Wedded bliss lasted about 12 hours for Paul Peragine.

On Saturday, he and his fiancée Pamela (née Teixeira) said their I-dos at a Mississauga church after a year-long engagement, before heading with some 300 guests to a reception hall in Woodbridge.

In the Italian tradition, guests arrived with envelopes full of money — gifts for the bride and groom. The cash was deposited in a wooden box. For a few hours, it was the repository of the couple’s financial future.

At the end of night, the wooden box was gone, to all appearances stolen by someone who was pretending to work at the venue. The family believes it contained about $50,000, mostly in cash.

After a long night of celebrating, the party finally began to wind down around 1:30 a.m. A man dressed in a hoodie and jeans volunteered to help clean up, said Peragine’s brother Joey. With ostentatious helpfulness, he asked where boxes and bouquets of flowers should go. It now seems likely that he was casing the joint.

Security footage viewed by the Peragines shows the “sketchy” character popping his head in and out of doorways and, finally, at 1:45 a.m., signalling to someone.

Soon after, the seed money for Paul and Pamela’s future was gone. Now, as they prepare to leave for their honeymoon in Fiji on Tuesday, a cloud hangs over what was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives.

“They’re like the nicest people you could ever imagine,” said Joey. “They’re embarrassed to go public and ask people for money. They think there’s so much suffering in the world already … they feel greedy asking for money.”

He launched a campaign on the fundraising site gofundme.com anyway — it had received over $3,000 by press time — to soften the financial blow. Meanwhile, Paul and Pamela have been frantically calling relatives and asking those who gave cheques to cancel them.

The family reported a theft to York Regional Police, but no charges have been laid.

“I feel so, so bad,” said Carlo Parentela, owner of the reception hall, Chateau Le Jardin. “We’re trying to help them in every which way.”

Parentela does not believe the alleged thief was a Le Jardin employee.

“We’ve been there for 30 years, we do 300 weddings a year, and we’ve never, ever had anything stolen,” he said.

Paul, an electrician, and Pamela, a social worker who works with troubled youth, got their own place in Mississauga last year, Joey said. The day they moved in, Paul proposed.

Now they’re saddled with bills for the wedding, reception and honeymoon.

“It’s not the cheapest honeymoon, and everything is booked,” Joey said.

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The couple’s immediate family is going to pony up the same amount they put in the pilfered money box, but others may be reluctant to double their gift.

As Joey wrote on the fundraising site, “If thousands of people see this and only give a few dollars you can get these two lives back on track and give their wedding the happy ending it deserves.”

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