Mansion Miseries: The subdivision that Donald Trump...

Mansion Miseries: The subdivision that Donald Trump wants to develop in Palm Beach, Fla., is not your usual cookie-cutter variety. The financially troubled real estate mogul wants to sell off two-acre chunks of his 17-acre Mar-a-Lago estate for luxury home sites. Trump bought the estate in 1985 for $10 million.

Mansion Miseries, 2: Morocco’s King Hassan II and the bean counters in a New Jersey community have stopped feuding over his 335-acre rural estate. Though the spread includes a 47-room, $3.1-million manse, two-thirds of it is now classified as farmland, giving Hassan a $196,000 tax rebate. The dispute arose when the tax assessor said he saw no grazing or planting on the property--which Hassan quickly remedied with cows and corn.

Do-Gooder: Leona Helmsley is concentrating on doing good works while appealing her tax fraud conviction. Though nicknamed the Queen of Mean, Helmsley responded to a 12-year-old girl seeking help for her visually impaired grandmother by sending a $10,000 check for eye disease research. “Mrs. Helmsley felt she could help out,” a Helmsley spokesman said.

Broken Toys: Nearly 4,000 young Japanese who applied for jobs as gigolos ended up on the short end of a swindle. The men answered newspaper ads for “Amateur Hosts--100,000 yen per month,” and paid a fee of 200,000 yen ($1,540). The swindlees sauntered into a “club” that was actually a front, and warmed up to “wives of company presidents” who were actually hookers. Before the police discovered the scam, the budding toy-boys had paid out $5.4 million.