Celebs & Money

Designers like Tommy Hilfiger and Oscar de la Renta depend on big celebrity names to sit in the front row of their shows during Fashion Week, which kicks off Feb. 11 in New York City. The A-listers typically wear the designer's latest frocks and parade around looking classy, helping to create buzz among the fashion elite and, most importantly, convincing people to open their wallets to purchase clothing items that often run upward of several thousand dollars.

But designers are apparently worried that Jenni "JWoww" Farley, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, Sammi "Sweetheart" Giancola, Paul "DJ Pauly D" and Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino could detract from the event's highbrow atmosphere.

Last February, former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer's mistress Ashley Dupre stole Yigal Azrouel's thunder when she sat in the front row of his show.

But Michael Schweiger, the agent who represents most of the "Jersey Shore" cast, tells the NY Post's Page Six that at least three designers have approached the cast to attend and perhaps even model in some of the Bryant Park runway shows.

You know what's coming next - a joint Lindsay Lohan and Snooki fashion line! They could call it "Looki."

It's the hottest new theme park opening in a decade: Universal Orlando Resort's Islands of Adventure park is putting the finishing touches on its feverishly anticipated The Wizarding World of Harry Potter section. This Sunday, Feb. 7, the world gets a sneak peek at the new 20-acre attraction when a top secret commercial airs during the Saints-Colts Super Bowl battle. Among the surprises: Daniel Radcliffe himself appears as Harry Potter to promote the opening, which was designed with the full cooperation and approval of series author J.K. Rowling. Guess what, Potterheads? WalletPop.com has an exclusive first online look at the entire spot.

Welcome to Ad Rant's 10-part series on The Best and Worst Celebrity Ads. In Part 1, we take a look at how some top stars earn millions for 30 seconds of acting as foolish as humanly possible. Where's the dignity?

You see, Hollywood stars are America's royalty. They have their reputations to uphold. They certainly wouldn't want their loyal subjects to think they'd sell out for a buck, and that's why the biggest names often refuse to appear in TV ads ... in America. Of course, they don't mind doing commercials in Japan. The idea is that no one in the U.S. will ever see these ads. Their secret will be safe.

Because, you know, there's no one in the U.S. with access to YouTube.

I could see how the typical Hollywood star might be duped in a cattle investment scam, but Kiefer Sutherland? The man probably knows cows better than any other actor, since he's spent many a weekend chasing and roping them from horseback.

Unfortunately, this familiarity might have helped make him the perfect patsy for reputed scam artist Michael Wayne Carr. TMZ reports Carr has been charged with bilking Sutherland out of $869,000 in a cattle investment swindle.

Apparently Carr promised to deliver a windfall by buying Mexican cattle and importing them to the U.S., but all he really delivered was a load of bull. He's now charged with grand theft, embezzlement and other crimes.

It hasn't been a fun January for Arizona Cardinals safety Antrel Rolle. First, his team was eliminated from the NFL playoffs by the Super Bowl-bound New Orleans Saints. Rolle left that game early with a head injury.

Now the IRS is giving Rolle a second pounding with a bill for $2.2 million bill in back taxes, interest and penalties.

Heidi Montag is looking for a new body and she is willing to pay big bucks to get it. Reportedly, she had 10 procedures done in the month of November to look "perfect." According to People Magazine, she did all the procedures in one day because she did not want to go under anesthesia multiple times. The procedures she had done included:

• Mini brow lift
• Botox in forehead and frown area
• Nose job revision
• Fat injections in cheeks, nasolabial folds and lips
• Chin reduction
• Neck liposuction
• Ears pinned back
• Breast augmentation revision
• Liposuction on waist, hips, and inner and outer thighs
• Buttock augmentation

That's a lot of surgery, and a lot of money. According to national averages by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, these procedures would cost more than $30,000. This writer's guess is that all this "perfection" cost a lot more than that.

After taking a pounding from Uncle Sam, Nicolas Cage is ready to cry uncle.

Cage, the Oscar winner turned accused tax cheat, said he's making amends with the IRS. The 46-year-old said he's paid what amounts to a national treasure to the IRS -- $70 million -- during his career. "Unfortunately, due to a recent legal situation, another approximate $14 million is owed to the IRS," he told People Magazine in a story published Friday.

I haven't played much poker in my life, or played it well, but there are some basic gambling lessons everyone should know.

And I don't just mean the rules of the game you're playing, but etiquette to keep it somewhat friendly and from anyone having to be investigated by the police for having a gun where it isn't supposed to be, as NBA player Gilbert Arenas is doing.

Arenas and Washington Wizards teammate Javaris Crittenton were playing the card game bourre, also called boo-ray, a game similar to poker that combines some of the grade school card game War. The players had a dispute over the game, according to various reports, and Arenas supposedly refused to pay Crittenton a debt from the game.

Bourre is a Cajun card game popular in Louisiana, and isn't played in casinos because players often have their own set of rules, according to a blog at Washingtoncitypaper.com.

That's my first informal rule for playing a serious card game:

Recession? What recession?

The Malibu summer beach home rental season -- where even celebrities pack up and leave their oceanfront homes when enough dollars are dangled in front of them -- just launched with a saltwater blast in the face of the recession. Fresh to the market is an oceanfront property that is listed at $550,000 for the summer -- more than double what the median home sells for in most of America.

Let me be the first to say that asking prices aren't the same as listing prices. Nevertheless, even in this well-heeled community, the tongues are a'wagging over this one. While many summer listings do fetch between $60,000 and $100,000 per month, not even places in the famed Malibu Colony have attempted this price level lately. And last summer's experience might best be described as dismal, with renters offering what they wanted to pay and frequently successfully negotiating shorter lease terms to make the experience more affordable.

Imagine you've made it to the final Tribal Council on Survivor. It's time to determine the winner, and host Jeff Probst keeps pulling slips bearing your name. Finally, he announces that you are the champion. Congratulations, you just won... $580,000!

Wait a minute, Jeff. Hang on. Isn't that prize short a few hundred thousand? I ate rancid sheep guts. I passed out from exhaustion. I earned my million bucks.

Nope. As the first Survivor winner, Richard Hatch, discovered through convictions and prison time, even if you win a prize on television, Uncle Sam counts it as taxable income. How much you're taxed depends on your income and the state you live in (because if your state levies income taxes, it will want its bite, too). However, it's safe to say that you'll lose nearly half to the taxman. If you want to survive on Survivor winnings for 20 years, you'll have to budget less than $30,000 a year after taxes.

If you're of a certain age or enjoy watching TV Land, you know who Wayne Rogers is -- an actor famed for his role as Trapper John in the 1970s TV series M*A*S*H. But if you watch Fox Business News, you may also know him as a regular guest on the series Cashin' In. Now, instead of saving lives on TV, he's encouraging people to save (and invest) their money.

This isn't a recent conversion on the actor's part. Rogers, 76, has been playing the role of businessman -- in real life -- since his days on M*A*S*H (1972 -- 1975). That's when he met Lew Wolff, a real estate developer, hotel owner and managing partner of the Oakland A's. At the time, Wolff was head of real estate for 20th Century Fox where M*A*S*H was filmed.

Real estate auctions began cropping up about four years ago, generally in places overbuilt with cookie-cutter homes. Initially, banks were auctioning off foreclosed properties. Then developers joined the bandwagon, trying to move their unsold inventory.

Bargains galore, right? Well, not exactly. In some cases, buyers got a bargain -- maybe a few grand below the neighborhood cops . But if it was bank-owned, they lost the right to home-seller disclosures, since banks don't have to tell you about property defects, even when they know about them. But in most cases, fear, wariness of the process and the fact that headlines told buyers daily that they were in the driver's seat and needn't rush into anything, kept them on the sidelines.

In the overwhelming thunder of 2009's Big Fizzle (the economy) many smaller yet important fizzles may have escaped public scrutiny. Here are nine that our writers found worthy of drawing to your attention. Feel free to add your candidates as comments.

The Jay Leno Show

Jay Leno, the former undisputed King of Late Night, still has a place in the TV kingdom, but not in prime time. His 10:00 p.m. "Jay Leno Show" -- which was hyped by NBC as the next great talk-show reinvention -- got shellacked in the ratings war of 2009. Early lukewarm reviews of the Monday-through-Friday comedy program hinted at a possible ratings rout: "Leno's funny, but ... he adheres to the center of the exact middle road, so it's wrong to expect a revolution here." "It's not a good sign when the Bud Light commercial is funnier than the comedy show it interrupts." Ouch.

The program showed ratings promise early on, but by Nov. 9, a scant two months after its mid-September premiere, it was cruising the swamps with a 1.2 national rating among 18-to-49-year-olds, a key demographic. That's 4.07 million viewers, compared with the nine million or so that tune in regularly to CBS' "CSI: Miami" in the same 10 p.m. time period.

And that's just Monday nights. Leno also dragged down Conan O'Brien, who'd fallen behind David Letterman in the late-night ratings derby. NBC affiliates, meanwhile, complained that they were losing their local audiences – KVBC Las Vegas lost nearly half its viewers at 10 p.m. compared with a year ago. It's no surprise, then, that the network is moving Leno back to the 11:35 p.m. slot, bumping Conan back to 12:05 a.m.. -- Diane Wedner

Shark Tank is back! And right away, as the desperate, money-seeking entrepreneurs step in front of the self-made billionaires, we've already seen our share of controversial characters.

Dorene Humason wanted to get her salad dressing mix onto supermarket shelves, and she needed $50,000 for just a 10% stake. So far, this food buyer and salesperson with 27 years' experience had managed to get into 1,300 stores, which translated to only $41,000 owing to the fact she had to pull her original label design. "My original packaging was offensive," she explained (Daymond John: "It had [Kevin O'Leary's] face on it?"). Because she went for a package that was "very interesting," she had accidentally put a picture of a Japanese prostitute on her Chinese seasoning.

That wasn't the only mistake Humason made. Although she won the Sharks' money in the end (read how she did it, below), now she thinks their business advice was wrong. Where they wanted her to focus on one aspect of her business, she wants to diversify, and now, several months after she made her pitch in the Tank, the deal is in jeopardy. Watch Jason Cochran's video interview of her, in which she's frank about the differences of opinion that threaten to ruin everything she won on Shark Tank.

Abraham Shakespeare, a truck driver's assistant, who lived with his mother, won $30 million in the Florida lottery in 2006. It now appears that his good fortune may have cost his life. According to Associated Press, he vanished months ago and his case is now being investigated as a homicide.

Shakespeare, 43, took a lump-sum payment of $16.9 million instead of annual installments and bought a Nissan Altima, a Rolex from a pawn shop, and a $1 million home in a gated community. He insisted that the money "would not change" him, but it seemed to quickly cause him problems.