India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Barack Obama’s first serious girlfriend Alex McNear, who could have been the First Lady, instead married a Serbian boxer who once tried to rob 60,000 dollars from a bank. Mother-of-one McNear, who runs a green energy company, met a young Obama at Occidental College in California. Both of them also had a ‘summer of romance’ in 1981 when Obama transferred to Columbia. She is also a Democrat who apparently voted for Obama in the 2008 election. Alex McNear is a mother-of-one who runs a green energy company and lives in a 2-million dollar mansion in Sag Harbor, New York. This week it emerged that McNear won the heart of the future president whilst at college, but till date the story of what happened next to her has not been told. Rather than moving into the White House she wed a rather less glamorous compensation prize - Bob Bozic in a ceremony which appalled her mother and brought a former vagrant and one time bookmaker into their upper middle class family. Obama meanwhile romanced his second love Genevieve Cook before meeting Michelle Obama and marrying her - and becoming leader of the Free World. “I am not giving any interviews,” McNear told the Daily Mail in her first comments since the story broke. “I did that one interview with David Maraniss for reasons I won’t go into. “I have nothing more to say about the whole subject.” McNear was named for the first time this week as the first person Obama fell for in extracts from an upcoming biopic about the president by author David Maraniss. Bozic spent part of his youth struggling to survive on the streets of Toronto having run away from home. He was so desperate that he would spend his nights sleeping in Laundromats or parked cars and spend his days stealing to makes ends meet. But love found a way, and in 1987 they tied the knot, and stayed together for seven years, but then divorced. They had a daughter together, Vesna, now 20, an aspiring actress who resides in Manhattan and remain close to this day. In a frank assessment of his function in McNear’s life, Bozic has asserted that she married him to ‘separate’ herself from her family. And it was not difficult to see why. According to a profile in the New Yorker magazine, he was everything her life was not. The working class son of an engineer, Bozic got into boxing when the owner of a gym in Toronto took pity on him and gave him a meal every day, making him stay around long enough to get interested in fighting. In time he became the Canadian national amateur heavyweight champion but went into semi-retirement when he started losing and travelled around Europe, stopping in Ibiza and Sweden . His most severe brush with the law came in 1980 when he was broke and in a bad mental place - apparently he was sent over the edge when faced with going to the opera on his own. Bozic then walked into a branch of the Manufacturers Hanover bank in Manhattan and told them than men outside had guns pointed at the bank. He asked for 60,000 dollars and was taken to the vault before the police detained him. He was given a lenient sentence of probation after confessing robbery in the third degree. It was after this that he met McNear whilst working as a bouncer at a transvestite club in New York, a job he had only taken in an attempt to keep the judge in his court case happy. She was working as a lawyer in Chicago at the time phoned up the club asking for a place to hold a benefit night. He told her his life story and, against all odds, they began fallinf for each other. Bozic, 61, now works as a barman in New York , a far cry from the prosperous lifestyle of his ex-wife. McNear, 51, runs renewable energy company GreenLogic in Southampton , New York . Her long term partner is Robert Stein, in his 60s, a child psychologist and their home is on a leafy street in Sag Harbor , which is near the millionaire’s playground of The Hamptons.

Obama girlfriend married a boxer jailed for robbery