The case of the missing Elvis

Stulman’s will to make the police solve the dispute gave him the upper hand. Finally, Messer went to his car and gave up Elvis. “We thought it was over,” he said. On the Great Jones Street, Stulman put the bust on the display.

A few days later, Messer and Gaver were visited by three NYPD officers. The main detective, Mark Tufano, wore a bullet resistant vest and a Yankees hat and spoke to the Queens of a Wan Caller. “Listen, I feel stupid coming to your door about it, but we can’t choose and choose the cases,” he said.

“Do you hunt for Elvis?” Gaver asked. She explained that they had already given it back.

“Here’s the business,” Tufano said. “Was a complaint made about the bust Elvis, ok? We are not, as it would, let us go your door and pull you out here in handcuffs. But you can’t put your toothpaste back into the tube. “Tufano told them that there is a mandate for their arrest, and he asked them to surrender the next day at the ninth section, in East Village.

Messer informed Tufano about their own roots East Village. Tufano replied, “Are you a guy of Mcsorley?” The conversation was amicable. Messer said to the three policemen: “I will call Ira Glass and see if they want to finish the story.” The officers looked as if they had no idea who he was talking about.

Messer left a message for a lawyer, and the next day, he and Gaver entered the premises. “The lawyer called back as I enter, and she said,” Don’t enter the premises! Don’t talk to anyone! ‘”Too late. A detective grabbed Messer’s arm. Gaver remembered:” I said, “I don’t touch him! He had nothing to do with it. I did it!” The detective advised that he just recognized a crime; Messer was an accessory. In a room of interrogation.

“I announced the police absolutely,” Stulman told me recently. I met him at Fairfax, his comfortable restaurant on the West Fourth Street, along with his business partner, Matt Kebbekus. Stulman wore a blue cardigan and a scarf and had his hair in a chiffle. It is serious and direct, and a romantic restaurant in Matrița Bourdain; He has been in business since he had a bar at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Kebbekus. (His college colleague was Virgil Abloh.) In 2003, he moved to New York, where he lived in a studio from the East Eastern part for thirteen hundred dollars a month and opened the first restaurant. When I told him about the opinion shared by Messer and Gaver – Dinsenta, that Jolene borrowed Jones’s credibility, because she wasn’t cool enough to have her own – she seemed hurt.

The taking over of Jones’s space, he explained, was not part of any plan. His son went to school, to PS 3, with the grandson of owner Jones. After Jones closed, in 2018, the owner endeavored to find a tenant. Stulman would be interested? “When I entered, it seemed that one day someone had just extinguished the lights,” he remembered. “Mardi Mardi Gras still hung. Elvis bust was still in the window. The last specials were still written on the board. It was, like this perfectly preserved, old, worn restaurant. And he spoke to us. There was energy in the walls. It was an atmosphere. “He and Kebbekus talked to the ordinary former history of the place. “Also, as it was, I have lived in New York for twenty -one,” Stulman said. “I went there.” The owner, himself a long -term resident in the neighborhood, stipulated in Stulman’s rental contract that certain parts of the building, such as a neon sign on the facade, and the bar itself, could not be modified or removed. “However, it was something else in the lease,” Stulman said. “Cape Elvis”.

If their initial decision to appoint the place Jones was a brand extension, it was triggered. Too many patrons considered that New Jones is the same as Old Jones and he associated it, said Stulman, with “medium gumbo and medium wings and a red stripe.” For a new name, they landed on Jolene, in honor of Dolly Parton. (Kebbekus’s young daughter was obsessed with the song.) “She felt like a female version of Jones,” said Kebbekus. “OJ-laziness. “Jolene has endeavored for some Funkiness and some comfort. “Our motor is to build restaurants for neighborhoods and for people to be part of their lives,” said Kebbekus. But things have changed since the eighties: Yelp, Regulation, work markets. Small margins, big rent. Soon the pandemic came, which, strangely, created something of the old feeling.

“It was amazing, in a way,” Stulman said. “It was only New Yorkers. I felt as if I were part of a resistant pile. There was an energy. “But he was also financially stressful. Sometimes Stulman woke up clogging his chest, believing he might have a heart attack.

Theft happened at one point, with the wrapping of the pandemic, when the restaurants, as a social idea, felt precious and, possibly, on the verge of extinction. Elvis loss has created a new problem. “They are literally default of the lease if I do not have this,” Stulman said, from the plaster. He saw his Instagram post as an attempt to solve the problem in addition. . A detective asked him how much Elvis was worth. Stulman said to me: “As for me, it is worth thousands and thousands of dollars – for someone.” Messer believes that it should be appreciated at the (negligible) price of its eBay clones, although this overlooks how meaningless objects are sometimes transmuted into something more precious to the strength of their history. A bartending manual can go for two dollars; Basquiat is for two hundred thousand. In any case, the police used Stulman’s evaluation in his report. This was enough to turn a small caper into a class-e crime, punished by up to four years in prison.

Stulman remembers the meeting in Elvis, as a bizarre. The first strange thing he noticed was the reporter in “This American Life” hung. He wondered if he was involved in a kind of advertising stunt: “Are there a Russian now?” (No story was materialized.) Also, he felt threatened. “They had at least one, maybe two, very big dogs,” he said. He endeavored to understand Messer’s complaint about Instagram post. “They accused us of trying to steal an artist’s artist,” Stulman said. Then he continued: “I begin to ask me:” Why is it so important to you? “I said, no. 1, was in my restaurant and you took it. And, whether this was initially or not, this is not a way to tell me. But then – and I think that was when they had, like, “Aha!” Moment – I said: “I am in fact, I am obliged by my rental contract to return this. So it is not my The bust Elvis. Belongs to 54 Great Jones Street. ”

Cartoon by Liana Finck

After returning to Elvis, Stulman informed the police that the bust had been returned and did not want to press accusations. The police told him it was not his call.

Meanwhile, Jolene has never cohered in a local joint. “That neighborhood has changed quite a lot,” Kebbekus said. “There are people who have money. And if you can afford to live there, you can also afford not to live there during the pandemic. “Last year, he and Stulman decided to close. Last night, one of the ordinary hired a Scot in a Kilt to play a wand. Soon, a new restaurant has taken over the lease. It was opened in September last year. The new owners called The Place Elvis.

Elvis is a French wine bar with orange walls, a comfortable back noise and tiny tables. When I visited, in January, it was a couple, he had lunch in a corner, who met in Jones, married and later divorced. A co -owner of the restaurant said that his girlfriend’s parents had the first meeting in Jones. He was loud and lively, and people seemed happy. Not Jones, exactly, but still cute. The Elvis, which I hoped to find, was not there.

“He can’t live here,” said one of the owners, Dar Rubell, adding that he wanted. “It’s a shame.”

Rubell said that, shortly after the name was notified, the ownership team received a termination letter and desisant from a company that manages the estate Elvis Presley, supporting the braking theft. “It’s the stern. It’s clear. Is well developed. He is threatening, “Rubell said.

In 2013, much of Presley’s property was purchased for a hundred and forty -five million dollars by a company called Authentic Brands Group. Authentic Brands is an intellectual property business whose portfolio consists mainly of companies in difficulty Brooks, Barneys New York, Juicy Couture, Nautica, Sports Illustrated. Authentic buys them cheaply, then usually ceases commercial operations and licenses. This keeps in life, in a certain sense, the beloved, bankruptcy enterprises; There are still Polos and juicy sweater pants, though manufactured by third parties. In another sense, it creates zombie brands, whose new lives have nothing to do with the original ones. You can buy Sports Illustrated protein powder, for example, or you can visit the Sports Illustrated resort in the Dominican Republic (“where champions come!”).

Jamie Salter, the founder and the authentic CEO of Brands, worked on a private fund-checked fund, where he bought the rights on Bob Marley’s estate. Salter left for shirts, beanies and Bootleg Marley bongs. There was money to make in the dead and famous. At Authentic, he bought the rights to the estates of Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali; Salter, holding twelve houses, recently said Bloomberg Businessweek That they made ideal partners: “They don’t fly private, I don’t talk back.” Authentic started selling Presley to a younger generation, licensing an Elvis Snapchat filter, dogs with dog dogs infused with CBD and an animated Netflix show, “Elvis agent”, in which Matthew McConaughey expresses an Elvis secret, which jet-pants.

Messer once noted me about the irony of a lot of good white people, who are struggling for the control of an Elvis I plaster chief, who has built his own career on the sound of Black Blues artists, many of whose copyright were stolen by their disc labels. The authentic purchase was just one step in the copyright food chain – an IP tone swallowed by an IP shark.