‘Out of bad comes good’ A Pontchartrain Park resident was defrauded out of $147,000 by her contractor, but she had St. Gabriel to help her through When Katrina started to roll in, St. Gabriel parishioner Marigold Hardesty thought she’d be back from her friend’s house in Baton Rouge in a few days, like usual. She even left her jewelry sitting on her bedroom dresser. She was finally able to get back into her neighborhood in Pontchartrain Park two weeks after the storm with the help of her son, who had a friend in the city police. I didn’t have the least idea that we had that kind of water. We got here around 6 o’clock in the morning, the police escorted us to the neighborhood – and it was gray, looked like Third World. Oh my goodness, no lights, no nothing – everything as just gray, ashy-looking stuff. . . For sure, the street still had water in it, about this high [about the height of her kitchen table]. So I got out and started walking, and the more I walked, the deeper it got. So when I got here, I still had water in the house. All the furniture was just strewn all around – the freezer was in the den, one sofa was coming out the front, the beds and the dresser was behind the door in the bedroom – I couldn’t open the door to get in the bedroom. Oh, it was just a mess, so I just fainted, right in that old water. We went on back to Baton Rouge and I took my car with me. That was in September. Father Doussan was in Baton Rouge, when I found he was there, I went to the church where he was saying mass. So I go to this church where he’s saying mass, and this little prayer that we say every Sunday before we go to communion, well he had taught this to the parishioners out there in Baton Rouge. ‘Let the holy spirit come in this place.’ And when he said that, I just couldn’t take it no more. I closed my eyes and said, ‘When I walk out of here, I’m gonna be in St. Gabriel’s.’ I just felt like I was in St. Gabriel. It meant a lot to have him there, and a few parishioners, until we moved back to New Orleans and started working on the church. So I stayed there September, October and November the first, I got an apartment on St. Charles Avenue, and I was paying $1600 a month but I wanted to get back home. So we rented that apartment, my sister and I, and then I started working trying to get the house together. Well, I applied for a trailer, and they put a trailer on my lot around January of 2006. I heard and got me a contractor, went through the Better Business Bureau. He didn’t have complaints or nothing – he and his mother had this business in the ‘80s. I said, well, he looks like a good person, and we talked. He knew I go to church every morning, and after that, he got religious, he’d be telling me he believed in God and all of this. But he was just fooling me, and the more he’d come around
and tell me, ‘I need like $40,000 to put the roof on.’ So I wrote him the check for the $40,000. And in a little while he said, ‘I need $20,000.’ It got down to the air conditioning, he told me needed $10,000 for a Trane, because that’s the type of air-conditioning I had before the storm, and I wanted the same kind because it was very good. I gave him $10,000 three times for the Trane. The first time, something happened, so he told me he had to use the money for something else, so I got him $10,000 more. He brought the Trane, put the Trane up – they had wired the house then – and the man who he bought the Trane from came and cut the Trane off and took it because he had never paid. So anyway, he took $147,000 from me. So then I took him to court and I won, so he’s paying me back, but he’s paying me back a little at a time. So it was hard, it was really hard. I had some nuns that came from church that helped me paint the sheet rock, and then I started buying the flooring and stuff, I had to do that myself. I would buy it and then have somebody put it down for me. But you never thought that somebody would do this, after we had gone through so much, because it was so hard for Katrina. And for him to take advantage – that’s what the judge told him when I went to court. He got a lawyer, but I didn’t have a lawyer, I was my own lawyer. His lawyer told the judge, ‘She shouldn’t be in criminal court with this, this is a civil court [issue].’ The judge said, ‘As much money as he took from that lady, it’s a criminal charge and he’s gonna pay her back.’ I know he did that to about 10 people. I had every check where I had paid him, I had back and front when he cashed it and everything. But this other lady, he might have taken cash from this lady, and she had no record of it, and I guess when she took him to court, she couldn’t prove it, but I could prove it because I had every check. So his lawyer told [the judge[, ‘My client didn’t keep records like her.’ Well he should have kept records better than me, because he was the businessman! This happened all of 2006 … I took him to court November of 2006, because I was back in my house in 2007. . . I’ve never had flooding – even with Betsy, and that was a bad, bad hurricane in 1965. We didn’t get any water, because of the levees. [With Katrina] it really and truly wasn’t the storm – it was the levees that broke. My flood insurance wasn’t that much. I think I had $44,000 flood insurance, and I figured that would be enough, if the floors or something, or water leaked. My homeowners’, which is where I had all of the money, they gave me $2,000, they said, because everything came from flood, and they don’t take care of flood. They were horrible, the homeowners’, they were really horrible.
Hardesty in front of her home in Pontchartrain Park The Road Home program, they were a joke. I applied to the Road Home, and right now I’m paying the SBA loan back, $625 a month, and that’s the money that [the contractor] took from me. My house was just like it is, swimming pool, everything, and they appraised my house for $94,000. I told them, I said, I retired in 1994, and I had that sunroom built on that back outside for the pool, and I had to borrow money from the bank. So the bank come and appraised my house: $170,000. That was in 1996 or something like that. And they’re going to appraise it for $94,000? … Plus, the Road Homers sent me a bill or something telling me it would take 290some thousand dollars to rebuild the house – and that’s all you’re going to give me? Ninetyfour thousand? So I sent it back, I didn’t take it, and that delayed me. Then, they redid it and they said, they gave me 113 or 114 thousand. And they said, that’s all we can give you. We have the Loyola Law Clinic around here, and a girl from that goes to our church, and I was telling her about it, and she says, ‘I’m going to write them a letter… I’m going to explain that you’re due more than $113,000.’ So they called me back and they told me they were going to send another appraisal out, but if that appraisal comes back less than the $113,000 we give you, you’re going to have to pay it back. I had gotten that already, the $113,000. And they sent they sent the appraiser out around Christmastime, and he appraised it for $25,000 more. I didn’t mind it, I really needed it because the man had took my money, but they sent it to the SBA. At least it lowered the SBA. It was hell. It was hard. But, I think it brought me closer to God. I used to cry so many nights in that trailer, not knowing … where I’d get the next penny from. But [God] always came through, and I think it just made me have more faith, because out of bad comes good. I was determined. I don’t know what I would have done. It’s inconceivable what I would have done if I couldn’t get back home.