Bathrobe

NEW YORK - I was crazy for you, mob boss Vincent Gigante told federal authorities yesterday, admitting to a judge what prosecutors say they knew for years - that he faked mental illness to avoid prosecution. Unshaven, unsteady and tousel-headed, a thin Gigante was a whisper of the image of a feared crime family boss as he stood in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. Judge I. Leo Glasser asked him if it was true that for seven years in the 1990s he deceived doctors who were examining his mental status.

TURNED 39 today, feel OK, not gonna make a big deal out of it the way Stallone did on his 39th when he drank a fifth of Absolut and jumped in his Ferrari Testarossa and hurtled through the streets of Beverly Hills at 160 mph singing "Help Me Rhonda" at the top of his lungs until the cops finally pulled him over, teary-eyed and incoherent.Or maybe that wasn't Stallone. Maybe I'm thinking of Tony Danza when he landed the starring role in "Who's the Boss?"Besides, what difference does it make?

The name popped up again -- Salvatore Pasquale Spinnato -- and immediately my mind raced off to that distant West Virginia morning when a man in a maroon bathrobe tried to do to me what he'd done to countless others -- con me.Sal Spinnato was from East Baltimore, a slithery man who'd hooked up with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for an undercover investigation of suspected corruption in the city's Department of Public Works. It was Abscam before Abscam, with FBI agents posing not as Arab sheiks but as blue-jeaned contractors looking for government jobs.

Twenty-four hours before Benjamin Morgan Hawkes, believing he was, alternately, Jesus Christ and Satan, killed his mother and a teen-age boarder in their Columbia home, a Howard County General Hospital physician made a diagnosis of "stable" but suffering from "anxiety" and sent him home with a prescription for anti-anxiety medicine, according to reports made public yesterday. It was the mental health system's latest and most deadly failure in its 14 years of periodically housing and treating Hawkes as he struggled with mental illness, Public Defender Carol A. Hanson said yesterday.

Google, the search engine giant, has banned CougarLife.com, a website promoting relationships between older women and younger men, from advertising on its "family friendly" pages, while taking no such action against websites that offer to match young women with "sugar daddies," such as DateAMillionaire.com. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher made the May-December romance so mainstream that we now have a prime-time television show, "Cougar Town," on the topic. Even Demi's ex, tough guy Bruce Willis, is cool enough with it to show up at family gatherings.

A black, male version of white bread Mary Richards?That's exactly who David Preston (David Alan Grier), of the new Fox sitcom "The Preston Episodes," is supposed to be. If you don't believe me now, you will by the time tonight's premiere episode ends -- with Grier running onto a city street and throwing his hat in the air while the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" theme song plays and the lyrics say, "You might just make it on your own."Only instead of the show ending on the upbeat image of the hat soaring skyward, the camera follows it down into the handsof a homeless man, who refuses to return it to Preston.

THE EGYPTIANS have the pyramids. The Romans have the Coliseum. The French have the Eiffel Tower - and I have my bathroom shelf. It is a thing of beauty. Like all master strokes, the glass shelf reflects the balance of man and his environment, even if this shelf is still not quite level. It also serves a testimony to the triumph of will, to the power of ingenuity, and to the benefit of making multiple trips to hardware stores. Like many of life's great triumphs, this saga began when somebody screwed up. In this case it was a couple of workmen who failed, a few years ago, to properly secure the shelf to the wall.

Whenever the subject turns to incredibly bad gifts, I think of that Christmas morning three years ago.We were all gathered around the tree opening our presents when my mother, who was visiting for the holidays, handed me a large, square box. The wrapping paper had a sort of psychedelic candy-canes-and-teddy-bears motif.That alone should have tipped me off to what lay ahead, but it was 6:30 in the morning and I hadn't even had a cup of coffee yet.Besides, the kids were going nuts tearing into what Santa had left them and you couldn't really concentrate, because every few seconds you had to look up and admire someone's Malibu Barbie or remote-controlled Desert Thunder tank with missile-firing capabilities.

WASHINGTON -- ONE DAY in the winter of 1989, I walked into my condominium in downtown Washington and found Mstislav Rostropovich, the great Russian/American conductor, standing at our front desk. This remarkable man, always so in control of everything, seemed slightly dazed, and there was a look of pure joy on his face.After greeting me, he stood still for several long seconds. "Last night, I conducted 250 cellists," he finally murmured. "Last night, I conducted 250 cellists . . ."At that moment, I saw as close to a beatific joy as I have ever seen, next to certain pictures of saints.

So, the Ravens' Tony Siragusa is headed for Hollywood upon his retirement from the National Football League. His agent at the William Morris talent agency says the Goose has screen-tested for HBO's The Sopranos and that a network sitcom could be in the works for Siragusa. Tony Siragusa with his own sitcom, imagine that. Given network television's penchant for sticking with the tried and true and then repeating it one too many times, we thought that's exactly what we'd do -- try to imagine the kinds of network shows in which we might be seeing Tony.