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In the course of writing this post, Norman Hsu has failed to appear at a bail hearing scheduled for today and may once again be a fugitive.

I spent yesterday digging for some answers about the mysterious Democratic fundraiser and confessed grand thief Hsu and wound up with more questions.

In campaign finance reports, Hsu's companies are listed as: Next Components Ltd., Cool Planets Ltd., Because Men's Clothes, and Dilini Management. But none of the companies have online footprints or appear in fashion industry directories that I have searched. The only official recognition of any of these companies that I have found is Next Components, in the form of a filing for a certificate of corporation with the New York Department of State, Division of Corporations -- but even that doesn't hold up to closer scrutiny. The filing was from May 6, 2005, and when I called the Division of Corporations, a representative there told me that the filing needed to be renewed every two years for a fee of $9, but Next Components never responded to the renewal notice.

 The filing lists 561 Seventh Ave., Suite 1301 as the address for Next Components, but I called Handro Properties, the management company that runs the building, and was told that not only have they never heard of Next Components, but "Suite 1301" doesn't even exist.

As I reported yesterday, it turns out that an address Hsu listed in his campaign finance filings—455 Fifth Ave.—is the site of the Mid-Manhattan Library. I had a friend of mine who is a real estate broker in New York look into yet another address he listed—160 Wooster St., Apt 3C. That apartment does exist and it's a luxury 2 bedroom that sold for $1.85 million in June of 2004. However, it was sold again for an undisclosed price on November 15, 2005, and FEC records show that Hsu made political donations from that address both before and after that date. So unless he sold the apartment to himself, it's another unusual piece to the rather bizarre puzzle that is Norman Hsu.

UPDATE: Blogger Flip Pidot, who has done some excellent posts following the Hsu money trail, writes in that the 455 Fifth Ave. address could have been a data entry/transcription error, because in other filings Hsu lists a 445 Fifth Ave. address, which is a legitimate apartment building. That could be a plausible explanation for why one of his addresses turned out to be the Mid-Manhattan Library.