– Yikes. Model Samantha Burke, the Red Neck Riviera-based Jude Law baby mama, is bursting at the seams a week after she gave birth to a girl she says is the 36-year-old actor’s love child. Burke, 24, revealed her voluptuous new bod Monday as she drove around her hometown of Pensacola in search of baby things. Unfortunately, pictures of the little girl, Sophia, are still under wraps. Burke says she got pregnant during a short, intense affair with Law as he shot Sherlock Holmes in New York City. The British actor starred in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain. Should you feel generous, check Burke’s baby registry at Babies R Us here.

Samantha Burke in Pensacola on Monday (Courtesy dlisted.com)

– Holy pony, Wellington polo player Nacho Figueras is getting even bigger as the local season looms. Figueras appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Monday, telling Oprah Winfrey: “You can actually die playing [polo], so it’s a very dangerous thing. You have to be conscious, but you’ve also got to be a little bit crazy.” Well, audiences everywhere, it seems, are crazy about the 32-year-old Figueras. He was also featured on CBS’ Sunday Morning on Sept. 20, and the Ralph Lauren pitchman was voted second-most handsome man in the world by the readers of Vanity Fair in June. He placed ahead of Brad Pitt, but second to Twilight’s Robert Pattinson. Oprah airs at 4 p.m. daily on WPTV-Channel 5.

Nacho Figueras in Wellington (Bill Ingram/The Palm Beach Post)

Frank Sr. and Jr. (Courtesy Kathleen Stallone)

Action hero Sylvester Stallone has dissed his 90-year-old dad on his birthday.

“He just declined to come,” Frank Stallone Sr. told 60-plus shocked well-wishers at his 12-hour party in Wellington. “I also regret that my 97-year-old sister isn’t here. But she couldn’t come.”

And from what guests tell me, Sly, the star of blockbuster franchises like Rocky and Rambo, didn’t make too many friends by not showing up.

“Frank made some sentimental remarks about Sly,” said Sr.’s neighbor, Eugenia Schumacher. She says she routinely sees the elder Stallone mowing his lawn wearing undies, cowboy boots and a Stetson.

“It wasn’t nice from Sly’s part. He lost face with his own family.”

For more on the Stallone family drama, look below or click (Read more…)

The rapper known as Vanilla Ice hit the Royal Palm Beach Rita’s Italian Ice with two ninos the other night. The singer of the 1980s hit Ice Ice Baby and star of the reality hit The Surreal Life lives in Wellington, a couple miles down the street from the Southern Boulevard store. A bystander tells me Ice ditched the vanilla to order tropical punch flavor, while the kids had custard.

Jaubert, moments before his escape (Courtesy Herve Jaubert)

The Middle Eastern emirate of Dubai has been a Shangri-la of sorts for rich Palm Beachers in search of exoticism.

Wellington resident Herve Jaubert has a message for them: Go at your own risk!

The 53-year-old former spy knows first-hand.

With members of Dubai’s security force threatening torture, Jaubert used MacGyver techniques for his middle-of-the-night escape from the desert nation where he worked for four years.

Dubai authorities confiscated Jaubert’s passport in 2007. He was accused of ripping off the government-run company that hired him to build personal submarines for billionaire sheiks.

Jaubert denies any impropriety, and denounces Dubai’s justice system as one that’s stacked against suspects like him.

“They were going to keep me for years,” he said. “I just know it. So, I sent my wife and two boys back to Wellington, and I got to work on a plan.”

After preparing for nearly six months, in May 2008 Jaubert checked into a motel close to a quiet beach.

Jaubert, moments before his escape (Courtesy Herve Jaubert)

One night, he put on a scuba outfit. It was shipped from France in small packages over several weeks to avoid raising suspicion.

Then, to make sure no one stopped him as he headed to sea, he covered himself from head-to-toe with a black abaya only worn by ultra-conservative Muslin women.

Jaubert made it to the waters of the Persian Gulf, shed the disguise and swam to the nearest harbor, he said. There, he sabotaged the fuel line of the area’s only military patrol boat, and used a Zodiac to get to a waiting sailboat.

Jaubert traveled for eight days to India, managed to get a new passport from the French consulate and returned to his $1.35 million Aero Club home in Wellington.

He’s now writing a book, Escape from Dubai.

“I had no choice,” he said of his escape. “Without a passport in Dubai, you’re a prisoner. You can’t leave, you can’t work, you can’t rent an apartment or a car, you can’t stay in some hotels. You’re condemned to become homeless.

“In the ‘80s, I worked for a French spy agency in Africa and the Eastern Block. I was stealing secret documents. It was very dangerous, so my escape from Dubai is something I was used to planning back in the day.”

For more, and the poll, look below or click (Read more…)

. . . the Transformers 2 star (middle) wore reindeer antlers when she went Christmas-shopping at Macy’s at the Mall at Wellington Green. Also wearing the silly things are her mom, Darlene Tonachio (right), and sister Kristi Branim (left). At the time, in 2001, the sisters lived in Port St. Lucie, and mom in Jensen Beach.

(Palm Beach Post archives)

A few weeks later, she talked to The Post about getting the acting bug from watching Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Nope, her Yorkie isn’t named Toto. It’s just Lord Ashley. That summer, Fox appeared in a flick with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Holiday in the Sun. At just 15, she juggled acting and modeling. She also attended classes and was a cheerleader at Port St. Lucie’s Morningside Academy. In her off-time, she mixed smoothies in a Jensen Beach shop. ”I think a lot of times people - especially girls my age - when they hear I do this kind of stuff (acting), they think I’m going to be self-absorbed, conceited,” she said at the time. “I’m not that way at all. I’m not rude. I’m not a scary person. I am actually pretty nice.” And nice-looking, too.

(Palm Beach Post archives)

(With help from Palm Beach Post researcher Niels Heimeriks)

Move over macho man Tommy Lee Jones!

You and those manly South Americans you share the field with in Wellington every winter won’t get so much attention this time around.

Make way for the GPL — the Gay Polo League.

The founder of the California-based league says his boys are planning to spend several weeks in the East Coast’s polo capital in suburban West Palm Beach to observe how it’s done — and field the GPL’s top team.

GPL match (Courtesy gaypolo.com)

In time, the GPL hopes to accede to the U.S. Open, rough-and-tumble polo’s equivalent to the Super Bowl. It’s played at the International Polo Club Palm Beach, whose most famous member is Hollywood actor Jones (The Fugitive, No Country for Old Men).

“The ladies with the floppy hats may not be the best looking people at the club on Sundays,” said Mason Phelps, an openly gay local equestrian and Olympics TV commentator. “Every drag queen from Miami will be tailgating at the games. It’ll definitely bring another fan base. Sure, it will grate on the nerves of some of the macho guys, but who cares what a player’s sexual orientation is. If they can play a good game of polo, so be it.”

GPL founder and former show-jumping specialist Chip McKenney says the league has fielded three teams in tournaments up and down the Left Coast so far, in places like Indio and Los Angeles.

But to get any credibility, the league needs to come out into the Florida sun, so to speak.

For more on the boys of winter and the poll, look below or click (Read more…)

A well-known West Palm Beach business owner died in a freak horse-riding accident while training at Wellington’s famed Palm Beach International Equestrian Center.

Serena and Turgut Kaytmaz

Serena Bostwick Kaytmaz, 46, who grew up in Palm Beach, was pronounced dead shortly after being Medevac-ed to Delray Medical Center Friday afternoon.

Kaytmaz was the owner, along with her husband of 15 years, Turgut Kaytmaz, of Café Centro, an eatery in the Northwood section of WPB that’s becoming increasingly popular among Palm Beachers.

Her death provides a strange and tragic exclamation point on a particularly sad horse season in Wellington.

In February, polo player Tracey Mactaggart passed away from the injuries she suffered when her horse stumbled and rolled over her during in match. And last week, 21 polo ponies died, possibly from a tainted batch of vitamins, before one of the year’s biggest matches.

But the accident that took Kaytmaz was just as unusual. (Read more…)

Well-known Wellington polo patron Neil Hirsch, who co-owns the Bridgehampton Polo Club on Long Island, tells Page2Live it’s time to have polo horses drug tested.

Neil Hirsch with his Black Watch team's star, Nacho Figueras (Courtesy The Polo Zone)

Hirsch’s team, the Ralph Lauren-sponsored Black Watch, was La Lechuza Caracas’ opponent in the U.S. Open quarter final Sunday afternoon when Caracas horses at the grounds were stricken with a mysterious illness that has killed 21 of them so far. Caracas owner Victor Vargas, a Venezuelan oil tycoon who came on the local polo scene here three years ago, hasn’t been in contact with the U.S. Polo Association since.

“It was all so heart-breaking,” said Hirsch, who watched his opponent’s ponies lay down or fall down one by one. “It’s just sickening. Now, I’m not saying they were doped up, but I’m saying it would benefit the sport to have the horses tested.”

In Wellington, only show jumpers are randomly tested.

“Everybody gives their polo horses vitamins,” Hirsch said. “But they’re given on a Monday or Tuesday when no one’s playing. You just don’t give them the day of a match.”

News story: horses killed

Meanwhile, Hirsch described Vargas, 57, as “very wealthy.” And coming from Hirsch, himself a multi-millionaire Wall Street investor, it’s quite a compliment. (Read more…)

Even at $100,000 per, what’s 21 polo horses to La Lechuza Caracas owner Victor Vargas?

Chances are, he can buy 21 others in no time.

Victor Vargas (photo courtesy of New York Social Diary)

Vargas, 57, the captain and patron of the team whose ponies died in mysterious circumstances before a match at the International Polo Club Palm Beach Sunday in Wellington, is one of South America’s richest men.

And someone with strong Palm Beach County ties.

Just last June, through a company called White Sea Holdings, Venezuelan bank owner Vargas plunked down $68.5 million for one of Palm Beach’s classic homes, the Polynesian-style manse of cellphone billionaire and fellow horse lover George Lindemann. Then he took a $20 million mortgage on it, from Merrill Lynch.

News story: horses killed

And how’s this for a coincidence? Lindemann’s son, George Lindemann Jr., served 33 months behind bars in the 1990s after being convicted of paying off someone to electrocute his champion jumper Charisma in a $250,000 insurance insurance scam.

Emma Cisneros, the CEO of Vargas’ Wellington-based White Sea Holdings, didn’t return calls asking about Vargas, who also owns a ranch in Wellington worth about $5 million.

The man has literally vanished since some of his horses laid down and died on the turf. One source at the United States Polo Association told me Vargas hopped on one of his three private jets Sunday afternoon and flew overseas. (Read more…)

Memo to Canadian Olympic hero Eric Lamaze: You just can’t, repeat, can not, jump a fence in a car!

Lamaze’s neighbors at the fancy Palm Beach Polo Country Club have become weary of his late-night car rodeos.

Eric Lamaze at the Olympics in August

According to police and club security records obtained by Page2Live, the bad boy equestrian has been involved in two serious car crashes inside the quaint Palm Beach Polo in the past 17 months.

Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputies didn’t believe Lamaze’s claims he was just a passenger in the latest accident, about midnight March 21. They charged him with leaving the scene of an accident, careless driving and driving with an expired license. Lamaze suffered scrapes and bruises and declined care.

Deputies think they can prove Lamaze, who was banned from two Olympic games (in 1996 Atlanta and 2000 Sydney) for drug use, flipped his AMG SL63 Mercedes on its roof near his $3 million mansion at the club. The car ended up on lawyer Richard Abedon’s front lawn on Mizner Way.

Damages were listed at $52,000, for the car and Abedon’s mailbox. (Read more…)