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You already know all about the cat-and-mouse of finding the now-retracted Nick Sylvester Village Voice piece. And you already know how we feel about a newspaper — a newspaper! — that tries to scrub inconvenient truths from the historical record. But the funny thing about the disappearing act is that the print issue remained on stands the whole fucking time. So while Simmons and his cronies were busy removing all signs of Sylvester's malfeasance from any website that hosted it, you could still pick up the damned thing on street corners throughout the city.

This is convenient, because there's yet another question left unanswered. Who is Steve Lookner and who is Steve Lucien? The apology from Sylvester referred to a manufactured encounter with Steve Lookner and two others; the angry letter to the editor published this week — the letter that presumably, like Janet Cooke's Pulitzer and Adam Penenberg's reporting on Jukt Micronics, set in motion Sylvester's unmasking — was from Steve Lookner. The Google cached version we linked to (since removed), and then the message board-posted version we subsequently linked to referred to "Steve Lucien." (There's also some inconsistency on the identity of the third member of this crew: Vic or Vail?

It is a good thing, then, that we grabbed a copy of the print Voice yesterday. Which we scanned:

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So the answer, then, is that Lookner was in the original and is a real person and is the guy who complained. Who's Lucien? Well, we've heard rumors that Sylvester and Simmons' first reaction to the letter was to try to cover things up — until they learned it had also gone to the letters the editor email address, which is read by another editor, who had already forwarded it to the lawyer. (You know, like how CTU uncovered the terrorists' plan to kill the Russian president despite President Logan's best efforts!) We have no idea if that story's true, but it seems to fit now, no?

The full final scene, as scanned from last week's Voice, is after the jump.

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