The Creep, The Cop, His Wife & Her Lovers

Fort lauderdale, the Swinging City of the dispossessed, had never seen anything like the Antiporn Crusader who was caught with his pants down. Neither had the cop in the closet

The white spire and cross of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale ascends more than 300 feet toward heaven as if to make it more visible to God. Whether or not God can see it, no one knows. It can be seen, however, from across the street at the insurance office of Doug Danziger, a deacon at C.R.P.C. and former vice-mayor of Fort Lauderdale. It is also visible from farther south on Federal Highway at Pure Platinum--a night club that features nude female dancers and oiled wrestlers--and from even farther south down Federal at another night club, Solid Gold, where, one night on stage under a bright light, a naked blonde tried to swallow a seven-foot python, head first. The python bit her on the tongue.

"Poetic justice, eh?" says the Reverend D. James Kennedy with a thin-lipped smile. "We should be truly ashamed. We've reached the unthinkable, all under the guise of freedom. Every major civilization has been destroyed by rampant--ahem--pandemic immorality. The Bible says, 'Use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh.'"

Kennedy, dressed impeccably in a navy double-breasted blazer and yellow silk tie, is the pastor of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. His church is one of the largest (10,000 members), wealthiest (its members once raised $8,000,000 on a single Sunday), most powerful (Kennedy is a friend of Senators and Congressmen) and most influential churches in this country. Its evangelical TV program, The Coral Ridge Hour, reaches more than 250 major cities in the U.S. and foreign countries.

Kennedy himself is a fastidiously puritanical man and the only evangelical minister on TV with a legitimate Ph.D. He does not beg, weep, cajole or sweat like evangelists of the Jimmy Swaggart ilk. "I don't hear voices," Kennedy says with obvious distaste. His erudite style and almost secular message (once a man is born again through Christ, Kennedy preaches, he can turn his attention to earthly success) appeal to an affluent and educated, though not necessarily intelligent, audience. Men like Doug Danziger.

Danziger, at 50, is a big, gruff man with short, neatly parted hair. He wears the kind of gray, preppie clothes one would expect of a conservative politician or retired Marine drill instructor. He has an air of authority about him, according to his friends. "He was a class leader in the fourth grade," said one, "but arrogant even then." According to his enemies--and there's no shortage of them in Fort Lauderdale--he has an air of insufferable self-righteousness. He was always a driven man, and when he moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1970, he immediately joined the C.R.P.C.--which was the right kind of church for a man on the move. As one local stockbroker put it, "When I drove past C.R.P.C. the first Sunday I was in Fort Lauderdale, I saw all those Cadillacs and Jaguars in the parking lot and had only one thought. Clients!"

Danziger owned a hotel, marina and bar for a while. In 1979 he opened his State Farm Insurance Agency. He found selling insurance "exciting," he said, "because I have a sales personality. This is God's plan for me." It was also God's plan, he says, for him to clean up Fort Lauderdale.

A lot of people at C.R.P.C. thought Fort Lauderdale needed cleaning up, though their sentiments weren't shared by a majority of citizens. Those folks liked their city just fine the way it was, even if they did refer to it, almost affectionately, as Fort Liquordale, Fort Lollipop or the Land of Sleaze and Sun, or simply by the name on its T-shirt of choice, which pictures three women in G strings above the word PARADISE. Danziger went with the C.R.P.C. crowd and instituted a campaign as vice-mayor to rid Paradise of its sleazy reputation and transform it into a city of "wholesome family values." He helped banish nude night clubs, adult bookstores, massage parlors and even spring break. "It's exciting to decide the destiny of our city," he said. "If certain people don't like the fact that we're gonna legislate morality, they can go someplace else."

Actually, it was Kennedy who first decided to clean up Paradise and he saw as the perfect instrument of his design the dogmatic pugnaciousness of Doug Danziger. "I'm not Rasputin," said Kennedy. "I don't tell Doug how to vote on a moral issue. But Doug's a Christian, so that determines how he acts on issues." Then he added, "You know, Doug Danziger may very well become the next mayor of Fort Lauderdale."

That possibility sent chills down the spines of many people in Paradise who hadn't moved to this honky-tonk city in the sun to be told how to live their lives by men like Doug Danziger. In fact, people don't really move to Fort Lauderdale. They flee to it when things go bad. It's a city of the dispossessed, of people outside the bounds of conventional society, people on the run from a bad marriage, a bad check, a bad rap, a bad life that offers no hope.

In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, Fort Lauderdale was the home of pirates, bootleggers and smugglers. In the Sixties and Seventies, college students migrated there for their bacchanalian spring breaks. In the Seventies and Eighties, Fort Lauderdale became home to drug smugglers because of its proximity to the marijuana and cocaine fields of South America--and because its vast number of labyrinthine waterways (one of its nicknames is The Venice of America) made it almost impossible for the Drug Enforcement Agency to capture smugglers in their sleek, powerful speedboats called go-fasters. With the arrival of easy drug money came the white-collar criminals--the boiler-room operators who sold nonexistent gold bars and worthless oil and gas leases in Alaska. The city had a laissez-faire attitude toward such businesses because it had always been a pioneer city, in constant flux, with a pioneer city's mentality toward laws. People came to Fort Lauderdale to flee constraints; it was a "catholic" city in the true sense of that word. It was a city where, on any given night, a resident could go to a bar on the intracoastal or the beach and drink Cuba libres with strippers and gays and smugglers and con men and personal-injury lawyers and cosmetic plastic surgeons and even a Presbyterian minister if that minister were so inclined. It was a city where people went to be left alone.

Kennedy was smart enough to know that, though most people in Paradise were indifferent to his message, there was a fearful minority, like Danziger, who had come to Paradise not for freedom but for certitude. They wanted someone to give them life's answer, while the majority around them did not even know life's question. So Kennedy anointed Danziger to lead this civic-minded minority over the apathetic majority. And Danziger cooperated; he changed laws, chipped away at freedoms, made it a crime not only to drink a beer in one's car, but even to drink a beer on the beach. The majority reacted the way that they always did in Paradise when confronted with the ludicrous. They shrugged, laughed and belittled Danziger and his followers who protested outside convenience stores that sold Playboy or theaters showing The Last Temptation of Christ and who successfully killed a human rights bill by labeling it a gay rights bill. Then they did ... nothing. They had not come to Paradise to be a part of conventional society but to be outside it. They hadn't come to unite, campaign or even vote. (A smaller percentage of people in Paradise responded to the national census than anywhere else in the country.) They came to be left alone. But they weren't. Their lives were changed by men like Doug Danziger, whose life would be irrevocably changed on a hot summer's day in 1991.

•

The neat, gray house on Northwest 79th Court was like every other in that middle-class neighborhood, except that it had a fireplace. Smoke billowed from its chimney night and day. Neighbors were understandably suspicious. It was midsummer in Tamarac, Florida. The temperature had hovered at 92 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks. A pitiless sun bleached the sky. Asphalt melted. Leather car seats caused third-degree burns. Old people suffered strokes. Children were kept in the house. The men in Lincoln Town Cars, which often circled the house on Northwest 79th Court before stopping in its driveway, kept their air conditioners on high so that their gray suits and monogrammed shirts wouldn't be wrinkled when they knocked on the front door and slipped inside.

"We thought she was cheating on her husband," said one of the neighbors. It titillated them at first. A middle-class sin. It was almost respectable in Tamarac, which, after all, is a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, which dominates Broward County. In fact, a lot of people who lived in Tamarac had lived in Fort Lauderdale when they were single and thus had more than a passing acquaintance with the pleasures of Paradise. Then they got married, had children and bought a little house with a yard in Tamarac. They went to little-league games, had back-yard barbecues, tried to develop a sense of community that did not exist in Paradise. But they could no more put Paradise behind them than they could refuse to acknowledge a deranged aunt at a wedding. Paradise always claims its own. Which was why they were amused, not shocked, by the goings on at the house on Northwest 79th Court. Their perceptions, however, had been dulled by their suburban life in Tamarac. That is the only explanation for an entire neighborhood believing that one of its wives was cheating on her husband, day and night, for more than six months, with as many as eight men each day.

When the ten officers from the Broward Sheriff's Office raided the house on Northwest 79th Court last July, they arrested the husband, Jeffrey Willets, 41, a Broward Sheriff's Office deputy, as her pimp, and subsequently arrested his wife, Kathy Willets, 33, on prostitution charges. The John they found in her bedroom they let go. "The poor gentleman was caught with his pants down," said Lieutenant Dave Green. The crime scene itself, the Willetses' bedroom, had a romantic ambience to it. The wife in a negligee. Incense candles. Champagne on ice in a silver bucket. A king-sized waterbed with an overhead mirror. The fireplace burning. "She made it like a therapy session," said Green.

The Willetses had been selling sex as therapy to more than 50 Broward lawyers, doctors, cops, politicians and businessmen for longer than six months at the rate of $150 a "session." They had placed a personal ad in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that advertised, "Frosted blonde, great tan, hot body, very sexual ... seeking generous, affluent, executive male, for day/evening interludes." When those affluent executives called a 900 number, a sultry voice belonging to 'Julie" told them she was a "very nice person ... and very hot." She asked her gentlemen callers to send her their business cards before they arranged a "date." So many sent in their cards that Kathy had to pull her ad from the paper. She was booked weeks in advance. There were stacks of unanswered letters and cards in her bedroom.

What those men got for their $150 was the illusion of romance. Kathy met them at the door in a smart turquoise suit and pumps. She led them to a sofa in her immaculate living room with its Colonial furniture. She offered them tea from a silver service. She served cheese and crackers. She introduced them to her seven-year-old stepdaughter, if she was home, and then sent her to play outside or to her room. She excused herself, went into her bedroom, stripped down to her panties and a flimsy top and returned. She liked to talk a lot about her life, as if to reinforce the illusion that this was a romantic date, both for her gentleman and for herself. She talked about her first husband, her children, the jobs she'd had and lost, especially the one at the stockbrokerage firm. After an hour of chitchat, she ushered her dates into her bedroom, where she told them matter-of-factly that she liked anal intercourse and that she liked to be on top. After some champagne and sex, her dates showered, dressed, left a present of $150 on the dresser and departed through the front door with a little peck on the cheek from Kathy.

"She wasn't a banshee," said one John. "But it was nice."

At first, the Willetses' story was only vaguely amusing to the knowing residents of Paradise. The cop, the pimp; the wife, the hooker; the executives, the Johns. Then it veered toward farce--a farce that terrified Kathy Willets' Johns. The Broward Sheriff's Office announced that its officers had confiscated a Rolodex in the Willetses' kitchen with the names, addresses, telephone numbers and sexual preferences of her customers. They also found a tape recording of phone conversations between Kathy and her Johns in her husband's shaving kit. They found eight more tape recordings in Jeffrey Willets' police car, along with a yellow legal pad filled with such notations as: "Mon 5/27 Gary $150 2 times Good 8:30-12:30 Watched Big. Fri 5/31 Mark $150 5 times, 1 cum, 1 BJ 9:30-11:30 Weird Watched. Wed 6/5 Paul $150 2 times 10-12, Big OK Watched tried ass all most [sic] caught."

What most intrigued the Broward Sheriff's Office was not the detailed notes of the sexual tastes of Kathy's Johns but rather the repetition of the word watched.

Jeffrey Willets is six feet, six inches tall. Still, while his wife was entertaining her Johns, he managed to squeeze into their narrow bedroom closet where he watched through a slatted door and took notes. One afternoon, while a John worked over his wife, Willets fell asleep and began to snore. The terrified John fled the house without putting his gift on the dresser. A man called the john at work and threatened to tell the John's wife of the interlude if he didn't return with the money. The john drove back to Northwest 79th Court, threw some bills onto the front lawn while Kathy stood in the doorway brandishing a baseball bat, and fled.

The Willetses' mom-and-pop business finally unraveled when Kathy became too convincing in spinning her illusion of romance. Foster McAllester, 54, forgot it was an illusion. He began to feel for Kathy when she told him her husband had forced her into prostitution, that he took the $2000 a week she made and that she was virtually a prisoner in her own home. When Jeffrey Willets found out what she'd said, he telephoned McAllester at three A.M. at his home and threatened his life. McAllester responded by calling the sheriff's office, which raided the house.

A few days after the Willetses' arrest, Doug Danziger, the vice-mayor, resigned for "personal reasons." Danziger, the married father of four daughters, said cryptically that his family was "the most important thing to me." Probably not so important to have confided in them that he was one of Kathy Willets' special clients. So special, in fact, that not only were his business card and sexual preferences found in her bedroom, but it was also rumored that Jeffrey, hiding in the closet, had video-taped Doug flagrante delicto with Kathy. The mental image of Danziger's stern Christian face buried between Kathy Willets' thighs entertained a lot of people in Paradise for weeks.

"I don't know what everyone's saying and I don't care," said Danziger. Then he hired a lawyer. Over 20 of Kathy Willets' other Johns hired lawyers, too, with instructions to keep their names from being made public. Newspapers and radio and television stations responded by hiring their own lawyers to compel the court to release the names on what had come to be known as Kathy Willets' List. So many prominent names were rumored to be on that list that male Broward residents began sporting lapel buttons that read I'm not on the list, or more brazenly, I'm on the list and proud of it. One local bar offered free drinks to (continued on page 80) the creep (continued from page 70) anyone whose name was on the list. The local newspaper carried a cartoon that showed a housewife who reached for her grocery list in a supermarket. Eleven frenzied men in business suits grabbed for the paper amid shouts of "Shred it!" Even Paradise's T-shirt of choice was revamped to show a drawing of Kathy's face above the words Kathy did Fort Lauderdale or i made Kathy Willets beg for Mercy. Both were hawked outside the Broward County Courthouse to the throng of TV cameramen, photographers, reporters and spectators who showed up on days the Willetses were to appear in court.

Kathy and her husband, of course, had their own battery of lawyers, led by Miami attorney Ellis Rubin. Rubin is known for his brilliant, flamboyant and imaginative defenses; he once defended a murderer by claiming he was the "victim" of television violence. For the Willetses, he called a press conference to announce that Kathy was not a prostitute. She was, in fact, a nymphomaniac; her husband was impotent and, therefore, her sexual encounters were merely "therapy." Jeffrey was the victim of an oversexed wife, said Rubin, and Kathy was the victim of an under-sexed husband. And then Rubin added, "If you have Jack Sprat who could eat no fat and his wife who could eat no lean.... Well, no greater love hath any man than to watch his wife have intercourse with another man." When reporters stopped laughing, they asked Rubin why Kathy charged money for sex if she was a nymphomaniac. Rubin said he guessed she needed the money to pay for her therapy. Then reporters turned to the Willetses and asked if it was true that they still loved each other. "Very much so," Kathy said. "Absolutely," Jeffrey said. Shortly afterward, the lovebirds cemented their undying devotion with a vacation at Hedonism II in Jamaica, where Jeffrey video-taped his wife frolicking naked on a white sand beach and having sex with three men.

Returning to Paradise for the beginning of a round of court appearances that would last for months, the Willetses were greeted by a frenzied mob outside the courthouse. Spectators and media alike trampled one another to get close to the now-famous couple starring in what one local newspaper columnist called Last Tango in Tamarac. Another columnist, who referred to Kathy as "the trollop of Tamarac," claimed her husband was booked on a home-remodeling TV show where he would reveal his plans for building "a really big, comfortable closet." The Willetses' case was the hottest ticket in Paradise; it even eclipsed the drug-trafficking trial in Miami of Panama's Manuel Noriega, which was playing to empty seats. Everyone, it seemed, was either reporting the Willetses' trial, making money off it or being entertained by it. The prevailing joke in Paradise went like this: "How is Kathy Willets different from the Titanic?" Answer: "Only fifteen hundred people went down on the Titanic."

In court, the Willetses sat at a table with their battery of lawyers: Jeffrey in his natty three-piece charcoal suit, Kathy in one of her pastel suits with a matching bow in her hair and a demure ankle bracelet. They held hands under the table, cooed in each other's ears, giggled like children in a classroom, looked around and smiled at their fans and kissed each other repeatedly during the proceedings. Around them sat more than 30 lawyers--for the state, for the John Does, for the media--lawyers of every shape and size, lawyers of both sexes, lawyers who were fat and rumpled and grumpy like Joel Lazarus, the prosecuting D.A., or lean and dapper and tanned like Rubin, or even dressed in wrinkled khaki pants, with long hair, like Norman Kent, a lawyer who was also a local radio talk-show host. It was Kent who put this farce in perspective: "The plot keeps changing and thickening and nobody knows the truth but the Shadow."

The Willetses lost their own civil attorney when he was subpoenaed to answer allegations of trying to sell evidence to the tabloid press, and hired another. Even Rubin had to hire a lawyer to defend himself against accusations of unethical conduct. Rubin vehemently denied such allegations and pleaded with the court "to consider my past." The courtroom rocked with laughter. Then Rubin hired another lawyer to defend him. By that time, his son, Guy, a lawyer in Rubin's firm, hired his own lawyer to defend him against the same accusations being leveled against his father. In fact, so many lawyers were coming and going, whispering and fidgeting, shuffling papers and standing to be heard, filing motions and beseeching the court, that not a few forgot what had started all the fuss, namely the woman from Northwest 79th Court who had put an ad in the personals.

•

Kathy Willets is a Fort Lauderdale blonde. Fake hair, fake tan, fake tits. She has bleached hair and a fall, a painted-on tan and huge breast implants, like light bulbs. She is savvy, but not smart, in the way of Fort Lauderdale blondes who know that an offer to take a pleasure cruise on a "gentleman's" boat always comes down to two choices. Suck or swim, spread or tread. She likes to describe herself as just "a typical, average American housewife." She keeps a spotless house, almost neurotically so. She also wears a nipple ring to keep her sexually aroused. It was confiscated by the B.S.O. when she was booked and strip-searched. She was in such a hurry to meet the press when she was released that she forgot to claim it. The B.S.O. said if she didn't claim her nipple ring soon, it would auction it off.

Kathy is the mother of two sons and the stepmother of a daughter. She describes herself as just "a homebody, a mother." When she was divorced from her first husband in 1983, her sons continued to live with her until 1990, when they pleaded with the court to let them live with their father. Her stepdaughter was taken away from her after she told the court that "people came to the house and gave mommy money." The stepdaughter was turned over to her maternal grandparents, who are suing for permanent custody.

She was born Katherine Anne Morris on April 24, 1958, in New York City, but she grew up in Fort Lauderdale where she attended Saint Thomas Aquinas High School. The photograph in her yearbook shows a flat-chested, drab-looking girl with lank, mouse-brown hair and a faint, longing smile. It was the smile of a Fort Lauderdale girl who knew she would never become a cheerleader or prom queen. So she married young, moved with her husband to Akron, Ohio, and had her two sons. She settled into what, for a Fort Lauderdale girl, must have been a mind-numbingly banal suburban existence. Her husband owned a Mr. Hero sandwich shop and was out late. Kathy cooked, cleaned and took care of her sons. It was not enough for her. She put on her skimpy bikini, skimpy by Akron standards, anyway, and sunbathed on her front lawn. The neighbors complained and her husband filed for divorce. After the divorce in 1983, (continued on page 162) the creep (continued from page 80) with no husband, no job, no prospects, Kathy could think of only one thing to do. With her sons, a cat, a box of clothes and $70 to her name, she headed back to Paradise, which, as everyone knows, always claims its own.

When Kathy returned to Fort Lauderdale in 1984, she was a blonde, and she took the kind of menial jobs most Fort Lauderdale blondes have while waiting for their lives to happen. It happened for her on a summer day in 1985 when she was stopped in her Subaru station wagon by a Fort Lauderdale cop. He was tall and tanned, with the kind of good looks that would remind a not-very-bright girl of Cary Grant, as long as she ignored his weak chin. He gave her a ticket for driving with a broken taillight, expired plates and no registration. What she gave him is not known, other than that whatever it was, it kept him from going home to his wife for the next three days. When Jeffrey Willets finally did return to his wife and daughter, it was only to pack his belongings and leave for good. Less than a year later, he married the blonde he met by the side of the road. He also paid her ticket.

Like Kathy, Jeffrey Willets was born outside of Paradise and lived for a time in the Midwest. He attended Roy C. Start High School in Toledo, Ohio, where he distinguished himself as the basketball team's water boy and as treasurer of the scuba diving club. He attended the University of Toledo, dropped out, then pursued a career in law enforcement. It took him to Georgia and back to Ohio before he, too, like Kathy, drifted down to Paradise, where he became a Fort Lauderdale policeman in 1973. His career was less than distinguished, or as a fellow officer said, 'Jeff was no ball of fire." From 1973 until 1978, when he "definitely left under a cloud," according to Ott Cefkin, police information officer, Jeffrey Willets was habitually being disciplined or suspended for such offenses as sleeping in his squad car, responding to a crime by going to the wrong address, using vulgar language with female clerks, eating crackers while filling out arrest reports and taking days off to be with his National Guard unit, which then notified the police department he was A.W.O.L.

"He was a rotten officer," said Sergeant Diana Cipriani, "but a nice-looking man. He asked me out. Thank God, I didn't go. There was something strange about him."

After he was forced to leave the Fort Lauderdale police department in 1978, Willets got a job as a Tamarac officer. When that police force was merged with the Broward Sheriff's Office in 1989, he was grandfathered in to the B.S.O. Again, he did not exactly distinguish himself. He was investigated for misconduct by the Internal Affairs Division three times (two reprimands were issued), was sued for harassment (charges were dropped) and had two criminal charges filed against him and Kathy by his former wife's parents (they were acquitted). A typical B.S.O. evaluation report on Willets read, "In March, Deputy Willets made no arrests, no field interrogations, processed no crime scenes and wrote only five traffic tickets." Which may explain why Tamarac residents sent the sheriff's office letters of praise for Deputy Willets' work in the community. He bothered no one, like a good resident of Paradise.

•

Once the scandal broke, Doug Danziger was described in his hometown newspaper as a man "who gives new meaning to the word hypocrisy." One article said that Danziger did the city a favor by resigning, while another ran the headline Dougie's big adventure above a quote from H. G. Wells that read, "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."

The only ones who came to Danziger's defense were a few politicians, such as former mayor Bob Cox, who sent him a letter that read, "Don't give the bastards the satisfaction of resigning," and city manager George Hanbury, who said, "I just hated to see somebody's life being ripped apart like some spiny lobster."

Danziger tried to keep a lower profile. One of the first things he did after he resigned was to have workmen take down the huge Doug Danziger Insurance Company sign on his building across the street from C.R.P.C. One of the first things Jeffrey Willets did after he was arrested was to call attorney Dick Wilson and offer to sell the Danziger video tape to Wilson's client, and Danziger's archenemy, Michael J. Peter, the nude-bar impresario of Paradise. Wilson declined the offer, he said, because "when you pick up a dead skunk and throw it at someone, even if you miss them, you're still left with the stink."

Wilson is in his late 40s, with a shock of unruly white hair that makes him resemble a more-disheveled Phil Donahue emerging from a lost weekend. He has a badly shattered leg he drags behind him like a dead branch. He shattered that leg, and was burned over 80 percent of his body, when he returned to a burning airplane that had crashed to try to save a woman inside. He is an atheist who refers to Reverend Kennedy as "just another snake-oil salesman," and a First Amendment lawyer who dates only strippers. "Freedom of expression, even to sin, is my religion," he says. Peter is his only client.

For years, Peter and Danziger had been at each other's throats. Danziger tried to close Peter's nude bars by getting a law passed that prohibited women from dancing nude in places that sell alcohol. (Most of the smaller clubs, like The Booby Trap and Flash Dancers, which did not have Peter's financial resources, closed.) But Danziger underestimated Peter's intransigency. Peter, through Wilson, has been fighting that law in the courts for years, and his two biggest clubs, Pure Platinum and Solid Gold, are still open.

Peter is 42, a small, dark man of Arab descent who wears shoes with three-inch lifts. According to a friend, he "thinks women are like camels, only camels are worth more." The local press refers to him as the Prince of Darkness, though he says he'd rather be called King. He publishes a monthly newsletter in which he interviews himself under the headline M. J. Peter, Man Or Myth? ("He's neither," said an acquaintance.)

Peter says the scandal has transformed him. He is so compassionate now that he talks about how bad he feels for Danziger, and for Kathy, too. To cheer her up, Peter offered her a job as a nude dancer with top billing at any of his 15 clubs spread across the U.S. But Kathy was too busy having fun as a celebrity. She was having so much fun, in fact, that Judge John Frusciante, who was hearing her case, had chastised her for selling autographs at ten dollars a pop at one bar and for getting into an altercation at another bar at four A.M. with a customer who made obscene comments to her.

Kathy seemed to be everywhere at once. Wearing a cutoff T-shirt, she was mobbed for autographs at a University of Miami football game, where men shouted to her, "How's your love life, Kathy?" every time she made one of her frequent trips to the ladies' room. She went down to Port Everglades to greet sailors when the fleet came in. One night, she called a local radio disc jockey, gave him her name and then dedicated a song to her husband, Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?

The Willetses weren't the only people in Paradise not to take the case seriously. People in downtown offices spent their time composing questions they'd like to ask Kathy, such as "If a tree fell in the forest and there was nobody there to hear it, would your husband catch it on video tape?" A woman, whose last name was Willette, was being besieged with telephone calls from "adult men" who thought she was Kathy. The woman seemed to enjoy the calls, saying, "Things were pretty dull before this."

Even the March of Dimes got into the act, holding a "jail and bail" fund-raising drive by "locking up" Jeffrey and Kathy look-alikes and asking for donations to bail them out. And finally, the five men running in a special election to replace Danziger declared they were all running under the same slogan: "We're not on the list."

•

In his office, meanwhile, Rubin, looking lean and dapper as always in a pale suit, stood at the table, where two books, The Female Orgasm and Disorders of Sexual Desire, were prominently displayed. He declared in his most sincere voice that Kathy Willets' nymphomania was caused by the antidepressant drug Prozac. He considered suing Eli Lilly, the drug's manufacturer, for turning his client into a sex-starved housewife. A spokesman for Lilly said, "People have blamed Prozac for lots of things, but this is the most bizarre." Rubin responded, "I did not make this up!" Then he added, "Every lawyer dreams of creating a new defense."

The only people in Paradise who did seem to take all this seriously were Doug Danziger and the unnamed Johns. Danziger, according to his lawyer, was suffering through a "nightmare" and "would like to put all this behind him" for the sake of his family. In fact, the lawyer referred to Danziger's suffering so often that it seemed the disgraced politician had finally joined the growing list of "victims."

Other unnamed Johns were "going through a living hell," according to one of their attorneys, while they waited for the courts to decide if their names should be made public. One John Doe's lawyer pointed out that some of the business cards found at the Willetses' home belonged to technically "innocent" men who had never consummated their relationship with Kathy, or, as Lazarus put it, were guilty only of "wasting a twenty-nine-cent stamp."

The question put before the courts concerning the John Does was whether they were victims in the case, entitled to privacy, or witnesses or criminals whose names must be made public according to Florida law. Rubin accused Lazarus of wanting to keep the Johns' names secret because Lazarus' good friend, Jose Torres, was on the list. Frusciante admonished Rubin for blurting out the name of only the third John to be identified (Danziger, who acknowledged he was one of Kathy's Johns, was one, Mc-Allester, who spilled the beans on the Tamarac couple, was the other). Lazarus immediately claimed he didn't know a Jose Torres and demanded Rubin identify him further. Rubin refused. But the damage had already been done. The name Jose Torres could be found 12 times in the Broward telephone book. The dinner conversations of those men with their wives that night were the subject of much speculation in Paradise.

After much huffing and puffing about blowing the state's case down, Rubin agreed to a plea bargain from Lazarus on September 11. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, except the unnamed Johns, since their names would now automatically be made public once the case was disposed of. Unfortunately, Rubin then made a move that jeopardized the Willetses' plea and further dragged everyone's name into the sleaze.

In brief, the facts are: Rubin's son Guy offered to sell the X-rated Danziger video tape, among other items, to TV tabloid show Inside Edition for $100,000. (Wilson claims Hard Copy, a rival tabloid show, phoned in an unsuccessful bid during his negotiations. Rubin himself was said to be the mastermind behind that offer.) An Inside Edition reporter, Steve Wilson, secretly taped the entire negotiation (including a showing of the Danziger tape). Wilson told Lazarus of the attempt to sell evidence and Lazarus immediately withdrew the plea-bargain agreement. Inside Edition then aired its story, minus the Danziger tape, which was deemed unacceptable for family viewing. Rubin denied he'd committed any ethics violation and refused to turn over the Danziger tape. Dade County prosecutors promptly raided his office and seized over 30 video tapes, only one of which had to do with the Willetses (Kathy having sex with three men at Hedonism II in Jamaica). Rubin was understandably outraged, and an editorial in the local newspaper a day later said, "It isn't easy to put Ellis Rubin in the role of victim, but the Dade state's attorney's office has figured out a way." It was Rubin's finest hour.

•

"Whether or not we're going to trial," says Jeffrey Willets with a smile, "is open to interpretation now, isn't it?"

He is sitting on a sofa in his den in the house on Northwest 79th Court. The room is illuminated only by two incense candles burning over the fireplace. A bank is foreclosing on the house because the Willetses haven't made a mortgage payment in almost a year. Which is odd, since the B.S.O. claims that the Willetses made well over $25,000 through Kathy's prostitution.

"Where did all the money go?" Jeffrey asks himself and smiles. "What money?" He drags on a cigarette, then coughs, a smoker's cough. Kathy enters the room.

"It's so dark in here," she says, turning on a light. She is wearing jeans and a white halter top that exposes her midriff. She is heavily made-up, a not-verypretty woman with a freckled tan. She sits down beside Jeffrey and says of Ellis Rubin, "I'm totally satisfied with him. He's won some of the biggest cases."

"He's done a few things to keep us in the public eye," says Jeffrey. "But everything he's said is true."

"It's not Mr. Rubin's fault some of the names came out," Kathy says. She laughs, a girlish giggle. "Poor Dougieboy. He got very attached to me. He was coming to me for three months. First once a week, then twice, then three times. He wanted to take me out to dinner and to play tennis."

"He also wanted to frolic naked with her in our pool," adds Jeffrey. "He had big plans. He wanted to try anal sex and have two women."

"But he was a good lover. He was high-class. A total gentleman. He was just a lonely man who wasn't getting any sex at home."

Jeffrey laughs. "Yeah, it's tough being the caped crusader. Especially when you've closed all the massage parlors."

Doug Danziger was one of more than 1000 men and women who answered Kathy's ad in two months. "Most of them were just sad, lonely gentlemen," says Kathy. "They trusted me. I made it comfortable for them. It was all done very romantically. Champagne. Cheese and crackers. They brought me flowers."

"There were so many flowers in the house, it looked like a goddamned funeral parlor," Jeffrey says.

"They'd come in, take off their shoes, loosen their ties, and I'd listen to their problems for an hour or two," Kathy says. "They spilled their guts like they had no friends. It was mostly about their wives who wouldn't have sex with them. If I learned one thing from all this, it was that women are bitches." They both laugh, and Kathy adds, "But they helped me, too. I needed the emotional part, too. I mean, these gentlemen risked their marriages for me. They were prominent gentlemen who told me I was beautiful. They brought me gifts. It's always been my fantasy to own an antique shop in New England, and they said they'd buy it for me. Of course, it was all a fantasy. I admit I led them on. I led Foster McAllester on because I was looking for a father figure. He treated me like a daughter."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't smart," Jeffrey says. "See where we are now?"

"I guess he did turn us in," Kathy says in a small voice.

Jeffrey snaps at her. "I get annoyed with this 'I guess.' It was in the papers."

Kathy is silent for a moment. Then she says, "They gave me affection."

Kathy says she suffered various deprivations as a child. By the time she was a freshman in high school, she had "fallen into the trap" of looking for men who would give her gifts and affection in return for her letting them dominate her. Her first boyfriend, who would become her first husband, made her quit the tennis team.

"My interests in high school?" Kathy says. "None. Just my boyfriend. The only real interest I ever had, believe it or not, was I wanted to be a cop." She laughs.

The den in the immaculately kept house on Northwest 79th Court could be the den of any suburban husband and wife with three children. The homey Colonial furniture, the fire burning in the fireplace, the wall devoted to mementos of their children. There is a big photograph of Jeffrey's daughter with Shirley Temple curls. Team photographs of Kathy's two sons in little-league and soccer uniforms. A collage of dozens of pictures of the three children, who all lived together at one time. There is a little shelf with silver trophies and a baseball. A plaque which honors Jeffrey Willets as the Tamarac Little League coach of 1988. It is an entire wall of mementos in a house without children, as if to these parents family was nothing more than a studious and faithful accumulation of memorabilia.

"Do you want to see the infamous bed?" Kathy says. "A man offered us three hundred thousand dollars for it." She gets up and goes into the bedroom. It is a small room dominated by a huge, thick-pine, four-post waterbed with an overhead mirror. There is a pine baby's crib on one side of the bed and, on the other side, a narrow closet with a slatted door. Through those slats it is possible to have a perfect view of the waterbed. Built into the headboard is a little shelf on which Kathy has placed, side by side like icons, and illuminated by incense candles, photographs of her two sons.

Kathy stares at the bed dreamily. "I love Colonial furniture," she says. "It means warmth and family to me. I was a good mother, you know." Her voice starts to break. "Our kids would all get pillows, sit by the fireplace with us, make popcorn and watch television every night. I guess because I had a horrible childhood, I did the extreme for my kids.... Now our lives are destroyed. For what? I'm not guilty of anything."

"Fame does have its rewards, though," says Jeffrey, who claims he kept such voluminous records in hopes of a book or movie contract. That's why he taped telephone conversations. That's why he hid in the closet and video-taped Doug Danziger making love to his wife. It did not bother him, Jeffrey says, watching other men make love to his wife.

"It's every man's fantasy," he says. "When your fantasy happens, it doesn't bother you. It becomes addictive."

•

A fortnight before Christmas, the Willetses agreed to a guilty plea in exchange for a lighter sentence--and for their willingness to testify against their former lawyer, Ellis Rubin, in a criminal action. Those who hoped for the spectacle of a trial will have to console themselves with the sentencing scheduled for the first week in February. Rubin, in pursuit of the Willetses' defense, had already elicited testimony about nymphomania from a number of psychologists and sex therapists, such as Lynn Leight, who said, "When you unleash female sexuality, the whole world gets turned upside down."

People in Paradise agree with Leight, just as they agree with Fort Lauderdale mayor Jim Naugle, who said, "Everything Doug Danziger has done has been in the best interest of this city." They would add, however, that goes for Kathy Willets, too.

"It was God's plan, says Danziger, for him to clean up Fort Lauderdale."

"The B.S.O. said if she didn't claim her nipple ring soon, it would auction it off."