From Group Sex to Holy Matrimony

 

By week six of Cook and Fanghella’s affair, mid-February 2000, the pair was aloft again. To New York, where Fanghella bought her a chinchilla coat, a Rolex watch, 20 outfits at Bergdorf Goodman’s, a birthstone ring, a diamond solitaire necklace, and a diamond baguette ring from Nally’s. Then to Paris, where she selected 25 outfits at Gianni Versace, Celine, and other stores, plus a Bulgari watch. Then, the grand prize: 5.7-carat diamond ring, worth $350,000, as  a promise that they would be married. A day later, a crack in the matrimonial crystal appeared at their at their Four Seasons suite: Fanghella had gotten drunk in the bar and Cook left, “to go upstairs and sleep. Barging in at three in the morning and turning on the lights, Fanghella screamed, “How do you like being called Kelly Spagnola?” Cook said he must have rifled through her purse and found her credit cards, one stamped with that name. She recalled Fanghella’s raving and his “frothing-at-the-mouth demeanor”: “’I thought you had cut him off, I thought you were through with him:’” The card’s imprint, she said, was mere protection: Spagnola wanted her to have it because her several porn-star aliases — Kelly Jaye, Kelly Lynn, Kelly Sabo-had caused her unwelcome notoriety.

Cook has denied any promise of marriage. Ever. To her, the ring—which she took— meant “his promise to me to change his behav­ior” ----the violent temper she had just witnessed - “so I would want to be with him.” Apparently even after this incident, she still “wanted to be with him” as much as she “wanted to help him?’ Fanghella, on the other hand, has asserted that the promise of marriage was the point of his lavishness. Somewhere between Jan­uary and February he said, we both realized we loved each other. I felt comfort­able being in love with her, and I believed what she would tell me.” Namely that as soon as their divorces were finished they would wed.

As their affair ripened, Fanghella said he and Cook enjoyed a few threesomes, that is, group sex. He said Cook liked hiring escorts for that purpose; in fact, she’d enjoyed multi-part­ners sex in her videos When asked, during his deposition, just how long it was after he and Cook had group sex that he gave her this ring, Fanghella, with unembarrassable laughter, noted it was about two weeks.

“What happened in those two weeks that made the relationship move from group sex to holy matrimony?”

“That’s quite an assumption, there, counselor,” Fanghella replied. Still, he maintained, marriage did come up, when the two were considering property in Port St. Charles, Barbados. At the door of one condo, Fanghella asked Cook, “Do you like?” She said, “Yes.”. So he bought it, a cool million. And, to cinch the pre-nuptial knot, he had another surprise: he was setting up an account with Barclays bank called the Blonde Angel Trust. This trust, promised to be stocked with up to $6.5 million in cash and other assets, would pay Cook an income for life so she would never have to work again. Depend­ing on which of the pair you believe, the gifts of condo and trust did (Fanghella) or did not (Cook) carry a stipulation that they stay together for good. Cook said Fanghdlla’s behavior changed after Bar­bados. He became violent, crazy, screaming, crying. I assumed he was using drugs.” He felt nauseated when he combined his pre­scription medication for anxiety (Zoloft) with cocaine and then would go off the prescription “I’ll stop taking Zoloft” Cook recalled his telling her,” to control my temper because I’m not going to do drugs anymore. And that way you and I will  be able to get along”  He also agreed to restart rehab. She said by this time she saw Fanghella only because she “needed to keep him calm. I was extremely con­cerned about him doing something [bad] to himself”, and she told him she cared for him “as a friend.” Then in late February, apparently beaten down by Fanghella’s manic life, Cook “ended” their friendship: she and Spangnola had patched things up. But then she called Fanghella back, saying she still wanted to help, maybe one day “be with him.” Fanghella thought they were on once more-and resumed sending her gifts.

   

During 2000, when cook was in contact with Fanghella, she accepted every gift and claimed no knowledge that the money he spent on her may not have been his to spend. Fanghella told Cook that PinnFund had made him a multimillionaire; he told Patrice he was worth nothing, leveraged on loans from the trust account. Had this been known by the more than 200 investors who put money into Peregrine….but then it wasn’t known. What no one knew was that Fanghella, Hillman, and others had, according to one court document, “created and operated a classic Ponzi scheme, “ bilking investors out of $330 million. In one of the nation’s largest mortgage scams ever, Fanghella and others were looting the investor trust account, falsifying audit reports and other financial records, lying on required filings with the Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD), and jeopardizing the livelihoods of 450 PinnFund employees in 53 regional and branch offices in 45 states. PinnFund would pancake under its own weight of debt, scattering hundreds of victims and teams of lawyers through family court as well as civil, criminal, and bankruptcy venues of the United States District court for the Southern District of California. (Dozens of depositions and thousands of pages of court records reveal the story of the fraud.)

The company in its eight years never made a profit— a lie kept under wraps by certain Pinnfund managers and sent to the warehouses  in the forms of falsified audits for the last two and a half years of the mortgage enders existence.

 

On March 21 2001, the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) closed PinnFund and, one month Iater froze the assets of Pinn­Fund and Peregrine. The SEC wrote that “Pinnpund and Peregrine had concealed more than $95 million in losses since 1997 and the transfer of more than $109 million to Fanghella since 1997” Losses may have been the cost of doing busi­ness, but the transfers were illegal. Former acting U.S. Attorney Charles La Bella, known for a 1996 probe into Clinton/Gore fund-raising, was appointed receiver in charge of  retrieving as much money as pos­sible to pay the snookered investors as well as Pinn­Fund employees and cred­itors. When La Bella looked at the Union Bank trust account, the vault in Pinn­Fund’s house where the investors’ money went, he found that out of the $330 million that should have been there, only $1.5 million was left. Scores of the savviest investors had been had.

 

The SEC has said that Fanghella and “cohorts” fal­sified the Levitz, Zacks 1997-98 audit which showed that PinnFund was losing money at a good $20 million per year. But except for the auditors, the defrauders, and HUD — no one else knew one audit report from the other. Thus, Fanghella could claim that the falsi­fied one was real and the real one (detailing the losses) was false. For many investors who had received checks every month, some for more than six years, the discov­ery that their funds were spent hit ihem like a bird fly­ing into a glass window.

 

Within 24 hours of the SEC’s closure of PinnFund’s offices, Fanghella was on a plane for Barbados, where he had stashed several

mil­lion dollars. There, he began transferring the assets of the Blonde Angel Trust from Kelly Cook to a Las Vegas flame, Denise Marohl. ‘Within days he was e-mail­ing Corrina Licardi, a woman with whom he’d been living for several months in his Rancho Santa Fe condo, where he’d left her. “He went out to walk the dog,” she told a friend, crying, “and he never came home.” Fanghella wrote Licardi: “Send money. Sell my ring and send me the money.” This was his father’s diamond ring, which Fanghella’s grown son Vincent had taken —-and refused to sell.