in 2000, so this number sounds about right. I’m not a golfer, but if you are, and you also want to be close to town, this is a killer location.

Or you could just let the place go, forget the parties

3 Cherry Blossom Lane, part of spec builder Greg Silver’s failed attempt at creating a maxi-pad development on the Banksville border, has sold for $3.150 million. Built in 2008 (and why the listing claims 2012, I don’t know), it started at $7.995 million when, presumably, Silver still intended to finish it, and then dropped steadily over the years, to $6.995 to $5.495 t0, finally, $3.195, when someone finally bit.

I always figured this as land value of, maybe, $1.5, but apparently someone has decided he can salvage the building itself, in which case, I suppose $3 million is not completely nuts. And if it turns out that it is, the structure is large enough to accommodate a nut house, so the buyer can stay precisely where he is – all the comforts of home.

From happier days, when Silver could afford electricity, if not fixtures:

Here’s a British import that might ease the financial burden of back country mansion owners

 

In the Master’s Bedroom

Rent them out for sex parties.

Home to Gogglebox’s ‘posh couple’, the £3.5million Salutation mansion in Kent is familiar to many as the chintzy pile where Dom and Steph Parker drink in front of the television.

But on Saturday, it was the setting for an altogether different type of entertainment when a schoolfriend of Kate Middleton’s held an exclusive, £500-a-ticket, sex party there.

Only the ‘sexual elite’ were invited to the May Ball organised by the Killing Kittens private club, founded by Emma Sayle, who boarded at Downe House with the future Duchess of Cambridge.

Swingers wearing masks and black tie parked their Ferraris and mingled in the seven-bedroom home designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens for champagne and oysters before the evening’s real entertainment began.

As the evening wore on, many of the 60 partygoers peeled off their dinner jackets and dresses and slipped into one of the bedrooms, or ‘playrooms’, to have sex with each other.  The beds were dressed only with sheets, while bowls of condoms were placed nearby.

Those who didn’t want to join in the orgy could watch, and the Sun‘s Jennifer Tippett said one couple had sex on an antique rocking horse while in another room, a grey-haired man wearing just his socks had sex with a woman.

Only couples or single women are allowed to attend Killing Kittens parties, with tickets for women going up to £60 per event and couples up to £500.  Masks are mandatory, but swingers are forbidden from taking phones to events to protect people’s privacy.

The Grade I-listed Salutation mansion, which the Parkers hire out at £1,700 for a night and also run as an upmarket B&B, is on the market for £3.5million as the Parkers are said to be keen to ‘do something different’.

Neither Mr Parker, 49, nor his 47-year-old wife responded to MailOnline’s request for a comment today, but they are believed not to have been present at the weekend’s orgy, which was a corporate booking.

Certainly not every Conyers Farm megabox is for sale, and some of the owners up there might be squeamish at the thought of strangers, even well-heeled ones, frolicking on their antique bedsteads, but here at FWIW we like to pass along creative uses for unwanted real estate, and so here’s this one, for free.