Welcome to the teenage world of Romola Hodas, who watched her father, Marty, grow from a poor nobody to become the lord of New York’s sleazy sex business in the 1970s.

In Romola’s memoir, “The Princess of 42nd Street: Surviving My Childhood as the Daughter of Times Square’s King of Porn,” the life of Marty Hodas is revealed in all its brilliance and debauchery. He owned virtually every 25-cent peep show in the city, raking in millions, while torturing and terrorizing his young daughter. Aside from routine beatings and relentless fat-shaming, Marty Hodas found disturbing ways to wreak emotional havoc on Romola, now 61.

She describes one day when, at the age of 14, Marty invited her to see him at work in his dingy Midtown office. Upon arrival, Romola watched a woman finish giving her father oral sex while he sat at his desk, get up without a word and leave.

Then, Marty rose from his chair and led his daughter to a small theater where he showed off his newest moneymaking plan: a live sex act featuring whips, chains and gags. Marty had his daughter sit in one of the heavily stained seats next to a bunch of porn-loving old men and watch the performance to its revolting conclusion.

As bizarre as that may seem, perhaps even stranger is how much Romola loved the man despite such treatment and much worse. She even waited until after he died in 2014 to start writing the book, saying, “I didn’t want to embarrass him.”

“Sure, I fantasized a thousand times about shoving him off a cliff, I had such a hatred for him,” Romola told the Daily News in a recent interview. “But when he was nice, he was the life of the party, making us laugh and feel loved.”

“Until I was 8, my father was terrific to me. I remember he was teaching us how to fly. Not really, but he had [her sister] Risa and I lay on our bellies and balance like that with our arms and legs out. He’d say, ‘Pretend you’re in the air.’ ”

The king of the peeps’ story began like so many others. A young Jewish man whose family fled the pogroms of Europe, Marty Hodas landed in Brooklyn and began hustling to make a living. Shining shoes, selling papers and laboring on a chicken farm were all part of his early years.

Things began to improve when he got a job at a company that installed gumball machines in mom-and-pop stores throughout New York.

They only took pennies, but the pennies added up to $600 a week, a fortune in the 1940s.

He used the money to expand from gumballs to cigarette and pinball machines. Those led to jukeboxes. All of them poured more money into his pockets.

But the real a-ha moment came in 1966 when he found a bunch of derelict film-loop machines in the basement of a New Jersey business. The loops, as they were called, had existed for many years before Marty Hodas came along, but he was the first to realize that if he could load them with girlie films and put them in the adult bookstores thriving in Manhattan, he’d make a mint.

The very first one went into Carpel Books in Times Square. On the first night, a line of horny guys stretched around the block. Soon all the bookstores wanted a peep-show machine, and Marty was happy to provide. Twenty-five cents at a time, Marty Hodas was getting rich, claiming at one point to rake in $30,000 a week.

From peep machines, Marty branched out. First, he made his own films to put in his machines. This, in part, was because there was too much demand and not enough porn in his early years. The public always wanted more. He soon began selling those films and others at the stores or through the mail. Beyond that, he opened a venture to fix the machines — which, because they were so heavily used, broke down all the time.

As Romola says in the book, “Dad understood and successfully implemented vertical integration of business long before the term was coined (no pun intended).”

For Romola, it was difficult to tell which Marty liked better, making money or the lifestyle his business opened up for him.

All that money funded a lavish life. At the family’s home in Malverne, L.I., he threw swinger parties full of cocaine, pot, alcohol and rampant swapping of sex partners. Much of this went on as the young Romola, her two sisters and brother wandered around watching people do lines of coke off the kitchen table and have sex everywhere, including in the kids’ bedrooms, the pool and the living room couch.

Not to mention a topless working girl breastfeeding her cat.

“It was horrifying,” says Romola, whose attitude was, “Sure, have the parties if you want, but not with the kids in the house.”

During these wild parties, Romola’s mother, Paula, “was part of the action,” Romola recalls. She would get dressed up and drink vodka while playing Scrabble or some other game. “If Mom won, she usually got a piece of jewelry or something nice. If Dad won, you can guess what he got.”

When he wasn’t partying or tending to his business, Marty was often focused on viciously abusing Romola, singling her out for constant beatings and ridicule. Among the more horrific moments were those when he mocked her for being heavy. He’d force her onto a scale, and, if she was over his mandated limit, he’d beat her, make her watch as the family ate dinner and then send her to bed hungry.

All the while, he’d berate her as “the fattest girl in school. Look at you! Look at your ass.”

She was just 9 years old.

Her mother was of little help. A talented artist and musician, Paula was also bipolar and often dysfunctional for months at a time. There were periods when Romola would try to coax her out to change her underwear, clean her hair and wash herself.

“Her teeth would be green and she stank to high heaven,” Romola says. “I’d have to pry her out of her room to brush her teeth.”

Marty did not lavish attention on his wife, who died in 2004 at age 64, and certainly did not make much effort to help her. He was too busy feeding his own appetites, trying to avoid being killed by the Mafia or getting locked up by the authorities.

One of his major victories was turning the Colombo crime family from an enemy into a business partner. As Romola tells it, they left him alone and, in turn, he showed the Colombos how to make more money from porn than they ever had before.

There were also run-ins with the law, but Marty, whether because he was smart, slippery or a little of both, was able to avoid major time. According to Romola, he served two or three stints in jail on various financial and public nuisance convictions, but never for more than a few months at a time.

Beginning in the 1980s, the cleanup of Times Square began in earnest, with zoning laws and police crackdowns being used to push the live sex shows and peep booths out of the area. The change “scared him to death,” said Romola, as one business after another was forced to close.

Eventually, so many of his sex dens were shut that he had to try other businesses, most of them unsuccessful. They included things like selling sheds to Home Depot and resoling people’s old sneakers.

But Marty did find his groove again, opening up the Miami Playground in Miami, which sold porn books, featured live dancing and catered to a gay clientele. He only sold it a year or so before he died at the age of 82, after more than 20 years.

Romola did marry, but she never had children. She’s focused on her own business interests, including a program to help problem drinkers called Creating Harmony/Mindful Moderation.

“It has helped a lot of people, and it has helped me,” Romola laughs.

Looking back, even Romola wonders where she got the strength to survive the chaos and depravity of her childhood.

“I wasn’t going to be one of those people who committed suicide. I was determined to live life by my way. I guess I was born with this kind of fierceness. I wasn’t going to be defeated. I wasn’t going to be a victim of Marty Hodas,” she said.

Eventually, his hard-partying life caught up with him, and Marty Hodas died in 2013 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It was a long, slow decline that Romola says was heartbreaking to watch.

“My sister Risa and I went to see him; he was living in Queens then, and his skin was just hanging on him. He looked terrible. He said, ‘I love you girls’ when we left. I told Risa, you gotta get ready, Daddy is going to pass soon. He never tells me he loves me.’”

The music plays, the warm wind blows, the wait staff comes by with trays full of libations like “Pirate’s Poison” and “Aruba Arriba.” Don’t ask what’s in them. I have no idea. Life is easy and good.

We stayed at the Hyatt Regency Aruba Resort Spa and Casino (aruba.regency.hyatt.com), which is on the northern part of the island in the Palm Beach district, and is brilliantly designed and appointed with nature in mind.

The soft natural colors of the hotel’s exterior and lobby blend beautifully with the beach. The grounds contain a stream with about 100 koi fish, five black swans, a variety of iguanas, lizards and parrots. It feels like part-hotel, part-nature preserve. The effect is soothing and fun.

The beach is the standard powdery white Caribbean perfection, while the water isn’t quite as warm or clear as off other islands. As a result, snorkeling off the beach isn’t fabulous, but there are reasonably-priced trips to nearby diving locations.

They are offered by several outfits, including the Jolly Pirates (jolly-pirates.com). In addition, there’s an array of other watersports, from kitesurfing to something called “snuba” — which is a cross between snorkeling and scuba diving and allows you to stay deep underwater without using an air tank (depalmtours.com/snuba). Instead, you breathe through a hose like the old deep sea divers, but without the heavy, clunky equipment.

Those looking for something a little different will be well rewarded by taking a trip into Aruba’s outback.

This is pretty hard-core desert, which makes up 70% of the island. The ground is hard-packed dirt strewn with cacti, and stunted dead-looking things called divi-divi trees, which are bent because of the constant wind blowing from the same direction. The trees are also one of Aruba’s iconic symbols.

Drive north along the western coast and come to the California Lighthouse (aruba.com), near Arashi Beach on the northwest tip of Aruba. The newly restored lighthouse is a fairly small facility and can be toured easily in about 30 minutes (from $8).

The real drama begins as you drive past the lighthouse and hook around the northern tip of the island. The first challenge is to actually find the thing that they call a “road.” I know what roads are supposed to look like. I’ve seen many of them in my lifetime. And what they call a road here clearly does not fit the definition. It’s a dirt track that’s barely discernable from the rest of the ground.

The track winds its way along the coast and soon becomes full of deep ruts made slippery because they’re filled with pebbles. In some of the road’s sections, you drive within a few yards of the raging sea as it slams against the sharp lava rocks that bring an abrupt end to the desert.

Along the saw-toothed northeast coast there are a couple of amazingly beautiful places where the rocks give way to tiny sandy beaches. You can dip your toes in, but bathing is not recommended since they’re full of coral and sea urchins.

Two sights you’ll pass while driving south through the desert are worth stopping to see. First is Natural Bridge, which is a rock formation over a tidal pool. It’s interesting, if not astonishing, but also a little gross because a lot of garbage washes up from the sea into the pool of water underneath the archway.

A few minutes’ drive from there are the remains of a stone building that used to be a gold mine. There’s not much to see other than the charcoal-colored blocks of stone, but the history of prospecting for riches in that environment is interesting.

Another hour south from the gold mine will bring you to Arikok National Park (arubanationalpark.org). The feature attraction here is called Natural Pool, a body of water perhaps 40 feet across that’s formed by a circular rock formation.

Sitting in the placid, crystal water as the ocean hammers the rocks just in front of you is a thrill. The spray showers down like rain.

But, and it’s a big but, getting to the Natural Pool is not easy, or necessarily safe.

Most visitors leave it to the professionals and hop on a tour that a guide drives along trails that look as if they’ve been hit by bombs.

My wife and I decided to go it alone in a rented Jeep. Two-foot deep holes swallowed our tires, and spiked boulders protruded from the gravel inspiring images of ripped tires and a shredded undercarriage.

The bruising ride continues for about 30 minutes, up hills, down slippery slopes, around blind curves, with the last few hundred yards being the most nerve-wracking. It’s nearly impossible to find the path down the steep slope.

We finally got down with our skin and the Jeep intact, and happily dove into the crystal clear pool. After all that work to get there, we spent just a few minutes chasing the crabs and fish around before heading back to the Jeep.

In about an hour more of bumping through gullies and rocks, we reached a road that actually was a road and soon exited the park.

As the sun began to set, we were back at our hotel where Pirate’s Poison never tasted so good.

If you go…

More info: Visit Aruba.com

Stay: Hyatt Regency Aruba Resort Spa and Casino (aruba.regency.hyatt.com)

Ferrari has issued a recall for its 458 Italias. The cause? Some of them are bursting into flames.

Since the sports cars left the factory in Northern Italy, at least six of the cars have caught fire, the Daily Mail reports.

The recall effects all 1,248 owners of the $230,000 luxury auto.

The problem seems to lie with glue.

“The wheel arch assembly and heat shield which incorporates both mechanical fasteners and adhesive may, in the case of particularly high temperatures and as a result of heat produced by the exhaust, cause the deformation of the assembly itself,” a Ferrari rep told the Daily Mail.

“Such deformation brings the assembly excessively close to the exhaust causing the adhesive used to overheat and produce smoke or, in the case of particularly high temperatures, ignite.”

The much-touted 458 has a 4.5-litre V8 engine which gives it a 0-62mph time of 3.4 seconds and a top speed of 202mph.

Owners who will have to bring in their Ferraris for a check-up include musician Eric Clapton and British soccer player Louis Saha, reports the Daily Mail.

Ferrari will reportedly repair the pricey sports cars, free of charge.

Steven Hill, who had been living at Ultima DVD’s distribution and production center for several months, attacked his colleagues Tuesday night after being told he must pack and leave, Los Angeles police said.

Hill fled the studio in a car after the attack and is being hunted by police.

Hill went on the rampage with a machete-type prop weapon used in porn production at the building.

He attacked one man and two others who heard his screams ran to help and were also attacked.

One of the helpers suffered a large wound to his torso and died in surgery at a hospital.

The victims, whose names were not released, were not established porn stars.

Susie Krabacher, a curvaceous blond, who once graced the pages of Playboy magazine, may seem an unlikely hero who has little in common with the people of Haiti. But she’s been lending a hand for years, and plans to be there for many more years to come.

In a country notorious for violence and poverty, Susie Krabacher may look like she doesn’t belong.

Despite her cover girl looks, expensive jeans and designer sunglasses, she’d say she belongs as much as anyone else.

In an interview with ABC’s Leon Harris, she confides, “I had a dream that I wanted to take care of kids that nobody chose for the orphanages for adoptions.”

Living a life of wrenching ups and downs, Krabacher was a former foster child herself, who went on to model for Playboy in the ’80s. Years later, in 1994, she answered a different calling.

“I didn’t feel like I had an adult that was caring for me like I saw other children’s parents loving on them,” Krabacher said.

Over the years, she’s built orphanages, schools and clinics — under the nonprofit Mercy and Sharing. In Cité Soleil, she’s learned to work with some of Haiti’s tougher residents, like negotiating the use of the school’s basketball court with local gang members.

“That’s pretty smart, pretty quick thinking for a Playboy bunny,” Leon joked. “Oh, please!” Krabacher responded. “You must not know very many,” she quipped.

But when Krabacher enters her orphanage, she’s simply known as Mama Susie. She and her staff of 160 care for 5,100 kids.

At the same time that their orphanage in Cazeau was destroyed, many more children came to need her help.

Since the earthquake in January, she’s taken on a number of new children.
“All of them are traumatized, all of them were in shock,” Krabacher explained.

Many of the children at Mercy and Sharing have disabilities, and won’t be adopted or even live to adulthood.

“They will never leave here because there’s no place for them to go,” Krabacher explained. “We try to give them a very happy life, to try to keep them comfortable.”

“This may be an orphanage, but the people here tell me they don’t want to see the kids adopted out of here,” Krabacher said. “First, they hate having to explain to the disabled kids why they didn’t get picked.

And they also think the ones that grow up here have a special mission here in Haiti. They come and change their country, learn to be leaders, they are the engineers and scientists and teachers, professors, doctors.”

One young man who Leon met, Aslin, is a student at Mercy and Sharing.
Through a translator, Aslin says he studies a lot, and already shares Mama Susie’s mission, aspiring to become a doctor.

Even though the rubble has yet to be cleared, Aslin is already a believer that he and Mama Susie can rebuild Haiti one child at a time. Board members for Mercy and Sharing cover the costs of overhead and administration. Private donations are used to pay for schools, food and clinics for the children.

But Mercy and Sharing is just one of many organizations asking the same question: Where is the money that’s been promised since the earthquake to rebuild the country? Expect future reports on that.

That’s the gist of a statement from 17-year-old Bora Kirca, who threw a monkey wrench into Twitter’s worldwide blogging earlier this week.

The Turkish student, accused of hacking into Twitter programming and leaving users, including (gasp) many celebrities, with no followers.

But young Bora protests, saying he is not a hacker. All he did was stumble across problems with the site and try to pass the information on to Twitter. No one, he says, would listen.

The bug, which was fixed late on Monday, hit millions worldwide and caused users to temporarily lose the list of people who followed them on the social networking site.
It also allowed any Twitter user to force another to follow them without permission. Normally, the other person has to initiate such a “following.”

Among those it left followerless for a time were Oprah Winfrey, Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. Reports indicate they all survived.

Demi Moore even tweeted: “The turkish hacker is really doing on a number on twitter wow!”

Twitter’s efforts to close the hole briefly left a number of users with zero followers although the delivery of messages did not appear to have been affected.
It also left many of the site’s users being bombarded by “spammers.”

After being tracked down in Turkey, Bora, who has an interest in computer programming, admitted to causing a “complication” to the site but denied he was a hacker.

“Yes, I caused a complication on Twitter but I am not a hacker,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“I just found a bug and sent it to Twitter staff. I [had not] got a reply even after 14 hours I sent that mail, so I thought they didn’t care about this bug.

“I thought it wasn’t a big thing and wrote this bug on [the] Internet.”

He added: “Such an accident led to a big chaos and I didn’t want it to be happen. I want to apologize for all Twitter users, I didn’t intend to harm anyone.

“A site of this size but with such a bad and big bug, who could even know that it would happen?

“I was pretty sure that it’s impossible to give physical damage to Twitter with such a ridiculous bug like this.”

He said he was listening to a metal music band called Accept earlier in the month when he tried to follow the group on the site.

He noticed later that they were “following me” and then published his discovery it on his Internet blog.

He did not disclose how the bug worked.

But Gizmodo, a popular technology blog which broke news of the bug, said the kid “figured out accidentally that if you tweet ‘accept username,’ for example billgates, then Bill Gates will follow you.”

A spokesman for the San Francisco based company was unavailable for comment on whether they received an e-mail from the student.

After the glitch was discovered late on Monday, the company released a statement saying the bug has been fixed.

John Wrenshall admitted in a Newark federal courtroom to conspiring to engage in sex tourism and conspiring to produce child pornography, and one count of distributing the materials.

The 63-year-old admitted to graphic acts of abuse against boys as young as 4 years old.
Wrenshall acknowledged that as early as January 2000, he arranged trips for sex tourists — including at least three U.S. citizens — to visit his home near Bangkok and pay to engage in sex acts with prepubescent Thai boys, from 4 to 12 years old.

He also admitted to abusing the children in order to “train them.” Wrenshall said he allowed his clients to photograph, videotape, and share footage of their exploits.

Wearing a yellow prison jumpsuit, the thin, bespectacled, balding man with grayish-white hair answered the judge’s questions in a quiet voice with his head bowed.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Vartan said authorities discovered Wrenshall was running a brothel for pedophiles after confiscating the computers of Wayne Corliss of Union City, N.J.

Corliss, a small-time actor and former children’s entertainer known for playing Santa Claus, was arrested in 2008 following an international manhunt. He is serving a 20-year sentence in a New Jersey prison after admitting he traveled to Thailand three times from 2000 to 2002 to have sex with at least two boys, ages 6 and 9.

Wrenshall was indicted in New Jersey after authorities discovered that Corliss had been one of his clients. Wrenshall was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport in December 2008 while traveling, and was extradited to New Jersey in July 2009.

Authorities found correspondence and chat room conversations between the two men, and others, on Corliss’ computers, Vartan said.

In court Wednesday, Vartan read from e-mails that Wrenshall acknowledged he had sent to Corliss.

“I am ready, willing and able to be your guide,” Vartan read from the e-mail. “Boys are available here.”

The e-mails outlined the prices for sex acts on children, and encouraged clients to bring certain items from the U.S. that were hard to find in Thailand, including “lots of bubble bath.” U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said his office continued working with agencies worldwide to find and prosecute “those who perpetuate the scourge of sex tourism.”

“John Wrenshall admitted today that he created a den for sexual predators determined enough to travel the world to victimize young boys,” Fishman said in a statement. “He invited others to commit and film horrifying acts in his home, where a child’s innocence could be bought for a price.”

The status of the child victims is not known, Vartan said, but he added that authorities had been able to track down and interview a few of them.

Seven people have been arrested in the investigation, which is ongoing, according to Vartan.
Wrenshall could face 50 years in prison when he’s sentenced Aug. 16, although the terms of his plea agreement suggest a range of 21 to 27 years.

He remains detained without bail in New Jersey’s Essex County Jail, according to his court-appointed attorney.

It took Wade McGilberry just 90 minutes to pocket a cool $1 million doing nothing more than playing a video game.

The 23-year-old from Mobile, Ala., became the first to pitch a perfect game in “Major League Baseball 2K10″ made by Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.

He and his wife, Katy, plan to pay off their mortgage and start a family with the winnings.

“We are trying to be responsible with it. We are simple people,” said Katy McGilberry, also 23.

It wasn’t supposed to be that easy. In fact Wade has not been able to duplicate his feat since March 2, the day he bought the game at its midnight launch and played it after coming home from his job as a records keeper for 401(k) retirement plans.

Take-Two offered the $1 million prize to the first person to pitch a perfect game.

Jason Argent, vice president of marketing at Take-Two’s 2K Sports business, said the company didn’t know how many times the feat has been accomplished in the video game. Certainly no one among the game’s developers has been able to do it.

In a perfect game, no batter from the other team ever scores or reaches a base. That means no hits, no walk and no getting on base because he is hit by a pitch or for any other reason.

It is among the rarest feats in all sports. And “MLB 2K10” tries to simulate real baseball as closely as possible with the player sitting on the couch.

Off the couch, only 18 pitchers have thrown perfect games in the history of Major League Baseball, beginning with Lee Richmond in 1880 and ending with Mark Buehrle in 2009.

“We knew it would be difficult but not impossible,” Argent said.

McGilberry said that when he bought the game, his wife suggested that he take the day off work so he could get a head start on the competition.

“I thought about it \\[and\\] the responsible thing to do was to go to work,” he said. When he came home, he set up a video recording, started playing and achieved the perfect game after “five or six attempts.”

Argent said Take-Two has received a handful of submissions after McGilberry, but they haven’t been verified yet. He said the contest helped sales of the game.

McGilberry agreed. “I think it’s really good publicity,” he said. “I wouldn’t have bought the game if not for that.”

Facebook on Wednesday temporarily shut down its online chat feature after a software glitch let people’s friends in the online community see each others’ private chat messages.

“Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us,” Facebook said in a message posted at the Web site.

“It should return to normal soon. Because of the bug, people could view friends’ chat messages and friend requests for a limited amount of time.”

For peeks at the usually walled off information Facebook users had to manipulate a “preview my profile” feature in a particular way, according to Facebook.

“We’ve fixed that issue and took down Chat as soon as we became aware of it,” Facebook said in its message. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

“I was appalled,” said Sally Giannini, a 72-year-old retired bookkeeper from Spokane, Wash., told the Baltimore Sun. Giannini told the Sun she was sending $10 to help offset Snyder’s $16,510 legal bills.

Snyder was ordered to pay that amount to Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., an anti-gay group that travels the country picketing military funerals, after his lawsuit was overturned last week by a federal appeals court, the Sun reported. Phelp’s group says military deaths are God’s punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Snyder sued Westboro after its members waved signs saying “God hates fags” and “God hates the USA” at the 2006 funeral in Westminster of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who had been killed in Iraq.

A federal jury in Baltimore awarded Snyder $11 million in damages in 2007, saying Phelps’ group intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the family. The award was later reduced to $5 million, and eventually overturned on appeal. It is currently scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

As news of the order to pay some of the court costs spread through the news media and online, strangers were moved to send money and set up funds to support Snyder’s court battle. Tuesday night, commentator Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Channel offered to pay the court costs owed by Snyder, according to WBAL Radio in Baltimore.

Mark Seavey, new-media director for the American Legion, also posted a message Tuesday on his Legion-affiliated blog, The Burn Pit, urging readers to donate to the Albert Snyder Fund. The American Legion’s message was picked up by conservative political blogger Michelle Malkin, who called the Westboro protesters “evil miscreants” and urged readers to donate.

“Regardless of how you feel about the merits of the Snyders’ suit, the Snyders deserve to know that Americans are forever grateful for their son’s heroism and for the family’s sacrifice. We shouldn’t stand by and watch them bankrupted,” Malkin wrote.

Money from donations will go toward covering the money owed to Phelps, and beyond that, toward preparing further appeals, Seavey said.

“As soon as we heard this, we just knew that it was going to go through the roof, and people were going to be upset. We seized on it,” Seavey said. “On an issue like this that cuts across political lines, it’s relatively easy, and it’s the kind of fight we want to wade into because it’s not right or left, it’s right or wrong.

“We’re going to do the best we can to make sure that Mr. Snyder doesn’t have to deal with this. We’re going to make sure he doesn’t have to pay a red cent.”

From Web sites to Twitter pages, people were galled that the grieving father of a fallen Marine would have to pay a group that uses such inflammatory tactics. A Facebook group called “I support Al Snyder in His fight against Westboro Baptist Church” had drawn nearly 12,000 members by the end of the day Tuesday.

In a phone interview with the Sun Tuesday, Snyder said he was “exhausted” by the long legal ordeal but heartened by the outpouring of support. He said he has received about 3,000 e-mail messages from people across the country who planned to contribute.

“It kind of restores your faith in mankind after dealing with this wacko church,” Snyder said. “Win or lose, I’ll know that I did everything I could for Matt, and for all the soldiers and Marines who are still coming home dying.”