Lethal Guardian (12 page)

If missing the appointment, showing up late and not driving Rebecca to Boston weren’t bad enough, the part of the day that troubled the Carpenters most, Cynthia said, was that Kim never called that night to find out what had happened in Boston. After she left the house at 10:30
A.M
., the Carpenters claimed they never heard back from her.

It was one more brick added to a foundation of missed appointments, neglect and a total lack of responsibility on Kim’s part. The Carpenters weren’t going to hear any more of it. It was evident that Kim wasn’t about to change anytime soon, and with Buzz now in the picture, her chances of giving Rebecca the common life the Carpenters thought she deserved were even less than they had been. Added to this was the fact that the more information the Carpenters found out about Buzz, the less they saw him as someone who could be a future role model for Rebecca.

The Carpenters viewed Buzz as a male-revue dancer. They had no idea he was planning on going to school to become a visiting nurse’s aide or, like his father, had been a member in the ironworkers union for years but just couldn’t find work.

There was a major conflict now. Because as Kim and Buzz’s relationship blossomed throughout the summer, Kim began to see an opportunity to involve Rebecca in the new union. It was the closest family environment she could offer Rebecca personally. Other than what the Carpenters, as grandparents, had given her, Rebecca had never really experienced that situation.

The Carpenters, though, didn’t quite see it that way—and were now beginning to line up their troops to do everything possible to take (and keep) Rebecca away from Buzz and Kim.

In Hollywood, there was a child custody fight heating up in August 1992. Mia Farrow and Woody Allen were locking horns in what would later prove to be a scandal that would brand actor-director Allen, many agreed, as the worst scourge on the planet: a child molester. Buzz Clinton didn’t know it at the time, but he and Woody Allen had more in common than merely living on the East Coast.

Late in the day on August 20, Kim approached Dee with what turned out to be a rather odd document.

Buzz wanted Kim to sign a prenuptial agreement. It wasn’t, Dee said later, that the two lovebirds had only known each other for a month and were already planning on getting married. Still, Dee wondered why Kim would even consider signing such a ridiculous document. Was she
that
intimidated by men?

Dee knew her son better than most. He was always coming up with quirky ideas that made little sense to many of the people around him. But this prenuptial agreement was different. It was an odd thing to ask of a woman after knowing her for only one month. Yet as Dee considered it later, she began to understand Buzz’s trepidation toward marriage. He had been burned by his former wife, Lisa, and, Dee suggested, had been screwed over by most of the women he’d dated. To insure that it wouldn’t happen again, before dipping his toes farther into what was becoming a very serious relationship, Buzz wanted something down on paper to protect himself. He wanted security.

It was an outrageous document, etched in poor grammar, yet extremely matter of fact. Buzz wasn’t a Rhodes scholar—and the writing in the prenup pretty much proved that.

On the other hand, however, Buzz surely knew what to say as it pertained to his future with Kim.

The one-page document began by having Kim insist that she had not been “forced” or “threatened” to sign the contract. By signing it, however, she would be releasing Buzz from “all financial responsibility” to her, including any future “child support payments, alimony, any inheritances, real estate, motor vehicles, personal property, bank accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pensions, retirement plans…or any other assets….”

Even more bizarre was that by signing the contract Kim would have to agree that Buzz was a “good parent for any and all children [they] may have in the future and…[agree to] give up all parental rights and…custody to [Buzz]…[and to] let [him] set all, if any, visitation times and dates.”

Ending the document, Kim was also admitting that the “contract means I have no control over any and all children….”

Apparently, Buzz had learned a few things being involved in the fiasco that had ensued between Kim and her family the past few weeks.

But there was something else tugging at Buzz’s heart-strings. He had been torn apart, according to Dee, by his divorce from Lisa; in the process, he had lost contact with Michael. He wasn’t about to let that happen again.

Kim had gone to Dee and showed her the contract after she signed it.

After hearing Kim out, Dee looked at her for a moment and fell silent. Then, “Are you nuts?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, Mrs. Clinton,” Kim replied. “It’ll never hold up in court.”

“How do you know
that
?”

“My sister’s a lawyer. I showed it to her. She told me not to worry about it.”

It was the first time Dee had heard that Kim’s sister, Beth Ann, was a lawyer.

After Beth Ann passed the New York and Connecticut bar exams, she began looking for work right away.

With her prospects grim, she volunteered at the public defender’s office in Norwich and began logging some hours working on probate cases. It was paper-pushing work for the most part, but legal experience nonetheless. Once in a while, she was even asked to show up in court and work a motion or represent a client.

Working probate cases, however—guardianships and conservatorships—was an interesting choice. One, Beth Ann could acquire that much-needed experience her prospective employers craved from law school graduates; and, two, perhaps most important, she could study the law as it pertained to Rebecca’s situation.

By the end of summer, Beth Ann had settled into a position with the public defender’s office, sharing an office in New London with another promising young lawyer, Michael Hasse.

While working in New London with Hasse, Beth Ann continued to send out job applications. Still, nothing materialized. Then one day after work, she walked into the law offices of Haiman Long Clein, a real estate attorney from Old Saybrook with a small satellite office in downtown New London, on State Street, directly across the street from the New London Superior Courthouse—and her life changed.

Haiman Long Clein had been known to many people as somewhat of a high-powered attorney who drove expensive cars and owned mansion-size homes, took friends and clients out to extravagant dinners, held wild stag parties and made good investments in real estate. When someone in the area needed a lawyer who knew the ins and outs of real estate transactions, Clein’s name always came up. He was well respected around town by some and revered as the go-to lawyer for the wealthy in communities like Waterford, New London, Old Lyme, Old Saybrook, Essex and a few surrounding boroughs. Clein had dabbled in a few criminal cases throughout the years, but his main focus and chief source of income came from real estate transactions, fiduciary cases and investment banking.

Others, however, painted Clein as being fake and phony.

“He never impressed the shit out of me, or I would have hired him myself,” a local businessman later said. “I have lived in Waterford since 1984. I’m pretty well known. [Clein] never ran with people who impressed me all that much. He wasn’t known as a high roller in the circles where it really mattered. To some people, maybe he was this big-time lawyer living in a big house up on the hill. But to me, he was nothing. Just another lawyer. There were some big-time lawyers around town that everyone knew—but Clein wasn’t one of them.”

When Beth Ann met Clein in August 1992, Clein had hit rock bottom. With the real estate market trying to gain back its legs, but still not anywhere near where it had been in the early 1980s, many of his investments had dried up. Most of the property he owned depended on borrowed monies. Recently he found himself for the first time not being able to meet loan payments. At one time, Clein had owned three office complexes in Old Saybrook and one in Essex. He was collecting rents, spending big and living large.

Lately, though, he was having trouble sleeping. He suffered mood swings. And it was the anxiety of losing everything he’d worked for that sent him running to psychotherapy—where he was quickly diagnosed with severe depression and, like millions of others, was prescribed Prozac.

Born on March 25, 1941, the brutish-looking lawyer had just turned fifty-one when the beautiful redhead Beth Ann Carpenter came bouncing into his New London office. Clein sported a salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, potbelly and a six-foot frame. Stick a shotgun in his hand and he could have doubled for 1970s television star Dan Haggerty, who played the country-bumpkinish character Grizzly Adams on a show of the same name.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Clein didn’t play the part of the high-powered attorney in public: crass and sharklike. He never wore expensive suits or Bruno Magli shoes, and he hardly came across as all that tough. When he was working around the office, he usually dressed in plaid lumberjack shirts and jeans. He was unpretentious and soft-spoken, and his clients, who liked him that way, ran the gamut—from low-life hoodlums and thieves to drug dealers to two-bit criminals to millionaire businessmen. But it didn’t matter who it was, like Beth Ann during that first encounter, those who met Clein usually fell victim to his down-home charm. It was a spell. He appeared trustworthy. People felt comfortable around him.

Clein’s magnetism and charming personality, undoubtedly, were somewhat built around his upbringing in Miami, Florida, where he attended the University of Miami in 1959. Forming an interest in law while there, he transferred to the University of Florida in 1961. Entering the University of Miami Law School in 1963, six years later, Clein found himself practicing law in the fast-paced world of Miami, where cocaine ran through the city like rainwater and beautiful women were everywhere.

Later, Clein would tell people he was “the black sheep of [his] family,” expressing it in a way that led many to believe he wasn’t the least bit sorry about admitting it. In fact, when questioned about what made him decide to go into law, Clein told several people that he had become a lawyer to “know the laws so I could get around them without being caught or penalized.”

While in Florida going to school, Clein met his first wife, a woman from Niantic, Connecticut, and by 1977, the happy couple was on a plane back to the Northeast to begin a life together.

By 1978, now a permanent resident of Connecticut, Clein was licensed in the state. Connecticut was, in many ways, the yin to the yang lifestyle Clein had grown accustomed to in Florida. Connecticut was slower paced and more of a playground for the artistic, academic and political. There was the famed Yale University in New Haven and Trinity College in Hartford; Katharine Hepburn was a state resident;
Saturday Night Live
onetime executive producer Dick Ebersol lived in Litchfield with his actress-wife Susan Saint James; David Letterman and Martha Stewart had homes in state; authors, lawyers and doctors had been buying up real estate in and around the Greenwich and Stamford areas for decades; the Kennedys even had blood in the state.

Indeed, Connecticut wasn’t West Palm Beach or Ft. Lauderdale, but it was brimming with potential wealth for Clein to take advantage of.

A few years after Clein and his new bride set up a home in Old Saybrook and had a daughter, the marriage dissolved. But Clein was never one to be without a woman. Some even said later that the divorce was based in part on a relationship Clein had begun with Bonnie MacHaffie, a local woman who had grown up in Gilford, New Hampshire, under the guidance of a family heavily influenced by the church.

In 1981, shortly after Clein closed his practice in Florida and dedicated himself exclusively to his Connecticut practice—he had been going back and forth between his offices—he ended up marrying MacHaffie. As the years passed, the couple found themselves raising four kids.

Finally, it seemed, Clein had met a woman who viewed the world the same way he did. Bonnie, a bit on the homely side, was her own person. On the other hand, like a Stepford wife, she listened attentively when Clein spoke, and some said, she never caused any problems for him when they were in public, playing the role of the happy homemaker well. During dinner parties, Bonnie would sit quietly, nodding at the appropriate times, schmoozing with her dinner guests, drinking expensive bottles of Cabernet and speaking when she thought it was the proper time.

“She was a pleasant woman who didn’t talk much,” one former acquaintance said.

Things were going okay for the Cleins. Haiman had a practice in Old Saybrook and was talking about opening up a satellite office in New London. The stock market had taken a dive in 1980, and its impact on Clein’s business had been substantial. But he had spent the remainder of the 1980s rebuilding his practice. By the mid-1980s, the Cleins had money again—lots of it. They had friends in high places. Cars. Two homes: one in Old Saybrook in a gated community overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and a second in Waterford. And although Bonnie had grown up in somewhat of a strict, religious-based home, she had no trouble converting to Judaism after marrying Clein, who himself wasn’t an Orthodox Jew, but practiced the faith nonetheless.

When the 1990s hit, however, things went bad. It was brewing up to be perhaps the worst time to own real estate in the past sixty years. If experts were right, the monies people were going to lose would dwarf any losses from the ’80s. Investments were going bust left and right. Unemployment rates soared. People were losing their homes. Pensions were being sucked dry by bad investments.

To Clein, it was a devastating blow to his ego. He had migrated to Connecticut with his first wife in the late 1970s and began almost immediately reaping the benefits of stepping on a fast-moving bandwagon of wealth. Sure, the 1980s were tough, but he got through it unscathed. It was nothing compared to what was happening now—or what was about to happen.

It had taken years, but what had begun as a small operation on Main Street, in downtown Old Saybrook, in an old run-down and rustic one-family house, grew into a full-fledged law firm specializing in real estate transactions.

As the years passed and business slowed after the boom of the 1980s, Clein’s new friends began to see a different person emerge—someone, many later said, who couldn’t handle the stress of a waning economy.

One of Clein’s closest friends throughout the years had been Matthew Elgart, an optometrist in town who ran a practice near Clein’s Old Saybrook office. Married, in his early thirties when he met Clein in 1973, Dr. Elgart had graduated from the New England College of Optometry, in Boston, around the same time Clein had entered law school in 1963. In 1972, a second doctor joined Elgart’s practice, and he soon began building what would eventually become a successful and distinguished practice. When asked about him, a man in the area later said, “Anybody who lives in the Old Saybrook area knows Dr. Elgart; he’s the guy on those huge billboards all over town.”

Walking into Clein’s law practice one day in the early 1970s, Elgart needed some legal work done and struck up a friendship. A hairdresser in town had initially referred Elgart to Clein. Since both men were Jewish, not to mention professionals and neighbors, the woman assumed they’d get along.

And they did.

Near the end of the 1980s, however, Clein’s world took a turn. His business life became more about recruiting new clients than tending to the legal matters of the client base he’d already built up. According to his psychiatrist, Vittorio Ferrero, Clein had “[h]is wife [Bonnie have] sex with friends…several different friends…and he watched it. Part of his rationalization…is that these people were business partners and he needed their support.”