No, Daddy, Don't! (11 page)

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Authors: Irene Pence

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N
INETEEN
Michelle’s life suddenly changed. It was like the first warm breath of spring. She felt an inner peace she hadn’t experienced in years. When John Battaglia married Mary Jean Pearle and they had a child, he finally stopped harassing her.
Laurie continued to visit her father once a month. During one of the visits, Mary Jean accompanied John in flying Laurie back after a weekend visit, so Mary Jean got to meet Michelle in Baton Rouge. The women eyed each other. Mary Jean was impressed with Michelle’s education and her career as a law professor. At the same time, Michelle was busy admiring Mary Jean’s designer clothes and beautiful jewelry.
 
 
Laurie, now five years old, loved her new baby sister, Faith, and for once she began looking forward to her Dallas visits. Mary Jean and her mother, Dorrace, were warm and thoughtful toward Laurie, treating her as a true member of the family. Frequently, she would return from Dallas with beautiful dresses and pretty shoes. The Pearle family could not have been nicer to her.
Still, Michelle worried about Mary Jean. She knew what hell being married to John Battaglia could be, and she feared that Mary Jean was suffering the same fate.
Sometimes the two women would talk on the phone to arrange the monthly visits. At one point, Michelle asked, “How’s everything going?” She tried to be subtle, but Mary Jean’s answer indicated that she understood.
“Great,” Mary Jean said. “Our friends tell me I’m very good for John. I calm him down.”
That reminded Michelle of the many times she’d tried to put a pretty face on her volatile relationship with John. But she was reassured when, after a visit to Dallas, Laurie mentioned that Mary Jean’s brother Rick had been in the army. Rick lived directly across the street from his sister. Michelle knew that John wouldn’t face up to a former military man. Maybe Mary Jean was having an easier time of it after all.
 
 
In the meantime, Michelle LaBorde began dating the handsome and dashing John Ghetti, to whom she had been introduced at the holiday party. He was stable and loving, and made a good living so Michelle didn’t have to apologize for her impressive salary. After dating him for eight months, she married Ghetti in June, 1992.
Ghetti touched a soft spot in her heart when he said he loved children and wanted to start a family immediately. The following year, Michelle gave birth to a son, Kevin Michael Ghetti.
T
WENTY
John Battaglia’s well-cut suits were his daily uniform for his RTC job. He looked every bit the distinguished supervisor.
However, he continued to complain about productivity. The more he griped, the more his efforts were met with hostility from the administration. He could sense his popularity declining. People began avoiding him. Whispering behind his back, employees discussed what a whiner he was and how easily he blew up.
But while Battaglia pretended to object to the foot-dragging of his cohorts, he would order already closed businesses to be scrutinized a second time using a different accounting formula. Those redundant inquiries floated some businesses on the books for two or three additional years, making John more inefficient than the employees he complained about.
His habit of alternating between being courteous and being disagreeable showed up at work. He was respectful to his superiors but rude to RTC employee Nancy Parker. She’d had polio as a child and walked with a pronounced limp. Battaglia found her an easy target for his fits of anger. One day, after he had snapped at her repeatedly, she promptly sued him for sexual harassment.
In revenge, Battaglia filed a sexual harassment complaint against his female supervisor for using vulgar language. Even after his supervisor apologized and promised to clean up her foul mouth, he refused to back off because Nancy Parker wouldn’t drop her complaint.
The conflicts at work should have made John Battaglia be more cautious, but instead they led him to lash out even harder. He complained, accused, and threatened until he lost his job supervising eleven employees—he was demoted to checking invoices from companies contracted to do accounting services for the RTC. In his mind, there had to be some way to get even.
 
 
To escape his on-the-job frustration, Battaglia sought diversion at night. On May 22, 1993, he borrowed his wife’s car and drove to Deep Ellum. Offbeat restaurants, tattoo parlors, and over sixty bars and clubs, some offering live rock bands, dotted the area. Deep Ellum sat just three blocks east of downtown. Elm Street, the main thoroughfare, ran through the middle of both neighborhoods. After the Civil War, former slaves settled there and, because of their dialect, referred to the street as “Ellum,” and from that “Deep Ellum” evolved. It became a little bit like Harlem, with a taste of Bourbon Street, and it was an offbeat place, ideal for outsiders. John Battaglia especially enjoyed the chic cafes that had transformed the old warehouse area.
However, he should have checked Mary Jean’s car more thoroughly that night. Her father, Gene Pearle, saw the safety of his only child as very important. A gun enthusiast, Gene gave Mary Jean a Smith 9-millimeter silver pistol to keep in her car for protection. The gun had slid from under the seat and was in plain sight when John Battaglia pulled up to the popular cafe Sambuca on Elm Street. The club’s security chief, Calvin Lane, allowed no one packing a gun to enter.
Lane, a handsome black man, didn’t have much trouble with unruly patrons, as he stood seven feet, six inches tall and weighed over four hundred pounds. He patrolled the front entry through which patrons passed on their way to the restaurant’s parking lot. With his height, he could see everything, and what he saw that night was a gun lying at John Battaglia’s feet. He strolled over to Battaglia’s car to question him about it.
Battaglia brushed aside the gun’s presence, saying it belonged to his wife, but Lane wasn’t buying it. He didn’t want anyone with a gun to darken his restaurant’s door. And he didn’t much care for Battaglia’s surly attitude.
Sambuca security was only one of Lane’s many jobs. He worked trade shows for businesses, where the “Gentle Giant” fascinated people who clustered outside his booth waiting to meet him. Advertisers sought him to push their products, and he had made several TV appearances in
Walker, Texas Ranger
. Someone like John Battaglia wasn’t about to bruise Calvin’s ego. He waved down the next police car that came along.
John Battaglia was still fuming when Officers Scott Carbo and Daren Roberts strolled over to his car and peered inside. They could easily view the shiny silver gun sitting on the floor, and told Battaglia to get out with his hands up. After frisking him for more weapons, Carbo picked up the gun, checked it, and found that it was loaded and in fine working order. When the officers asked to see his permit, Battaglia should have known better than to mouth off, insisting that the gun belonged to his wife so he didn’t need a permit. He was perturbed at being stopped in the first place.
The officers arrested him for unlawfully carrying a weapon, a Class A misdemeanor, and took him to police headquarters. That was a serious offense for someone working for a government agency, an offense Battaglia later fought hard to conceal, knowing it could cost him his job.
By the time he had been delivered to headquarters it was almost 2:00
A.M.
The only attorney he knew that might help him at that hour was Robert Clark, Mary Jean’s half-brother.
Clark drowsily reached for the ringing phone on his nightstand and listened to Battaglia’s tale of woe. He slowly climbed out of bed and got dressed. He knew that if he didn’t go, he’d have to listen to John grumble, so he drove down to jail and bailed him out.
 
 
The next week, Battaglia was sorting through a batch of invoices from Texas Data Control (TDC), a company hired to keep data-processing records for the RTC. It was classified as minority-owned because it was partially made up of Hispanics. He was shocked at the figures—$500,000 a month to belch out reports. He glared more closely at the amounts and discovered that although the reports were mailed in batches, the charges were coming in for each one as if mailed individually—TDC was charging for each page as if it were a separate document. That alone added up to an additional $900,000 over the last three years. Battaglia gathered up the evidence and hurried to the RTC’s oversight manager, Donald Houk. Houk pored over the documents and labeled Battaglia the “new watchdog over TDC billings.” Battaglia glowed at the recognition. He didn’t like being told to continue paying the invoices, but he was promised that an inspection would begin immediately. In the next few weeks, John detected no signs of a serious investigation, and TDC continued bilking the government.
By the fall of 1993, John was furious with the snail-paced inquiry, so he wrote Stephen Beard, Director of the U.S. Office of the Inspector General (OIG), stating, “I intended to use my skills to help my country resolve what I perceived to be a national crisis.” Then, he outlined his findings, describing TDC as an octopus that was greedily sucking up government spoils. The OIG performed an audit of TDC’s billing procedures and agreed with Battaglia. The report caused Battaglia’s hopes to soar, especially when the OIG told the Dallas office to seek a refund of $5.6 million from the TDC. It probably didn’t hurt that Battaglia threatened to go public with his findings if the OIG didn’t address his concerns.
While all that was taking place, Battaglia stumbled across an article about a government employee who had made millions suing a defense contractor—basically a whistle-blower case. Battaglia’s hands itched at the prospect.
 
 
During the same year, Michelle Ghetti was researching on the Internet and saw that Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards was establishing a “Violent Crime and Homicide Task Force.” This was her chance, her opportunity to change the laws that had protected John Battaglia and left her all the more a victim. She researched the procedures for serving on the task force and found that some members would be appointed by state legislators. She had taught the son of a state senator in two of her law school classes. Excited, she called her former student and asked to be put in touch with his father. One phone call later, Michelle was a member of the task force.
Then, one door after another began opening. She was the only domestic violence advocate on the task force, but she soon met Bobbette Apple, Director of the Office of Women’s Services for Louisiana. Many other bright women who were involved in the issue of abuse, including a former student, Anne Stehr, became part of her team. She began building a strong coalition of knowledgeable women who could assist in her struggle for tougher, more far-reaching legislation.
Thinking about how John Battaglia had received only a slap on the wrist for repeated protective order violations, Michelle wrote a law spelling out penalties, giving a specific number of hours, days, or years of jail time for violations involving violence or injury.
She remembered the time that John was arrested and given probation with the admonition to keep his distance from her. Then he showed up at her bedside. As her most powerful change, she made noncontact of a spouse a condition of bail. If an abuser still tried to illegally see a spouse, he was in contempt of court and immediately sent to jail until his trial.
Knowing how frequently John had slipped out of his counseling sessions, she established mandatory therapy as a condition of probation.
Stalking was what John Battaglia did so well and so often. The courts were reluctant to do much about stalking because many stalkers border on being mentally ill. But stalking escalates. It’s the first rung in the ladder toward violent behavior. She strengthened the law and detailed how stalking would violate a protective order and lead to jail time. Her laws would not affect John Battaglia, but he was her reason for writing them.
 
 
Michelle had attended high school with Jay Jardenne, now a well-respected Louisiana state senator. He enthusiastically agreed to sponsor her laws.
It was up to her to get the laws passed. She would leave her classroom and pick up two-year-old Kevin from the baby-sitter. At the state capital, she attended legislative hearings. Standing in the back of the room, she wrote notes to senators asking them to meet with her. With Kevin on one hip, she would hand out packets of her abuse laws to senators and urge their support.
One night, Michelle was lying in bed, tears streaming down her cheeks as she watched police follow O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco during his famous chase. She was editing her abuse laws and she considered the Simpson case the worst ever of spousal abuse.
Now maybe people will be more aware.
“God is good,” she said to herself, knowing the entire country would be getting a first hand glimpse into the tragedy of abuse.
Her husband, John Ghetti, walked by and saw her crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The timing of this is unbelievable,” she said. “With all this media attention on domestic violence, the legislature will pass our laws unanimously.”
And they did.
The year 1994 turned out to be a significant one for Michelle Ghetti.
Wanting more recognition for her laws, she entered the “Mrs. Baton Rouge” Pageant. A pretty face wasn’t enough; contestants had to speak on a platform of important issues. She won the title, in part, by making more people aware of domestic violence.
The following September, she stood in the spotlight, acknowledging the applause of six hundred state dignitaries. At a gala banquet at the Centroplex in Baton Rouge, the YWCA named her “Woman of Achievement” for her public service in government and education. She was selected from the group of fifty-five outstanding women especially because of her domestic violence legislation. Now Michelle was living her dream—to help other women suffering the same type of abuse she’d suffered at the hands of John Battaglia.

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