“Hope Diamond” by Charles Rammelkamp

Richie died before she got out, / but he’d have been proud, five years / after Beldini went to prison

Not the Big Dig, Boston’s Back Bay boondoggle, but
the “Bid Rig,” the FBI/IRS sting operation 
into New Jersey political corruption,
which lasted years, longer than Ken Starr’s
Whitewater witch-hunt, resulting in over sixty indictments,
more than forty arrests, including rabbis and political officials;
a couple dozen given prison sentences,
Leona Beldini, deputy mayor of Jersey City among them.

But my husband Richie knew Beldini better
as Hope Diamond, “the Gem of the Exotics,”
when she’d headlined at the old Hudson Theater,
forty years earlier, in Union City,
even took me to a show in Toledo to see her strip,
when he was there on a business trip in the Sixties.

“It’s not fair!” Richie complained. “I was on the jury?
I’d acquit her in a New York minute.”
But she got three years for taking $20,000,
sent to the federal pen in Texas,
already seventy-six when she flew down to Fort Worth
with her son, to surrender herself.

Richie died before she got out,
but he’d have been proud, five years
after Beldini went to prison,
to see her back onstage at Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theater,
a benefit for the Kennedy Dancers,
82 years old but her head unbowed!

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two of his full-length collections have been published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing.