Preparations were underway for Deborah Carona's 50th birthday party when the host learned who would be attending the party. He was stunned.
Among the guests invited to the celebration for the wife of Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona was the lawman's mistress, Debra V. Hoffman.
"I said, 'If you're going to invite her, I'm not going to have it at my house,' " Joseph Cavallo said he told the sheriff, then a close friend and political ally. The two have since parted ways and Cavallo was recently sentenced to jail in a kickback scheme involving bail bond agents.
The sheriff relented and Hoffman did not attend.
But friends and associates of the sheriff said the 2001 birthday bash -- midway into Carona's first term and not long before Larry King dubbed him "America's sheriff" -- was indicative of the frenzied lifestyle that Carona was juggling as he ran the state's second-largest sheriff's department.
Deborah Carona was a member of a moneyed and prominent family that was mentioned as a point of reference in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Debra Hoffman was a struggling but charming attorney, 15 years younger than the sheriff's wife. Their lives bumped together often.
Both women appeared at official functions together, the wife often sitting in the first row, Hoffman in the second. Photographers working for the Sheriff's Department sometimes snapped photos of the two women together and sometimes of both posing with the sheriff.
But just beyond public view, associates say, the sheriff's behavior with his mistress was reckless, even defiant: a trip to Las Vegas, text messages and pet names.
Now, Carona, his wife and mistress have been accused in a broad public conspiracy case that alleges that the sheriff sold his office for a stream of gifts and money. All three have pleaded not guilty and said they expect to prevail at trial. Carona, his wife and Hoffman all declined to be interviewed for this story.
On the morning after he was charged, Carona was ushered into a courtroom ordinarily reserved for drug runners, bank robbers -- the sorts of alleged criminals the sheriff had spent years trying to sweep off the streets.
The two Debbies sat nearby. Like the sheriff, they were in handcuffs.
--
'In love'
Twenty-year-old Mike Carona was stuck stocking shelves at the Sunrise Market in Los Angeles County, working alongside his teenage wife and trying to make ends meet. But his young wife said in an interview with the Times that she knew Carona already had his eyes on another woman.
