The blond woman arrives early each morning in the federal courtroom where what's left of Bill Hanhardt's honor is shredded.

She always takes her seat in the front row, behind the prosecutors and the FBI. The feds know who she is. But others don't.

She listens when they talk around her, remembering conversations, associations, body language, until she goes home in the evenings to tell her husband.

On Tuesday, she was in a soft blue suit, blue shoes. That big diamond was missing from her hand.

Her blue eyes watch the lawyers, and how U. S. District Judge Charles Norgle Sr. reacts and scolds.

She sees Hanhardt's family across the way, sitting behind the defense table, his wife and daughters and their husbands, their faces mottled by pain and shame.

In a few weeks, when Hanhardt--the former Chicago police chief of detectives--is in prison, she'll be sitting on that side of the courtroom too.

She wonders how people will see her then, when she's sitting in the section where the wives sit, before their husbands are sent away.

She's Cynthia DeStefano, wife of Sam DeStefano, one of the members of Hanhardt's nationwide and Outfit-sponsored jewelry heist crew.

"It sounds strange, but being here is therapeutic for me," Cynthia DeStefano told me over lunch Tuesday, during a break in Hanhardt's sentencing hearing that will continue on Wednesday.

"I'm sitting there, like an outsider, watching, but I'm not an outsider, am I?" she said. "I keep thinking about the Hanhardt family, and how hard this all is emotionally for them, how it's devastated them."

DeStefano isn't making excuses for Hanhardt, Sam, or for the others in the crew. They pleaded guilty.

"They made their choices, and they made the wrong choices and they're going to pay," she said. "But my husband, he didn't hurt anybody, he wasn't violent, and he's going to go away.

"In a strange way, this has brought us together and those around us."

I asked how that works.

"We found out real quick who our friends are," she said. "The friends that are there for you when things go wrong, you know they're your friends. And family. We have wonderful family."

"I'm a wife. You get on the roller coaster, and it keeps rolling and you stay on. I love my husband. I'm here because he can't be here. So when I go home, I tell him everything that happened.

"Oh, he'd like to be here, but you know he can't. You reporters would be all over him."

Sam DeStefano was born into an Outfit family. He's the son of mobster Mario DeStefano, and nephew of Outfit psycho Mad Sam DeStefano.

At 48, if her husband is sentenced to between 40 and 50 months in prison, he'll be in his early 50s when he gets out.

"We'll still have a life," she said. "We're young enough."

At 73, facing 20 years in prison for selling his badge, Hanhardt can't be that optimistic.

"Put in the paper that the FBI has ruined our lives!" said one of Hanhardt's grown daughters, the anger twisting through her face as she confronted me outside court on Tuesday.

"They've broken us financially. And that agent, Ted McNamara? He's the devil from hell."

Testifying on Tuesday, McNamara looked as devilish as a Cub Scout, down to the hard part in his new haircut.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Cole hammered at McNamara all day in a spirited cross-examination.

But by offering wiretaps and other evidence, McNamara linked Hanhardt's crew to another heist, the Aug. 23, 1995, robbery of a jewelry salesman in a Wisconsin hotel.

The phone card used by Hanhardt's crew as part of their surveillance of jewelry salesmen was used hours before the robbery, at a pay phone a mile from the hotel. The card was used earlier, in Minnesota, as the victim traveled through on sales calls.

I don't feel any sympathy for Hanhardt. He used inside police information while running a crew of Outfit crooks. Norgle should give him the full 20 years.

Only a stiff sentence in a hard place with death at his back can loosen his tongue and persuade him to tell what he knows about the links between the Chicago Outfit and the Chicago Police.

He should know.

While we can feel sorry for the families, let's not forget the other wives out there, too:

They're the wives of all the honest cops. The wives who worked three jobs, shopped at the thrift stores and wore the cheap shoes to save a dollar for the kids' tuition.

Their husbands didn't get the promotions because they wouldn't play ball with Hanhardt and his type.

You want to feel sympathy? Feel it for them.