NEW YORK (AP) — "Captain" Lou Albano, who became one of the most recognized professional wrestlers of the 1980s after appearing in Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" music video, died Wednesday. He was 76.
Albano, whose real name was Louis Vincent Albano, died in Westchester County in suburban New York, said Dawn Marie, founder of Wrestlers Rescue, an organization that helps raise money for the health care of retired wrestlers. He died of natural causes, Marie said.
World Wrestling Entertainment called him one of the company's "most popular and charismatic legends."
With his trademark Hawaiian shirts, wiry goatee and rubber bands hung like piercings from his cheek, Albano was an outsize personality who, in a career spanning nearly five decades, was known as much for his showmanship as for his talent in the ring.
His fame skyrocketed when he appeared in Lauper's landmark 1983 music video, playing a scruffy, overbearing father in a white tank top who gets shoved against a wall by the singer.
Partly because of the success of Albano's partnership with Lauper, the entity then known as the World Wrestling Federation forged ties with the music industry. That helped bring it to a wider national audience in the mid-1980s, known as the "Rock n' Wrestling" era.
It was a time when wrestlers such as Albano, Hulk Hogan, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and Andre the Giant were so popular that they could headline a television cartoon series and appear in movies.
Albano later had a role in the music video for Lauper's 1984 song "Time After Time," and he appeared in episodes of the TV series "Miami Vice" and in the 1986 movie "Body Slam." He played Mario in "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show," a live-action animated show, from 1989 to 1991.
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William Wayne Justice
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, whose rulings shattered old Texas by changing the way the state educated children, treated prisoners and housed its poorest and most vulnerable citizens, has died. He was 89.
His law clerk, Kelly Davis, said the judge died Tuesday in Austin.
The soft-spoken jurist spent three often tumultuous decades on the bench following his appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. To some, Justice was a judicial renegade who disregarded the public's will by imposing his own concepts on a conservative state.
But his decisions are widely credited for creating a modern Texas. They forced the state to dramatically expand and improve its prison and juvenile justice systems, and to dismantle racial barriers in public housing and education. He opened public schools to the children of illegal immigrants and provided bilingual education in rulings that were later used as the foundation of national policy.
After only two years on the bench, he ordered the state in 1970 to eliminate racial segregation in public schools after many districts ignored desegregation federal policies. That ruling, U.S. v. Texas, affected more than 1,000 school districts and 2 million students statewide.
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PRESCOTT, Ariz. (AP) — Willard Varnell Oliver, a member of the Navajo Code Talkers who confounded the Japanese during World War II by transmitting messages in their native language, died Wednesday. He was 88.
Lawrence Oliver said his father died at the Northern Arizona Veterans Administration Health Care System Hospital in Prescott, Ariz. He had been declining health for the past two years.
Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. ordered flags on the Navajo Nation to be flown at half-staff from Oct. 15-19 in honor of Oliver, who is at least the fifth Code Talker to die since May.
Oliver was part of an elite group of Navajo Marines who confused the Japanese during World War II by transmitting messages in Navajo.
The Code Talkers took part in every assault the Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. Their work was declassified in 1968.
Oliver, who grew up between Shiprock and Farmington, N.M., served in the South Pacific with the 2nd Marine Division from 1943 to 1945. He was wounded during the battle of Saipan of 1944.
Oliver's brother, Lloyd Oliver, was also a member of the elite group.
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ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) — Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who wrote a book about female employees' fight for equal treatment at the newspaper, has died. She was 83.
Robertson died Tuesday of heart disease at a nursing home in Rockville, said Jane Freundel Levey, her stepdaughter-in-law.
The veteran reporter won a 1983 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a personal piece — an unsparing account of her sudden encounter with toxic shock syndrome. The article, published in The New York Times Magazine, detailed how the illness led to the amputation of the end joints of all her fingers except for her thumbs.
Robertson began working for the Times in 1955, when women were frequently assigned to write about topics such as fashion, shopping and interior decorating. Over more than three decades with the newspaper, she was promoted to the metropolitan staff and then to the Washington bureau, where she covered the first lady and the first family, and then to the paper's bureau in Paris.
Robertson was not one of the named plaintiffs in the 1974 federal class-action suit filed on behalf of 550 women at The Times. The lawsuit, which claimed women were paid less and shortchanged on assignments and advancement, was detailed in her 1992 book, "The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times."
The newspaper ultimately settled the case for $350,000 in 1978 and agreed to an affirmative-action plan.
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Bruce Wasserstein, the CEO of Lazard Ltd. and a prominent Wall Street dealmaker, died Wednesday after being hospitalized earlier this week with an irregular heartbeat, a company spokeswoman said. He was 61.
In a statement Wednesday, Lazard's board said the cause of death had not yet been determined.
Wasserstein had been a Wall Street superstar since the 1980s, working on such landmark deals as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts' takeover of RJR Nabisco, and the Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter and AOL-Time Warner mergers.
He was the driving force behind Lazard, one of Wall Street's top mergers and acquisitions advisory firms. Wasserstein was under contract to serve as Lazard CEO through 2012.
In the 1980s, Wasserstein and Joseph Perella ran First Boston Corp.'s mergers and acquisitions department before leaving to form their own boutique investment bank, Wasserstein Perella Group Inc. It was at Wasserstein Perella that the pair worked on the RJR Nabisco deal, at the time the biggest corporate takeover in U.S. history, with a price tag of $24.5 billion.
The deal was chronicled in the 1990 book "Barbarians at the Gate," by journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, and later made into an Emmy award-winning television movie starring James Garner as RJR Nabisco CEO F. Ross Johnson.
Forbes magazine estimates Wasserstein's net worth at $2 billion.
Source: AP Features
