Feature

Husband Hunting

Several days later, at dawn, Jane and Patsy waited for Robert at Dulles. Accompanied by half a dozen airport cops, the two women were trembling with excitement and disbelief. “My heart was pounding,” Jane recalls. “It was like a climax. It crescendoed as I walked, step by step, toward the gate.” The guns of the cops scared her a bit, she says, but what really terrified her was the possibility that he’d elude them again.

As Jane and Patsy waited, the cops searched the airport. Nothing. The women began to despair. Jane turned to Patsy and whispered, “Go find him.” Patsy took a quick lap around the airport and was about to give up when she saw a nondescript man sitting quietly with his hands resting atop his luggage. He seemed much older than she thought her father would look, and he had shaved his head. But Patsy recognized the hands. They belonged to Robert Maharam.

The cops surrounded him and took him to an empty part of the airport. Jane followed, her eyes full of tears. “I was elated,” she says. “I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.”

Jane and Robert didn’t exchange a single word—but at one point, their eyes met. She was startled. “His eyes were cold and empty,” she recalls. “He didn’t look anything like the man I knew. His good looks were gone. There was a stiffness to his face. He had an empty stare.”

Under subsequent questioning from Rosenblum, Robert Maharam maintained that his money was socked away in banks in Europe and Bermuda. He said that there wasn’t as much of it as Jane had thought, and added that he had a heart condition and had to return to Europe. After making him sign a document directing the banks to release his funds and forward the money to Rosenblum, the judge let him go. That was all the law allowed.

At that point, Jane had been through enough to know that this would probably not be the end of it. But she held out some hope. “We thought that just maybe, after all this, he was ready to stop running, and would pay something just to keep us from chasing him,” she says.

But the money never came, and when Rosenblum called the banks, he was informed by executives at each one that the order to release funds had been rescinded by Robert Maharam.

Extensive efforts to contact Robert were unsuccessful. A spokesman for the Maharam company was unable to provide any clues to his whereabouts. Both his cousin Donald Maharam and nephew Michael Maharam say they haven’t had contact with him since at least the mid-nineties, don’t know where he is, and have no idea who does.

As each effort to get Robert failed, Jane and Patsy determined that the only way to solve the problem was to put teeth in divorce law. As things stand now, if a former spouse is declared by the courts to owe a certain amount but is determined not to pay, it’s hard to collect. It becomes all but impossible if the debtor claims to have no assets or manages to conceal them. Collecting in those cases would require that the offender be seized and incarcerated until he pays. That’s not something judges want to do in response to a noncriminal matter in another state. Bernard Clair, a Manhattan divorce lawyer who once represented Jane, estimates that thousands of women are victimized by this loophole each year.

The new bill based on Jane’s case would be similar to federal child-support law—the 1998 Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act—and make evasion of divorce-related debts a federal crime. Last year, Jane and Patsy began visiting New York lawmakers to ask for help in creating this legislation, and finally found a willing sponsor in John Sweeney. The bill, which has been drafted and is ready for introduction, would make it illegal to leave a divorce-related debt of greater than $5,000 unpaid for more than a year anywhere in the country. It would also be a crime to cross state lines with the intent to avoid payment. If you break the law, you can be forced to pay what you owe—and possibly spend up to two years in prison. The bill has bipartisan sponsorship, which should help bring it to a vote, and Sweeney promises an all-out push, including congressional hearings, to get it passed. “This thing is gonna get done,” he vows.

If it does, the law will apply retroactively, giving Jane and Patsy a new way to nab Robert. That doesn’t mean they’ll get him, though. He apparently spends much of his time in Europe, and international extradition is always tough. But Jane takes satisfaction in knowing that other women will be spared her fate, and that Robert Maharam will never be able to fully leave his old life behind, much as he’s tried to. “Let him live his life looking over his shoulder,” she says. “Is that a life, really?”