• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

If the state would compensate her enough to find another home and also pay for the relocation of her pink house, she’d agree to leave the neighborhood. She had only one condition: she would not settle until the city and the state took care of the Cristofaro family.

The Cristofaro family had come up with its own conditions for leaving. First, they wanted to take some of the shrubs from the property; Pasquale Cristofaro had transplanted the shrubs decades earlier when the city had taken his first house through eminent domain. Second, they wanted a plaque erected in the fort neighborhood in honor of Margherita Cristofaro, the family matriarch who had died during the battle with the city. And third, if the city ended up building new upscale housing where their homes had once stood, the family wanted an exclusive right to purchase one at a fixed price so it could return to the neighborhood.

Bullock brought these terms and conditions to Ron Angelo.

He had heard all the rumors: Susette was impossible to deal with. She was greedy. She was holding out for more money.

Ron Angelo was on his way to her house to find out for himself. Before closing any deal, he wanted to sit down with her face-to-face, something no one in the Rell administration had ever bothered to do.

When he arrived, Susette met him at the door. “This is my son Willis,” she said, introducing her twenty-eight-year-old son, a student working on his master’s degree in biology. “He’ll be the one you’re going to talk to.”

“My mother’s done talking,” Willis said.

Angelo said he understood. Susette looked like a woman carrying the weight of the world.

The three of them sat down. Willis got right to the bottom line. “This is what my mother wants,” he said. “She has a little house on a little hill overlooking the water. And that’s what she’s going to end up with.”

It was simple. She wanted the deed back to her pink house and enough money to move it outside the fort and establish it as a historic site. And she wanted enough money to purchase a home that resembled what she’d be leaving behind.

“You gotta understand,” Willis told Angelo. “This is no longer about my mother. The whole country is watching to see whether she stays and gets dragged out. If you knew my mother, you’d understand that she says what she means, and she means what she says. My mother isn’t afraid of you or anybody else.”

Angelo said he understood, and he apologized. But he wanted Susette to understand something too. The Rell administration had inherited this mess from the Rowland administration. Angelo hadn’t chosen the job of picking up the pieces. Rather it had been dumped in his lap.

“Is your mother proud of you for the job you’re doing?” Susette asked.

Angelo didn’t take offense. Instead, he revealed something. His daughter in middle school was doing a project on the case and she sided with the homeowners. She wasn’t pleased with her father.

His honesty impressed Susette.

Susette’s grit impressed Angelo. Nobody knew what it felt like to walk in her shoes, he knew. By the time he left her house, he decided he wanted to go to bat for her.

Initially, Tom Londregan and the city council had the same response when Angelo first told them what Susette and Michael Cristofaro wanted: “No way.” They were not interested in seeing Susette’s house saved, and they sure as hell didn’t want the Cristofaro family to move back into the neighborhood when or if high-end housing went up. And the city didn’t want to see them get as much money as the state seemed willing to pay them.

Bullock said that Susette and Michael Cristofaro had a simple response if their demands were not met: Bring on the marshals.

Then the council reflected. The NLDC had had enough and wanted out at any cost. Mayor Sabilia feared Susette wouldn’t go. And Londregan knew that Angelo held a trump card: Although the state couldn’t force the city to settle, it could make life very difficult when the city tried to proceed with the development. Virtually every