Real Housewives Of New Jersey’s Danielle Staub’s Miami Past

If you’ve been watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey, you know there is a lot in store this season regarding divorcée Danielle’s shady past. In her ex-husband’s tell-tale book, Cop Without a Badge, ex-con turned informant Kevin Maher talks about Staub’s criminal history, including her life in Miami and involvement with a Colombian drug cartel. If that doesn’t make you a real housewife, we’re not sure what does.

Maher met Staub at the Mayfair Hotel [Ed. note: This is where we had our prom!], née Beverly Merrill, while he was working a DEA case in Miami, Florida. According to Maher, Merrill had been involved with a “big-time” Colombian cocaine dealer and was out on a $10,000 bail for charges including kidnapping, extortion and drug-possession. Merrill had been partying with a cocaine dealer when he was caught holding a wealthy client for ransom. At the time, she was a paid escort and, according to Maher, a nymphomaniac (At one point in the series, she offers her 45 26-year-old boyfriend a quickie, on camera, in a restaurant bathroom. He mulls it over before aging another 17 years.) with whom he had sex on a bathroom floor the night they met, directly after she had participated in a cocaine-fueled orgy. Double dipping: Some people dig it.

Recalls Maher in words reminiscent of, perhaps, Salinger:

I was introduced to Beverly, and I thought she was one of the sexiest women I had ever seen. She was wearing leather hot pants and had her leg up over the arm of a chair - and it was clear she wasn’t wearing panties!

Maher and Merrill soon began a relationship and Maher paid for his new girlfriend to move into a Queens apartment with two strippers. He also got her a job at the Satin Dolls strip club in Lodi, New Jersey, where she would bring in something like $3,000 a night dancing under the name “Danielle.” Maher was married at the time but said Merrill didn’t care. Women who are cavalier about commitment being universally irresistible, Maher married her as well. 

Both of Maher’s marriages ended at around the same time, and he says that, last he saw of Merrill, she was still dancing. After her divorce, Merrill married exercise equipment magnate Thomas Staub, with whom she had two daughters. Danielle Staub, as she is now known, is now the resident “bad girl” of the housewives and gaining lots of face time and publicity - attention that worries Maher, who says that, due to her past involvement with drug lords, her life could be in danger:

She did a lot of things that I think will put her life in danger. She was involved with the drug cartels in Cali and Medellín.

Danielle has responded to the allegations made in Maher’s book on her Bravo blog:

Number one - over two and a half decades ago I was arrested. I was just a child, with no guidance or parents to speak of, in an industry that was very fast paced. I got in with the wrong crowd, and was not completely aware of the serious nature of my surroundings. I did not kidnap anyone. I am not a prostitute. I was merely at the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time. I apologize for being vague, but this is all I can reveal at this time.

…And reveals she loves Latin dancing:

A dance floor to me is what a canvas is to a painter. It is where I feel most free to express myself without words. I apologize if I misinterpreted the meaning of our dance that evening, and furthermore if I offended anyone. I was just having fun like everyone else, but perhaps I was taking it too seriously, because I have always wanted to learn Latin dancing. 

Danielle, you go right on ‘head. Do a salsachatalimbo and let her freak flag fly. God knows these carefree, dance-filled days will come to an untimely end should a pissed off drug lord track you down.

Drugs, Prison & Stripping! [Star, print version]