Gabriel Villa, now 90, married Christina Carta, now 59, in New York in 1994 but just months later, he secretly flew to the Dominican Republic to get a divorce to protect his considerable assets.
Once there, he hired lawyers for both himself and her and told a court that life with her was “unbearable”.
He then flew home to their Manhattan apartment, where he and Christina lived together happily as man and wife for the next two decades, until a tax bill arrived without her name on it.
She hired a lawyer to investigate the omission and discovered the hushed-up divorce. She is now seeking to have the divorce nullified.
