Ramone's manager beaten to death

[Paul Bearer]

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7073241.stm

Linda Stein, former co-manager of punk band The Ramones, has been found dead at her Manhattan apartment.

A pathologist said the 62-year-old, who went on to become one of New York's leading estate agents, died from blows to the head and neck.

Stein, the ex-wife of Sire Records head Seymour Stein, managed the Ramones with Danny Fields during their 1970s heyday.

After parting company with the band in 1980, she went into property. Her clients included Sting and Billy Joel.

Long-time friend Sir Elton John told the New York Times he was "absolutely shocked and upset".

'Roller coaster'

According to the newspaper, Stein was the model for the agent who tries to sell Charlie Sheen's character an apartment in the film Wall Street.

Born in Manhattan, she worked as a teacher before a blind date with Seymour Stein brought her into the music business.

The record mogul would later tell Vanity Fair magazine their marriage had resembled "eight years on a roller coaster, and not always strapped in".

Stein is credited with arranging The Ramones' July 1976 appearance at the Roundhouse in London, thought to be one of the key moments in the creation of the British punk scene.

[B]

cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/at-brokers-funeral-downtown-edge-and-uptown-glitz/index.html?ex=1194667200&en=f8ab987efa41acfd&ei=5053&partner=NYTHEADLINES_HP

November 2, 2007, 4:41 pm
At Broker’s Funeral, Downtown Edge and Uptown Glitz
By Anne Barnard
NY Times

Women with Chanel scarves and Prada bags mingled with frizzy-haired men in leather jackets and fedoras at a memorial service today for Linda Stein, a fitting tribute to a woman who brought together New York’s downtown edge and its uptown glitz.
Ms. Stein, 62, helped start the careers of the Ramones and other bands, and later leveraged her friendship with Madonna to start a career brokering multimillion-dollar real estate deals for clients like Sting and Billy Joel.
She was bludgeoned to death on Tuesday in her Fifth Avenue apartment, in a crime that shocked her friends in both the uptown and downtown worlds, and brought hundreds to a service where her daughter Mandy eulogized her as so brassy and bold that Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, planted a kiss on her the moment he met her.
“Linda lived in New York, and New York lived in her,’’ the family’s rabbi, Emil Hirsch, said to open the service. “The real New York is like Linda. She had an edge to her.’’
That edge showed during and after the service. Ms. Stein’s ex-husband, Seymour, said her greatest asset was “her chutzpah.’’ Her music-industry friends lighted cigarettes outside, worried that their best stories about her would be unprintable, and reminisced about the time she packed off a close friend to alcohol rehabilitation and then burst into tears.
And her daughter Samantha concluded a tender eulogy by describing how she and her sister went to see their mother’s body this morning.
“We had to see her one last time,’’ she said, to see what the killer had done to her.
“We stood there and we promised: Justice will be served.”
Ms. Stein’s A-list celebrity friends, like Madonna and Elton John, were not spotted at the funeral. But in the crowd were real estate clients like Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife; and music-business friends like Bob Gruen, the rock photographer, and Mickey Leigh, the brother of Joey Ramone, a member of the band that Ms. Stein helped make famous.
It was “vintage Linda,’’ said Liz Rosenberg, a spokesman for Ms. Stein’s ex-husband, that the Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side was so packed that the service was delayed while funeral directors tried to seat the family — apparently because friends of Ms. Stein’s, adamant that they, too, were as close as family, refused to vacate the front rows.