“We don’t need any negativity about Little Italy,” Giovanna Marie “Gia” Blatterman says over the phone on June 15.

The 64-year-old businesswoman is one of the neighborhood’s most visible and diehard promoters, and she has a long history of political clout and controversy. When Kurt Schmoke was Baltimore’s mayor in the 1980s and 1990s, she was a key fundraiser for his campaigns and served as one of his appointees on the Board of Municipal Zoning Appeals. Today, part of her civic involvement is running what she calls the Little Italy Bocce Committee, an all-volunteer, unincorporated outfit that oversees Wednesday night bocce competitions at the city-owned Thomas J. D’Alesandro Jr. Park. The park, a tiny space with two bench-lined bocce courts, is tucked off Stiles Street amid Little Italy’s restaurants and rowhouses.

Based on two recent Wednesday night visits, there appears to be nothing negative in the least about the peaceful, placid bocce games being played there. No voices were raised, no tempers flared, and the slow, deliberate pace of the game, which involves two teams strategically rolling balls down a carefully tended court, promotes a calm civility that, even on an evening with temperatures in the high 90s, tends not to make people sweat.

Nonetheless, a ghost of negativity haunts the place. That’s because Blatterman, her bocce committee, and their lawyer have taken a feud from D’Alesandro Park and moved it into the District Court for Howard County, Civil Division. There have been heated bocce disputes in Little Italy before, including one in 2002 that featured Blatterman in a fight with a neighbor over lighting the courts at night, and even one that became a lawsuit, dismissed in 2003, over a neighboring restaurant’s fire escape and an ordinance that would have closed down bocce play at 9:30 p.m. But none of the prior disputes came with accusations as hot as these.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which was filed on March 1, are the Little Italy Bocce Committee, Blatterman, and two other committee members, Salvatore Petti and Francis Blatterman. Petti’s daughter, Lisa Ellis, represents them. They are asking the court to make the defendant—52-year-old Marriottsville resident Thomas Paul Macchia—pay thousands of dollars in damages and attorney’s fees, and to order him “forever barred” from Little Italy’s bocce courts and from obtaining any bocce permits from the City of Baltimore “for a period of no less than ten (10) years,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit, as initially filed, claims defamation and malicious destruction of property and accuses Macchia of writing defamatory graffiti and posting defamatory notices around the neighborhood. It also claims he destroyed lighting, a video camera, a souvenir map, and bocce equipment at D’Alesandro Park. A pretrial conference is scheduled for June 21—the day this article goes to press—and Macchia is proceeding without the benefit of an attorney.

Shortly after it was filed, though, Macchia twice was charged criminally in Baltimore City District Court based on applications for charges filed by Blatterman. In the first criminal case, filed on March 6, Macchia was accused of malicious destruction of property for breaking the bocce court’s lighting, camera, and map “on or about” Aug. 19, 2010, according to court records. But in the second, filed on March 9, Blatterman accused Macchia of serious violence.

As a result of Blatterman’s written statement, court records show Macchia was charged with first- and second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and witness retaliation for driving “his car over the curb onto the sidewalk straight at” Blatterman, who was standing on the corner outside Café Gia, her daughter’s Little Italy restaurant. The complaint also says Macchia “has made prior death threats against me, my daughter, and my grandson” and is “trying to intimidate me so I will not testify about his criminal activity.”

On April 27, the Baltimore City State’s Attorneys Office declined to prosecute all but one of the criminal charges, placing one count of second-degree assault on the inactive docket so, if needed, it could be pursued at a later date. The outcome, Macchia acknowledges, included an oral agreement made in front of a judge that he will not go near Blatterman’s home or business for three years—but he insists, despite Ellis’ contentions otherwise, that he’s free to go to the bocce courts and to Little Italy, as long as he stays away from those two places.

On June 14, Ellis filed a “pre-trial statement” in the Howard County lawsuit, which ratcheted up the accusations, saying Macchia “engaged in a campaign to terrorize” Blatterman “over his anger at the bocce situation.” The statement says the plaintiffs intend to add additional counts, seek higher damages, and name Macchia’s wife, Lisa Macchia, as a defendant because she “knew or should have known that Giovanna Blattermann [sic] was in danger.”

Macchia says that, thanks to the lawsuit and the criminal charges, “in the court of public opinion, I’m already convicted of crimes that never occurred.” Indeed, he calls them “imaginary events in [Blatterman’s] mind. And now they are going to try to bring my wife into this. My wife has no knowledge of something that didn’t happen.”

 

According to Macchia, the whole dispute erupted because his bocce team—Tutto Bocce, which was sponsored by Caesar’s Den Restaurant—kept winning the annual tournaments that take place each summer among about a dozen teams. So Blatterman “tried to chase us off,” he says, because she and her fellow committee members are “sore-losing types.”

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