New York: Some Mess, Bess

Some Mess, Bess

Bonny Bess Myerson, beauty from the Bronx, seemed to have everything -- a Miss America crown (1945), big money and political clout. But last April she resigned her $83,000-a-year job as New York City's commissioner of cultural affairs because of what the papers called the "Bess mess." Her romance with Contractor Carl Capasso was a family-wrecking affair, upended when Capasso ran into the tax trouble that got him a four-year prison term. Worse still were charges that in 1983 Myerson gave a $19,000 job to the daughter of State Supreme Court Justice Hortense Gabel in order to induce the judge to...

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