Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, has built his campaign for a New York City House seat around turning the page on the Democrats’ old guard.

Yet when he debuts his first paid advertisement on Wednesday, the 33-year-old candidate has chosen his party’s oldest living leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, to do the talking.

The choice reflects the unique challenge Mr. Schlossberg faces ahead of a marquee June primary against more seasoned rivals. He may have star power and youth, but he is still trying to persuade aging voters who form the Democratic base that he is serious and experienced enough to represent a storied Manhattan district — home to corporate chieftains, media empires and cultural meccas.

The 30-second ad, which was shared first with The New York Times, uses Ms. Pelosi, a former House speaker, to make his case. In it, the congresswoman, 86, speaks directly to the camera to say that Mr. Schlossberg has “a deep sense of duty” and the kind of energy that could help propel Democrats back to power nationally.

“This moment calls for leaders who understand the stakes and how to deliver for the people they serve,” she says, sometimes over clips of him campaigning. “Jack Schlossberg is that kind of leader.”

Mr. Schlossberg is among the first candidates in New York’s 12th District to start spending on paid media. But a handful of super PACs funded by competing A.I. companies and former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have already burned through millions of dollars trying to sway voters toward or away from his rivals.

Mr. Schlossberg’s outlay will be relatively modest in comparison. The campaign said it would initially spend $70,000 on digital platforms, and eventually add more digital spending and $250,000 in broadcast TV time — a relatively small sum in the nation’s most expensive media market.

Mr. Schlossberg, who has reported inherited assets between $10 million and $32 million, said he would not be spending any of his own money in the race. He does not have a super PAC behind him.

While there has been no real public polling to date, private polls released by several of Mr. Schlossberg’s rivals have all narrowly put him in the lead.

With two months left until Primary Day, two state assemblymen — Alex Bores and Micah Lasher — are not far behind; followed by George Conway, a former Republican turned high-profile antagonist of President Trump, and Nina Schwalbe, a public health expert. Because the seat is safely Democratic, the primary winner will almost certainly win the general election to replace Representative Jerrold Nadler, who is retiring.

Mr. Schlossberg, earlier known for a head-turning social media presence, has largely tried to portray his opponents as old-fashioned, risk-averse establishment figures who have not been able to check Mr. Trump. They, in turn, have raised doubts about the thinness of his résumé, which includes no long-term traditional work experience, elected or otherwise.

In an interview, Mr. Schlossberg said it was an obvious choice to turn to Ms. Pelosi, who is perhaps her party’s most respected elder stateswoman.

“Speaker Pelosi is the backbone of our party,” he said. “She most importantly understands better than anyone how the House of Representatives works and what the Democratic Party needs right now.”

Yet embracing Ms. Pelosi may also have its costs, complicating Mr. Schlossberg’s attempts to position himself as an outsider and a fresh face by reminding voters of his family’s deep ties to the Democratic establishment.

Mr. Schlossberg said he believes he first met Ms. Pelosi when he was in high school. Alongside his family, he presented her with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2019.

The candidate said Ms. Pelosi asked to meet with him in her Washington office before she endorsed his campaign in February.

“I printed out all my plans I have for the district and the country,” he said. “She read them over and quizzed me.”

An earlier version of the ad shared with The Times included footage of Mr. Schlossberg and Ms. Pelosi spending time with his mother, the former ambassador Caroline Kennedy, and his niece, the daughter of his sister Tatiana Schlossberg. (Ms. Schlossberg, who was an environmental journalist, died in December after a fight with blood cancer that she chronicled in a widely read essay.) That footage was cut from the final ad before it was distributed.

In the interview, Mr. Schlossberg said he exempted Ms. Pelosi from his critique of this party’s aging officials — and argued voters would, too.

“I put her in a category of her own,” he said. “She has magic that doesn’t age. It wins.”

The provocative painting seemed like an authentic work by Andy Warhol, depicting a nude man and woman gazing at each other with colorful shading around their bodies.

But the piece was a well-disguised counterfeit, among more than 200 fakes of works by artists like Banksy, Picasso and the Native American painter Fritz Scholder, which sold for a total of more than $2 million. Many of the works were made by an artist in Poland, and commissioned by a father and daughter living in New Jersey.

On Tuesday, the father and daughter, Erwin Bankowski and Karolina Bankowska, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Brooklyn to running a scheme to sell the counterfeit works.

The duo “painted themselves as purveyors of fine art while selling lies on canvas to unsuspecting collectors,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement.

Federal guidelines call for a prison sentence of 33 to 41 months for each defendant. Both Mr. Bankowski and Mr. Bankowska are citizens of Poland and face deportation after serving their sentences. They are set to be sentenced on Aug. 5.

Todd Spodek, a lawyer for Ms. Bankowska, 26, said his client had accepted responsibility for her crimes. Jeffrey Chabrowe, a lawyer for Mr. Bankowski, 50, said his client also accepted responsibility and had “made a terrible decision to support his family.”

Counterfeit art schemes date back thousands of years. Many forgers in recent decades have pulled off their operations by faking a work’s provenance, or documented ownership history, which elite art collectors check to determine authenticity.

Famous art forgers include Wolfgang Beltracchi, a German man who says he painted in the style of more than 100 artists, and Mark Landis, who has donated numerous fakes to dozens of museums. Two art forgery rings in Thunder Bay, Ontario, manufactured thousands of fake paintings presented as works by Norval Morrisseau, one of Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous artists.

Mr. Bankowski and Ms. Bankowska went to great lengths to conceal their efforts. In addition to creating the fake provenances, sometimes by using forged stamps from art galleries, they told buyers that the pieces were from art galleries that had since closed, prosecutors said. That made it harder for buyers to verify that the pieces were real.

The pair’s collection included splotchy pieces, often with strong political overtones, that were sold to reputable galleries and auction houses around the United States. One fake of a work by Banksy, the anonymous British street artist, that protested the Iraq War sold for $2,000. A knockoff of a painting by Raimonds Staprans, a Latvian American visual artist who died in January, sold for $60,000.

Mr. Bankowski and Ms. Bankowska also sold works that they claimed were made by Native American artists, earning a rarely used federal charge: the misrepresentation of Indian goods and services. One of the counterfeits was a fake of a landscape by Richard Mayhew, a painter of Black and Native American heritage; it sold for $160,000, prosecutors said.

Mr. Spodek, who has represented many people accused of elaborate scams, said his clients had taken great care to ensure the knockoffs looked authentic. He said the replicas that the father and daughter commissioned were “identical” to the originals.

“It’s not just selling on eBay,” Mr. Spodek said.

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll get a look inside an intake center for homeless men that the city plans to close. We’ll also find out why the Rikers Island jail complex has video games for people incarcerated there.

A city shelter near Bellevue Hospital is closing. The homeless men who were staying there have already been transferred to other shelters. Inside the building, on 30th Street, is an intake center where people go to be assigned to a bed elsewhere.

The city’s plan is to move the intake center to a building in the East Village that has been serving as a shelter for homeless men with substance abuse problems. Neighbors there are fighting the move. Last week a judge temporarily blocked the plan.

When the city announced the closing of the 30th Street shelter, it said the building was in a “severe state of disrepair.” My colleague Elizabeth A. Harris, who covers homelessness for the Metro desk, got a look inside the building. I asked her about what she saw — and what closing it would mean for the city’s shelter system.

The 30th Street shelter has served as the front door to the city’s shelter system for adult men for more than 40 years. Can the system handle the change?

We’ll see. The intake center at 30th Street is still there while the lawsuit plays out, but when it does move — wherever the new location is — it’s going to be a big shift. The 30th Street shelter was there for so long; it was very well known. Men knew it was the first stop if they needed a bed. Getting the word out to people who are homeless can be difficult, so it’s going to take time for people to be aware of the change.

The city has said it will keep a presence at 30th Street for at least a year so that when people inevitably come in looking for help, they can be sent to the new intake center.

The city says the 30th Street building is unsafe and has been unacceptable for years. Is it? What did you see?

There are parts of the building that the city is still using or used until recently. Those sections feel institutional, reminiscent of the locked psychiatric wards the building was built to have.

There are other parts of the building that have been off limits to the public for years. Those feel as if they’ve been left to rot. I saw the solarium, where psychiatric patients would have gone to get sunlight years ago. Huge chunks of the ceiling are missing. It looked as if someone had shredded the walls with a crowbar.

In the basement, there were places where the ceiling was visibly sagging, and beams that looked visibly rotted.

I was never worried that anything was going to fall on me. The city has said there’s no immediate danger in the building, and it has taken steps to shore it up, like putting temporary metal support structures in areas where support beams have corroded and netting over the Juliet balconies and the cornices so pieces don’t fall.

Closing the 30th Street shelter seems to symbolize the direction the Mamdani administration wants to take. How so?

The Mamdani administration wants to move away from big shelters. The Bellevue shelter is this huge institutional place that has had a reputation for being dangerous for a long time. Theft has been a problem. Violence has been a problem. Open drug use has been a problem. It’s a place that people don’t want to go, even if they have nowhere else to turn. Some people would rather sleep on the street than go there.

The idea is to have smaller shelters that people would actually be willing to go to. But it has been hard to close 30th Street for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s big. It has the capacity for 850 beds.

Another reason is location. It’s in the heart of Manhattan. It’s hard to find another centrally located place in Manhattan to have an intake shelter. So 30th Street was problematic for a long time, but it was hard to figure out what a better option would be.

What happens to the building if the plan to move the intake center goes through?

The Mamdani administration hasn’t said yet, but an engineering report commissioned by the city said the building was too far gone and should just be torn down.

Weather

Increasing clouds are expected today with a high near 65. Tonight, expect mostly cloudy skies and temperatures in the low 50s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“No one will ever compare to Michael Jackson.” — Grace Acosta, who wore a red “Thriller” jacket and matching pants to a Manhattan theater to see “Michael,” a biopic about Michael Jackson that critics have savaged but that crushed box-office records over the weekend.

The latest New York news

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is too violent. But people incarcerated at Rikers Island can play Mortal Kombat. Rikers bought 33 copies of the latest edition in 2024.

The notorious jail complex uses video games as part of a strategy to reduce violence among inmates. And some inmates find mental freedom playing games like Daymare: 1998.

“The environment is very hostile at times,” said Talik Thomas, 22, who was held at Rikers for eight months on gun charges. “It’s a good way to offset the hostility, so I know I’m still me. I don’t always have to be on edge.”

They play offline, on PlayStations, because the internet is not freely available at Rikers. A majority of its 49 housing units have PlayStation 4 consoles, and the Department of Correction bought 20 PlayStation 5 consoles in 2024. The newer units are kept in a center that inmates from each housing unit can visit a few times a month. The controllers are kept in a locked case — a corrections officer must take the units out and unlock them to insert the discs.

In 2024 the department bought hundreds of copies of games like NBA 2K24, Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Last year it bought the latest editions of sports franchises like Madden NFL, as well as God of War and Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order.

Jessica Medard, the executive director for facility programming at the Department of Correction, said the games available at Rikers do not include realistic violence. So, no Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.

METROPOLITAN diary

Lock talk

Dear Diary:

I had just finished my workout at the Dodge Y.M.C.A. on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and couldn’t remember which locker I had put my stuff in.

A guy who looked to be, like me, in his 60s, noticed me going from row to row futilely trying my combination on every black Master Lock.

“You forgot which locker?” he said. “I have a system for that.”

I said I had a system for remembering my lock’s combination, but not the locker number.

He asked how I remembered the combination.

“I take each number and think about which Yankee had that number when I was a kid,” I explained.

His eyes brightened.

“I do the same with old Mets players!” he exclaimed.

I laughed.

“Well,” I said, “we’ve got nothing else to talk about, then.”

He asked which Yankees.

He’s a Mets fan, I thought to myself. What harm would it do?

“Roy White, Lou Piniella and Sparky Lyle,” I said, lowering my voice to a murmur.

He didn’t hesitate.

“Six, 14, 28!” he exclaimed.

There were chuckles all around.

“Time to get a new lock,” I heard someone say.

— Tom Guiltinan

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.