Read Mean Justice for Free Online

home. “He doesn’t let his wife do anything.” Pat remembers thinking that sounded pretty odd to him—he couldn’t imagine picking out Nancy’s brassieres, or her letting him do so even if he wanted to. But he made no comment, as he clearly heard in Sandy’s voice that she thought Mr. Paola quite charming and sophisticated, Old World ways and all. Being taken care of, it seemed, even in such a heavy-handed fashion, strongly appealed to her.
    Not long after that conversation, Sandy left her job at the clothing store and Pat stopped seeing her waiting for buses. The next thing he heard, Patrick Paola—nearly thirty years Sandy’s senior—had left the wife he so jealously cared for and had begun courting the twenty-six-year-old sales clerk from Manhattan. They married a short time later, in 1961. Sandy told friends of how she tried to resist Paola’s advances, fretting that everyone would think that she was some kind of gold digger interested only in Old Man Paola’s money. But while Sandy tended to be intensely concerned about what others thought of her, proud and acutely conscious of what she considered to be her lofty station in life, her new husband cared little about what people thought of him. He was, according to one contemporary, a fast-talking deal maker with huge ambitions and a modestly proportioned conscience. “That’s okay, honey,” he had told Sandy with a laugh when she mentioned her fears about being seen as a gold digger. “Tell them, hell, yes, you’re after the money. That’ll shut them up.” From that moment on, this anecdote became her lifelong foil—she would tell it as a kind of preamble to describing her years with Pat Paola, just in case someone really did think she was a fortune hunter.
    Pat Dunn lost touch with Sandy after her marriage to Patrick Paola, though he would occasionally hear reports from his mother-in-law about the courtship and marriage, and how Mr. Paola had begun doing everything for Sandy just as he had for his first wife, right down to selecting her shoes and underwear. Pat’s in-laws knew the Paolas—in fact, Pat and Nancy Dunn held their wedding reception at his restaurant, gratis. But the Dunn family did not move in the same circles as the Paolas, who went about building a number of Bakersfield landmarks, fromhousing developments to bowling alleys to shopping malls, and accumulating several million dollars in cash and real estate in the process.
    Twenty-five years passed without them crossing paths again, except for one time when Pat helped his father-in-law—then a Paola employee—measure the square footage of the Paolas’ home for an appraisal. In those twenty-five years, Pat and Nancy Dunn raised three children, Patrick Jr., Danny and Jennifer. Pat taught elementary school and junior high math classes in the Bakersfield school system, later becoming a counselor, then taking a job as principal for a tiny school district at the windswept top of the Grapevine Pass, in a historic community called Tejon Ranch. He eventually left that position on an early retirement in 1981 after taking the losing side in a heated political battle with the school board over the size of the faculty at the district’s two schools.
    Seizing on California’s sky-high real estate market at the time—and the record number of defaults that the high prices were causing—Pat entered the mortgage-foreclosure business the following year. He cleaned, repaired and boarded homes that had been repossessed—sometimes, he did the evicting and repossessing, too—so that the properties could be resold by the banks or federal housing agencies that held the notes on them. The homes of the dispossessed were rarely left in pristine condition, and Pat soon had more offers for work than he could handle. His company quickly grew from two trucks and crews into nine and handled business throughout the broad valleys and boom towns of Central California. It was a dirty, sad business, and Pat took