So while Ms. Velez, still bitter, complains that Hunts Point Multi-Service is "a completely different animal" than it was under her father, Mr. Rosa, the unlikely heir to that throne, believes things are not yet different enough.

As he sings about the newly sanitized Times Square or his romantic misadventures backed by his Spanish Rocketship band, he's an unlikely heir to Carmen Miranda.

Soft-spoken and introverted, Binyamin Kahane seemed an unlikely heir to the virulently anti-Arab legacy of his fiercely outspoken father.

Now the designer of uniforms for McDonald's, Trans World Airlines, Avis and Princess Cruises, he is the unlikely heir to such high-profile council presidents as Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta and Carolyne Roehm.

Photographed before an intensely blue sky high in the Andes, his rumpled shirt open at the neck and a parka slung over one shoulder, the 40-year-old former Finance Minister seems an unlikely heir to Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Mr. Booker, in turn, has become the unlikely heir apparent in this poor, majority African-American city of 280,000 - a suburban-raised, statistics-wielding lawyer with degrees from Oxford and Yale who meditates and peppers his speech with Yiddish phrases.

At first notice some would have thought him an unlikely heir to the presidency.

A1 Shea & Gould's opulent offices draw an unlikely heir.

No listener to the recording can doubt that it is both, or that in Mr. Taha, a rumpled North African with a buzz saw voice, the Clash has an unlikely heir.

Hunter Bell, as the unlikely heir, rises to the occasion, and knows it.