New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft's wife on how Vladimir Putin ended up with Kraft's Super Bowl ring:

As Kraft tells it, she and her husband were in St. Petersburg with Sandy Weill, then the chairman of Citigroup Inc., their "good friend" the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, an oil executive, and a physician. That group, all except for Kraft, met at Konstantinovsky Palace with the Russian president, and when she next saw her husband in their hotel room, he confessed he had a problem. "They were getting up for formal pictures, and Sandy said to Robert, 'Why don't you show the president your ring?'" she says. "So Robert never wears the ring, [but] sometimes, in certain instances, he'll have it in his pocket, he'll take it out. Putin put it on his finger, and his first comment was 'I could kill someone with this,' which was a little bit of an unusual comment, and then they took pictures, and Putin put it back in his pocket and walked out."

Then the fuss began. The story leaked to the media, and Robert Kraft issued a statement: "I decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin."

Myra Kraft even has an explanation for the official story. "Sandy called and said, 'You've got to do something to put this at rest,' so Robert said 'fine' and came up with some statement about the warm fuzzy feelings he had being in Russia. Of course, his forebears were probably raped and pillaged by these people, but Robert had to make it sound good," she says. "That's what it is. And so he got another one."

The article also has some Holy Cross-related anecdotes, for those of you who are interested.