CNBC is drooling, drooling over its "first ever television interview" with real estate mogul Jeff Greene today. He's about the only hedge funder to make out like a bandit in the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. His $50 million investment is said to be worth $500 million now. (Full disclosure: we didn't have time to independently verify that; an intern with a graphing calculator is on it.)

You know who also loves Greene? Heidi Fleiss. But you won't hear about that in CNBC's doting profile of the financial world's new hotness. Greene, Fleiss says, once helped himself to a $30,000 chunk of a six-figure endorsement deal Fleiss was getting to hawk liquor in Australia. They were friends, having met right after Heidi got out of the pen in 1999. The former Hollywood madam crashed at his place for two years after Tom Sizemore smacked her around in 2003.

"If I knew it was going to cost me $30,000, I'd have gotten a place of my own," jokes Fleiss, who says she loves Greene and that he's the real deal, a truly self-made man.

"He's so nerdy he's likable." And, no, the relationship wasn't sexual. "I mean, a rich guy is always my type, but there has to be some sexual attraction—when I moved in, he was buying his groceries from Costco," she tells Radar.

Fleiss says she invited Greene along on her Australian jaunt and had the liquor company write an around-the-world ticket for Greene into the deal. The company could cover it with frequent flier points, so the cost didn't come out of her cash. But Greene cashed in the ticket, she says. She found out when she asked the spirits company why they stopped making the monthly payments to her early. They explained that the cash-out had to come out of her payment and agreed with Fleiss that it was "strange behavior for a wealthy man."

Then again, despite his collection of rare Vietnamese art, his 40,000-square-foot Beverly Hills home, and his three private jets, CNBC does deign to call Greene "illiquid."

Conspicuously absent from Greene's CNBC knob job is the $605,000 he was ordered by an L.A. judge to pay Ron Howard when the director's family was forced to flee a house they'd rented from the real estate mogul. According to Howard's attorney at the time, he split from Greene's place and refused to pay out the lease because the house (his family was staying there while he filmed EDtv) had rats, flooding, broken plumbing, and rampant mildew.

CNBC does mention Greene's weirdly cozy relationship with pugilist Mike Tyson, who was best man at Greene's wedding. The whole biting and rape thing didn't deter Greene. "I was shocked that this guy I'd been reading about ... was nothing like that," Greene tells the network's Jane Wells. "Mike is a very, very bright guy, very well read, very sweet disposition."

Fleiss compares Tyson's chummy relationship to her own former pal position in Greene's company. "He's got my job now."