Widow of jewelry thief sues over movie

Will Astor//August 11, 2006//

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Producers of a recently broadcast USA Network movie based on the exploits of her deceased husband, a noted jewel thief and Rochester native, portrayed her in a false and unflattering light, a Fairport woman claims.
Carmella Comfort, the widow of Robert Anthony “Bobby” Comfort, sued Once Upon a Time Films Ltd. of Los Angeles and the Toronto-based Darius Films Inc.-producers of the USA Network movie “Cool Money”-in state Supreme Court in Rochester in March. The filmmakers had the action moved to U.S. District Court in Rochester on July 31.
Also individually named are executive producers Stanley Brooks and John Fasano, both of California, Nicholas Tabarrock of Toronto and Shelley Evans of Cambridge, Mass., scriptwriter of “Cool Money.”
Neither Comfort nor her attorney, Donald O’Brien Jr. of Woods Oviatt Gilman LLP, returned calls seeking comment on the suit.
Comfort’s court complaint takes no issue with the movie’s portrayal of her husband as a thief. In her court papers, she praises Bobby Comfort as “a man of unusual talents and proclivities” and “an accomplished jewel thief.” Comfort’s heists “were noted for the unflappability of the perpetrators, the lack of violence and the wealth of their victims,” the legal brief states.
Bobby Comfort’s well-publicized criminal career stretched from the 1950s to the early 1980s. His most noted score was at the Hotel Pierre in Manhattan in 1972. In the heist, planned by Comfort, Comfort and four tuxedo-clad accomplices-rightly figuring that hotel security would be more easily defeated than a jewelry store’s-handcuffed 19 hotel workers and guests and cleaned more than $10 million in jewels and cash out of the hotel’s safe.
The Pierre heist, other criminal exploits and Comfort’s family life were detailed in a well-reviewed 1987 true-crime book, “The Man who Robbed the Pierre: The Story of Bobby Comfort and the Biggest Hotel Robbery Ever,” by journalist Ira Berkow. And before the March airing of “Cool Money,” filmmaker Robert Zemeckis had laid plans to put out a different movie version-still listed as in development-of Comfort’s life starring John Cusack as Comfort.
An accomplished jailhouse lawyer as well as a thief, Comfort-convicted of theft and sentenced to an indeterminate term-concocted legal arguments sufficient to win early release from the Attica Correctional Facility and a $15,000 award from the state after he was released.
Billed as a drama based on actual events rather than a straightforward biopic, “Cool Money,” which aired last March, depicts the exploits of a jewel thief named Bobby Comfort. In the movie, Comfort’s wife is named Stephanie, not Carmella, and the film is set in Miami rather than Rochester.
A March 19 Variety review of “Cool Money” praised James Marsters, whose previous credits include a long-running stint as the heroine’s bleached blonde vampire love interest in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” TV series, as “completely convincing” in his portrayal of Comfort as a “surface charmer.”
With no up-to-date heist movie features such as “elaborate blueprints and laser-driven gadgetry,” the movie was “almost charmingly low-tech, and as a result, more than a little dull,” the reviewer wrote.
Carmella Comfort was neither bored nor charmed, her court complaint indicates. And the filmmakers neither sought nor received her permission to portray her, court papers state.
Lines in the movie spoken by Stephanie Comfort such as “Baby you need to be smart” painted a picture of Comfort’s wife as “a willing and knowing supporter and beneficiary” of Comfort’s criminal activities,” the complaint states. Those statements would lead viewers of the film to conclude that Comfort’s wife was “shallow, materialistic and obtuse.”
In the film, Bobby Comfort’s wife “warms up to him” after being told that her husband left “some money under the bed in a bag,” court papers state. But in real life, Bobby Comfort’s “unorthodox employment history” left Carmella Comfort with “no inheritance but two loving daughters and memories of an unconventional marriage.”
Unlike, “Cool Money’s” Stephanie Comfort, who took an active interest in Bobby Comfort’s criminal activities and egged her husband on, demanding that he hook up with more professional criminal partners, Carmella Comfort, throughout the course of the couple’s 21-year marriage was “preoccupied with her duties as a wife and mother” and had no direct knowledge of her husband’s illicit adventures,” court papers state.
“(Bobby) Comfort, who died in 1986 while still married to Carmella Comfort, did not confide in (Carmella Comfort) and she was raised in an age and an environment in which a wife deferred to her husband and did not question him,” the court complaint states.
Claiming that the March broadcast defamed her and “exposed her to ridicule, obloquy, disgrace and embarrassment,” Carmella Comfort is seeking unspecified damages and court costs.
It is too early in the case to comment on allegations in the lawsuit, the filmmakers’ attorney, Donald Cayea of Jones, Hirsch, Connors & Bull P.C. in Manhattan, said.
An answer to Carmella Comfort’s complaint filed Aug. 4 in U.S. District Court in Rochester denies that Carmella Comfort had in any way suffered harm as a result of the “Cool Money” broadcast. The name of Comfort’s wife in the film is different and any portrayals of Carmella Comfort in the film are “truthful,” the court papers state.
In the answer, Cayea moves for dismissal and also asks for court costs, claiming that the defendants were improperly served and that the suit should be barred as having exceeded the statute of limitations.
No court date is set.
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