Because he was not only one of the richest men in a city full of very rich men – but also a serious Catholic who threw his considerable financial and political weight behind socially conservative causes. Like Angels Assist. Patrick Kelleher was a Wall Streeter who decided twenty years ago, while still in his late thirties, to move his entire mutual funds operation out to Southern California. I googled a great deal about Patrick Kelleher when I discovered he was the chief underwriter of Angels Assist. How, in his two decades in LA, his net worth had risen from a mere $50 million to close to $650 million. How he was, in his younger days, very much the hotshot financier around town, dating actresses and models, known for his extravagance and for having grown up in a bog Irish American background not dissimilar from me … only in South Boston where his dad had been a fireman. He too was raised a serious Catholic. But a very lapsed one. And famously unmarried. Until he got together with Cheryl Chandler – who, back in 2010, was one of the hottest young actresses in Hollywood with an immense fan base and a huge career in romantic comedies where she always played the beautiful, sought-after woman. She was twenty-five when she married the fifty-year old Kelleher. She was pregnant a year later – but had a much-publicized abortion when she filed for divorce, accusing Kelleher of physical and emotional abuse, not to mention being a control freak nightmare. Kelleher, in turn, went after her career – letting it be known that he had discovered (courtesy of a team of private detectives) that she’d been having an affair with her co-star on two of her more successful films, Jason Meese, an actor whom Klara once described as ‘Mr Hunk who doubles in the role of Prince Not So Bright’. Kelleher also alleged that the reason his wife had a secret abortion was to eliminate the possibility of a paternity test … as it wasn’t known if Kelleher or Meese was the father. Cheryl Chandler denied this version of events. So too did Jason Meese. But after word got out about her affair with her co-star her career went into something of a tailspin. Then, two years after her very publicized divorce (where she came out with $10 million – which, given Kelleher’s net worth, was the equivalent of a speeding ticket) – she and Meese were killed in a car accident en route to Vegas. She was heading there to start work on a small independent film – her first acting gig since her private life became the stuff of supermarket tabloids and reality news shows. Her Porsche blew a tire while she was speeding along the interstate at 92 mph (according to the police records – which also went public everywhere). The Porsche somersaulted three times on this empty stretch of desert highway before exploding into flames. In the wake of her death Kelleher expressed what seemed to many to be genuine grief, saying that he had deeply loved his wife, had been heartbroken when she left him, and that all the bad publicity that circled her afterwards was the media’s own doing; that he’d never orchestrated any of it. Cheryl’s friends and fans thought otherwise – some even wondering out loud if Kelleher had been behind their deaths. The police investigation into the accident ruled it just that: an accident. But many in Cheryl’s camp screamed that he had paid for a cover-up. Just as many of Kelleher’s friends in the press (especially at Fox News and the also-Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal) came out swinging in his defense, detailing Meese’s extensive drug use (he was a cokehead) and Cheryl’s many fines for reckless driving. They also published more lurid photographs of the couple in bed … which Kelleher maintained were masterminded by grubby paparazzi. In the wake of her death, Kelleher became (in Klara’s words) ‘a tsunami of bullshit compassion’. Not only did he set up five big acting scholarships every year in Cheryl’s name at CalArts (her alma mater) – and indicated they should be given in favor of minority and LGBT students – but he also donated $20 million to a statewide ‘anti-drug and responsible driving’ educational program (which, according to my daughter, could all be boiled down to ‘if you can afford to drive a Porsche don’t break speed limits when coked up’). Most tellingly, Kelleher admitted in several carefully orchestrated interviews that his wife’s tragic death had rekindled his Catholic faith. He was giving a great deal to Catholic food programs, Catholic Third World education programs. But his biggest project, without question, was Angels Assist. Todor had shrewdly become his priestly mouthpiece – who, in keeping with Kelleher’s public image, was compassionate and apparently reasonable … yet simultaneously relentless when it came to insisting that abortion was outright murder.