Word: capasso
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Michelle A. Capasso '01 was surprised to learn late in the week that in addition to her parents her two aunts and two older cousins would also be visiting. She watched the six adults storm the halls of Straus complaining of their hunger...
Alexander, author of a 1983 book on Jean Harris and the murder of diet doctor Herman Tarnower, carefully details the lives of the players: Myerson's lover Andy Capasso and his estranged wife Nancy; Judge Hortense Gabel, who presided over the Capasso divorce; and Sukhreet, the judge's troubled daughter. Bess is a towering "glamazon" who dazzled almost everyone she met; Hortense Gabel is a stocky housing lawyer with Coke-bottle glasses and sensible shoes. Yet Alexander pairs them as spiritual twins. Both had climbed out of the Bronx through brains, hard work and chutzpah. And both hated looking back...
Alexander portrays Myerson as a woman who loved too much and too desperately through two failed marriages and numerous affairs. That picture is so convincing that Myerson's willingness to hire Judge Gabel's nearly unemployable daughter as a way to induce Gabel to lower Capasso's alimony payments makes an odd kind of sense. Capasso, a sewer contractor from Queens, had nothing to offer Bess but limousines, furs and financial security. But for someone as insecure as Myerson, he was an emotional...
Obsession was the theme of the trial. Just as Hortense Gabel searched relentlessly for a job for her only daughter, the still attractive Myerson, 64, was obsessed with the fleshy Capasso, who is serving three years in federal prison for income tax evasion. Born in 1945 -- the year Myerson was crowned Miss America -- Capasso came along during Myerson's losing Senate bid in 1980, helped her pay off campaign debts, bought her a Mercedes and a fur coat, and gave her the run of his Long Island mansion. All was seeming paradise until Nancy Capasso found out about Bess...
...week trial ultimately came down to Sukhreet Gabel. She had taped telephone conversations and stolen her mother's files and she seemed to relish testifying that her job and the judge's ruling in Capasso's divorce were no coincidence. Yet the obviously unstable Sukhreet came across like an indulged child desperate for attention. Judge John Keenan twice instructed the jurors on "reasonable doubt," and after four days they returned with a verdict: not guilty. Myerson brushed away tears and kissed Gabel. Then she walked past the cameras, smiling...