Here’s last month’s version, in the FT; the breaks are back up to sixteen in that hip/pelvis (a new body part):

The impact sent him flying, and he landed hard, fracturing his hip in 16 places. Despite the pain, he asked that the morphine be cut so that he would be clear-headed when discussing the deal on the telephone from his hospital room.

At a certain point, this becomes offensive.

This is not about missing a clip or two on Factiva. (We’ll leave that sad gotcha game to The Deal.com. This is about the business press being led around by the nose by a PR hack. Readers have every right to feel betrayed, and not only because some stale story is being presented to them—annually—as though it were original.

No, far more gravely, the misframing of the ground zero story has been a major cause of the project’s failure.

The gritty underdog story has always had a dark side: Silverstein is and always was seriously undercapitalized, under-staffed and inexperienced in this kind of mega-mixed-use development. He was in no position to rebuild should something seriously go wrong.

What the FT, and Esquire, which we’ll get to, fail to understand is that Silverstein is a real estate developer, which is the same thing as saying he is a salesman. It is not a bad thing to be a salesman. And Silverstein and Rubenstein are practitioners of the hardest of hard sells. Ron Popeil has nothing on them. But for the press to buy the same pelvis-a-matic at this date is a shame.

Silverstein had to sell the public, and the Port Authority, that he was properly capitalized, equipped, insured and experienced to rebuild ground zero —when he was in fact none of those things. An inability to rebuild is, and always was, grounds for default on his lease.

The FT fails to mention that Silverstein bought the $3.2 billion towers with a sliver of equity—$125 million, a whopping 4 percent down—most of it from silent partner Lloyd Goldman, whose behind-the-scenes role has never been adequately explained. Silverstein then borrowed equity—if that’s possible—from bondholders, layering on debt like a teetering Dagwood sandwich.

Then, he underinsured the property by more than half in a slapdash process that left the paperwork undone by the time the towers fell, creating the need for his dog-and-pony suit against Swiss Re and other insurers that author Steven Brill predicted, correctly, as early as April 2003, that Silverstein would lose (which he did, but only after years and hundreds of millions of dollars—enough to build something—was wasted on the legal fight).

This suit created the illusion that Silverstein could obtain $7 billion and would therefore be able to fulfill the rebuilding requirements of his lease. Without this doomed attempt to force insurers to fund the redevelopment project, Silverstein’s financial shortfall would have been obvious for the world to see. But the Port Authority, the site’s owner, supported the legal action.

Then, Silverstein somehow convinced the George Pataki-controlled Port to refund his group’s $125 million in equity while retaining control over the site, to the stupefaction of civic groups and all sensible people.

Finally, last year, Mr. No Money Down pulled off another negotiating coup in the waning days of the Pataki administration in which he walks away with the three best parcels, leaving the Port with the two worst ones, including the un-rentable Freedom Tower.

And all along in fact it has been Silverstein’s very presence—hasn’t it?—that has necessitated plans that include millions of square feet of unneeded office space and useless bickering over what the Freedom Tower should look like.

But the FT writes:

While there will be debates over Silverstein’s vision long after the buildings have been completed, the man has presented a strong case that no one could have handled the project more efficiently. It is a remarkable achievement.

Remarkable indeed.

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