Showing posts with label Michele McPhee's posts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michele McPhee's posts. Show all posts

Friday, March 6, 2009

Wiseguy Protection Program—Your Tax Dollars at Work

by Michele McPhee

You want to know the secret ways in which untold amounts of our federal tax dollars are squandered? Recently, I was asked whether I thought Joseph Milano—the owner of a Florida pizzeria named Goomba’s—was really a Mafia hitman named Joey “Crazy Joe” Calco I wrote about in my first book, Mob Over Miami.

I did and it was.

Calco (pictured above) is a confessed killer who was part of the notorious Bonanno crime family’s Bath Avenue Crew. He served six years in prison for murdering two of his pals. He promised federal Judge Edward Korman that if given another chance he “won’t let this court down and I won’t let you down.”

With that, Calco became one of the many in the absurdly expensive federal Witness Protection Program and was relocated to Florida with a girlfriend and his parents.

On January 23rd, two customers came into Goomba’s to complain about a calzone they had purchased. Milano (at right) pulled out a Luger 9mm handgun, jumped over the counter, and pistol-whipped the men. The attack was captured on surveillance tape (below). After the incident, Milano was arrested at his parents’ home and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Two weeks later, once police caught on, Joseph Milano, a.k.a. “Joey Calco,” was rearrested as a felon in possession of a firearm.

In the years since Calco became a maggot in Florida, he has been accused of sexually harassing a teenage girl who worked in the pizzeria and he has logged a battery arrest for slapping another teen employee.

Richie Capie, 35, one of the men Calco attacked, said he has heard the news that he was brutalized by a Mob hitman helped by the government.

“Now that’s in the back of my mind—the guy’s a killer," Capie said.

Calco is not the only wiseguy to get in trouble again after making a deal. Who could forget Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, the Gambino crime family hitman? I guess their contributions help stimulate the economy with police overtime?





Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Why Are Smart Women Carried Away by Fakes?

by Michele McPhee

Clark Rockefeller, the kidnapper captured in Baltimore this past Saturday—six days after he snatched his 7-year-old daughter from the ritzy Back Bay enclave during a supervised visit—had no driver’s license.

No Social Security card.

No work history.

No record of education.

No family members to speak of.

In 1994, he did marry a woman (after first falling in love with her identical twin) but he did not file for a marriage license. He spread stories of owning Lear Jets, built a bizarre moat around his New Hampshire home, led neighbors to believe he was a descendant of the Rockefellers—the famed industrialist clan—and he swore he graduated from Yale. All lies.

In the words of one Boston Police law enforcement source, “He’s a ghost.” A broke ghost that lived off of his wife’s lucrative income.

But that did not stop Harvard-educated, high-powered political consultant Sandra Boss from marrying Rockefeller. Or Clark Rock. Or Michael Brown. Or whatever Rockefeller’s real name is. She was married to the man for more than a decade, but, astonishingly, she would never know who her husband and father of their child (who has since reunited with her mother) really was. In fact, Rockefeller took a “substantial amount of money” to relinquish custody of his little girl (pictured above) and even signed off on paperwork to change her name from Reigh Rockefeller to Reigh Boss.

Sandra Boss is not the only smart woman to fall in love with an impostor. Two decades of crime reporting have shown me that women are often willing to clench their eyes shut to the possibility that the man they have fallen in love with is not who he said he was—like whistling in the dark to keep away ghosts. Recent murder trials have shown us that much.

Rachel Entwistle, the beloved teacher from the South Shore, who was shot dead alongside her nine-month-old daughter Lillian Rose, thought she had found a loving husband and doting dad in Neil Entwistle, who was pulling in $10,000 a month as a computer consultant for British intelligence. In fact, Rachel (pictured right) created a Web site to keep family members abreast of the Entwistles' perfect life and signed each message the same way, “Love, the happy family.” Neil Entwistle was in fact a broke, cowardly sex addict who pumped bullets into his baby’s belly and his wife’s head. He was convicted this summer.

Weeks later, in the same courthouse, another so-called loving husband, former WRKO radio talk-show host James Keown, was convicted of killing his wife Julie by spiking her Gatorade with antifreeze. As she died slowly and painfully in their Waltham home, Julie Keown (pictured left) was still convinced her husband was a Harvard Business School student (he forged acceptance letters), a man who was heartbroken over the inexplicable sickness of his wife. In e-mails to friends, Julie wrote about her unending love for James, and even expressed fear that her illness would “mess up” his life.

When sentencing Keown, a judge remarked, "I am truly in the presence of an evil person." Why couldn't intelligent women, in intimate relations with these men, sense something shady beneath the façades? Why are smart women so ready to believe obvious lies? Have we become so focused on advancing our careers that we ignore our personal lives—failing to see the "ghosts," the evil, right before our eyes?


Monday, June 30, 2008

"Life" for Neil Entwistle Means Death in Prison (One Way or Another)

by Michele McPhee

SHIRLEY, MASSACHUSETTS—Within weeks of his arrest, Neil Entwistle suffered a kick to the stomach so swift and brutally hard, the Englishman crumpled to the ground and whimpered. The man who delivered the blow, a fellow inmate, continued to shout “Baby Killer!” as correction officers restrained him.

Correction officers in Massachusetts are now charged with making sure that those kinds of attacks on Entwistle do not become a daily occurrence as he begins his prison sentence. Last week, Entwistle was convicted of killing his 27-year-old wife, Rachel, and his baby daughter, Lillian Rose, 9 months. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The bodies of the infant and her mother were found nestled alongside each other in the family’s rented Massachusetts home on January 20, 2006.

"It’s our intent to protect him as we protect any inmate. We’re not going to treat him special, but we’ll insure that he gets equal protection like every other murderer and rapist,’’ said Steve Kenneway, President of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. “We are trained to overlook the crime. Our job is not to judge the inmate. Our job is to keep them safe and protect society from them.

“I won’t, however, speak for the inmate population–which is why he will probably be housed away from them,’’ Kenneway said. “People convicted of crimes against children are very, very difficult to protect from the inmate population.’’

Because of the notorious and high-profile nature of his crime, Entwistle was moved last Friday to the special management unit, a segregated section of the maximum-security prison at Souza-Baranowski, by Massachusetts Department of Correction Officials. He was issued a pair of red scrubs with the letters DOC emblazoned on the back and was brought into the unit with handcuffs and shackles early Friday morning, prison officials said.

A correction officer will be assigned to monitor Entwistle, who has threatened suicide twice since his arrest two and a half years ago, around the clock. The isolation can provoke some inmates to find ways to commit suicide. In 2005, Andrew Armstrong, a convict serving time for a brutal home invasion, was found hung in the very cell where Entwistle was assigned on Friday, prison sources said.

That cell is 7-feet-by-13-feet with a steel toilet and sink; a bed steel-mounted to the wall, just shy of his height. Entwistle was issued state-owned sheets, a pillow, and a blanket. The cell has a metal footlocker; a desk; and stool and one metal shelf hanging on the wall. He will be completely isolated with no contact with the general population at the prison, said Cara Savelli, a spokeswoman for the DOC.

Each of his meals costs Massachusetts taxpayers $1.42 a day and taste like “the worst school cafeteria grub you can think of,’’ said convicted drug dealer Jimmy Connors, who was recently released from the prison and spent time in the special management unit.

“They have to keep him away from everyone. Everyone knows who Neil Entwistle is. He’s the coward who killed his own baby,’’ Connors said of Entwistle. “Baby killers, child molesters, are tortured in there.”

One of those child molesters in fact was murdered in the unit where Entwistle is now. Pedophile Roman Catholic priest Thomas Geoghan, 68, was strangled to death by a fellow inmate in a segregation unit at the prison nicknamed “The Shoe") in 2003. Geoghan’s killer was a homicidal maniac named Joseph Druce who confessed his hatred for child molesters. In a bizarre, macabre security video he was captured re-enacting the priest’s murder.

“I did it to save the kids,’’ Druce told investigators after the slaying, which occurred on August 23, 2003. Roughly 150 children claim they were molested by Geoghan during his 30-year career in six Catholic parishes.

In the video pantomime of the priest’s slaying, the clip starts with Druce standing in a cell naked but for white boxer shorts, his sinewy body scrawled with crude jailhouse tattoos. His pock-marked face is covered with a scraggly brown beard as he talks to himself in a mirror.

He then re-enacts the murder. He jammed the door of Geoghan’s cell with a paperback book so correction officers could not stop him. He punched the priest in the face. The priest fell to his knees at which point Druce (pictured left) bound his hands behind his back with a white T-shirt. Druce pushed the priest to the floor, face down and proceeded to strangle him with a tube-sock tourniquet that he tightened with the priest’s own sneaker.

As the priest slowly suffocated, Druce then climbed onto the steel-mounted bed and jumped on the elderly man’s back, stomping him three times. The video simulation mirrors what prosecutors have described in the slaying. An autopsy showed Geoghan's cause of death to be ligature strangulation and blunt chest trauma; broken ribs and a punctured lung.

It’s a brutal act, and one that prison officials say they do not want to see repeated on Neil Entwistle. The 29-year-old Worksop native will spend the rest of his life behind bars trying to avoid attacks like the one that killed the pedophile priest, which led to accusations that correction officers were complicit in Geoghan’s murder. Several correction officers were suspended from their jobs after Geoghan’s slaying.

Of course, Entwistle is not the only man serving life in a Massachusetts prison for killing his own child. There is an official tax-exempt organization called Lifers Group Inc. in the prison system comprised of a bloody fraternity of the state’s most notorious killers who advocate for convicts' rights and petition lawmakers for special protections. The leader of the group, Kenneth Seguin, is serving life in prison for slitting the throats of his two children before plunging their bodies into a pond. After that gruesome murder, he went home and buried an ax into his wife’s head. Another Lifers Group leader is Gordon Haas, a former department store manager who smothered his wife and two small children to death with plastic bags.

“Neil Entwistle will be among his peers in jail,’’ said a correction officer assigned to the prison. That officer declined to be named. “Guys like this really make us sick, but we are paid to protect them.”


Saturday, June 14, 2008

Sex Addiction as a Motive? Notes from the Murder Trial of Neil Entwistle

by Michele McPhee

Woburn, MA – The trial of Neil Entwistle will be "sordid, gruesome and graphic,'' his defense attorney warned jurors who heard opening arguments in the case of the Englishman accused of borrowing a .22 caliber handgun from his in-law's gun cabinet and using it to pump a bullet into his baby's stomach and his wife's head as the mother and child lay sleeping alongside each other in bed.

Entwistle, 29, was arrested in England in February 2006, weeks after the bodies of his 9-month-old daughter and wife Rachel, 27, were discovered in the master bedroom of their Hopkinton home. Entwistle (pictured right) told investigators that he found them like that after running errands on a Saturday morning.

In court Friday, prosecutor Michael Fabbri recalled the scene for jurors, recounting a phone conversation between a Massachusetts state trooper and Entwistle, who called from England. "After I came home and found them in the bed, I covered them up,'' Entwistle said.

"It was like I was closing them off. It was all trace-like and ordered after that. My first thought was to go downstairs and get a knife from the kitchen to hurt myself, but I knew that would hurt,'' Entwistle told the state trooper.

Entwistle's parents, Yvonne and Clifford, along with his younger brother Russell, attended the court proceedings this week and told reporters that Neil was "one-hundred percent innocent."

Yesterday, as defense attorneys described Neil as a devoted dad who loved his wife and baby (pictured left), his mother wept behind him as her husband patted her leg. She has spent much of the week blowing kisses to the accused killer as he sits in a dark suit with a seemingly smug smile on his face.

When Entwistle was arrested he was carrying a note to himself about selling the story of his murdered family "to the highest bidder!" He also had list of hookers and the scrawled phone number of an ex-girlfriend he tried to look up in England.

We hear a lot about booze and drugs as an excuse for murder. The more I learn about Neil Entwistle, the more I am convinced that he is a sex addict. And his insatiable lust drove him to kill.

The trial continues tomorrow in Middlesex Superior Court. Lawyers plan to argue over a photograph that shows Neil Entwistle naked and aroused on a lawn chair at his in-laws' backyard. Prosecutors want the photo, which was submitted to adult friend finder, admitted as evidence. Clearly, defense attorneys want it tossed. Should be an interesting court battle.


Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Reporters on Trial - Why I Won't Testify in the Murder Trial of Neil Entwistle

by Michele McPhee

Martha's Vineyard is gorgeous this time of year. In fact, despite the real estate slump, the average hotel room on the island can still fetch upwards of $600 to $700 a night.

No wonder Neil Entwistle's attorneys want to move his trial to Edgartown Superior Court, a cozy, picturesque courtroom that serves Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Entwistle is the Englishman charged with pumping a bullet into his 9-month-old daughter's belly, and his wife's head, on a cold winter's night in 2006.

After the killings, Entwistle (pictured below with wife and child) fled the country, according to prosecutors, who say he even left traces of gunshot residue on a kitchen knife, bolstering investigators' theory that the plan was murder-suicide. Only Entwistle didn't have the guts to commit suicide.

Why the change of venue? Well, Weinstein argued that my new book, Heartless, the True Story of Neil Entwistle and the Brutal Murder of His Wife and Child, released today, will make it impossible for him to defend his client from a prejudiced jury. And what better place to find a fair jury than a gorgeous seaside island at the height of the summer crush? After all, lodging for the accused British killer and his legal team would be picked up by the Massachusetts taxpayers – not by his attorneys, Elliot Weinstein and Stephanie Page.

The selection of the jury who will decide Neil Entwistle's fate began yesterday and will continue this week. On Friday, Weinstein asked the Honorable Diane Kottmyer to consider a motion to change venue, to move the Woburn-based trial to the Cape, arguing that the book and the publicity surrounding the case will make it impossible for Entwistle (attorney and client pictured right) to get a fair trial. (With the British invasion of reporters from the United Kingdom flooding into Massachusetts right now, he hasn't seen publicity yet. I remember all too well the trial of the English au pair Louise Woodward who was convicted of shaking a baby to death that was in her care. The British press corps resemble European soccer fans, crushing and often over-zealous.) After seeing the strip mall that the Entwistle trial will unfold in, I can see why Weinstein would rather spend the summer on Cape Cod than in Woburn.

But I believe that the judge recognizes the court would be hard pressed to find a reasonable alternate location where a jury has not heard at least some of the details of this gruesome murder. And I think she also realizes that Rachel Souza's devastated mother, her brother, and her step-father have every right to attend the trail – without having to endure the additional hardship of a ferry ride, expensive lodging, and a crowded courtroom. That's why Kottmyer denied Weinstein's request.

Still, the lawyer is expected to ask again this week – armed with a copy of my book. Earlier this month, he hit me with a subpoena with a plan to compel me to reveal a confidential source regarding a suicide note his client had penned him from the slammer. That case was found to be moot after prosecutors said the suicide note would not be used in the Entwistle trial.

So the case that will unfold this week is not just a horrible allegation of domestic violence. It's a case for First Amendment lawyers to watch closely so we can finally bring a reporter's shield law to Massachusetts. Thirty-two other states have laws protecting reporters from being forced – under the threat of jail or financial penalties – from revealing their sources. It's a critical First Amendment issue and one that could continue to unfold as the Entwistle trial gets underway.

Why? Because Weinstein has told other reporters that he could hit me with another subpoena about the sourcing in the book. And, again, I will answer with the same refrain I have used as a crime reporter for two decades:

I have never revealed a source, and I never will.


Tuesday, May 20, 2008

NOT-SO-WISE WISEGUYS

by Michele McPhee

It’s official. The New England Mafia sleeps with the fishes. This week, the man whom federal prosecutors call the underboss for the Boston underworld–Carmen “The Cheese Man” DiNunzio–begged a judge to grant him access to a bigger toilet after he was locked up for trying to bribe Big Dig officials into giving him a lucrative contract to sell the highway department dirt.

For those of you unfamiliar with the $15 billion boondoggle that was Boston’s Big Dig, that was the most expensive roadway project in the history of the United States paid for with your tax dollars. In 1982, Massachusetts politicians swore the Big Dig would only cost us $3 billion and take a few years to complete. Well, it’s 2008, the job has swelled to the $15 billion-range and reputed wiseguys are still trying to get a piece of the massive swindle. That tells you roughly all you need to know.

Anyway, why the bigger toilet for the New England Mafia underboss? DiNunzio, 50, who earned his nickname from the cheese shop he owns in Boston’s Little Italy, the North End, weighs 400 pounds and can only relieve himself on a super-sized toilet. At least that’s what his lawyer argued in front of a federal judge this week.

Out loud. In public.

What is the underworld coming to when its bosses complain that their toilets are too small and continue to bloviate about themselves within earshot of wiretaps like DiNunzio did when he declared to an undercover informant posing as a dirty Massachusetts highway official: “I’m the Cheeseman."

The undercover replied: “You’re the Cheeseman?"

To which DiNunzio replied, “Ask anyone about me."

Oh boy.

But there is no one in law enforcement under the illusion that the Mafia anywhere in this country is intact. In New York City, Joseph Massino of the Bonanno crime family was the only Mafia boss not in prison. Shortly after I wrote a front page New York Daily News story dubbing him "The Last Don," Massino was arrested. He quickly rolled and became a government informant, ratting out his underlings.

Before Massino “went bad,” as underworld associates refer to government witnesses, Vincent “Vinny Ocean” Palermo, the boss of the New Jersey crime family the hit TV series The Sopranos was based on, rolled on his family. Since then, dozens of made guys have joined the witness protection program rather than serve time.

Now the feds are scraping the bottom of the barrel to sweep up wiseguys to garner those headline-grabbing arrests. In New Jersey this month, twenty-one Gambino associates were arrested in a sweep.

So as Boston’s underboss undertakes his battle for a bigger throne in prison, Brooklyn crime boss John “Jackie the Nose” D’Amico is arguing that he should be allowed to leave jail to resume his $700-a-week no-show job at a water-bottling plant. Only problem with that is that Jackie the Nose was caught bragging that he paid the company $700 a week to put his name on the payroll books to evade investigators. A judge is taking his request under consideration.

Covering the Mafia used to be so much fun. There was the crime family that plotted to kill Rudolph Giuliani and the Gotti son that wanted to kill the founder of the Guardian Angels Curtis Sliwa. Then there was Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and his famous wanderings through Greenwich Village, Manhattan in a bathrobe to shake the cops. It worked . . . for a while. What about Joey Gallo, the gangster who was shot dead in Umbertos, dying in a plate of pasta or Carmine Galante, who died with a lit stogie in his mouth.

My first book, Mob Over Miami, covered La Cosa Nostra in its glory years and exposed how South Beach, Miami was revitalized in the 1990s by gangsters' money. St. Martin’s Press announced this week it will republish the 2002 title in anticipation of a feature film, UnMade Man, based on my book.

Now, the mobsters in my book were wiseguys. This generation being chased around by the government is earning the reputation that they are the not-so-wise guys.


Friday, April 18, 2008

Can Background Checks Prevent Murder?

by Michele McPhee

I have spent two decades covering crime. As a result, I never date a guy without conducting a thorough background check on him. Initially, my research was prompted after a couple of dates with a guy who wrapped his arm around his dinner plate, “Walpole-style’’ as they call it up here in Massachusetts, referring to the state’s super-max prison. Sure enough, that gruff yet buff date had spent a decade at Walpole perfecting his plate protecting. Then there was that swarthy Italian guy in New York I dated while working as the police bureau chief of the New York Daily News. He turned out to be a Gambino crime family associate with a rap sheet.

But it’s not just my own experience that provokes me to pursue criminal histories on potential mates. It’s all the women who didn’t find out who their loves really were, women who ended up dead.

On June 3rd, the same day my book Heartless: The True Story of Neil Entwistle and the Cold-Blooded Murder of his Wife and Baby will be released by St. Martin’s Press true crime division, Neil Entwistle (pictured above) will go on trial for the 2005 assassinations of his infant Lillian Rose and his bride Rachel. The motive that provoked the Brit to allegedly pump a bullet into his baby’s stomach and his wife’s head, prosecutors believe, was money. In his case, the complete lack of any.

Entwistle was one of those guys who could become whoever you wanted him to be; the master con artist. His wife Rachel had no idea that the charming raven-haired genius she met at a rowing club in England, the man who told her he had a top-secret job at an intelligence firm, was actually just an unemployed chump living off credit and trolling Internet sex sites for clandestine hookups. Even her mother and her step-father were snowed by Neil Entwistle. To them he was nothing other than a doting husband and loving dad – that is until that January 2006 day when the bodies of his wife and baby were found under a rumpled comforter in their idyllic New England home. He fled the country after finding their bodies, without calling police, and was arrested for their murders in England months later.

But Entwistle is not the only guy with a shaky past who went on to kill his lover. In fact, Massachusetts has a macabre history of providing the backdrop for infamous crime scenes where women were brutally slain by men they trusted. This week the trial of James Keown--the radio talk-show host who is charged with spiking his wife's Gatorade with anti-freeze, fatally poisoning her in 2004--ended in a mistrial. Keown is accused of killing his wife Julie in an attempt to collect on a $250,000 life insurance policy. Julie, a dedicated nurse who was 31 years old when her kidneys began to fail, had no idea that the love of her life was broke, and desperate enough to kill her - according to Massachusetts prosecutors.

Keown was transmitting his radio show from their Waltham home because he convinced his employer - and his wife - that he had been accepted to Harvard Business School. In fact, he had taken a night course on the Cambridge campus, but had flunked it. Prosecutors said they will retry Keown on June 9, meaning his murder trial will take place down the hall from Neil Entwistle's double homicide trial.

Here are just a few others:

- Christa Worthington - the fashion writer who was found bloodied and stabbed in her Cape Cod cottage with her two-year-old daughter Ava desperately trying to breastfeed from her mother’s dead body. Her alleged sometime lover, the local trash man, was convicted of raping and killing the wealthy, attractive single mom one winter afternoon in 2002. That arrest came after her other lovers' reputations were stained with accusations that they were suspects.

- Carol DiMaiti-Stuart - Carol and her unborn son Christopher were shot dead by her dashing husband Charles Stuart after they attended a Lamaze class together in 1989. Stuart, a greedy Newbury Street furrier, blamed a black man and set off a near-race war in Boston, all motivated by a half-million life insurance policy. He threw himself off the Tobin Bridge when the cops closed in. But was it really suicide? That remains a Boston mystery.

- Laura Jane Rosenthal - Laura was beaten to death with a rock by her financier husband Richard who then impaled her heart and lungs on a stake in the backyard after she burnt the ziti she was cooking for dinner in 1995. The handsome well-to-do businessman is serving life.

- Kenneth Seguin - Kenneth was a handsome, successful businessman who had never been in trouble when he drove an axe into his wife Mary Anne’s head then drugged his two children and hacked them to death in 1992. Currently, he heads a Lifers Group – a union of sorts for convicted killers in Massachusetts jail.

All of these men shared something in common: a hint in their backgrounds that something might snap. The trash man that killed Worthington had a long history of violence. Charles Stuart had taken out a massive life insurance policy on his wife before they married and she got pregnant. Richard Rosenthal had a history of mental illness. Seguin was going broke.

Credit and criminal checks work, as does some old-fashioned shoe leather reporting. Ask about old girlfriends and family trees; snoop just a little bit to make sure there are no prescriptions for psychotic episodes in the medicine cabinet. A little research could have provided that mustard seed of information that would have made these slain women just a little bit more leery.

We do background checks on used cars before we buy them, why not build workups on the men in our lives?


Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Clutch

by Michele McPhee

Why do political wives engage in "the Clutch"? Silda Spitzer made me physically ill when I saw her make that long, slow, horrifying walk into the hot glare of TV lights and cast her eyes downward as throngs of hostile peppered her husband - who will now forever be known as Client No. 9 - with questions about the thousands he is accused of spending on high-end hookers. The man even paid extra to not use a condom, according to the FBI. The humiliation was etched into her face, but she was there clutching Eliot Spitzer's arm - not once, twice.

Silda Spitzer is not the only political wife who engaged in "the Clutch" in recent memory. There was Hillary Clinton's famous hand-holding when Bill Clinton wagged his finger at the American public saying "I did not have sex with that woman!" Larry "Senator Wide Stance" Craig dragged his poor wife into the cacophony of TV trucks and camera flashes when he was caught toe-tapping gay sex signals in a public restroom at a Minneapolis airport. David Vitter's wife was caught in the clutch after her hubby's name was found in the black book of the infamous D.C. Madam. Gary Hart's wife stood-by-her-man after he was photographed with a young hottie on his lap. Gary Condit's wife was in the clutch even after her husband's admitted lover Chandra Levy went missing. The worst clutch came from Dina McGreevy, who clutched the hand of the New Jersey governor Jim McGreevy as he declared: "I am a gay American."

If my boyfriend was unmasked as a prostitute paying-sicko, was caught having an affair with a college student, or was busted for toe-tapping a signal wanting a quick Monica Lewinsky in the stall of a mens room, the clutch I would engage in would happen lower than his hand . . . and it would probably make him weep with much more than regret.

Can't put a price on dignity.