The Tribune Co. has found a hero to rescue it from impending oblivion: Dick Tracy! They just have to break him out of Warren Beatty's basement.

Just days before Bernie Madoff was arrested, a Bronx businessman named Martin Rosenman handed over $10 million of his family's money to the now-imprisoned financier's investment firm. Terrible timing, no doubt, but Rosenman quickly argued that he hadn't actually intended to have Madoff invest the cash until the following month, so he was entitled to get his money back pronto, and shouldn't be treated like the thousands of shlubs who'd fallen victim to Madoff months or years earlier. A federal judge ruled against Rosenman in February and instructed him to take his place in line with everyone else, thank you very much. But it seems Rosenman isn't taking no for an answer. Today he filed notice that he intends to appeal the ruling. Best of luck with that, Marty—you'll need it. The court papers are below.

Soon-to-be-former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has some of the best lawyers dirty money can buy. And one of them just basically admitted that his current strategy is "tie this election up in court forever."

Some people's entire lives were created just to help the tabloids stoke class warfare. There's no other explanation for Swedish countess Marie Douglas-David, who needs $53K per week just to survive. She can prove it!

Oh no, "Skanks in NYC," the city's top craptastic Blogspot blog about the alleged skankiness of cover model Liskula Cohen, has been pulled from the internet in the wake of Cohen's ridonkulous lawsuit. Never forget:

Discovery Communications, the owner of cable channels like FitTV and Animal Planet, is suing Amazon.com, maker of the Kindle, over an electronic-books patent taken out by its founder and CEO, John Hendricks, years ago.

There's been a flurry of activity at 75 Wall Street lately. But not the good kind! Over the past few months, condo buyers have been filing suit to extricate themselves from contracts they signed during the boom times, demanding that developers return the down payments they put down when the apartments were worth 30 or 40 percent more than they're worth today. One of the buildings particularly under siege right now: 75 Wall, the David Rockwell-designed condo conversion that has adopted some of the most desperate tactics to drum up buyers in recent weeks. The building's developer, the Hakimian Organization, is now facing three separate suits from people now seeking an out, all filed by the New Jersey law firm of Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer. Whether any of them end up getting their money back remains to be seen. In the meantime, you can look over the suits for yourself after the jump.

The writer Harlan Ellison is suing CBS for the only reason anybody sues anybody else, only he's being honest about it: "It ain't about the 'principle,' friend, it's about the money! Pay me!"

Walter Noel and the Fairfield Greenwich Group have been sued yet again. The full complaint is after the jump.

Court hearing yesterday for cover model Liskula Cohen, who's suing Google to try to force it to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who calls her a skank, which "impugned her chastity." Hilarity ensued.

Taylor Stein, the mother of Estée Lauder CEO William Lauder's love child, is going to court to get him to pay a $9.5 million settlement he agreed to in exchange for her silence.

OBEY artist Shepard Fairey preemptively sued the AP for the right to use their Obama photo, free; today the AP sued him back. Shep seemed more righteous before we knew he sues other artists. But!:

It's no fun being Sheldon Solow these days. In December, Citigroup filed suit against the developer, alleging he'd failed to pay back more than $80 million in loans related to the development of a series of buildings along the East River waterfront. Now it appears Solow has another legal mess to contend with.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is enduring the most challenging stretch of his career for many reasons: His credibility took a hit before he even took the job thanks to his little tax issue, he's managing the nation's finances during quite possibly the bleakest moment in American economic history, and in recent weeks he's been isolated in a sad, lonely office where he's had to make do with a skeletal staff. One more reason why Geithner may have the worst job in the world (with the possible exception of Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit): When a disgruntled former employee of the IRS decides to sue the agency because it didn't give him a "riser for his computer monitor" or the larger cubicle he requested, and he suffers severe neck and back pain and emotional distress as a result, it's Geithner's name that appears all over the lawsuit. Poor Timmy. The full suit is below.

J. Ezra Merkin, the disgraced money manager who steered more than $2 billion to Bernie Madoff, has a new lawsuit to contend with. NYU filed suit against Merkin last month, accusing him of losing $24 million of the unversity's endowment due to his "deliberate ignorance." Now a pension plan, which says it lost $4 million investing in Merkin's various funds, is taking action, too. The full complaint appears below.

Michael Wolff is a lousy husband and, as we learned today, a lousy son-in-law, too. If you'd like to take a look at the lawsuit filed against Wolff and his wife by 85-year-old Edith Anthoine—she claims the pair tried to force her out of her apartment—we posted a copy of it below. Earlier we listed one way Condé Nast could save a few bucks as it embarks on another round of budget cuts. Here's one more: terminate Michael Wolff's contract with Vanity Fair. We're no lawyers or anything, but we have a feeling that sleeping with an intern constitutes just cause.

It's been more than a decade since Chris Rock first made tabloid headlines when it was reported that he'd had a fling with Monika Zsibrita, a Hungarian model whom he met over Sunday brunch at the Four Seasons in LA. Unfortunately for Rock, the brief liaison has dogged him ever since. Zsibrita later accused him of raping her and suggested he was the father of her child; Rock, in turn, hired Anthony Pellicano to investigate Zsibrita and was forced to testify about his relationship with the disgraced private eye at his wiretapping trial last year. It doesn't appear Rock will be able to put the matter behind him anytime soon. Although no charges were ever filed against Rock—and paternity tests concluded he wasn't the father of her child—Zsibrita slapped Rock with a civil suit last August, claiming that Rock forced himself on her, had dispatched Pellicano to intimidate her, and then had damaged her reputation when he talked about the case on Howard Stern's radio show. (She also disputes the results of the paternity test.) The court documents were sealed when the suit was originally filed last year, but a judge lifted the seal late last week. We've obtained the court papers, and you can have a look at the raunchy allegations for yourself after the jump.

Greg Shenkman, CEO of a San Francisco software company, allegedly used work visas to import an Eastern European woman as a sexual plaything, according to a former assistant who is charging him with sexual battery.

Through the recession-blackened debris of our once great nation, there blows a consolatory treasure, a reminder, if you will, of what being American is all about: suing people! Thanks to the mass layoffs of lawyers—on February 12th alone, 800 law firm employees were let go—the cost of a lawsuit should drop "for the first time in history," explains Mark Penn, the CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller and the scandal-plagued strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Music to the ears, no doubt, of women who have ever been employed by Simon Hammerstein, or of waitstaff at basically any New York restaurant.