Going, going, gone, went Juan Gonzalez. Say it ain’t so; say so long to Sammy Sosa as well.

The Yankees got shut out in their pursuit of the
two slugging all-stars. Is there any justice? The answer is "yes," in the person of David Justice, Halle Berry’s ex-beau, whom the Yankees acquired last week from Cleveland in exchange for Ricky Ledee and a couple of marginal prospects to be named later.

Sosa was Steinbrenner's guy from the start. Sources say that Steinbrenner viewed Sammy as the Second Coming of Reggie Jackson, with an even greater potential upside. According to Yankee insiders, George was willing to create an elaborate ruse by trading for Gonzales, and deliberately breaking off salary negotiations after making a proposal that The Boss knew would be refused. The plan was that afterwards Sosa would fall more cheaply into the Yankees' lap.

Sosa’s team, the Chicago Cubs, had something else in mind. They tried to commit a 4th of
July Day Massacre of the Yankee minor league system. The Yankee braintrust persuaded Steinbrenner to grin and bare the Cub fiasco, save a fortune, and hold on to their prospects to use in other transactions before baseball’s July 31 trading deadline. A Yankee official said, " the money not spent on Sosa would be used during the next off season to lure Cleveland Indian slugger, free-agent to be, Bronx native, and fan favorite Manny Ramirez."

Sources also tell NYConf that the Knicks are
ready to finally let loose of Patrick Ewing.

The seeds were planted this week during the NBA draft when the Knicks stockpiled on guards via the draft and trades. The Knicks hierarchy’s master plan is to package their surplus of guards in trades that would bring back some blue-collar type power forward, and put them in a position to trade Ewing to Miami where he could team up with fellow Georgetown alum and close friend Alonzo Mourning and ex-Knick coach Pat Riley.

Once that’s done, Cablevision will turn its attention to finagling the purchase of San Antonio Spur superstar center Tim Duncan, and then opening up the vault to ensure that Duncan plays at The Garden for at least as long as Ewing has, but with much better results.

The Chelsea Clinton that New Yorkers are sure to see a lot more of this summer — she’ll be campaigning for her mother — won’t look like the old college girl we’re used to.

Instead, she’ll be coiffed up with the best of them. When the 20-year-old Stanford junior filled in for her mom at a state dinner at the White House for King Mohammed VI of Morocco, we hear that Chelsea had Christophe do her hair, makeup, and nails before the event. Christophe, for those with a good memory, is the eponymous salon that gave Bill Clinton his famous flight-delaying hair cut a few years back.

We hear that Chelsea will appear at a Gen X fundraiser for her mother over the Labor Day weekend in Southampton and possibly some other Hillary for Senate events this summer in the Hamptons which are now in the planning stages.

Although the CBS-Viacom merger is all but done, sources tell NYConfidential that internal chaos has ripped through the corporate offices, leaving employees wondering who’ll be the "Survivors" of the shakedown.

On the CBS side, layoffs have begun. Recently, CBS.com took a hit, as nearly 50 employees received their walking papers. CBS’s Executive Producer of New Media Adam Wiener saw that the CBS eyes were wide shut, and bailed to go to work in Silicon Alley. More CBS new media employers are likely to follow.

One CBS employee, who will not be leaving the network any time soon, is Don Hewitt. Hewitt just inked a new 4-year deal to stay on as Exec Producer of CBS’s perennial survivor "60 Minutes."

Meanwhile, the M in Viacom subsidiary M-TV ought to stand for Mutiny after Viacom’s Sumner Redstone snatched the WWF’s TV rights from the USA network, and is set to telecast the non-animated, wrestling death-matches on primetime M-TV. Employees of the music video cable channel that already glamorizes "gangsta rap" are reportedly fed up by the network's planned foray into "Trash TV." Sources say that there’s talk at M-TV headquarters in Time Square of a mass exodus of M-TV employees almost equaling the number of weeks that Britney Spears has been on top of the M-TV video countdown charts.