The Culture Business

Postscript: Dana Does Detention

Giacchetto is currently incarcerated in a dormitory at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Brooklyn, the third facility he's occupied since his arrest. He sleeps in a bunk bed in a room with about 200 other inmates, rises each morning at six, eats dinner at five, and must be in his bunk by eleven. To occupy his time, he reads, plays Scrabble, listens to the radio, and writes long poems to his fiancée and his prominent lawyer, Ronald Fischetti.

The once-plump moneyman works out three times a day, bulking up as he's shed twenty pounds. As part of his "spiritual transformation," says Brosco, he reads from the Gospels at services each Sunday and works the pay phone trying to make amends. Not long ago, she says, he waited in line nearly two hours to call Michael Ovitz, whose receptionist refused to take the call. He has also sent dozens of letters to former clients, asking for their help and forgiveness. Most have gone unanswered.

Early on, there were rumors that the high-profile, effete prisoner had been assaulted by other inmates, but Brosco denies this. "He just tries to keep to himself," she says. Since his arrest, Giacchetto has declined all interview requests, including entreaties from Barbara Walters and 60 Minutes. But he still keeps up with his press. "He knows when he's in the paper before I do," says Brosco, who adds that Dana tries not to dwell on the past. Once, while strolling though the prison yard during a stint upstate in Otisville, Giacchetto spotted his old friend Johnny Depp, there to research a movie. "The old Dana would have fallen over himself to get to him," says Brosco. The new Dana walked sheepishly the other way.

Brosco insists that hubris, not greed, caused Giacchetto's downfall. "I'm not here to tell you he's innocent. I'm not stupid," she says. "Dana pleaded guilty. He's sorry. He knows he fucked up, and so do I. But money was never his god. He could be a sycophant and a star-fucker, so desperate not to disappoint anybody that when things got bad, he took money out of his own account to pay people off. When Dana invested in Iridium and Iridium went bad, his clients came to him and said, 'Give me my money back.' And the dumb-ass, instead of saying, You know what? I fucked up, it was a bad investment, he paid them back!"

The problems at Cassandra were exacerbated, Brosco admits, by Dana's frenetic socializing: "Some nights we'd be hanging out quietly alone, it would be like four o'clock in the morning, and the doorbell would ring, and in would come fifteen people." Drugs were an inevitable part of that scene, though Brosco claims Giacchetto's taste ran to alcohol and tranquilizers rather than to club drugs or cocaine. "People were doing whatever their recreational drug was. And that was part of his demise. All the money and fame and partying made him lose his center."

When he was first arrested, a few friends, like Alanis Morissette, rallied around him. But his bizarre Las Vegas high jinks scared off even his most die-hard fans. At a subsequent bail hearing, Dana, cuffed and clad in his prison jumpsuit, tearfully denied he intended to flee, but Brosco claims his lawyer at the time, Andrew Levander, privately denounced him as a liar and asked to be let off the case. "He basically left him for dead," she says bitterly. ("Under the canon of ethics," Levander responds, "I cannot comment on my dealings with Mr. Giacchetto.")

Brosco also claims that Giacchetto, who traveled constantly, always stockpiled airline tickets so he could have them readily on hand. (Others speculate that the onetime millionaire, chafing at his imposed $100-a-day allowance, hoped to trade in the tickets for $40,000 in cash.) She has a little more difficulty explaining the doctored passport. "The only speculation I can make is that he was fucked up drinking, taking prescription drugs, under unbelievable pressure, and he just cracked," she says. "His parents, who aren't wealthy, put up their house. Dana would never fuck them over like that. He would never have done that to me."

Prosecutors charged that Giacchetto planned to elope with Brosco to Italy, a scenario she doesn't deny. "Dana called me and said, 'I just bought two first-class tickets to Rome. Do you mind getting married in Rome?' " she recalls. "And I said, 'Of course, I'd love to. But Dana, you have a bit of a passport problem.' And he started to laugh and he said, 'I know. But isn't it a snug idea?' Snug was Dana's word for everything that's loving. So I said yes. I mean, I'm not going to say, 'No, you fucking moron; it's a stupid idea! Now everyone's going to think you were trying to flee the country with me.' I said, 'Yeah, it's a lovely idea; yup, very snug.' But it was just a fantasy.

"I know some people think, Oh, Allegra's this dumb woman who's been manipulated by Dana's charm and his exaggeration," she continues, dragging deeply on her umpteenth cigarette. "And the truth is, he's definitely prone to hyperbole. But no one in a million years will ever occupy the place this man occupies in my life."

Siacchetto's SoHo loft was vacated in July; his penchant for partying provoked the building into evicting him long before his legal problems arose. His possessions were stored or put up for sale. First to go were Giacchetto's paintings -- some 40 Bleckners, George Condos, and Lichtensteins valued in the millions. Last November, in an attempt to fend off an imminent lawsuit, Giacchetto turned the works over to the rock group Phish, the earliest of his clients to charge malfeasance.

Next to go were his endlessly photographed cockatoos. Beloved by Giacchetto, the birds despised each other, and they were dispersed to different coasts. Angel, the female, now lives in Brooklyn with Giacchetto's former maid. The male, Tiberius, was adopted by a cousin in Los Angeles. Brosco packed the rest of Dana's belongings into boxes -- and spent weeks rummaging through the detritus of his life. "It seemed like he had a good time," she admits. "He saved every VIP pass he got."

She took special care with his suits -- racks of Helmut Langs and Pradas, which she carefully folded and packed away. Giacchetto's belongings are now in storage in Massachusetts, where they may be confiscated to pay off his fines.

The night before she moved out, Brosco slept alone on a sheet in the middle of the now-empty loft. The electricity had been shut off earlier in the day. By then, there were dozens of mice running around the apartment, some climbing into her makeshift bed. "It was like the apocalypse," she says. "The mice started coming a few weeks after Dana was in jail. I hired an exterminator, but it didn't do any good. By the end, there were about twenty of them and they were everywhere. It was almost like they knew Dana was gone."