• Paolo Pellegrini, the white-hot hedge fund manager who started his own firm last year after working for billionaire John Paulson, has closed on the purchase of a 3,500-square-foot apartment at 88 Central Park West. Pellegrini and his wife Henrietta paid $9 million for the co-op, down from the $10.995 million asking price that owners Ray Errol Fox and Jean Thomas were seeking. The apartment was first listed in May 2008 for $12.995 million. [Cityfile, Stribling]
• Victoria's Secret president Ed Razek has sold his UES pied-à-terre. Razek sold his one-bedroom co-op at 32 East 64th Street for $2.25 million. [Cityfile]
• Deborah Doyle McWhinney, who was appointed as the head of Citi's Personal Wealth Management division this spring, has picked up a new apartment. McWhinney paid $2.88 million for a co-op at 25 East 86th Street. [Cityfile]

• Whoopi Goldberg is headed to Jersey. Two months after she put her Soho loft on the market for $3.99 million (which still happens to be up for sale, incidentally) comes word that the comedienne and View co-host has picked up a 9,486-square foot Colonial on 2.4 acres in West Orange, NJ. Originally listed for $2.999 million, Goldberg closed on the house for $2.8 million. [Real Estalker]
• Paolo Pellegrini, the Italian-born hedge funder who worked for John Paulson until recently and who generated a 80% return this year by betting the economy was going to tank, has a new pad. He's paying "close to" $10 million to buy an apartment at 88 Central Park West from writer Ray Errol Fox and his wife Jean Thomas, a backup singer for Ella Fitzgerald in the '60s. [NYP]
• Walter Cronkite's former apartment at the UN Plaza will soon be up for sale. Joanna Simon, the broker who landed the listing, says the two-bedroom co-op will hit the market "within the month" for $2.995 million. [NYO]

• Investor Amit Ben-Haim has finally unloaded his four-bedroom penthouse at 15 CPW, albeit for significantly less than the $80 million he was looking for last year. The London-based exec just sold the condo for $37 million to two unidentified corporations listed in city property records as Novgorod and Novgorod Two. [NYO]
• Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander has reportedly closed on the purchase of a penthouse at the Superior Ink building on West 12th Street. (The 6,321-square-foot pad had been most recently listed for $25 million.) Meanwhile, Alexander is still trying to unload his East Hampton estate, which is currently on the market for $20.5 million. [NYP, PDE]
• Alec Baldwin appears to have taken his apartment at the El Dorado off the market just a month after listing it. The three-bedroom co-op, along with a smaller one-bedroom unit a few floors below, had been up for sale for a combined $8.9 million. [NYM]
• Daniele Bodini, a real estate mogul and the Republic of San Marino's permanent representative to the United Nations, has paid $10.9 million for a 3,500-square-foot apartment at 88 Central Park West. Update: On October 5, 2009, five days after publishing an item stating that Daniele Bodini had purchased an apartment at 88 Central Park West, the New York Post updated the story on its web site, deleting any reference to Bodini and stating instead that Italian financier Paolo Pellegrini had purchased the apartment. You can read the original, archived version here. The Post did not correct the story or in any way call attention to the fact that it had substantially changed it. On March 13, 2013—four years after this item was originally published on CityFile, and three years after Gawker Media purchased CityFile—an attorney representing Bodini alerted Gawker Media to the fact that the Post had changed the story and asked us to remove the mention of Bodini. As far as we can tell from a review of real estate records, neither Bodini nor Pellegrini purchased the apartment in question; it was purchased by Sarah Henrietta Hoblyn Jones in November 2009. [NYP]

• Morgan Stanley exec Guy Metcalfe is finally on his way to unloading his five-bedroom apartment at 15 CPW, which he bought for $9.35 million in October and quickly re-listed for $16.5 million two-weeks later. After cutting the price to $13.75 million and then dropping it again to $12.5 million, he is now in contract to sell the 3,822-square-foot spread. [Cityfile, Corcoran]
• Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Thani of Qatar has lowered the price of his three-bedroom apartment at Trump Park Avenue, which he bought for $6.1 million in 2005 and listed for $14 million late last year. It's now on the market for $10 million. [Cityfile, Corcoran]
• It turns out Sting won't be listing his Central Park West duplex for $26 million with Claudine and Raphael De Niro after all. Halstead's Mark Friedman will be handling the honors, and the four-bedroom apartment will be offered for a much more modest $19 million. [NYT]

• Sting has put his four-bedroom duplex at 88 Central Park West on the market for with Prudential Douglas Elliman's Claudine DeNiro for $26 million. Update: The listing has gone to Halstead's Mark Friedman, not Claudine DeNiro as per the Times. You can see more details of $19 million listing here. [NYT]
• Icelandic mogul Jon Asgeir Johannesson and his wife, Ingibjorg Palmadottir, have put the top two floors of their penthouse at 50 Gramercy Park North on the market for $25 million. [NYT, Corcoran]
• JPMorgan exec Adam Ansaldi has sold his three-bedroom apartment at 4 East 88th Street to Laurence Mascera, a managing director at Broadpoint Capital, for $3.299 million. [Cityfile]
• Condé Nast is selling off a company-owned apartment at the Promenade at 530 East 76th Street. The five-bedroom condo, which was typically occupied by Jonathan Newhouse when he visited New York, went into contract in late January. It had been listed in December for $4.995 million. [NYT, PDE]