Get a job, creep!
An unemployed Manhattan man suspected of murdering his estranged wife on New Year’s Eve 2009 wants the public to pick up his legal tab as he attempts to block her parents from seeing their grandkids, a judge revealed today.
Roderick Covlin, a former financial whiz who hasn’t worked in more than two years, had asked Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Emily Jane Goodman to assign him a public lawyer to help battle his late wife Shele’s ailing parents from having visits with their two kids, ages 5 and 11.
But Goodman scoffed at the request, noting that Shele’s parents, Joel and Jaelene Danishefsky, said the former finance worker had been unemployed by choice.
She suggested that the freeloader — who’s been living at his parents’ home in tony Scarsdale — get his folks to pay for a lawyer or he could pay for his own.
“He could get a job and pay the attorneys he hires,” the judge said, saying it would be a “travesty” if the cash-strapped state had to pay his legal tab.
“It is reasonable to expect him to work at something before the public pays his legal fees,” the judge said.
Covlin is appealing her ruling, which has resulted in a hearing on the grandparents’ request for visitation being postponed.
The lawyer for the grandparents, Marilyn Chinitz, said her clients hadn’t seen their grandkids in over a year and a half, ever since Covlin – who’s long been the primary suspect in the murder of his wife – got full custody of the pair.
“I have two loving grandparents who tragically lost their daughter, and now tragically are losing their grandchildren,” Chinitz said.
She also said she’s not sure how much longer the ailing grandparents can fight.
“I don’t know if they will be alive when this [case] gets heard,” Chinitz said, noting that “Mr. Danishefsky was able to walk into the courtroom when this case started. Now he’s in a wheelchair.”
The still grieving dad was in the front row, two rows in front of his former son-in-law.
Chinitz pleaded for her clients to have even minimal visitation with their grandkids, but Goodman refused, saying she still wanted to have a full hearing on whether that would be in their best interests. The lawyer for Covlin’s parents, Bonnie Rabin, suggested it wouldn’t be, and that the reason the visitation was cut off in the first place was because of comments the grandparents made about Covlin.
The back and forth – and the revelations about Covlin’s claimed money woes – came after Goodman decided to lift an earlier order sealing proceedings in the hotly-contested case.
Covlin was slapped with a wrongful death suit by his estranged wife’s estate last month, accusing him of having strangled her in an apartment in the W. 68th Street building they both lived in. She was slated to change her will to exclude Covlin – who she’d already gotten a religious divorce from – as a beneficiary the next day.
Police have called Covlin a prime suspect in the case, but sources say efforts to prosecute Covlin have been hampered because of forensic issues. Sheles’ family initially objected to having an autopsy done for religious reasons, and the body was badly decomposed by the time they got a rabbi’s blessing to exhume the body three months later.
A knowledgeable source said Covlin could still be arrested in the case as soon as this spring, but his newly hired criminal lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, said reports of his client’s imminent arrest have been greatly exaggerated.
Gottlieb said he’d had a meeting with prosecutor John Wolfstaetter of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, and said “it’s clear to me” that the DA’s office “never stated that Mr. Covlin was about to be charged.”
“It’s also clear to me that there are individuals who are misleading the public and the press by falsely stating that Mr. Covlin is going to be charged in the murder,” he said, adding that he was told they have “an investigation into Shele Covlin’s death, but that they are not focusing exclusively on any one person. They are looking at everything, as the DA should do to find the truth.”
Gottlieb earlier this week said of Covlin, “He was not involved in any way whatsoever with the tragic death of his wife.”
“Up to now he chose not to respond to the scurillous comments made by other to shield his very young children from the media spotlight. But enough is enough — he is through with being a punching bag for others who do not have the children’s welfare at heart.”
“Finally he will defend himself and is confident that the DA will not charge him with any crimes for one very simple reason: he didn’t commit any crimes,” Gottlieb said.