Indictment Provides Grim Finale to What Once Seemed a Fairy Tale : It May Be Midnight for Cinderella

In the early 1970s, Nancy Hoover seemed a model Del Mar wife and mother, running an art center for the Del Mar schools, working as an administrative assistant at Psychology Today magazine, serving as PTA president.

A San Diego native, whose family had hopscotched across the country following their Navy pilot father, Hoover craved community involvement and later dove into politics, serving on the Del Mar City Council for eight years and serving a spell as mayor.

By 1983, she had shed her housewife image and had been transformed into the queen of J. David & Co. She was in charge of the office staff--hiring and promoting; lived in luxurious homes; threw extravagant parties, and doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to local charities and political causes.

Now, three years later, she has been indicted by a federal grand jury on 234 counts of fraud, conspiracy and income tax evasion.

Nancy Hoover met J. David (Jerry) Dominelli when both worked as stock brokers at Prudential Bache Securities in La Jolla (known then as Bache, Halsey, Stuart) in the mid-1970s. Their immediate supervisor was George Hoover, Nancy’s husband.

Hoover was gregarious, and her infectious smile won her friends and clients. Sitting next to her, in what was known as “the pit,” was Dominelli, a shy, clumsy colleague with a mediocre stock trading record.

Both her husband and her fellow workers were stunned when Hoover left her husband for Dominelli. Together, they started J. David & Co. in late 1979.

As partners, Hoover and Dominelli couldn’t have been more dissimilar, but their personalities complemented each other. Where Hoover was fit and athletic, Dominelli was slovenly and unhealthy-looking. She was politically active and liberal, he was reclusive and slightly libertarian.

They lived what seemed to outsiders a fairy tale existance, sharing a spacious Rancho Santa Fe estate and working side by side in J. David’s opulent La Jolla offices.

But there was tension, in the office and at home.

Dominelli maintained that he had divorced his wife, Antje, but he never had.

In fact, in February, 1984, just weeks after the J. David bankruptcy, Hoover told a reporter that Dominelli was divorced. The reporter, offering that court records failed to support that claim, corrected her. Hoover was livid.

That night, over dinner with friends, Hoover chose not to discuss the failed firm, or the fact that Dominelli’s personal and business assets had been frozen by a federal judge, or that their dream world had crumbled.

Instead, Hoover berated Dominelli in front of friends for lying to her about being divorced.

In the office, the couple’s shouting matches were legendary. While Dominelli supposedly made foreign currency trades, Hoover brokered stock and was in charge of running the office. She was successful at the former--earning $1.8 million in one 12-month period--but by most accounts she was a sloppy and disorganized manager.

Her political acumen was respected, but colleagues described her as a “basket case” in terms of organizational skills.

Nonetheless, J. David’s seeming success was very much a part of Hoover’s social awareness, her ready smile and her breezy style.

In the end, the J. David saga was as much a tortured love tale as it was an investment swindle. Insiders say Dominelli saw in Hoover the outgoing, socially swinging person he could never be. Hoover was attracted to Dominelli by the money and power he could provide.

Hoover has made a new life for herself since the collapse of J. David. She married millionaire businessman Kenneth Hunter and lives with her husband in Santa Barbara. She spends part of her time delivering hot meals to the elderly and working in the city’s library. The library job is part of the three-year probation and community service sentence she received after pleading guilty in April to charges of illegally funneling money into Roger Hedgecock’s 1983 campaign for mayor.