Leon Black, the architect of the trail of calamity that is Apollo (Mis)Management, co-owner of Harrah's Entertainment, enjoyed the feature treatment in the New York Times last weekend. The portrait that emerges is of a volatile wheeler-dealer. He's depicted as the latest iteration of the Wall Street villain du jour: The sort who keeps living high on the hog no matter what catastrophes befall his debt-encumbered companies. (Black grants audience to the Times, without apparent irony, from an office in which Tyco Int'l kleptocrat-in-chief Dennis Kozlowski once held court.)

What's more, the miseries of the Black's foundering companies are compounded by the propensity of him and others to over-borrow and then essentially manufacture spurious "dividends" paid out of money lent, not earned. It's high-stakes gambling to the max.

Black's debris field includes not only Harrah's but Realogy, Linens 'n Things, the U.K. version of Countrywide, and Jacuzzi. All of them, you might say, are in hot water, though Apollo prefers the euphemism "cyclically challenged." What's more, the tendency of Black and his ilk to lard their (im)balance sheets with debt is, according to the NYT, accelerating the number of companies going bust in the current economy. Black himself is an alumnus of defunct Drexel Burnham Lambert, the vehicle with which buddy Michael Milken wreaked so much havoc. There's a thought that ought to give Harrah's debtholders more than a few sleepless nights.

But apparently not. According to Black, there are fiscal kamikazes responsible financiers out there itching to throw good money after bad lining up another $20 billion with which Black will play "Monopoly" agglomerate distressed debt. It's a testimony to how little has been learnt in the past year that, while Harrah's can't get even a couple of hundred million to finance its aborted Kansas casino, Black has lemmings bankers by the score who are apparently willing to jump off a cliff follow his leadership straight to the poorhouse toward further prosperity, to the tune of tens of billions.

By that yardstick, if you are I are teetering on the brink of Chapter 7, our credit card providers should loan us even more money, right? Works for me.

But should Black's dubious business models continue on their present course, we'd better pass the hat: He'll probably need a few high-thread-count crying towels if he sails away from the smoking ruins of Apollo misadventures (like quite possibly Harrah's), aboard one of his yachts. I think we could pick some up for him at Linens 'n Things -- and for cheap, too.