Los Angeles – Resigned to do the time, Paris Hilton played jailhouse hostess yesterday, accepting her first guests since her stunning reversal of fortune landed her back in lockup.
The hotel heiress sister, Nicky, and her ex-boyfriend Stavros Niachros spent less than an hour with the mentally fragile inmate, trying to boost her spirits.
“She’s being strong,” Nicky Hilton told reporters as she emerged from the Twin Towers Correctional Facility’s medical center just after 1 p.m.
The pampered princess is apparently adjusting to her new isolated digs in the jail’s medical ward, eating cereal and bread, and crying less, sources said.
Nicky Hilton and Niachros were allowed to enter the jail without waiting on line, prompting other visitors to gripe, “Hey, that’s not fair!”
“No one else can just walk right up,” said Misty Lloyd, 32, who waited nearly one and a half hours to see her cousin.
Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore denied Nicky Hilton and Niachros got special treatment.
Paris’ parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton, are expected to visit her tomorrow, friends said.
A day after saying she will not appeal a judge’s decision Friday to send her back to jail to serve the remainder of her 45-day sentence, the “Simple Life” reality TV star seemed to be adjusting to incarceration. Being back on her unspecified medication is helping her cope, friends said.
She considers her new confines a step up from the Century Regional Detention Center in nearby Lynwood, where she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a friend said. Paris called Lynwood “hell,” the pal said.
Ocala, Fla. – Actor Wesley Snipes is a victim of “unscrupulous tax advice” and is being selectively targeted for prosecution on federal tax evasion charges because he is black, his attorneys argue in a motion to dismiss the indictment.
That’s what Snipes has said all along about the charges.
In a June 4 motion to dismiss the indictment, Snipes’ attorneys argue that prosecutors filed additional tax evasion charges against him and not against two co-defendants because they are “Caucasian, while Mr. Snipes is African-American.” A federal judge is still considering the motion.
The Oct. 17 indictment charges Snipes with fraudulently claiming refunds totaling nearly $12 million in 1996 and 1997 for income taxes already paid. The star of the “Blade” trilogy and other films also was charged with failure to file returns from 1999 through 2004.
The indictment said Snipes conspired with American Rights Litigators’ founder Eddie Ray Kahn and tax preparer Douglas P.
Rosile Sr. to file false refund claims based on a bogus argument that only income from foreign sources was subject to taxation.
Snipes’ motion says he should be counted among 2,000 people who relied on Kahn and Rosile for tax advice, not as one of their co-defendants.
The indictment said Kahn and Rosile, through American Rights Litigators, collected fees of up to 20 percent of refunds from fraudulent tax returns.
Rosile’s attorney, David Wilson, said Sunday his client never gave Snipes any tax advice.
“Mr. Rosile never met Mr. Snipes,” Wilson said.
Kahn’s attorney did not immediately return phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.
There was no immediate response Sunday to calls seeking comment from Snipes’ manager or a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office.
London – Little known musician Chris Jagger had been saying for years that his famous brother Mick would one day join him on stage. When it finally happened, the audience numbered about 40.
It happened late last month at the Bull’s Head, a riverside pub in southwest London, and anyone who wants proof can see grainy footage on YouTube that someone captured on a cell phone.
Mick Jagger, 63, had been visiting his former wife Jerry and their children in nearby Richmond when he slipped into the pub wearing a purple sweater and joined Chris’s Atcha! blues band.
In the impromptu performance, Chris, 59, plays guitar, and the brothers use a single microphone to sing “Dead Flowers,” a track from the Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” album.
Chris told the Daily Mail newspaper that he persuaded his brother during a break in the Atcha! show to take to the stage.
“At first he didn’t really want to do it, but I said to him: ‘You’ve got a tour coming up. I think you need the practice’,” Chris said.
The Rolling Stones began a European tour in Belgium this week and will be headlining at the Isle of Wight music festival on Sunday.
New Haven, Conn. – Spike Lee, screening his documentary about Hurricane Katrina, urged people to vote to ensure government functions better in the future than it did after the deadly storm.
Lee, who attended New Haven’s annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas, showed his Peabody Award-winning 2006 HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts.” “It was a fiasco, a mockery on the local, state and federal levels, and once again, Americans got hornswoggled, led astray, bamboozled,” he said. “And too many people have died so we all have the right to vote. Never tell anyone your vote doesn’t matter.” Lee faulted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the levees that failed to keep the floodwaters out of New Orleans.
“The damage and devastation was brought about by a breach in the levees,” Lee said after the Saturday screening. “It wasn’t the hurricane. It was the breach in the levees. That is the job of the Army Corps of Engineers. They did not do their job.” The documentary recounts the Aug.
29, 2005, storm with eyewitness accounts and news footage of flooding that drowned New Orleans as the levees designed to hold back the waterways surrounding the city failed.
