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WASHINGTONBehind closed doors, House Speaker Newt Gingrich today will explain his controversial book deal with medial mogul Rupert Murdoch to the House ethics committee. The panel is probing a series of ethics complaints against Gingrich stemming from his multi-million-dollar book deal with Murdoch's HarperCollins publishers.At question is a meeting last November that Murdoch and his lobbyists held with Gingrichfirst disclosed by the Daily Newsjust before the Georgia Republican agreed to a book deal with HarperCollins. An ethics complaint charges that the deal for Gingrich's now-best-selling "To Renew America" is a conflict of interest because of Murdoch's extensive interests before the government. "These are no-holds-barred discussions and I expect the one with the speaker will be absolutely no holds barred," panel Chairwoman Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.) told reporters. Yesterday, the committee questioned Murdoch lobbyists Preston Padden and Peggy Binzel, as well as Jeffrey Eisenach, a Gingrich political ally who first suggested the book. Murdoch, who owns the Fox TV network and the New York Post, is scheduled to appear before the panel in another closed session next Tuesday.
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Mob matriarch Victoria Gotti underwent successful surgery to relieve a blockage in her brain after tests showed she'd suffered her second stroke in four months, the Daily News has learned.Doctors inserted a stent in Gotti's brain during surgery Monday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia, and by the afternoon her sense of humor had returned."Seth, this is not exactly a Max Factor moment," Gotti quipped to family attorney Seth Ginsberg in a coy reference to the famed cosmetics king.Gotti's four children - Angel, Victoria, John and Peter - gathered at her bedside in the same hospital that had cared for her after she suffered a stroke just days before last Thanksgiving.Gotti, 64, had not been feeling well in recent days and doctors recommended she undergo an MRI, Ginsberg said.The test showed she had suffered a second stroke. Though reluctant to undergo surgery, she relented after being convinced it was in the best interests for her future health, Ginsberg said.Before the latest stroke, Gotti had been recuperating at the modest Howard Beach, Queens, home where she raised her kids."She's doing well, conscious, making jokes," said Ginsberg, a member of John A. (Junior) Gotti's defense team during three racketeering-conspiracy trials Gotti faced over the past two years. Each of the cases ended in mistrials, and prosecutors decided last year not to him again.Victoria Gotti is an avid painter whose portraits of her late husband, Bill Clinton and other big names have been displayed at several New York galleries.Though seldom seen around the courthouse when the Dapper Don, her husband of 42 years, was convicted of racketeering in the late 1980s, she was a regular at all three of her son's trials.During the last trial, the matriarch accused the prosecutor of taunting her by asking, "What the hell are you looking at?"She fired back, "Who the hell do you think you are talking to?"
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MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL'S steroid investigation is already looking beyond BALCO and Barry Bonds. Lawyers with George Mitchell's panel interviewed sources from a series of Daily News articles last year in which Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were identified as heavy-duty steroid users by informants in an FBI trafficking investigation. One investigator also asked about a 2005 Daily News report that the lead agent on the case, Greg Stejskal, told MLB security chief Kevin Hallinan in 1994 that players had been implicated as steroid users, and that MLB did nothing about it. While the information could prove embarrassing for MLB and McGwire, the interviews are a sign that Mitchell is indeed pursuing available evidence, as baseball promised to do when it announced its investigation last month. Whether or not that information ends up in Mitchell's final report remains to be seen, and one of the FBI agents, retired undercover officer Bill Randall, described the interview as "cursory" at best. MLB officials would not comment yesterday, saying their policy is to avoid discussing the investigation, and former U.S. attorney Charles Scheeler, who conducted at least two of the interviews, did not return a call to his Baltimore office. In addition to Stejskal and Randall, who ran the landmark "Operation Equine" investigation that led to more than 70 steroid-trafficking convictions in the early 1990s, Scheeler and other investigators wereing to reach convicted steroid dealer Curt Wenzlaff, who sources said provided steroids to Canseco and McGwire, and another convicted dealer who was interviewed by the Daily News, but who was not named in the paper. Randall said he did not know whether Wenzlaff or the other source planned to cooperate, but Wenzlaff, who dodged jail time by cooperating in the case, has tried to avoid publicity since he was interviewed by The News. Stejskal, reached at the FBI office in Ann Arbor, Mich., yesterday, confirmed that he had spoken to Scheeler, but said he could not say more because of FBI orders that he not speak to the media. Randall retired in 2001 and now works in private security. "(Scheeler) asked about the specifics of the (Daily News) article, asked about Operation Equine, when it started, how long you were doing it, that sort of thing. This was 'Interview 101' type stuff," Randall said. "It seemed like he was looking for any discrepancies. I just told him that Canseco's name had come up and then later it came up about McGwire.
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