My apologies for few blog posts this week -- I was up in New York speaking at a conference at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. My topic -- how journalists cover crime in the Internet age. I won't bore you here, but I was on a panel with an interesting FBI agent from Maryland who talked about bank robberies, so stay tuned for my print column on Friday to learn more.

The interesting part of the trip began in a bar (don't they all?) around 10:30 p.m., when I headed up to Elaine's on the Upper East Side. The New York Times describes it best --  "the living room for New York’s cop-and-writer set" -- a place where you can relax and rub elbows with anybody who is anybody. (The New York Times profile's owner Elaine Kaufman's living room in today's on-line editions).

Here's a portion of a restaurant review from New York Magazine:

The casual bistro setting is a favorite of too many notables to count. Devotees have included Michael Caine, Woody Allen and Jackie Onassis—New York recently ran a charming photo of a young Candace Bushnell flashing her panties here. Such antics justified the 2004 publication of Everyone Comes to Elaine’s, which recounts the heady days of this upper crust stomping ground and tales of its cantankerous owner, Elaine Kaufman, who still tends to guests.

I didn't know what to expect, but I think I remember stumbling out around 3:45 in the morning, as the metal shades were being lowered and well after the waiters and the owner Elaine insisted that one bottle of red wine simply was not enough. Elaine sat down at our table for a cup of pea soup and chatted with folks who wandered by our table (I was with a friend and a regular there). Chris Noth of Law and Order fame (Detective Mike Logan) was making the rounds, and when he heard I was from Baltimore he noted how he liked the town for the crime it serves up. I didn't get a chance to ask him what brought him to our city, though he did appear at least once in a Law & Order - Homicide: Life on the Street cross-over with our very own David Simon.

Doing further research, I've discovered that Noth was just in Baltimore last month filming My One and Only with Renee Zellweger, a film based in 1953. They were in Mount Vernon.

But then, walking over, I spotted (well, actually, I'm horrible at recognizing people, so my friend pointed him out) none other than Junior Soprano -- Dominic Chianese -- from of course the Sopranos. He was off to Hollywood for a couple of months, and he and Fox News gossip columnist Roger Friedman exchanged notes on restaurants there. Friedman was leaving for the Grammys.

At the bar were two former New York police officials -- a retired chief spokesman and Stephen P. Davis, who now runs a private detective shop. He also used to be the NYPD's chief spokesman, and had been a captain and precinct commander. He of course knew our very own Eddie Norris, our former police commissioner who grew up in the NYPD and is now a radio talk show host.

Norris studied under the famed Jack Maple, who author of Compstat, the computer crime analysis that Baltimore and just about every other big city police department copied. Today, the New York Times reviews a book on New York police and homeland security by Christopher Dickey and of course, Elaine's comes up as the place where Compstat was born:

Terrorists may be inspired by Hollywood, but the New York Police Department has grabbed ideas from unusual places too. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Dickey notes, a dapper, high-ranking officer named Jack Maple was sitting in his favorite restaurant, on the Upper East Side, observing the way the owner constantly kept track of how the evening’s sales were going. Why couldn’t the police, Mr. Maple wondered, get real-time crime statistics instead of having to wait months for them?

When he got this wise notion, Mr. Maple was sitting in Elaine’s, watching Elaine Kaufman.

Norris used to hang out in Elaine's as well, and I called him today to confirm the Compstat story. He told me Maple wrote up the initial plan on the back of a napkin. Norris also told me the two of them devised their policing strategy on the back of a (different) napkin at an Oriole bar at the downtown Baltimore Sheraton. That seems one too manY crime plans on the back of napkins if you ask me.

Norris said he hasn't been to Elaine's since he attended a memorial for Maple, who died a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. "It's funny that I still know people up there," he told me.

Back in 2001, I mentioned Elaine's in a story about Norris and his trips to New York to dine with what was known as the New York Road Show -- former NYPD commanders who had gone off to run departments elsewhere, spreading the Jack Maple philosophy around the country.

For me, Elaine's turned New York into a small-town.