This slow-talking, cowboy boot-wearing, gun-carrying detective has been busting international criminals for 26 years. But as he begins to describe his role in recovering the Jacopo painting, his demeanor softens. “Have you seen the Jacopo painting?” he asks enthusiastically. “It is stunning. We made a copy and blew it up for our office.”

At 6-foot-4, Webber greets me with a big, gentle smile. As he meticulously repeats his main points in a slight drawl, he comes across more like a politician than a James Bond — oozing the simplest charm while speaking of the most complicated and highly sensitive matters.

“We’re rural folk, my family,” he says. “But I bring my toddlers to art and history museums every weekend. I love learning about art. I love figuring out puzzles, and art theft poses the greatest, most multileveled ones around.” Webber handles all kinds of crimes, but has been one of the few at customs specializing in art theft cases over the last 10 years. He originally volunteered to work on those because he had fond memories of his college art history classes.

In the wake of the recent Jacopo recovery, Webber is taking art theft investigation to a new level. Beginning last week, Webber convened a unit of six agents who will undergo special training to handle such cases. Art theft seizures demand an ability to recognize valuable art, verify the authenticity of a piece and properly preserve it, and the job requires a masterful grasp of international regulations and the ability to work with people of astounding wealth and expertise. As in the case of the Jacopo piece, there are possibly hundreds of masterpieces hanging illicitly in living rooms or churches across the country.

“The first step is really raising awareness,” Webber says. His unit has already launched the first “Most Wanted” list on the Customs Web site. Over the past few years, Webber has seized over $30 million worth of stolen art and artifacts — in addition to making thousands of narcotics busts.

At first glance, Frank Vaccaro, owner of Master of Furniture in Baldwin, N.Y., and the man arrested in the Jacopo case, doesn’t come across as an aesthete either. And certainly not someone who could spot a classic Renaissance painting out of a pile of posters and tacky frames. But he did: In 1998, a school art teacher, Sister Rose Mary Phol, brought the Jacopo painting to Vaccaro to have the frame restored. He noticed that the structure of the frame was anachronistic. He carefully removed a family photo that the nun had glued on top of Christ’s portrait and began to research the painting. He returned the frame to Phol without the portrait, telling her he had thrown it away.

Meanwhile, Vaccaro had already contacted the Weimar Museum, determined that the painting had indeed been stolen in 1945 and proven in photos that he had it. He demanded a $100,000 finder’s fee, and museum officials considered the request extortion. They called the U.S. Customs Service for help.

Enter Joseph Webber and Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt.

Goldblatt went undercover as a Weimar representative and began to “negotiate” with Vaccaro. During recorded phone conversations, she obtained his address, a description of the painting and his demands. On Nov. 8, 1999, the agents had enough proof of ill intent, and obtained a search warrant. Agents found the small painting hidden in the ceiling of the furniture store. Vaccaro was arrested on the spot.

At the time, the museum estimated the painting’s value between $150,000 and $400,000. It was subsequently appraised at $5 million, and because Vaccaro’s demand was low in comparison to the actual value of the painting, charges were dropped. “I am happy the painting is back in the museum. That’s what I wanted all along,” he says. He just wanted a finder’s fee as well.

And is that so wrong? After all, if it hadn’t been for Vaccaro’s astuteness, the portrait might never have been recovered at all. According to Chicago-based art theft attorney Thaddeus J. Stauber, while stolen property in general should be returned with or without reward, there is an even greater responsibility to return stolen art unconditionally. “Every piece of art is unique, there is only one, created in time. In that sense, art is irreplaceable. And therefore, there is a higher ethical demand to get it to its owner.”

The good news is that “The Bust of Christ” did finally go back to Germany last week, just in time for Christmas — and in immaculate condition. Of its mysterious half-century journey, investigators have only been able to piece together the following: In 1972, Msg. Thomas Campbell, pastor of the now-defunct St. John’s Moda Christi RC Parish in Queens, N.Y., gave the painting to the school art teacher, Sister Rose Mary Phol. Campbell, now 85, has told Customs investigators that he can’t recall how he came to be in possession of the painting, but he guesses that a parishioner may have given it to him.

Approximately 65 percent of all U.S. art imports arrive through the Port of New York, and in 2000 alone, the New York Office of Investigations seized $5.5 million in art fraud, accounting for 80 percent of Customs art seizures nationwide. The FBI is the other government agency that plays a leading role in recovering stolen art.

Robert Speil, a private investigator who spent 20 years investigating art-related crimes for the FBI, says there are no cases more fascinating than art theft. “For all crime, you get to work with eccentrics on both sides of the game, but in art investigations in particular, the people are more complex,” says Speil, who also was turned on to art by his college art history courses. “The art experts are different from those who specialize in fur, for example. Art specialists are professors. I prefer working with them.”

And the criminals are a unique bunch, too, he says. In one of Speil’s favorite cases, a 35-year-old, drunk high school dropout shared Speil’s fascination with this sort of refined, cerebral-minded crime. And the bond between the two men, at least according to the thief, was palpable.

Charles Richmond, a serial art thief, would lure gay men into private quarters — Richmond says he, himself, is heterosexual — steal their wallets and run. But he wasn’t after their money. He wanted their I.D.s. He would then go to art galleries, study their collections at the library and return to initiate a sophisticated and ongoing dialogue with gallery staff. After weeks of softening them up, he would ask a question so challenging that the good-natured gallery attendant would leave the room to look up the answer. That’s when Richmond would grab a painting and run — but certainly not hide. He would typically scurry right next door to a neighboring gallery, stopping only to take one deep breath, and then calmly walk in. After showing his stolen I.D., he would sell the piece for about 10 percent of its value. He would cash the checks using the same I.D.

While Speil was searching for this quirky thief, Richmond was arrested twice for shoplifting. The first time, he had no fake I.D. with him so his real name was acquired and photographs and fingerprints were taken. The same week, he stole and sold a painting, posing as one of his gay victims, John Rogers. He was later busted for shoplifting again, and this time used Rogers’ I.D.

The FBI’s computer system noted the matching fingerprints, and Speil now had a face and name to go with. It was just a matter of alerting all the galleries in New York to his identity. Within six months, an attendant at a gallery on Madison Avenue called Speil, informing him that Richmond had just left the gallery. The FBI’s headquarters at that time were four blocks away, and Speil and three other armed agents ran up and down Madison Avenue for about 40 minutes until they saw Richmond walk out of a different gallery, stolen painting in tow. They arrested him on the spot and within half an hour Richmond was “beaming with pride,” confessing everything. He sent Speil Christmas cards from jail. “He sees us as players in the same game,” says Speil. “And he thinks we all — him included — did a great job.”

Richmond is out of prison and nowhere to be found this moment, according to Speil. “He began to think that the whole world, including the governor and I, were after him.” When he got out of jail, Speil asked Richmond if he had any leads on any other illegal activity in the area, and apparently Richmond was alarmed by the line of questioning — perhaps the insinuation was too artless for Richmond.

Vaccaro seems to have emerged from his foray into art crime in better condition, if a little overwhelmed. No matter how he tries to lose himself in his furniture store’s holiday hustle, he knows that if he had played his cards just a little differently, he could have become somewhat of a hero in the history of art, rather than a perpetrator.

“But this is my calling,” says the popular, upper-middle-class Duke graduate, referring to her commitment to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Joining religious life is a long journey, however, and she recognizes that she can still change her mind.

Last week, Camardo entered her novitiate year, the third and final year of religious life before she takes her first, temporary vows. She lives with eight women between the ages of 50 and 80, and one 27-year-old, at the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kan. There are no exact figures, but there are probably fewer than 100 nuns under 40 in the United States.

Camardo is radical, by any standards. Her room in the “Motherhouse” — a wing of a huge brick building that houses retired and infirm sisters — is decorated only by a portrait of Dorothy Day, the Catholic, Communist, feminist activist who anticipated Liberation Theology by 30 years. She writes letters to Congress and protests the School of Americas, the government organization that trains foreign soldiers in anti-guerrilla warfare. She votes Democratic, no matter the candidate’s stance on abortion. In fact, she dropped out of her school’s pro-life association, uncomfortable with its demonstration tactics. And she believes that it’s downright un-Christian to discriminate against gays, as the major tenet of Catholicism holds that every person has an inherent dignity. “I won’t use the Bible to justify oppressing others,” she says. “The way Scripture works, you can use it to justify anything you want without taking into regard the historical context of the time it was written.”

Camardo knows her views on the Bible aren’t popular among traditional Catholics and admits that, in the end, she will submit to the law of the church. But if she’s so frustrated with some of the church’s stances, why would she become a nun? Why can’t she devote herself to social work on her own terms? Why must she acquiesce to standards she rejects? And why be celibate? At first, this last question is only half-answered:

“I have yet to meet a man who shares the same commitment to caring. And it’s hard to imagine that ever happening,” she says. She is referring to her two main exes: Ken, her high school sweetheart, now a high-powered yuppie, and Sean, a man she met while studying for her novitiate in Denver. Sean sounded like the more promising match. A former priest candidate, he remains committed to social justice through God. But even he put unrelenting pressure on her to spend time with him, and she found herself again torn between her ideals and a partner.

“I am committed to social work,” she says. “And I don’t want to compromise my values in any way for a relationship.”

Camardo’s ex-boyfriends may be tortured by the prospect of her vows, but not exactly surprised by them. During college, this straight-A student spent most of her free time tutoring Hispanic fourth-graders in English, clearing fields of leftover crops to be brought to food pantries and bringing Communion to Catholic hospital patients. During her sophomore year, she helped build a school in a tiny village in Honduras. As a senior, she was elected vice president of her “alternative” sorority. She and her secular sisters focused on philanthropy, AIDS and building a women’s community. This sisterhood wasn’t outwardly about God, but it wasn’t about hazing and fashion, either.

After graduation, Camardo moved to Kansas to join a program for socially concerned Catholic women, and for those considering religious life. She coordinated a job training program for welfare moms, encouraged employers to hire the less privileged and managed a program that encouraged good fathering and mothering. “I don’t have a particular cause. I just try to stay balanced,” she says.

So two things are clear: Camardo is a devoted activist and is bothered by the pressures of relationships. But where is God in all this? She was beginning to sound more like a hopelessly single, atheist, post-Holocaust Jew — driven by guilt and overeducation to making the world a better place — than a Catholic woman betrothed to the Lord.

It was in 1998 when Camardo had a “real God moment.” After years of reading and talking about religious life, she decided to attend a religious retreat for women who were trying to discern their calling. “In the year before, I woke up so many times in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this!’” But something changed on her first morning at the retreat: She says she was finally blessed with a moment of “heightened awareness.” Camardo, isolated within a world of spiritual sisters, finds it nearly impossible to explain in lay terms the course of events or feelings that led her to join the sisterhood.

“I woke up in the early hours with an unusual depth of peace and joy. I knew I wanted to be a Sister of Charity,” she explains. “I rested in that feeling of freedom and peace for quite a while, wrote it all down in my journal and started my day with a reassurance that I was on the right path.” Since then, she says, she has had many occasions to reevaluate her decision. “But even when it doesn’t make sense, I still choose to stay on this path because I believe that it is grounded in my experience of loving God.” She went through the application process the next day.

This fall she turns inward. A novitiate day begins with the 8 a.m. Mass and a meditative walk. After meeting in the common room over a bowl of Special K and straightening up her bed and things, she prepares for class. In this critical year of her religious training she is immersed in study of the Old Testament, psalms, vows, the history of religious life and the history of her particular community. She and the other novices will leave the premises only on rare occasions — a family wedding or death. She will be missing numerous weddings this year.

Camardo and her roommates talk daily about what the vows — poverty, obedience and celibacy — really mean. They pray, maintain the house, cook and take evening walks together. The sisterhood provides room and board, and a $60 monthly allowance for extras such as clothes, shampoo, toothpaste and long-distance phone calls. She does her shopping at thrift or discount stores.

Every Wednesday, Camardo meets with a novice advisor to share her epiphanies, struggles and doubts about committing to religious life. Fridays are for personal reflection — a day for her to integrate everything she’s explored. She listens to music a lot — Indigo Girls lyrics are an inspiration to her. She turns off her lights by 10 p.m., prays, reviews the day and remembers her family and friends.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Camardo is in Boston for a friend’s wedding, and she and her parents are genially disagreeing about social welfare and politics. “But Dad,” Camardo pleads, “I really don’t think that inner-city women get themselves pregnant in order to boost their welfare checks.” Her parents each run small, successful businesses, attend weekly Mass and donate to the Republican Party and to Birthright, a nonprofit organization that supports women who choose not to abort their unplanned pregnancies.

Despite political and lifestyle differences, Camardo’s parents are as understated and gentle as she is. She has tremendous respect for them and says the roots of her own compassion lie in the moral fabric of their home: “In third grade, there was a little boy who used to steal my lunch every day,” Camardo says. “When I told my mother she said, ‘Well, he doesn’t have lunch, he’s hungry.’ And she made an extra sandwich or prepared a little something for him every day for the rest of the year.”

Camardo’s mother didn’t realize quite how seriously her daughter would take the lesson. Today Camardo minds the poor full time, giving them everything she can. When she makes her first vows next year, she’ll give her savings and all other possessions to the church or to her family.

“I am drawn to a system that holds you accountable to your ideals,” she says, as she walks back to her hotel with her family. “It provides a supportive social structure to cultivate them.”

This kind of support can come in particularly handy after a weekend like this, where she sees not only a friend’s wedding, but her ex, as well.

“When Ken is sitting this close to me, asking me about my life decisions over some beers at my friend’s wedding, sometimes it makes you wonder,” she laughs.

Her father chimes in: “But if Melissa was to settle down with Ken, she would be living in a house with a white picket fence and she’d be dressed to the hilt when he came home from work … and then they’d be off to the country club. And that’s not Melissa.”

It took her father a while to get to this point of understanding. Both her parents expected their intellectually gifted child to go to Duke and become a doctor. Other family members remain bewildered. Camardo describes her sister as her opposite: a New York professional, engaged to be married to a non-Christian. “She is sad that we won’t be hanging out with husbands together, doing couple things,” explains Camardo. “I can understand that.”

Her grandfather and various aunts hesitate to approve for different reasons. “Many of the older folk remember the nuns from their schools,” explains her mother. “They remember a rigid group of women in strange dress, alienated from society, and worse, from their families.”

“And they are worried that Melissa is missing out on something,” her mother adds. “That she’s going to miss opportunities of youth.”

But times have changed, Camardo points out. Most young people spend their prime years in mismatched relationships, trying on different careers and clothes. Women and men today mature and marry later in life. “I’m not that afraid of what I’m missing.” And the sisterhood has changed, too, she adds. “We are no longer cut off.”

Dress codes and social segregation were abandoned in the ’60s at Vatican II, when Pope John XXIII revolutionized the church. He called on the leaders of each Catholic order to compare their practices to their original missions. After much reflection, clergy throughout the world agreed that the church had lost its connection to the people, and began to change rules, permitting religious leaders more freedom.

And most noticeably, while women in secular society burned their bras, religious sisters in the ’60s shed their habits. But not with feminism in mind. “Habits were the dress of widows in some parts of Europe in the 19th century. Religious orders then decided that dressing like widows would allow sisters to both blend in with society and appear unavailable to men,” explains Virginia Piecuch, program coordinator at the Center for the Study of Religious Life in Maryland.

But today the habit serves the opposite purpose: It makes sisters stand out. And yet without the severe, all-black gear, sisters become completely invisible, reinforcing the fear among Catholics that religious life is disappearing. And their fears aren’t unfounded. Whereas in the ’50s many orders reported dozens of new candidates annually, vocational leaders across the country today hope for one new candidate every few years.

But many Catholics don’t see the decline as a crisis. Piecuch points out that Catholics see religious life as a calling, not as a career. “It’s all dependent on the Spirit. The cycles of growth and decline of religious life are God’s will.”

Other outspoken laymen and clergy reject this perspective.

“You can blame the crisis on coercive celibacy,” says Elizabeth Abbott, author of “A History of Celibacy.” Abbott contends that the church — and Camardo — are making a big mistake by focusing their spirituality around celibacy.

“It took over a millennium to get celibacy established in the Catholic Church, and it was motivated purely with profit in mind,” she says. It wasn’t until the 12th century that celibacy was finally imposed. Abbott, dean of women at Trinity College at University of Toronto, claims that the church introduced celibacy to protect the wealth of the church. Feeding, clothing and caring for the children and spouses of clergy drained resources.

“And it never works,” she adds. “Throughout history, people cheated, and today in anonymous surveys we see that 40 to 50 percent are not celibate at given points in their professional careers. Why would you keep a tenet that turns religious people into guilt-ridden hypocrites and liars?”

But many in the clergy see the two — devotion to God and celibacy — as intrinsically linked.

“Throughout history, even before celibacy became an institution, few religious women opted to marry,” says the Rev. Ciprian Davis, professor of church history at Saint Minrad College in Indiana. Like Camardo and Abbott, Davis sees sexual-emotional relationships as a distraction from conviction and personal, or spiritual, growth.

“But that doesn’t take away from the point that the church is in crisis,” he adds. “We have to begin to address the problems. We must still go out there and let youngsters know us, we must look for the vocations — those who yearn for religious life — and help them find us.”

Still, Camardo seems distant from the spiritual, religious crisis.

“Look at her,” says her father at one point. “She is so emotionally content for now.”

For now? Camardo doesn’t look offended by her father’s implicit doubts in the permanence of her decision. Is there a chance she may change her mind?

“I have seven years until I have to make final vows. I doubt I’ll change my mind in that time. But I guess there is that possibility.”

A psoriasis sufferer, he developed the idea after years of painful flossing sessions; although it takes a little effort to tie the floss onto the rings, the small, plastic dental aids sit much more comfortably around sensitive fingers than raw floss. Arthritis sufferers can also find solace in floss rings.

Dix watched as his affordable product won favorable reviews from the press, including Bloomberg Radio, and got picked up, gradually, by more and more major department stores and pharmacies. He grew even more hopeful when a 1996 Beutel study found that using the rings while flossing can lead to the removal of as much as 23.8 percent more plaque, and when the Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore added the rings to its “Dentistry in Transformation” section.

So Dix was flying high when CNN called to say it was running a news piece on his floss rings. He spent nearly two months providing the network with information to illuminate the virtues of his product. The CNN crew came into his home and his company’s office in New York multiple times. Dix told everyone he knew in media and venture capital about the airing of the show.

He even called and thanked the CNN segment’s producer, Linda Djerejian. And in her response, Dix saw his world — and possibly his mental health — begin to crumble.

“She said to me, ‘Well you might not want to thank me yet. You may not like the piece,’” Dix remembers. “I didn’t quite understand what she was getting at. I couldn’t let myself face [it] because the product was getting such wonderful reviews. But I filed away her statement in my mind.” (Djerejian was out of town and unreachable for comment at the time this article was written.)

At 9 p.m. on June 12, 1996, Dix enthusiastically turned on CNN’s “The World Today.” He sat in disbelief as he watched an eight-minute humor segment, featuring two dismissive assessments from dentists, Johnson & Johnson’s decision to not back his rings and, worst of all, fluff TV’s reliable minimum of 18 sorry puns: “Sean Dix really put his money where his mouth is,” etc.

With his first patented invention the butt of a televised bad joke, Dix’s characteristic grin turned into something of a cringe.

The national sales team of 12 at Dix Preventive Products and Dix’s most generous investors didn’t find the segment too funny, either. Dix says they all bailed within weeks of the first airing of the show.

“Before the airing of the piece, I was about to invest $100,000 in the rings, and was on my way to raising another million,” says Peter Lusk, a venture capitalist. “But due to the embarrassingly negative and trivializing tone of the CNN article, I found it very difficult to go back to my contacts — whom I had alerted to the show — for potential investment.”

Dix is unusually determined and resilient, according to those who know him. “Sean always had a smile on his face,” says Tony Chirinian, who worked with Dix in the jewelry business for 10 years. “He is a fair, honest, determined guy that couldn’t hurt a soul.”

From the look of the sparse one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment Dix and his brother grew up in, he came from an average — but struggling — American family, and was committed to creating a better life for himself. “Sean was willing to work for it to no end,” says Chirinian. “Even as he watched his life fall apart, Sean kept trying to stay upbeat,” he says.

At least at first.

Dix managed to persuade one of the dental specialists who had appeared on the show, Dr. George Reskakis, to reevaluate the flossing aid and then to put his second, kinder opinion in writing.

“I figured, ‘What do I have to lose,’” Reskakis says. “Sean was so upset, so I took another look and wrote a more complete assessment.” The dentist admits that at the time of the CNN taping, he wasn’t given a chance to read the directions before using the product, and that his “initial criticism may have been premature.”

Dix began to feel that a conspiracy may have been at hand: Perhaps CNN intentionally denied the dentists time to learn proper use of the rings. Perhaps it was all part of a big business plan to squash the little guy.

After all, the worldwide director of licensing and acquisitions at Johnson & Johnson’s Oral Care and Wound Care Franchises in the Consumer Group, Brian Bootel, had said in a letter to Dix: “It is quite conceivable to expect that as many as ten to twenty million U.S. consumers could embrace the product line … This penetration equates to a U.S. market potential of 50 million dollars to 100 million dollars.” Eventually, though, J&J decided not to go with the rings. Is the company waiting for Dix’s patent to expire?

Dix is sure of it. “The only reason that CNN would run a hatchet job on such a viable product would be as a favor to Johnson & Johnson,” Dix insists. J&J has been advertising on CNN at least since 1996.

But doesn’t TV just run fluff for fluff’s sake sometimes?

“Yes, but there’s nothing humorous about floss rings,” Dix declares. “They had to go out of their way — not give the dentists time to read the instructions — to make floss rings funny.”

Armed with the letter from the dentist, Dix called CNN numerous times over the following two years, begging it to run another piece on the product. CNN journalist Jeanne Moos, who is a patient of Reskakis’, stated in a letter to Dix that “we didn’t influence [the dentists] in any way.”

“Sean, I’m sorry about this,” she said. “Getting press is a double-edged sword. And I must tell you, I was fairly gentle in choosing what comments from the dentists and how much of their comments to use. They basically had nothing complimentary to say … I really don’t know what you want me to say. I’m certainly in no position to give advice on merchandising your floss rings … Now I better get back to work.” (Moos was out of town and unreachable for comment at the time this article was written.)

In 1998, CNN finally responded to Dix’s demands, promising that if he sent his claims and requests in writing to CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, Ted Turner himself would review the case. Dix sent the package. CNN said it didn’t receive it. He sent it again. Still no sign of it.

“So I said to myself, fine, I’m going to make sure you get it!” Dix recalls.

He proceeded to fax his documents 6,000 times over the next four days, jamming up the network’s communications equipment for the week.

He didn’t get his desired response, but he did get away with the tactic at first. CNN staff saw only one discernible name and number on the pages: the letterhead of the dentist who had taken the time to reassess Dix’s rings. “They called and ordered me to cease and desist,” says Reskakis. “I called Sean for an explanation and he yelled at me.”

A few months later, Dix finally got a response to his obsessive faxing and phone calling. Two men from the FBI came knocking on Dix’s door and informed him that his behavior was considered harassment across state borders and that he had therefore committed a felony. He got off with a warning.

But Dix remained committed to having CNN take responsibility for, as he believed, ruining his life.

A year after the FBI warning, Dix protested in front of the CNN building with a megaphone and a poster declaring that “CNN and Johnson & Johnson Conspire Against Dix.” In a scuffle with security, Dix was thrown down a flight of stairs and was arrested and held for 24 hours.

Ignored, humiliated and in financial straits, Dix launched a more militant pursuit of his American dream.

“I felt like I pushed the envelope so many times — so one day I said that I don’t think anything short of a death threat will make CNN staff look and see what they did to me. I mean, shows like the one they did on me can make people go off the deep end!”

Indeed. In April, Dix faxed a letter that stated, “I am now telling you that if you do not attempt to make restitution I will attempt to kill Ted Turner, and if he is unreachable in his ivory tower, then I only need kill one CNN employee and it will be on your hands.”

The police showed up the next day, and Dix was taken away in handcuffs.

“But I was just trying to get CNN’s attention,” says Dix, who has no prior record of mental illness, and who refuses to plead insanity.

In July, Dix replaced his public defender because she urged him to plead guilty and take the minimum two-year jail sentence (rather than risk the maximum five-year sentence for threatening someone’s life across state borders). “I mean, what kind of a lawyer tells you that doing time is unavoidable?” Dix asks in disbelief from the Atlanta City Detention Center.

Despite the fact that he signed a death threat and sent it to Turner — and faxed it from his home fax machine — he believes he has a case.

“To sentence me, they have to prove criminal intent. But if you read the letter I wrote to Turner, you see that I end it with: ‘If you press charges, I will have my day in court,’” says Dix. “I just wanted to get the case into court so I could publicly document my side of the story. I had no criminal intent to kill Ted Turner.”

As Dix anticipates his vindication — and waits for a trial date to be set — he passes time reading “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” by Stephen Laberge, playing cards and strategizing chess moves.

Meanwhile, his mother, Carmela Silvestri — having invested more than $35,000 of her own money in Dix’s business — tries to keep the product afloat. “We still have one major store — H.E. Butt Grocery Co., in San Antonio, Texas. They still order 288 units of floss rings every month,” she says. The grocery company doesn’t know about Dix’s arrest, and the family is afraid that if it finds out, it will stop ordering the product, as so many others have.

The East Coast chain Eckerds, which bought $22,000 worth of floss rings in 1997, has since discontinued sales of the product. H.E. Butt has spent just $380 on the rings this year.

“But I’ve gotten about 18 letters of request from people who have read about the rings and want to try them,” Silvestri says. “I’m just trying to maintain things as status quo so when Sean gets out he can bring the business back to the level he left it at, and take it further, of course.”

Are the rings a perfect product yet? Silvestri sees a problem that one of the dentists pointed out on the CNN segment: Tying the string around the rings is not convenient. “But Sean has patented a segment that would make the whole process a cinch; he just needs the funding to manufacture it,” she explains.

As I sit with Silvestri in her cluttered East Village home, she prods me to try the dental aids that led to her son’s current predicament. She’s a frazzled but gentle public school teacher, and she slowly and intensely demonstrates proper use of the ring.

After a bit of difficulty getting the floss around the small plastic pieces and locking it into place, I sit back and enjoy the easiest, most thorough flossing session I have ever experienced. Silvestri lights up.

“See?” she says. “There is still hope that these things will take America by storm.”

(Nicole Bode helped research this article.)

Moishe is tripping over broken English and I’m thrown off by Yiddishisms and confusing innuendo. He has never before talked about sex with a woman. He has hardly talked about it with men. But he’s dying to let me, a representative of the modern world, know that he is more than just a skinny, 28-year-old Hasidic camera salesman, more than just a baby-making machine.

He wants to tell me that he just experienced something sexually extraordinary.

“People see your side curls and funny hat and jacket and think you’re from outer space. And the truth is, you feel like you are,” Moishe says. But he wants pleasure. Moishe wants to give pleasure. He yearns for physical, emotional and intellectual completion.

“I gave my wife an orgasm for the first time,” he says. He clears his throat and his voice finally projects: “And it was the most emotionally satisfying experience I ever had.”

Moishe and his wife are just one of a new generation of young Hasidic couples who privately insist that sexual fulfillment is a central aspect of a healthy, happy and holy Jewish home. Rabbi David Bleich, author of the four-volume series “Contemporary Khalachic Problems,” explains that while some of the great influential rabbis condemned sexual relations that did not lead to reproduction, many others encouraged pleasure for the sake of pleasure and marital closeness. Ultimately, he says, the pursuit of sexual satisfaction is not necessarily a deviation from biblical texts. “Rather, there is just endless debate about its appropriate boundaries.”

So the younger generation is choosing its rabbis wisely. These days, Moishe says, more and more Hasidim are having sex within marriage for the sake of sex. He cites the high condom sales in Hasidic neighborhoods as proof. “People aren’t coming from out of town to buy condoms!” he laughs. “Couples these days are more comfortable with exploring intimacy. They still have certain taboos, like oral sex, but they’re becoming more open-minded. For example, I used to be afraid of oral sex.”

Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, a Hasidic resident of Borough Park, Brooklyn, and editor in chief of Jewish World Review, says that in most parts of the Hasidic community, oral sex is considered degrading to women. “And from what I understand, women in secular society are also uncomfortable with such activity for the same reason: It’s embarrassing for them. Even I’m turning red talking about it.”

But after seven years of marriage, Moishe went down on his wife — and pleased her. “We love each other more now. We feel an indescribable closeness.” In the same breath, Moishe mentions that they don’t have much to talk about. Hasidic men spend their days studying or working, while Hasidic women spend their lives raising children and maintaining the home. “But all the guys at work are jealous of the lunches she packs me: that every day she leaves a sweet note in the bag. She doesn’t have to do that.”

Moishe tells me that he shared his new accomplishment with his best friend, who listened detail for detail, giggled, then called him “a fucking liar.” “I told him: ‘I swear, go down on [your wife] and she will have pleasure.’ Two weeks later the nebbish thanked me.”

But the question arises: Can going down on a woman be kosher? According to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the 31-year-old Hasidic author of “Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy,” the answer is yes. “One of the great rabbis said that the matriarchs had sex for the sake of pleasure,” he points out, “and the laws themselves state that a man is obligated to ‘give a woman sexual pleasure’ — not necessarily have sex with her.”

The greatest Talmudic commentator of all time, says Boteach, said that the “true connection between husband and wife cannot be obtained without sexual pleasure.” Boteach argues not only that sexual pleasure is acceptable according to Jewish law but that the traditional system has created an ultraerotic dynamic between men and women.

“I would make a money bet that Hasidic couples, especially the young ones, are having better sex than those in the secular world,” he declares. “There’s nothing more exciting than depriving yourself of pleasure, waiting for marriage to even touch a member of the opposite sex and then discovering sexuality with that innocent partner, who’s on your exact same level.” Also, he adds, according to Jewish law a husband and wife must refrain from sexual activity for two weeks every month. “Refraining keeps the passion alive.”

As an 18-year-old boy preparing for his wedding, Moishe had never seen breasts or a naked pair of women’s legs. He didn’t know women felt sexual things. He only knew that he was supposed to be nice to his 17-year-old wife-to-be, and impregnate her.

Moishe met Rachel for the first time on the day of their engagement. She was sitting across from him, flanked by her parents and grandparents, her small, frumpy frame sunk into a green sofa. After some schmoozing, the family left the two virgins alone so they could decide for themselves if their life partners sat before them. The room was bright and breezy, with only an unframed poster of a rebbe and a particleboard bookcase weighed down by a 1932 Talmud collection. With little else to do, Moishe and Rachel cocked their heads to the side and stared at the floor. Later that evening, the families asked each of them in private if they would agree to marry. Why not? they said.

“On our wedding night, we were terrified,” Moishe tells me. “I had never in my life even talked to a woman besides my family members.” As is typically done, the week before the ceremony, a rabbi taught Moishe what to do: “Kiss her, be nice, open her legs and put it in.” The rabbi gave his number to Moishe in case they ran into a problem.

“But we didn’t call. It all worked out that night,” Moishe says with a grin. Today they are 28 and 27, with five children, 48 uncles and aunts and 128 cousins, all living, laughing, dancing, arguing, falling in love and discovering the art of screwing in Borough Park. Bracha Levertov, the lady who runs the main mikvah (ritual bath) in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, points to the law that requires couples to have sex on the Sabbath. “No matter what you’re fighting about,” she says, “you know that you have to make up by Friday. This keeps things very alive in Orthodox communities.”

But a year into his marriage, Moishe felt something was wrong. “I knew that girls were supposed to have an orgasm, too.” He had read it somewhere. “My wife never complained, but it was driving me crazy.” He and his wife tried to figure it out: “I did dis, I did dat,” he says in his Yiddish accent, until finally they went to an older Hasidic sex therapist. “The schmuck told us that the problem was that we have a television. He said it interfered with spontaneity.”

In Hasidic communities, Moishe explains, televisions are forbidden. “We were looking for tips on technique. He was looking for a way to blame our sexual problems on our religious transgressions.” So Moishe and Rachel had to figure it out completely on their own. “And that made us closer in a way.”

Moishe’s sex therapist apparently was not of the new “Boteach generation.” And many older Hasidim do not share the controversial author’s liberal and romantic views of Hasidic Jewish life.

Moishe takes me around his workplace to meet several colleagues or “characters,” as he puts it, under the pretense that I’m a customer. With a straight face, I ask a few of them — each in private — what they think of Boteach’s views: “I just read a book,” I tell them, “by a Hasidic man who says Hasidim are having the best sex in New York City.”

Moishe’s 54-year-old friend Mutty, a Hasidic diamond salesman of the Satmar sect, starts shaking in his seat from laughing at the dopey-eyed girl before him. “This is the biggest bunch of bullshit I have ever heard!” He takes a deep breath and coughs. “What I see is a community of miserable, repressed people. This is the sad truth.”

In fact, traditional practices in Satmar, the largest and most rigid Hasidic sect, have not always led to romantic marital unions, instead compelling the young, curious and repressed to unexpected places: S/M bars, 42nd Street and topless clubs.

Moishe takes me to meet his “wild” associate, Mendy. “You want to know about sex in the Hasidic community? In the middle of the night, teachers would come and throw the covers off you if you were sleeping on your belly,” says Mendy, a 29-year-old married man with a whips-and-chains fetish. “We had to sleep on our sides to ensure that we wouldn’t accidentally get aroused.” He and others were told that sexual pleasure is only to encourage reproduction, and that any “wasted seed” is a sin.

That night, Mendy tucks his side curls behind his ears as he shows me the S/M clubs that he and his Yiddish friends frequent. They all like to be dominated. I ask him if he enjoys having sex “forced” upon him because it rids him of the guilt of wanting to have sex. “I never thought about it,” he says. “But probably.” Of course, only a very small percentage of Hasidic Jews venture into these underworlds. As Mendy and I talk quietly Moishe chimes in: “What is S/M, anyway?”

As we discuss these unfamiliar sexual practices, including the implicit infidelity, Moishe’s face reddens again.

“When we hear of someone going off the path,” Moishe says, “it is such a shock. Because nobody’s doing it. Most of us are just focused on trying to figure out how to be happy and holy, and how to make our families happy, on learning about our wives and ourselves.”

It’s Friday afternoon and Mendy begins closing the shop in preparation for the Sabbath. Moishe looks at the time and packs his things quickly. It has been two weeks since he and his wife made love and Shabbos is a sacred time reserved for them. He smiles at me, nods humbly and hurries home.