Can Al and Jeanine Pirro's Marriage Be Saved? -- New York Magazine

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

After two months in the hospital, Al emerged with the depression lifted and with renewed, seemingly redoubled energy. He set about rebuilding his business, becoming his law firm’s rainmaker. He threw himself into the social whirl of Pirroland, the gatherings and the elaborate dinners. The table was magnificent. There were gold napkin holders. Ruby-red goblets. And room for more than twenty. They employed help, but Jeanine did a lot of the cooking. “I love to cook,” says Jeanine. Al liked to putter around the kitchen as well. (“Al’s not as good a cook,” says Jeanine, “and he’s a mess in the kitchen.”) Mostly, the kitchen was Jeanine’s spot. (If they were in there together, there’d be trouble. “We’d kill each other,” she says.) Jeanine liked to prepare Lebanese meatballs—she’s Lebanese—while chatting with the girls (the county executive’s wife or Barbara Bruno). They gabbed about politics or bikini waxing. “She’s really good to her girlfriends,” says a friend.

For some of Jeanine’s supporters, mixing the D.A.’s world with Al’s was unsettling. Al was a person to be leery of. “He was unpredictable,” says one longtime former staffer. “In a quest for attention or escape or whatever his motives, he always ends up in the newspaper.” Still, one guest recalls how charming and sweet Al could be, especially to Jeanine. Al was the funny one; Jeanine the straight man. In a party setting, he was proud and teasing; he flirted with her. Though, of course, the flirting could be barbed.

“Let me tell you what happened to me today … ” Jeanine might begin.

“Oh, yeah, everybody wants to know all about Jeanine,” Al would joke.

To most observers, the marriage seemed back on track. Jeanine hadn’t missed a beat—she coped by burying herself in work. She was the crusading D.A., loved by (and in love with) the cameras; Al was the political muscle and moneymaker. It was Al who brought the governor into their midst. Al had supported Pataki when he was still a state senator from nearby Peekskill. Al opened a lobbying firm in Albany, which by Pataki’s second term brought in more than $500,000 a year in revenue. Libby Pataki and Jeanine also became fast friends.

It was a merry mix, and at the end of a festive meal shots of tequila were sometimes set up. (Once, a potbellied pig wandered under the table.) Everyone was thrilled to see the governor throw one back before hitting the road. It was a perfect Pirro moment, downmarket fun in pricey company.

Then, in 1998, a few days before Christmas, the subpoenas began arriving. The investigation had started over a $5,000 check Al wrote to a Yonkers politician. The politician later claimed it was a bribe. Al said it was a consulting fee. Soon, the investigative focus had shifted. Al, the government charged, had understated his and Jeanine’s personal income by $1.2 million over eight years and, in the process, evaded $400,000 in personal income tax.

Al assumed the government’s true intent was political vengeance, an attempt to darken Jeanine’s political star. (Jeanine’s critics accuse her of a similar game. “If you oppose her on an issue, she’s vengeful,” says one Democratic county official.) Al had long seen the world as hostile, “a cold and threatening place unresponsive to his needs,” as the psychiatric report had put it a decade earlier. For Al, this investigation was further proof. Al believed politics was the reason he’d been investigated for the better part of a decade—by the IRS, the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, and then the U.S. Attorney, which, his lawyers calculated, issued 210 grand-jury subpoenas to everyone from his clients to his alma mater.

Of course, Al and Jeanine’s tax forms (they co-signed the returns) were fraudulent. Al’s businesses—he had 32 single-purpose entities, one for each real-estate deal—took about $20 million in deductions. The government alleged that about 5 percent of those really were personal. Some of the personal expenses charged to businesses were tantalizing. There was an anniversary stay at the Plaza, $1,800 grillwork for the pet pigs’ pen, a $4,450 portrait of their two children, Al’s $123,000 Ferrari 348 Spider convertible, even $70,000 to fight Al’s paternity suit. (Al claimed he had to fight. The mother is a convicted embezzler who’d listed another father on the birth certificate.) The government also discovered a complicated lease structure that allowed Jeanine to claim a Mercedes as hers, though one of Al’s companies paid for it. (One of Al’s companies also picked up the tab for Jeanine’s mother’s Mercedes, which pissed off his own mother.)

The indictment of the sitting D.A.’s husband was extremely embarrassing to Jeanine. That she had co-signed fraudulent personal tax returns was worse. She wasn’t, as critics pointed out, a naïve homemaker. How could she have known nothing?