Did This Real Housewife of New Jersey Have a Past Life as Coked-up Stripper in Miami?

We heard a few murmurs that Bravo was scouting Miami as a possible setting for the next Real Housewives season, but it turns out the show that plucks prime housewife stereotypes from the nation's most ridiculous regions and watches them fight to the proverbial death on camera has decided to go with Washington,...

By Kyle Munzenrieder

May 28, 2009

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We heard a few murmurs that Bravo was scouting Miami as a possible setting for the next Real Housewives season, but it turns out the show that plucks prime housewife stereotypes from the nation's most ridiculous regions and watches them fight to the proverbial death on camera has decided to go with Washington, D.C., and Beverly Hills as the next "lucky" towns. However, it seems that one reliable Miami stereotype has snuck its way onto Real Housewives of New Jersey. Spoiler alert: Stop reading now if you want your sacred viewing of reality TV untarnished.

Danielle Staub stars as the mysterious outsider on the current season, and while it's not exactly a Lost-caliber mystery, most of the season deals with the others learning about her shady past. It apparently involves stripping, drugs, Colombian cartel connections, and prostitution. Last week, one of the ladies let it slip that the key to her past was contained in the book A Cop Without a Badge. The housewives are not familiar with these "book" things, so while they wait a week to hire someone to read it for them, the Internet has already uncovered the tome.

Among other things, it seems Danielle spent a good deal of time post-prison, pre-Jersey (which is worse?) in Miami as a coked-up nympho stripper with organized crime ties. Charming back in the '80s. Then again, in the '80s, who in Miami wasn't coked up, having lots of sex, and mingling with mobsters?

Back then, Danielle was going by the name of Beverly Merrill and using Danielle as her stripper name. She met Kevin Maher, the central character of the book, at a party.

She was brunette. Long, perfectly shaped legs poked out of her leather hot pants just as provocatively as her braless breasts strained against her low-cut blouse." And no, she wasn't wearing any underwear. After she and Maher have "explosive sex," he thinks to himself, "This is a good person. She has no morals, but she's a good person."

The book doesn't have a lot of info about her life before Maher -- the Miami years apparently -- and he soon takes her to New Jersey and briefly marries her until he decides he wants kids and realizes she wouldn't be the best mother material.

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