Notorious

Joseph T. Maskell, a retired Baltimore police lieutenant who was shot in a 1964 robbery that began the notorious Veney brothers case, died of lung cancer April 10 at his Mount Washington home. He was 73.Lieutenant Maskell joined the Police Department in 1946 and, after recovering from his wounds, retired in 1966. He became an adjuster for an insurance company and was appointed vice president of marketing at Freestate Adjusting Co. in 1979. He retired again in 1986 and was a rental car salesman until 1990.

Along with the tabloid coverage and lawsuits, the best thing about being notorious has got to be doing movie cameos. It's easy work, and besides, when someone's tainted reputation precedes him or her, it's hard to be accepted as another character anyway.There are exceptions, of course. Take debutante turned revolutionary turned socialite Patty Hearst, currently in John Waters' "Pecker." She started out as a novelty cameo diva for Waters, but has managed to parlay it into an actual career.

To get the city to clean up a notorious drug market, write a best-seller about it.If they built a proper convention hotel, the Convention Center would never book safety hearings.Al Gore befuddled everyone in Kyoto. A triumph.The stock market is booming because the U.S. is the least bad economy in which to park your money.Pub Date: 12/10/97

"Notorious," by Donald Spoto. HarperCollins. 496 pages. $27.50. Two years before her death in 1982, Ingrid Bergman asked to be remembered for her work: "I hope they will put on my gravestone, 'She acted to the last day of her life. Here rests a good actress.' " By naming his new life story of Bergman after her 1946 film "Notorious," Donald Spoto glances at her work, but chiefly invokes the scandal that has long overshadowed her career in the popular imagination.Forget the hard-sell title: The substance of Spoto's absorbing and artful biography puts the emphasis back where it belongs, on Ingrid Bergman's creative accomplishment.

Day 2 of AMC's fifth annual Film Preservation Festival devotes itself to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, so you know plenty of good stuff is in store.The day's highlight is the TV debut of the restored version of "Vertigo" (8 p.m.-10: 15 p.m.), with James Stewart as a police investigator obsessed with a woman he's been asked to investigate. Kim Novak plays the mysterious woman he loses and then finds? The film is a masterpiece, and the $1 million restoration was worth every penny, restoring both the film's vivid colors and its wide-screen glory.

"Baltimore would be displaying a short memory if it allowed Henry Barnes to depart without a warm expression of public appreciation," said The Evening Sun in 1962, in tribute to the famed traffic expert who had spent a quarter-century unsnarling traffic in some of the nation's largest cities, when he left Baltimore to become New York City's traffic czar."Disputatious to the end, his verbal disagreements do not overshadow his many solid accomplishments, which have earned him the highest honor in his field: the chance to tackle New York's traffic mess."

"You mongrel Slavic swine," the cramped scribbling on the postcard began. "When are you going to apologize for wrongly blaming the Muslim world for the Oklahoma bombing? If the world ever goes to war, it will be because of pigs like you. I hope that you . . ."I couldn't make out what he hoped but I assume it wasn't pleasant. And his name appeared to be something like GlshF8rgh, but I can't be sure. That's usually the way it is with the names of those who use "mongrel Slavic swine" as a salutation.

An 11-year-old student in a California elementary school thought it was really funny when Beavis and Butt-Head, the breathtakingly moronic duo whose animated series wins the highest ratings of any program on MTV, mooned their teacher.So he tried it, too."I got in trouble," he admits sheepishly. "I won't do anything else they do anymore."Beavis and Butt-Head, heavy-metal couch potatoes whose vocabulary has scarcely evolved beyond their ubiquitous muttering chuckles, initially followed "The Simpsons" and "Ren and Stimpy" in sending subversive messages through the medium of TV animation.

She really does love rock 'n' roll.Talk to Joan Jett on the telephone and you can't miss it. It's the voice of a fan.She's going on about the young bands she's been listening to: "I'm a huge fan of the Replacements. I really like Jane's Addiction, but now they broke up. I like the Nirvana record, but everybody seems to like that. And I just got turned on to this band Fugazi from D.C. They're a great band."Then there are the bands that lit her rock fire: "I think the first single I ever bought was 'All Right Now' [a 1970 hit by British hard-rock group Free]

DURBAN, South Africa -- The South African government released notorious killers from opposite ends of the political spectrum yesterday in the name of political reform and reconciliation.The most notorious former guerrilla released yesterday was Robert McBride, who planted a car bomb in 1986 that killed three white women. He walked out of prison here to a hero's welcome from dozens of activists from the African National Congress.They shouted "Viva Robert McBride" and "Long Live," the usual chants of the black liberation movement, as the 29-year-old former guerrilla fighter stepped past the iron, sliding gate of Durban's Westville Prison, his right fist held high in the air.He was flanked by his wife, Paula, a human rights activist from a wealthy white family who married him while he was on death row, and Walter Sisulu, an ANC veteran who spent 25 years as a political prisoner.

Coraline : (Focus Features) The makers of A Nightmare Before Christmas tell an animated story of a young girl who walks through a secret door in her new home and discovers an alternate version of her life. With the voices of Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher. He's Just Not That Into You: (New Line Cinema) The lives of desperate Baltimore singles intersect in a loose adaptation of the popular self-help book. With Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore. The Pink Panther Deux : (Columbia Pictures)

The star of Notorious, Jamal Woolard, who plays the straight-out-of-Brooklyn rap giant Christopher Wallace - known as Biggie Smalls, Big Poppa, the Notorious B.I.G. or just plain Biggie - possesses a marvelously malleable presence. He's as ominous as Mike Tyson and as lovable as Fat Albert. He's perfect for the fact-based story of Biggie Smalls, shot down at age 24 in 1997, because Woolard can make the rapper's evasiveness as well as his brutal honesty seem charismatic and attractive. Sometimes his friends can't penetrate to his core because he loses himself in deep emotion, as when he discovers that his super-strict yet loving mom (Angela Bassett)

last call BOLT *** 1/2 ( 3 1/2 STARS) Disney proved there's life in the Mouse House yet with this ode to a dog who thinks he's a superhero and the girl who loves him just for being a dog. The movie has been packing them in at theaters showcasing it in digital 3-D, but its essential and considerable joy comes from watching Bolt, a TV action star who mistakes his fantasy adventures for reality, learn, finally, how to act like a dog. Chris Kaltenbach ...

St. Mary's City -- Nezia Munezero and her 10-member family spent years running from one East African refugee camp to another, staying one step ahead of death in a world torn by ethnic warfare and genocide. In 2002, they were resettled in Baltimore. At age 16 and with no knowledge of English, she enrolled at the now-shuttered Southwestern High School and lived in a grim neighborhood beset by urban crime. It was a stepping-stone to a better life, but also another place to flee. "Students at Southwestern weren't friendly toward immigrants," said Munezero, 22, a slight woman with a lilting accent.

Rams Head Live will host a performance by the Wu-Tang Clan on Wednesday. The notorious New York hip-hop group, which had been on a six-year hiatus, is on tour to promote its new album, The 8 Diagrams. Doors open at 7 p.m. The group performs at 9 p.m. Rams Head Live is at 20 Market Place. Tickets are $49.50. Call 410-244-1131 or go to ramsheadlive.com.

The proliferation of gangs in American cities has led to calls for new federal laws and tougher penalties to stem gang violence. Locking up more gang members may deplete their ranks, but only until the next teenager becomes the newest recruit. It's the wrong approach to the real solution, which is keeping youngsters from joining a gang in the first place. We question the need for new laws because there are few crimes unique to gangs. Their members - no matter their colors - murder, steal, sell drugs, extort money, beat up rivals and intimidate witnesses.

NEW YORK -- When it comes to playing Biggie on the big screen, size matters. Take it from De'Andre Neal, a 6-foot-3, 315- pound bouncer with fingers as thick as Twix bars. The Brooklyn native was one of more than 100 hopefuls who turned out this past weekend for an open casting call on a soundstage in Manhattan's meat-packing district, trying to fill the size-13 shoes of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G., in Notorious, a new biopic about the slain rapper. "Seriously, I saw people who shouldn't even be here," said Neal, 29, his voice so deep it could give you the bends.

GALWAY, Ireland -- As an unsupervised young chief trader in Singapore in 1995, Nicholas W. Leeson lost $1.3 billion in frenzied trades in Japanese stock futures and bonds, destroying his employer, the 233-year-old Barings Bank, which had Queen Elizabeth II as a customer. Now, Leeson, having served four years in prison and survived a bout with colon cancer, has managed to turn those money-losing bets into a money-making enterprise - warning bankers of their continuing vulnerability to rogue traders.

WASHINGTON -- No transcript is known to survive, but it is reasonable to assume that when a mob of white men lynched a black man named Sam Hose, cut off his fingers, ears and genitals and skinned his face in 1899, they used the N-word. Similarly, though there's no recording of the attack, it's likely that when a pregnant black woman named Mary Turner had her fetus slashed out of her, then was stomped to death by a white mob in 1918, the N-word was there. By contrast with Mr. Hose and Ms. Turner, 23-year-old Glenn Moore got off easy.

Television's newest genre may be the celebrity-abuse sitcom. Kirstie Alley was the first to mock herself in her own show. Then Farrah Fawcett did it. And now Tori Spelling is doing it, too. With each new show, in which B-list celebrities grasp at stardom by making fun of themselves on camera, the amount of humiliation heaped upon them grows. SO NOTORIOUS / / makes its premiere at 10 tonight on VH1.