Allegra Brosco was not the sort of woman who had ever imagined herself married to a convict. Still, when Dana Giacchetto suddenly popped the question last August, during her weekly jailhouse visit, Brosco pondered for just a few minutes before saying yes.

It was, she admits, an inauspicious debut to a lifelong commitment, but in her retelling it seems dangerous and romantic -- like a scene from a Brontë novel. "There was a guard who was watching to make sure we didn't get too close," she remembers. "And all around us these sad, tired people. I didn't want to get tossed out, so we just pressed our foreheads together and cried." When he proposed, they had been a couple for eleven months.

During that time, Giacchetto, the manic, starstruck money manager, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud. Due to be sentenced on January 17, he faces 46 to 57 months in jail. The couple initially resolved to marry in prison, a plan they've since reconsidered. "Both our parents were against it," Brosco explains. "And we've caused them enough pain already."

There has been, amid the torrent of press documenting the fall of Dana Giacchetto, little mention of Allegra Brosco, the 32-year-old woman who had the closest view of his spectacular flameout and stuck around to help clean up the mess. When they began dating, Giacchetto was at the top of his game, a millionaire investment whiz and offbeat guru to an adoring flock of movie stars, musicians, and media types. As head of the $100 million Cassandra Group, he spent his days managing funds for clients like Leonardo DiCaprio, Q-Tip, and Michael Stipe, his nights picking up their tabs at Moomba and Lot 61.

Disarmingly down-to-earth and unfussily attractive, Brosco seemed out of place among the glossy starlets and socialites in Giacchetto's orbit. She'd moved to New York four years earlier, following a brief marriage to a Boston doctor, determined to become a film producer. She worked as a personal assistant to Ted Hope, co-founder of indie production company Good Machine, and lived for three years with a promising young filmmaker in TriBeCa.

Brosco claims that Giacchetto, who traveled constantly, always stockpiled airline tickets so he could have them readily available. She has a little more difficulty explaining the doctored passport.

In the fall of '99, bored with her life and her boyfriend, she called Dana, whom she'd met years earlier, and asked him for a job. Romance, she says, was not on her mind. "I knew all about Dana," she says. "I didn't want to be balanced between a supermodel and a movie star." But Giacchetto pursued her with typical zeal and eventually won her over, though friends were surprised by his ardor. "Dana was like a child," explains one, "always reaching for the shiniest object in the room, but Allegra wasn't like that at all. She was always at his side, but never really engaged. She just seemed mesmerized by his life."

Barely a month into the relationship, Giacchetto's partners had tossed him out of the $100 million venture-capital firm they had started with Chase Manhattan; his best friend, agent Jay Moloney, had hung himself; the SEC had begun an investigation; and dozens of anxious clients were pressing him to return their money. Giacchetto seemed oddly detached from his growing woes. "We went on walks, we watched movies, he didn't want to talk about business," Brosco says. "We were too busy falling in love."

But by the time she moved into his Prince Street loft in November, the situation had become too dire to ignore. She returned home one afternoon to find Dana sobbing uncontrollably on the phone with DiCaprio's mother, begging her to persuade Leo not to leave him. ("Losing Leo was like losing a brother," Allegra says.) The same month, the FBI launched an early-morning raid on his home and downstairs office, carting boxes of bills and documents while she watched in her nightgown. She was also there, alone, when the agents returned at 5 a.m. six weeks later with a warrant for Dana's arrest. They spent twenty minutes searching the apartment for Giacchetto, who was flying back from a trip to Tokyo. Brosco picked him up that night at the airport, and he surrendered the next morning.

He was charged with looting upwards of $9 million in funds belonging to clients. Prosecutors claimed he was using investors' funds as a personal slush pile, moving money in and out of various accounts to mask his losses and to finance his lavish lifestyle. He and his pals ran up an $80,000 bill on a weeklong stay at the Chateau Marmont. Another $12,000 went to help purchase a car for his sometime security guard and close friend, a handsome NYPD cop. With Dana's help, some of his clients succeeded in getting back their money. Other clients, especially the less celebrated ones, were left holding the bag.

Giacchetto's elderly parents paid his bail by mortgaging their house, but their son's freedom was short-lived. On April 9, he violated terms of his release by flying without warning to Las Vegas. Brosco says he headed out West to "clear his head and make a few deals." He returned clutching a briefcase stuffed with 80 first-class airline tickets, $4,000 in small bills, and a clumsily doctored passport that had long since expired. Drunk and incoherent, he was arrested and confined to an isolation cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, which he later described to friends as "the VIP room of jail."

Giacchetto's troubles filled Brosco with new purpose, and she devoted herself full-time to his redemption: helping him find a lawyer, raising money for his defense, calling up his old friends to plead for their support. She has not always been successful. "I couldn't believe the gall," says the recipient of one such call. "I told her I already gave at the office."

Brosco is not unaware of the frustration she inspires. "Most people who read this will think I'm either desperate or crazy," she admits matter-of-factly. It's a frosty winter evening, and a shivering Brosco is nursing a vodka on the patio of a SoHo restaurant, where we have retreated to elude eavesdropping diners inside. Jobless for months after Dana's arrest, she now lives with a roommate in a cramped one-bedroom on Cleveland Place and supports herself doing temp work.