You may recall a piece we covered in early October entitled, "Man Poses As Divorce Lawyer." At the time, Arizona resident Gary Karpin was facing 24 counts of theft and one count of fraud as a result of posing as a divorce lawyer and deceiving at least two dozen clients. (Check out how he was caught.)

Well, the verdict's in, and Karpin has been found guilty of all charges and has been sentenced to 15 years of jail time, reports zoniereport.com.

According to the article, the 57-year-old was ashamed of his behavior and said he would accept any punishment the court handed down (not like he has choice...).

What's more troubling than the $300,000 he essentially stole from his clients is the financial condition he left them in. One woman, who paid Karpin $90,000, was forced to declare bankruptcy and is unable to purchase plane tickets to visit her ailing parents.

There was no talk of restitution, but an additional hearing will address the matter, and a civil case has been filed against Karpin, as well.

Photo: The Arizona Republic

Ever since Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil tied the knot in May 2007, rumors have swirled that their marriage was over. The New York Post's Page Six, however, reports that two have split-this time for real. The paper says the 25-year-old admitted to a British tabloid that she has split from her 26-year-old husband.

She's a drug-challenged, Grammy-award-winning artist; he's currently serving time for assault and bribery charges. Both have their issues, sure. But is one of them codependence?

Winehouse may say it's over — she says that Fielder-Civil left her for a German model — but who's knows what she'll say tomorrow. One thing's for sure: Their reported shared sex kink (see the link to the article, above) is enough to keep our finger on the Winehouse-Civil pulse...

Photo: popbuzzUK.com

She was a tall, young Armani model from Yugoslavia. He was a short billionaire who happened to be the head of a Formula 1 racing federation. They met at a Formula 1 race in Italy in 1981, and didn’t speak a word of each other’s language. Well, she did know how to communicate one thing: rejection, with a fake phone number.

But, as The Telegraph of London said, “Ever since he was a boy, growing up in wartime Suffolk, Bernie Ecclestone has coveted things of sleekness and beauty that cost a lot to run and vanish at amazing speed.”

He tracked her down and married her.

The marriage crossed the finish line last week, after 24 years, which is actually a pretty long race. What is astonishing: Slavica Ecclestone’s filing for divorce seems to have caught her husband by surprise.

Let’s consider, this stunning woman, once a blonde now a brunette, and her two stunning daughters, Tamara, 24 and Petra, 19, lived under the thumb of a man who once said “Women should be in the kitchen... They should wear white, like a domestic appliance, and they shouldn’t be allowed out. You don’t take the washing machine out of the house, do you?”

Oh boy. And he didn’t see this coming?

When asked about the divorce action he told The Telegraph, "Really? ... You hear of things — I must find out."

He’s now 78, and she is 50. He is 5 foot 4, and she is a willowy 6 foot 2. Their daughters are stars in their own right in London, one a presenter, the other a fashion designer.

When are children acting in their parents’ best interests? And when are children acting in their own best interests? Usually these questions come up in billion-dollar cases, like the one with Anna Nichole Smith and her husband, J. Howard Johnson, 63 years her senior.

Who’s to say that Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy playmate, did not make the last years of Johnson’s life in Texas a lot happier, even if they never lived together?

Ok, let’s leave that extremely messy question behind.

Next question: if a penny-pinching widower named Claude Thomas, age 87, secretly marries Susana Martinez Ramirez, 45, in 2001, and if she spends a lot of his money on things like cars for her ex-husband and clothes and such, who is to say that Claude Thomas is not happy to be throwing some money around, including in her direction.

Why of course it’s his children. They say that their father amassed $1.5 million by being frugal. And that his second wife has spent down that estate to a mere $165,000 since their marriage in 2001. And so they petitioned the court to force their father to divorce his wife.

Although Claude Thomas had exhibited some early signs of dementia, in court he said that he was happy with his wife, and her spending habits. He had met her when she was pushing a tea cart in a local restaurant. After that she came to help clean his house. And even though she doesn’t speak much English, and he doesn’t speak much Spanish, they found comfort in each other after Thomas’s wife died.

Somehow, two years later, in 2001, Thomas and Ramirez got married. His children claim that there was no sign of the marriage. And that she didn’t live with him.

The divorce is final between Madonna and Guy Ritchie, and she can continue being a material girl.

Ritchie, who has his own wealth (estimated at more than $50 million), didn't want manimony and they both keep their assets.

The terms Madonna cited were "unreasonable behavior" by Ritchie — though the decree did not elaborate on what that could be. But what is reasonable is that they worked out an arrangement that didn't escalate into an ugly painful public battle a la Heather Mills and Paul McCartney. That divorce case has become a cautionary tale for any one.

Madonna and Ritchie worked out a custody arrangement where his sons Rocco, 8, and David Banda, 3, who was adopted from Malawi in 2006, can split their time between Britian and the United States.

But as we reported before, this is still a loss for the children since they will only get to see one parent periodically. When school is in session in the States, it's not as though Guy can just take them out for a quick Wednesday dinner or a weekend soccer game. There will be extended time away from his children. But like many fathers, he will deal with the cards he's dealt and play his best hand. Plus, the advantage of cellphones is that you can use them and soon the kids will be of age for email.

A British reverend has been banned from the ministry for seven years following an affair with a female parishioner, reports The Telegraph. Rev. Andrew Gair served as marriage therapist to a husband and wife, known only as Mr. and Mrs. X, in 2004.

Gair counseled the couple individually. He saw Mr. X on parish grounds, while he took "long walks in the countryside" with Mrs. X. (How romantic!) According to both Gair and Mrs. X, they fell in love and spoke of starting a new life together.

His guilt getting the best of him, Gair confessed the relationship to Mr. X, claiming that "these things happen." Gair and Mrs. X soon went their separate ways after realizing that they weren't meant to be together — although Mr. and Mrs. X are divorcing after all.

According to the article: Gair's scandal "emerged just days after the Rev. Teresa Davies, a motorbike-riding female vicar who held church services while drunk and went on wife-swapping holidays with her husband, was banned for 12 years."

Yikes. Those Church of England revs really know how to have a good time, don't they?

Madonna is about to find out that she can’t flex her muscles when it comes to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s parenting style. The self-described control freak reportedly gave a list of rigid rules documenting what Guy Ritchie could and couldn’t do when he has sons Rocco, 8, and David, 3.

The list reportedly included a ban on TV, no Miley Cyrus for these boys, no non-organic food such as microwaved pizza and soda, nor any clothes that were not 100 percent cotton and sent by her. She even wanted her total blessings on what water they drank — Kaballah preferred — and no toys that are “spiritually or ethically unsound.”

What this sounds like is a recipe for disaster.

Divorced women tell me all the time that the hardest part of divorce is not leaving the husband but leaving the kids with him. And if you, like Madonna, are used to control, it becomes agony to realize the limited power you now have over your ex-spouse’s parenting style. It’s as though handcuffs have been put on you just when you thought you were finally liberated.

“Moms go nuts about this but all they can do is write to Dear Abby or Firstwivesworld,” says noted divorce lawyer Raoul Felder. “The courts will not mini-manage or arbitrate parenting styles unless it involves safety or basic acceptable serious judgment issues.”

Such as?

“Other than allergies like peanuts, religion and sky diving, the hand of the parent who turned the kids over for their weekend with Pop has about as much to say in what the kids do there as Bush does in the choice of the next Secretary of State,” Felder says. “But isn’t that what week-end Dads are all about? Lot’s of hot dogs, chocolate and crummy blood and gory movies.”

The man allegedly responsible for his wife's disappearance has sought counsel from one of the country's top paternal rights divorce lawyers, states TMCnet.com.

Twenty-four-year-old Stacy Peterson was last seen just over a year ago driving away from her suburban Illinois home. Since that time, investigators have concluded Drew Peterson is in fact suspect, despite finding a lack of evidence — the Peterson home has been searched twice; investigators have impounded their cars for further investigation and sent divers into a nearby retention pond in an effort to track down clues on the case. The area has been combed by officials and volunteers alike.

Drew Peterson, who retired from the local police force shortly after Stacy's disappearance, has also been linked to the death of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. Savio's body was exhumed to reconsider the current cause of death, which was labeled accidental, shortly after Stacy's investigation began.

Peterson has take an angry stance over Stacy's disappearance, claiming his wife most certainly left him for another man. When asked if he would take her back, should she return, he said it would "take a lot of talking" to persuade him.

Which is why it's not so strange that the 54-year-old met with attorney Jeffrey Leving last week to seek divorce information on the grounds of desertion. Peterson initially denied meeting with Leving (Leving represented Elian Gonzales's father and won custody of the Cuban child from his U.S. foster family on behalf of his client), but finally divulged that a divorce would allow him to move his children to a new location — once the marital assets had been divided.

Photo: ABC News

Let’s cast the movie in our minds. Shirley MacLaine could play Rebecca Willis, the dirty dancing granny. No, MacLaine is too old. Meryl Streep?

Rebecca Willis was back in the news last week after being awarded $275,000 in a settlement with the town of Marshall, North Carolina. That comes some seven years after being banned from the town community center for dancing in a "sexually provocative manner — gyrating and simulating sexual intercourse with her partner.”

She was suggestive. She was lewd.

She wore short skirts.

She exposed her panties, or worse!

The townspeople (the population is 831) said their children would be scarred for life. They didn’t just ban Mrs. Willis, they banned her “for life.”

Why? Because Rebecca Willis was a 56 year old divorced woman. And when the townsfolk asked her to tone it down, she just danced some more.

For her, it was a matter of freedom of speech. At least that’s what her lawyer, Jon Sasser, argued, after she found him through the ACLU. So the case was argued, appealed, argued, appealed. Up and down the courts for five years, during which time the dancing divorcee got married again.

Now 64, she gave a little dance of joy after the settlement (out of which she will have to pay her lawyer). She considers it a victory, even though she had to promise not to dance in the town center again. “It just tickles me to death,” she said.

The most recent decision came after her lawyer asked the town to prove she wasn’t being singled out. Jon Sasser told First Wives World that much of the town’s attention seemed focused on the fact that Mrs. Willis was divorced.

“Some witnesses testified that she was fine when she was married, but became wilder after her divorce,” he said. “There was definitely an undertone of jealousy.”

Pakistani women may have an entirely new outlook on divorce, if family law legislation is passed, reports New Delhi new web site ndtv.com. The Council of Islamic Ideology has proposed that a woman who files for separation is automatically granted a divorce if her husband does not respond within 90 days.

Currently, a man can divorce his spouse verbally (by simply stating "divorce") and privately, says Reuters. Women, however, must appear before family court — but first must surrender any right to mehr, or money her husband pledged to her when the two married.

The proposal is meeting stiff opposition, as you can imagine, from religious sectors, which claim the change challenges Islamic law.