Death Ends Double Life, and 2 Families Are Suffering

The double life that sailor Antonio Rivera led for 26 years--shuttling between two women, two families, each oblivious of the other’s existence--has been the plot of burlesque comedies that were already ancient when Julius Caesar went to the theater.

Except this time, it had a decidedly unhappy ending.

Rivera, 50, didn’t get caught until he died of a heart attack in the San Francisco International Airport terminal last July on his way to another voyage on a merchant ship.

And the complications for the two women and four children he left behind are far from hilarious. Instead, said attorney Edward McKinnon, representing Rivera’s wife, Maria, of Chula Vista, “he left a lot of heartache behind him.”

For 26 years, “this guy was leading a double life,” McKinnon said, and for 26 years it evidently worked. Rivera apparently divided his shore leave, and at least some of his salary, between the Chula Vista home where his wife and their three children waited and the Long Beach home of his “other wife”--a woman he had met and lived with all those years, and their daughter, now in her 20s.

When he died, the mathematics no longer worked. There were two grieving women and there was one body.

On Tuesday, Maria Rivera and her two minor children, a 17-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, filed suit against the San Mateo County coroner’s office on charges of negligence, claiming $450,000 in compensatory damages because the coroner there had turned over Rivera’s body to a Long Beach woman who is not named in the lawsuit, the other woman who believed that she was the next of kin and was listed as such on the death certificate, McKinnon said:

With Rivera’s body, the lawsuit claims, went his personal effects--watches, passport, photos, cash, wallet, camera, keys, suitcase--and one wedding ring. The Long Beach woman got them from the San Mateo coroner, McKinnon said, and Maria Rivera believes that they belong to her.

The shock of it--learning of her husband’s death and learning of his double life--caused “extreme mental anguish and pain, nervous shock and humiliations,” Maria Rivera declared in the lawsuit.

And to top it off, McKinnon said, Rivera had always wanted to be buried at sea--Maria Rivera said so in the claim she filed in San Mateo County last October, a claim that was rejected. But his body, taken to Los Angeles by the Long Beach woman “(listed) as surviving spouse,” according to the suit--is buried in All Souls Cemetery, said an employee of the Long Beach mortuary that handled his body.

Neither woman was available for comment Wednesday: “It’s pretty much of a tragedy for both families,” McKinnon said.

San Mateo County Dist. Atty. Jim Fox said he could not comment until he had reviewed the lawsuit.

Rivera’s marital difficulties evidently began in New York in 1957, McKinnon said, where Rivera--then apparently working as a butcher--was divorced by his first wife, by whom he had a son, now dead, and a daughter.

In the decree, McKinnon said, Judge Edward Koch--now the mayor of New York City--ordered Rivera not to remarry in New York, something Koch could do under laws, no longer in effect, that were designed to ensure that a divorced man not begin a second family while he still had to provide for the first one, McKinnon explained.

A year later he met Maria and married her. At about the same time, he also met the woman in Long Beach and eventually set up housekeeping in two towns more than 100 miles apart, McKinnon said. For 26 years, as Rivera worked as a merchant seaman, his two women waited at home, each presuming, McKinnon said, that when he was not with her, he was at sea.

The balancing act almost tipped a few months before Rivera’s death, McKinnon said. A heart attack put him in Long Beach Naval Hospital, and when an anxious Maria called and said she was going to see him, Rivera, from his bed, told her not to, that he would let her know how he was, McKinnon said.

‘Someone ... Knew’

Several months later, on Saturday, July 14, he died, and the fabric began to unravel. When Rivera failed to report to his ship, one shipmate called Long Beach and another called Maria in Chula Vista, McKinnon said. “Someone on that ship knew he had more than one wife,” he said. The seamen later took up a collection for Maria.

Shortly after the coroner called Maria about the body--she begged to be given until Monday to call her brother and make a decision--the Long Beach woman made contact as well, McKinnon said, claimed the body as the next of kin and made arrangements to take Rivera to Long Beach.

By the time Maria called the coroner back on Monday, “she was told everything had been taken care of,” McKinnon said. “The body had been released to his wife and had been shipped to Los Angeles.”

The problems began then. Until recently, McKinnon said, when Maria got Maritime Union benefits, some insurance money and Social Security for the children, “she had a real problem. . . . She had a death certificate listing somebody else as the surviving spouse,” and she “had to go through the whole story.”

No will has turned up. “Maybe he had them (his personal affairs) so scrambled up he couldn’t get them straight,” McKinnon said.