The flamboyant wife of billionaire Jack Kent Cooke left federal court all smiles and in a limo, but the deportation proceedings against her may signal trouble ahead.
Marlena Ramallo Chalmers Cooke - estranged from and possibly not legally married to the owner of the Washington Redskins football team - was freed on $50,000 bail Monday in U.S. District Court following her arrest by the Immigration and Naturalization Service after she lost an appeal of her deportation order.Mrs. Cooke, who pleaded guilty in 1986 to a drug trafficking charge and served time in a federal penitentiary, was taken into custody at her apartment in Alexandria, Va., after INS officials worked out an agreement with her lawyers, said INS spokesman Verne Jervis.
Last week, she lost her appeal of the deportation order originally issued in 1988, before she married Cooke.
Jervis said the agency considers Mrs. Cooke deportable because she left the country voluntarily while she was appealing the deportation order. That amounts to "self-deportation," and a waiving of her right to remain in the country, he said.
Mrs. Cooke, about half the age of her 81-year-old husband, has made headlines by mysteriously shooting herself in the hand, driving through Georgetown with a man she identified as her nephew clinging to the hood of her car, and throwing a high-heeled shoe at a police officer who stopped her that night.