Rescue Impossible

Laurie Swint Ghidaoui was living with her husband, Foued, and their daughter, Leila, in Foued's parents' home near the Mediterranean in Tunisia in 1987. Sometimes, Foued went out and would come home with lipstick on his shirts. And he was beating Laurie. Finally, Foued told Laurie he was going to send Leila to Libya for a clitorectomy and see that she was raised as a Muslim. Laurie was so distraught over this she sought out a Tunisian lawyer for a divorce. But in Tunisia, non-Islamic mothers with Tunisian husbands have no rights over their children.

In 1980, when Cathy Mahone divorced her Jordanian husband, Ali Bayan, she was awarded sole custody of their infant daughter, Lauren, by a Dallas court. For the next seven years, Ali was a dutiful divorced father. He would take his daughter for weekend visits and return her promptly. One day in October 1987, he took his daughter for a weekend visit and fled with her to his home country of Jordan.

Kim Hefner knew that her husband Charlie, an Army demolitions expert, had a volatile temper. But she thought it was just part of her husband's dangerous, stressful job. When his behavior began to affect their family life, however, Kim filed for divorce. They were separated in 1990, but before their divorce went through Charlie fled with their daughter, Amy, and son, Jeremy, to Ecuador.

The children of all three women were living in Third World countries with their fathers. The mothers were U.S. citizens, but their own State Department could do nothing to help.

All three women took steps to get their children back to the U.S. Because the government couldn't help, each hired a team of ex--Delta Force (continued on page 120)Rescue(continued from page 96) commandos. Those commandos spirited Laurie and Leila from a Tunisian beach to a speedboat that took them to Pantelleria, an island off Sicily. Cathy Mahone's daughter was kidnapped off a school bus in Jordan and spirited across the border to Israel. Kim Hefner's children were kidnapped out of a car on the way to school in Ecuador and flown out of the country.

"It was like movie stuff," said Kim, months later. "I thought that stuff didn't happen in real life."

•

Don Feeney and his team are in the business of "snatching kids," or as Feeney would rather put it, "recovering kidnapped children in foreign countries." Corporate Training Unlimited, Feeney's group, is the court of last resort for parents whose spouses have taken their children to foreign countries, usually after acrimonious separations or divorces. Most of the kidnappers are the children's fathers, usually foreign nationals married to American women, though this is not always the case. The stories are essentially the same. Invariably the men are charming, aggressive and often from Third World countries, where more than half of the 806 children kidnapped in the U. S. in 1993 were taken. Their attitude toward women, especially wives, can be less than enlightened. Women are like camels, only of less value. The men are often in the U. S. on temporary visas that become permanent if they marry American citizens. The women are mostly from small towns and have experienced unhappy childhoods and patterns of abuse. Their meager selfesteem can be sustained only by a man. So they marry hastily, have a child and then discover that their charming suitor has become a monster. When they can no longer take being abused by their husbands, the women file for divorce and are awarded custody of their children. This loss of control infuriates the ex-husband. To reassert his control (and, in his mind, his manhood), he kidnaps his own child from his or her mother and escapes to his foreign homeland.

If that child has been abducted to one of the foreign countries that signed the Hague Convention Treaty on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, the mother can get help from the U.S. State Department. But if that abducted child is in a country that hasn't signed the Hague Treaty--most of which are in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America--the U. S. government is helpless. The best the government can do, says a State Department spokeswoman, "is attempt as best we can to locate the children and visit them and report on their health." Often, the mother is warned not to attempt a "hostile recovery" of her child by American citizens such as Don Feeney, because it might precipitate a dramatic international incident. In fact, when Feeney and his CTU team recovered their first kidnapped child from Jordan in 1988, the U. S. State Department was so incensed that it apologized to the Jordanian government.

Feeney claims it is not CTU but the "host countries" that are the criminals. "We aren't the judge and jury," he says. "We just supply the result administered by an American judge that no one else will do."

Connie Ghozzi asked the State Department for help to get her son, Elias, back from Tunisia, where Connie's estranged husband, Nabil, had taken him. But she was told there was nothing to be done. "That's what you get for marrying a foreigner," said a State Department official, who added, "You can always have another child." She was warned not to attempt a hostile recovery, especially not with Don Feeney of CTU. So Connie went to a private investigator who claimed he had experience in such recoveries, and she paid him $70,000. "He was a phony," says Connie. "Then I went to another guy, and he was incompetent. That cost me $30,000." Connie was so frustrated she returned to the State Department. An official there reiterated what she had been told previously, and warned her again about Don Feeney and CTU.

"After enough people had warned me about Don," says Connie, "I decided he was the one I had to go to."

•

Connie Ghozzi, now 42, is a shy, pretty woman with unblinking blue eyes that look almost owlish behind her thick-lensed glasses. After three marriages (one lasted two months and the others less than two years), she met Nabil Ghozzi in 1988 in San Francisco, where she was managing an optical store. "He was charming and shy, and he chose me," says Connie, "so I felt close to him. He said he was a Tunisian architect living here with a green card. That wasn't true."

Once they were married, Connie says, her husband "changed drastically. He was always angry. He didn't work. He stayed out all night and when I questioned him he flew into a rage. I realized he didn't even like me, he hated me, but I was his property." Later, Connie would learn that Nabil had a wealthy male friend who had given him money to court her so he could marry Connie and get a permanent visa. "He had lied like an SOB," she says, "but after three failed marriages, and with me being pregnant, I felt maybe it was my fault, so I stayed."

After her son, Elias, was born ("Nabil liked to show him off to his Tunisian friends as if he were a new suit," she says), Connie finally separated from her husband. While she waited out the separation, a friend's car, parked in front of her mother's house, was fire-bombed, her mail was rerouted and she became aware that someone was stalking her. Nabil forged $5000 in checks from her bank account. When Connie confronted him about the fire-bombed car, he confessed, apologized and promised he would give her custody of Elias if she didn't press charges. Against her better judgment, she let him take Elias for the weekend. When they didn't return on Monday, Connie knew Nabil had abducted her son to Tunisia.

Feeney took Connie's case for a fee of $50,000 and expenses. He encouraged her to continue contact by telephone with Nabil in Tunisia and to try to convince him she still loved him and wanted to join him where she could become a proper Tunisian wife. When Nabil fell for this ruse, Connie went to live with him in his parents' home on the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Don, his wife Judy and their CTU team flew to Tunisia to set up their sting.

In Tunisia, Nabil's parents watched Connie day and night. She was never left alone except when she slept with Elias, who was four. "Sleeping with Elias kept Nabil away from me sexually," says Connie.

Nabil's parents eventually began to let Connie take walks on the beach with her son. Don had already made contact with Nabil, introducing himself as an American wine distributor who wanted to export Tunisian wine. ("It tastes like vinegar," says Don.) He offered Nabil a job. Don made an appointment one day far from the Ghozzi home. After Nabil left home that day, Connie and Elias went for their walk on the beach. "I was terrified," says Connie. "When I (continued on page 130)Rescue(continued from page 120) got to our rendezvous point no one was there. I thought I had been dumped and started crying. Then, there was a CTU employee in a gray car. I got in and he drove Elias and me to a hotel, where we waited almost two hours for Judy to arrive with the boat."

Judy and another CTU operative had rented a speedboat on Pantelleria. They left the island in calm, sunny weather. When they arrived at a Tunisian port, they were met by police, who searched the boat and took their passports. Judy played the dumb tourist, smiling and nodding to the police. Before long, the police were smiling too. They gave the travelers coffee and returned their passports. The boat then motored south along the Tunisian coast toward its rendezvous with Connie and Don, who had joined the operation at that point.

When everyone was onboard and the boat headed back out to sea, the weather turned. Rough swells tossed the little craft as if it were a matchstick. Connie was bodyslammed from one side to the other. Three of her ribs were broken. Just as they were about to leave Tunisian waters, a Tunisian patrol boat spotted them and gave chase. With the patrol boat in pursuit, the CTU team rocketed over the high swells until it reached Italian territory and the Tunisians gave up the chase.

"Our operations are scams," says Don, "95 percent brains. We cannot use weapons or fake documents in foreign countries. If I do, it's federal time." But that doesn't mean CTU doesn't use the threat of physical force. In some cases, its operatives are armed, even if Feeney doesn't like to admit it. Gus Zamora is a former military man like Feeney. He's also, says Judy, "our resident bullshitter. He can talk his way out of anything." The operatives' physical presence alone, with beefy arms crossing their puffed-up chests, is usually enough to intimidate most of CTU's marks, who, like most bullies, are cowards. Overall, CTU uses a revolving band of five operatives--including a former commando in the Rhodesian army, an ex-policeman, a special operations Airborne Ranger and a former Royal Irish Ranger--as well as Don and Judy.

Don is the leader of CTU. His second-best attribute is his ability to blend into a crowd. He can grow a beard and pass for an Arab one day, then shave it off, trim his hair, put on a powder-blue leisure suit and pass himself off as a tourist in front of the same people the next day. Judy says her best asset is that she can play "the dumb tourist housewife." In one scam in Thailand, she passed a bar that advertised girls and ping-pong. Judy exclaimed, "Oh, I love ping-pong!" and went inside. The girls were on their backs on the bar, shooting ping-pong balls out of their vaginas at customers.

Judy is calmer and more reasoned than Don when under pressure. Don's first instinct, one former CTU employee says, is to "kick down the door and kill everyone." Sometimes, Don's macho, Delta attitude toward women ("He wants to protect them," says Judy) conflicts with Judy's knowledge of just how tough women can be. In one sting in Bangladesh, the second wife of a man who had kidnapped his first wife's daughter offered to return to him (they were separated) to help Judy and Don work their sting. Don was adamantly opposed to having the woman sleep with a man she despised. "Judy insisted she do it," Don says. "I said I wouldn't allow it. He was a scumbag. But Judy insisted the woman wanted to do it, so I gave in. Judy was right. We couldn't have snatched the kid if it hadn't been for the second wife."

Corporate Training Unlimited was founded in 1986. In the early years Don usually relegated Judy to the side of the distraught mothers as a calming influence. (The Feeneys have two teenage sons and a 21-year-old daughter.) In one case, Judy coached a mother, a California secretary, to sweet-talk her husband out of Iraq, where he had taken their son. "Iraq was too dangerous for us to enter," says Don. The wife convinced the husband to meet her in London for a reconciliation. When he arrived there with his son, he was arrested by Scotland Yard (the U.K. signed the Hague treaty). Mother and son were immediately put on a plane to the States.

Lately, however, Judy has taken a more active role in CTU operations. She helps conceive the scams and often takes part in them. Judy is a blonde who likes to dress in jeans and sweatshirts. She doesn't think of herself as an attractive woman. "When this guy came on to me once in Las Vegas," she says, "I said, 'You mean me?'" Then she adds, "I was always tomboyish. I always thought men were more interesting than women. I liked what the guys did."

"Judy's specialty is countersurveillance and evasive driving," says Don. "She's also an expert with semiautomatic pistols." Judy says her favorite pistol is a Czech CZ-75, but she's equally at ease carrying a Glock or a Browning Hi-Power. Even at home in Fayetteville, North Carolina, she says, "I always have a gun in my hand when I get out of the car at night. I want the neighbors and their kids to see that Mrs. Feeney has a gun and isn't afraid to use it." Both Judy and Don are usually armed, even in Fayetteville, they say, because more than one husband they have scammed has threatened to kill them.

•

The CTU offices are situated in a nondescript strip mall along Raeford Road in Fayetteville. A white sign with red letters reads Global Security, the name of CTU's umbrella company. It offers a host of courses and services: hostage rescue, shooting enhancement, protective security, defensive driving and professional bodyguarding. CTU trains American business executives in Latin America on how to protect themselves with semiautomatic weapons. For $900, it offers a two-week course to train people to become professional bodyguards. "We turn down guys with criminal backgrounds," says Don. Judy says, "And guys with Charles Manson eyes." CTU will also set up executives' homes with protection devices. "Either overt protection," says Judy, "with home video cameras and a secure perimeter to scare people off, or covert protection to capture a real threat. What do we do? We hide in the trees."

Both Judy and Don have been private bodyguards. Don worked for Mario Kassar, executive producer of Sylvester Stallone's Rambo series. "Mario is Italian and Lebanese," says Don, "and when he was filming in Israel he received death threats from Arabs who said he was a traitor. I set up a team to guard him there. Movie people are impossible to deal with because of their personalities. I couldn't guard Stallone. He's flamboyant. He wanted ten big guys flashing Uzis around him. I don't let people know I'm armed. Our goal is to save lives, not to put on a show. Sometimes I have to tell them their money's not worth my reputation if they were to get shot on my shift."

Inside Global Security, there are a series of small rooms sparsely furnished with cheap metal office desks and chairs. One large room is used as a conference room where instructors tutor a group of men Don describes as "government types" in the art of eavesdropping and countersurveillance. They are all ordinary-looking men taking notes--it looks like college. The instructor points to a chart that reads: Presence, Verbal Commands, Control and Restraint, Chemical Agents, Impact Weapons, Deadly Force--the stages necessary to overwhelm an enemy.

Behind the conference room is a storage room where CTU keeps its weapons in a safe. Alongside that is a small office adjoining Don's larger office. One morning two CTU operatives were sitting there, drinking coffee and talking. One man had a beard and the other evidently had lucked into employment despite having the "Charles Manson eyes" that Judy dislikes. Both were former Delta Force commandos. The bearded man was. kidding the other about his habit of going to punk bars looking for fights. In one fight, the man with Manson eyes was badly beaten. He went to his car, got his .45 pistol and waited for his attackers to emerge. When they did, he shot them.

Finally, the two men begin discussing an operation, this one involving a difficult woman. "She's a manipulative woman," says the man with Manson eyes.

The bearded man says, "Yeah, she's the kind of woman that if you use her for a job you have to kill her before you leave."

"Do you want me to kill her?"

"No, I was just kidding about that."

"I can kill her," the man with Manson eyes says in the same tone of voice one might use to offer to drive to the grocery store.

Inside Don's office, Judy and Don plan another recovery, this one in the Philippines. Don has just returned from Manila, where he had gained entry to the Filipino father's house only to find it deserted. Now he has to go back again. "Time is running out," Judy says. The phone rings. It is another distraught mother who has heard of CTU. Throughout any given day the phone in the office will ring dozens of times. Don and Judy are always working on three or four recoveries at the same time. Checking the mothers' stories. Juggling finances. Finding time. Time is their most limited resource. They seem never to have enough. They are rarely home, rarely together. In one recent four-month period, Don was gone for 25 days, 23 days, 27 days and 29 days each month.

What is Don's motivation for recovering children? "No one else is doing it," he says. "It's primarily for the kids. We had a mother living with us who had no money. Her husband had taken her kid to Greece and we were trying to raise money to get the kid back. Most of these women are not wealthy. Wealthy people settle problems with lawyers in court. It's not uncommon for us to run out of money halfway through a mission. We continue because the kid deserves to live in America. An abduction in Ecuador cost us $13,000, and the mother could pay us only $8000. But still, we affected her life. We got her kids back."

Judy's motivation has more to do with her maternal instinct and her deprived past. "Don and I are two kids who never had anything," she says. "Now we're making a dent in this world. As a child I saw battered women, cheating men, alcohol, broken marriages. I asked God to send me a good man. He did. Now I'm a mother and I can see the pain in other mothers' eyes. I take it personally."

"This is what makes it all worthwhile," says Gus Zamora, smiling at Elias Ghozzi, the boy rescued from Tunisia. Gus is 40, a dark, bearded, hyper man of Basque descent, who has three children of his own. He was the pistol-shooting champion in the 101st Airborne Division in 1984, but left later that year because he wanted more excitement. "I wanted an adrenaline flow," Zamora says. Over the next four years he popped up in Israel, where he went on patrols in Lebanon with Israeli troops. Then Gus was in Nicaragua, working for the contras. Finally, he became a personal bodyguard to General John Singlaub, who was traveling around the States trying to raise money for the contras. When Gus first heard of CTU in the late Eighties, he contacted Don. Gus was so aggressive about joining CTU that Don grew leery of him. "He thought I was FBI," says Gus. This was not an unnatural fear of Don's. Most government agencies look askance at CTU, and Don and Judy are afraid of a government sting to lure them into some sort of illegal activity.

Gus' first assignment was as an inter preter and assistant bodyguard instructor, training Colombian bodyguards in the use of small arms for protecting their Shell Oil clients. He then joined Don in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm. Don said they had drawn up a team of commandos to go into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait to rescue high-ranking Kuwaitis. The mission, instigated by the U. S. government, was so secret that Don refuses to reveal details about it even today.

Gus makes about $250 a day with CTU, but will often work for less. "I do things for Don I won't do for anyone else," he says. "I need the excitement. If I'm home for two days, I start to pace. I have to get out of the house. I'll carry Don's bags if I have to."

Don grew up in Brooklyn, where his major activity was sitting on his stoop at the corner of Clinton and DeGraw and dreaming of joining the Army. His parents were divorced when he was 13. "My father had an Irish beer habit," he says, "but he doesn't touch beer now." As a teenager, Don worked as a butcher and served coffee to the local wise guys while they played cards in social clubs that were not unlike Chez Bippy in the movie A Bronx Tale.

When he was old enough, at 17, Don enlisted in the Army, eventually joining the 82nd Airborne stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville. He was 5'10", 117 pounds and, by his own admission, not much of a fighter. He immediately volunteered for special operations, where he was trained to go behind enemy lines, blow up bridges and lead insurgencies. Eight years later, in 1978, he heard of a secret new force being formed--Delta Force--and volunteered for that, too. "They were looking for innovators," he says. "People who would give 100 percent no matter what the odds. It was something real and I was the first."

It was "real" because its men were trained in the ultimate physical responses. Life was simplified for Delta men--good and evil, black and white, us and them. They were men taught to see life's conflicts in terms of physical solutions. When not training, they were men who ride motorcycles fast, skydive for amusement or scale mountains. "We were the best special ops in the world," says Don. "Delta always won counterterrorist games because we could blow down a door and not hurt the hostages inside. Other countries' commandos often did not care whom they killed."

In 1980 Don was on a C-130 transport plane assigned to the Iranian desert during the ill-fated attempted rescue of American hostages in Tehran. During refueling, a helicopter crashed into Don's plane. Both crafts plummeted to the desert, killing eight men. For days, Judy thought Don was dead until she finally got word that he had survived the crash. But that disastrous Delta operation would do irreparable damage to the psyche of Delta Force commandos. That day in the desert, they lost their sense of invincibility.

Over the next six years, Don continued to work for Delta Force. He was assigned to guard a diplomat in Lebanon in 1982. In 1983, he took part in the rescue of American missionaries held hostage by Sudanese rebels. "We killed some of the bad guys," says Don, "and the rest ran off."

Don's stay in Beirut in 1982 came back to haunt him. It ultimately destroyed his Delta career. While in Beirut, Don felt his per diem pay was insufficient to pay for his expenses. So he and other commandos worked out a deal with the owner of a hotel where several of them would stay in one room and the owner would give back $10 a day to each man. "Delta taught us to be innovators," he says. "To get the job done with no questions asked." Two years later, the Army demanded the commandos repay the kickback money and threatened court-martial. Don refused to pay back his share and refused to accept punishment.

"If this was the way the system worked," he says, "I wanted out. I had lost faith in it. The hierarchy didn't understand the way we were taught to do things."

Eventually, the Army dropped all charges against Don, and he was given an honorable discharge. "I never regretted one day with Delta," he says.

•

"The difference between Delta and CTU," Don says, "is that CTU doesn't have any support team." When Don started CTU in 1986, he thought he would mostly train bodyguards and SWAT teams and be a bodyguard himself. But in 1988 Cathy Mahone asked if he would help her get her kidnapped daughter, Lauren, out of Jordan. Don went to Jordan with his team and set up surveillance. When the child was going to school on a bus, he "snatched the kid" and fled toward the Israeli border in a car. Dave Chatellier, another operative, sped in the opposite direction with the Jordanian police in pursuit. When they caught up with Dave, he was sitting in his car, nonchalantly eating a candy bar, while Don and the child were crossing into Israel. The story of that rescue was eventually made into a TV movie starring Mariel Hemingway called Desperate Rescue. The attendant publicity from that movie led to dozens of pleas to CTU from other mothers who wanted help in recovering their children.

Ever since they founded CTU, however, the Feeneys' finances have been precarious. Twice they returned from recoveries to find a foreclosure notice on their house. The IRS put a lien on their house for payment of back taxes. And twice the Feeneys have had to declare bankruptcy, the most recent time just before Don served a year in an Icelandic jail. That grim chapter began with Judy.

It was Judy who devised a scam to rescue two girls from their Icelandic mother, Erna, a pretty blonde who had married two men and lost Florida custody battles with her two daughters' fathers. An alleged drug abuser and child abuser, she snuck the children off to Iceland. Judy followed, posing as an advance scout for a Sylvester Stallone movie. Don came later (pretending to be the movie's director), as did James Grayson, the father of one of the girls. They took the children from a hotel room in Reykjavik while Erna was asleep. When she awoke, she called the police, who were unable to stop Judy (who was already on a plane with one daughter). But they did arrest Don and Grayson at the airport. Both men were convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to prison, Don for two years and Grayson for three months.

Don was sent to a dormitory-like jail on a barren plain near a small, isolated town. He knew he could break out of the jail at will, but where could he go? He needed money, a passport, credit cards. He began to correspond with Judy, who'd eluded Interpol and was back in Fayetteville. She sent him greeting cards, all printed on thick, cardboard-like paper. He slit them open to find money and, once, an American Express gold card inside. By the time Don had accumulated $2000 and his gold card, he was ready to make his break.

One night, while the guards were watching TV, he slipped out of his room, picked the front gate lock and trudged into town. He rented a small plane that flew him toward the Faeroe Islands. But they were fogged in, so the plane had to land on an Icelandic island, where Don was captured by the police, returned to prison and put in isolation for six months.

He ended by serving 12 months of his two-year term. Once he was reunited with his family, Don and Judy began to plot again on getting the two girls out of Iceland. (The child who left with Judy had been returned to Iceland.) They refer to their Icelandic caper as "the one that got away," and it bothers them. "It's not over yet," says Judy.

The Feeneys' Iceland misadventure was one of their few bungled recoveries. Still, it has come back to haunt them. When Don was jailed, the Feeneys had to file for Chapter 11 protection. And CTU received its first negative publicity. Dateline NBC aired a program on March 23, 1993 that hinted the Feeneys were a less than reputable couple. The show claimed James Grayson's mother had paid the Feeneys $40,000 and didn't get what she paid for. It suggested Don was forced to leave Delta under less than honorable circumstances for financial improprieties. The Feeneys slapped Dateline NBC with a $27 million libel suit that is still in the courts today.

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Don's most bizarre rescue began in Brooklyn, when a mother hired CTU to recover her young son, Benjamin, whose American father had kidnapped him to Lima, Peru after the mother had won sole custody of the boy. And, the mother said, she was an Orthodox Jew and needed a rabbinical divorce, called a get, from her husband. In order to obtain the divorce she was sending three rabbis from the East Coast to Lima. They were going to convince her husband to say the words of the get so she could be free from her marriage.

"What?" Don blurted out. "Do you know how hard it is to hide even one rabbi in Peru?"

The three rabbis were precisely as Don had pictured them. They wore yarmulkes and long black overcoats and had long beards. Two of them weighed in excess of 200 pounds. One of them, the one from Brooklyn, was almost 300 pounds. "I tried not to be a wise guy," Don says, "but I told the one from Brooklyn how hard it would be to keep them unnoticed" in Peru. The rabbi said it still had to be done. The wife needed the get. It had already been transcribed by a special scribe with a quill pen, as it had been done for centuries. The rabbi from Brooklyn told Don that the words are usually recited by the husband of his own free will, but this time the husband wasn't cooperative. "The tribunal said we could do what we had to do to get this guy to say the words," the Brooklyn rabbi says now. "We could use force if we had to. Hey, he was a bad boy and I'm not such a simple guy myself. I've done stuff in my life."

While Don set up surveillance of the husband's house, the rabbis spent their time sight-seeing in Lima. One day, they were walking along a side street when they were mugged. They chased their attacker down an alley and caught him. "We beat him up," says the Brooklyn rabbi, "while a crowd watched and cheered, 'Viva los norteamericanos!'" The rabbi had no qualms about that beating. "An eye for an eye," he says.

On the day of the recovery, Don drove with the wife, the three rabbis and a Peruvian cop to the father's house. He approached the front door and knocked. The boy opened the door and Don said, "Hi, Benjamin. I'm a friend of your father's. Where is he?" The boy said he was in the bathroom. Don told Benjamin his mother was waiting for him in the car. As the boy ran toward his mother, Don, trailed by the three overweight rabbis, charged through the house in search of the bathroom. When he heard a shower running behind a door, Don burst in, saw the steamy image of a body in the shower and crashed through the shower door. The father was bent over a girl, screwing her from behind. "He was 6'1"," says Don, "but he wasn't that fat." With help from the three rabbis, Don wrested the soapy man out of the shower and onto the bed in his bedroom. One of the rabbis threw a towel over the terrified girl, while the other rabbis pinned the man to the bed. The rabbi from Brooklyn began to recite the words of the get to the man, but the man said, "That's not right." The rabbi said, "You wanna see a right?" and punched him in the face. Still, the man refused to say the words of the get, so the Brooklyn rabbi placed a pillow over his face and began to smother him. "Either you do the get," said the rabbi, "or your wife's a widow." The Peruvian cop became afraid that they were going to kill the father. But the rabbi lifted the pillow and the father, gasping for air, spluttered, "Whatever you want." After the father said the words of the get, Don tied up and drugged him and the girl so there would be time to escape with the boy.

When Don tells the story of the three rabbis in Peru, he conveniently forgets to mention the pillow and the drugs. But the Brooklyn rabbi doesn't. "We did it," he says, "but we didn't enjoy our work." Then he laughs.

When Judy later asked the rabbi if he would have killed the man, the rabbi said, "Would you have killed him? Some people don't deserve to live in this world."

Judy said, "And what about the fifth commandment?"

The rabbi said, "What about the eleventh commandment? You have to do what you have to do, and don't get caught."

They marry hastily, have a child and then discover that their charming suitor has become a monster.

Both are usually armed, because more than one husband they have scammed has threatened to kill them.