166
PARTISAN REVIEW
them she had to use an assumed name because her husband was a
wife-beater and she was on the lam from him. Clancy thought a man
might do well to join a chapter of AA in a medium New York suburb
like Mount Vernon. Although our
homage
to Dashiel Hammett never
got published, it occurred to me after reading Ellen Hawkes's gritty
account of Ginny Foat - of mobile, violent America from the sixties
through the eighties and the new breed of California fast-track femi–
nists - that my Atlanta notion wasn't too far off the mark. Ginny
Foat's own saga, as described by Hawkes, is true Ida Lupino with a
sou
p~on
Mildred Pierce and Jessica Lange doing the paler remake.
Hawkes recounts the story of a woman who essentially hid her past
by using the feminist movement to invent a new self.
But Ginny Foat could no longer totally conceal that past after
her second husband, Jack Sidote, in 1977, confessed to Nevada
police two 1965 robbery murders . He alleged that his exwife (then
known as Virginia Galluzo) lured an Argentinian businessman,
Moises Chayo, from the bar in Bourbon Street where she worked as
a go-go girl and Sidote worked as a barman, into their car and blud–
geoned him. The couple fled to Nevada where (according to Sidote)
Ginny Foat found another victim in a Reno casino whom she also
killed. In 1977 in a Nevada court Sidote plea-bargained: his sentence
was lightened in exchange for his testimony against his exwife.
Later, he reneged, and refused to testify against her. Foat, who had
been under arrest in Nevada, then returned to Los Angeles and her
third husband-a caterer, Raymond Foat, and her new career as
president of California NOW. Though the Louisiana courts seemed
remarkably indolent about the Chayo Bourbon Street murder, even–
tually they caught up with Ginny Foat in California. The Los Angeles
police knew of her not because she was a prominent leader of NOW,
but because in 1969 she had been with a small-time hood, Richard
Busconi, when he got pumped full of bullets in front of a San Pedro
bar. Foat had been called by the police as a witness in their investi–
gation of the Busconi murder. Ginny Foat's past had been
varied.
During Foat's unsuccessful attempt in 1983 to fight extradition
to Louisiana for what later turned into her sensational trial for the
Chayo Bourbon Street murder, her NOW spokeswoman, Jan Hol–
den, primly told the press: "We want to stress who she is
today,
not
who she was before ."
But it is, precisely, the rise of Ginny Foat that is so fascinating.
She met husband number three, (after him there was a fourth, eight-
