I'll Take Care of You (21 page)

In turn, Billy told Nanette that he was “an up-and-comer,” still in school, but he didn't have anywhere near as much money as she and John Packard. Billy earned a comparatively modest $50,000 annual salary.

But that did not seem to deter her. “I think she knew I had a good career,” he said recently.

The fact that he was also handsome and athletic surely helped make the physical attraction between them part of the package, because this, too, had been part of Nanette's MO.

He also was able to help her spend her and John Packard's money on things she wanted. Besides designer clothes and shoes, she had a serious thing for motorcycles. But she didn't want just any motorcycle. She had to have a special custom-built one. So Billy found a builder in Boca Raton, Florida, and commissioned him to build her a purple chopper to her specifications for $50,000, a model that normally would have cost $100,000.

 

 

Citing “irreconcilable differences,” John Packard filed for divorce from Nanette on July 17, 2003, when their daughter was 3½ years old. He asked the court for joint legal and physical custody of Jaycie.

A week later, Nanette filed for sole physical custody and joint legal custody, claiming that she and John had been separated since March 1—eight months after Nanette had met Billy and five years and one month after she'd married John. He claimed they'd separated December 27, 2002.

A few months later, Nanette filed paperwork accusing John of being “a severe alcoholic,” who bought sixteen-year-old Lishele and her friends a half gallon of vodka at Albertsons. Nanette said she had to take Lishele to the emergency room, where she was kept overnight for alcohol poisoning.

I can honestly state that in the last two years, I have never seen petitioner go a day without a drink,
she wrote.
This is a way of life for him.

She complained that she found their toddler, running around in her underwear on John's front lawn, and that the child had reported some pretty alarming comments to Nanette, such as
“Daddy is teaching me how to make a martini for him.”
(None of these allegations could be confirmed.)

In a rather ironic filing, dated November 2006, Nanette accused John of being “incapable of setting rules.”

[He is] negatively impacting the co-parenting relationship and is the primary cause of the problems,
she wrote.

CHAPTER 29

Between seasons playing in Europe, Eric Naposki met Natalia Algorta in 1996 at Polyester's, a bar in Stamford, Connecticut, where they both worked. After returning to Barcelona for the 1997 season, he married Natalia in Sitges, a Mediterranean coastal town about twenty-two miles outside of Barcelona, in June 1998.

Finally done with football, Eric came back to Connecticut to finish his college degree and opened a gym in Milford.

In 1998, Eric was granted visitation rights to see his two daughters, despite owing more than $75,000 in back support payments, for which a portion of his wages was being withheld.

According to Eric, he was working by that time for a security company, where he said** he ran the ESPN account and claimed to have “caught the mailman stealing.” While at that job, he also claimed to have been honored as “Supervisor of the Year,” although he listed his position in court records simply as “security guard,” earning $480 a week. (ESPN couldn't confirm this information, noting that even if he had worked security there, his records would be with the private contractor.) Later, Eric said, his boss asked him to work security for a property management company, which he did until 2004 or 2005.

Eric occasionally made $800 payments to the family court, but he missed numerous hearings, prompting the issuance of a series of bench warrants with bonds as high as $25,000. When the self-described unemployed physical trainer asked the court to decrease his support payments, he was ordered to prove that he was looking for a job.

In spite of his outstanding child support debt, he and his new wife decided to have two children of their own—Eric Junior, in April 1999, and Susanna, in June 2002.

Eric's marriage to Natalia ultimately went bad as well. During an argument in a parking lot, he said**, he punched and shattered Natalia's car windshield. She called out to some cops driving by, who subsequently issued an arrest warrant for him. He said the case was dismissed, and no court records of any such incident could be located in 2012.

Natalia and Eric separated after almost seven years, on April 30, 2005, and she filed for divorce in late June. The estranged couple initially agreed to share joint legal custody and for Eric to pay child support, based on his “uneven” earning potential. Two months later, Natalia went for sole custody, because Eric wasn't visiting the children or paying support.

At this point, Eric was not sending money to either of his ex-wives for his three minor children, ages three, six, and fifteen.

In July, Eric said he was so poor he couldn't even afford to pay the court fees for his second divorce. Nonetheless, he filed a separate set of divorce papers in November.

Meanwhile, Eric still owed more than $75,000 to Kathy for his older daughters. Contending he had only $70 to his name, he complained that his debts were now up to $104,000, including credit card bills and student loans.

Not surprisingly, Natalia also filed a number of contempt motions after he failed to make his payments to her as well.

I never know what I am going to get and when I am going to receive it,
she wrote in March 2007, prompting judges to issue bench warrants with $5,000 bonds when he failed to show up for hearings.

“Defendant to be arrested any weekday between nine-thirty
A.M.
and four
P.M.
,” a judge ordered in April 2007.

 

 

By this point, Eric had moved on to another woman in his life, a pretty blond schoolteacher named Rosemarie “Rosie” Macaluso, of Greenwich, Connecticut, whom he met in a bar in Stamford. Rosie's uncle was a police officer.

Eric continued to work security, opened a gym in Westchester County, New York, and also trained high-school athletes at a gym in Chappaqua, but he still had the massive support debt hanging over his head.

As a result, Eric was picked up in August 2007 on one of the bench warrants, and had to fork over $5,000 to the state of Connecticut as bond forfeiture.

As proof that he was trying to earn a living, he submitted a flyer to the Danbury court to show he was running a six-week $850 training camp:
Increase your speed, strength, endurance, flexibility and quickness. Learn proper weight training techniques, speed drills, boxing skills, plyometric exercises and vertical training programs,
it stated.

 

 

During the spring of 2009, Eric and Rosie moved in together and got engaged.

Based on photos of the couple posing with his two younger, giggling children, it looks like he did spend some time with them.

On May 20, 2009, at 9:00
A.M.
, Eric was supposed to appear at the umpteenth hearing on one of Kathy's contempt motions. She showed up, but he did not. For reasons he never saw coming, he had more pressing matters to deal with that morning.

CHAPTER 30

Nanette had moved on as well. She registered to vote as a Republican, and after three years of dating, Nanette and Billy McNeal got engaged in April 2005. He gave her a three-carat diamond ring, and was disappointed when she insisted that he buy her several diamond-studded bands to wear on either side of it.

“For me, as her husband, it never seemed like it was enough,” he said.

At first, it was hard for Billy's parents to warm up to her, but eventually they came around. “She was very cold, hard to know,” he recalled.

 

 

Nanette, who was working at a real estate office in Ladera Ranch, still had dollar signs in her eyes. She bought two homes in Lake Forest, which Billy said he and his father helped her renovate and flip, but he had no idea how much she made off the sales.

In 2006, she told Billy she was helping a wealthy property owner sell big lots to real estate developers, such as Lennar and Standard Pacific Homes. For the next six months, she traveled to Palm Desert every six weeks to meet for a few hours with this wealthy man, whom she said she'd met through a mortgage broker friend. She was always home by three in the afternoon.

Nanette claimed to have earned a 3 percent commission by working with this man on a $20 million transaction involving 1,200 acres, and Billy had no reason not to believe her.

A few years later, Billy learned that this man had been in his mid to late fifties and his wife was dying of cancer. The man had indeed made some big deals, but when Billy looked into it, Nanette's name was nowhere to be found on the public documents.

“I think she was trying to weave her way in there,” he said, speculating that she'd been searching for another rich mark like Bill McLaughlin or John Packard, whom she could entice into marrying her.

 

 

Instead, Nanette married Billy on a boat in Newport Beach on August 25, 2006, and they honeymooned in Greece.

With the financial portion of her divorce to John Packard finalized, Nanette continued to fight for a bigger share of John's complicated asset portfolio, a quest that continued for years.

But she never shared her financial paperwork with Billy. They had a postnuptial agreement, he said, and “never commingled” their money. She also declined to take his last name.

“I never asked her about money,” he said, noting that he wrote checks to pay for the mortgage for their house, which was in her name. She'd bought the $1.27 million house on Illuminata Lane in Ladera Ranch with her half of the proceeds from the sale of the home she'd shared with John.

The only time she and Billy discussed finances, he said, was seven years into their relationship when she couldn't afford to send her daughter Jaycie back to the Stoneybrooke Christian School. Nanette was upset and Billy wanted to help, so he offered to sit down and create a budget for her.

Billy built her a spreadsheet of her expenses, based on her word alone. She told Billy that she was receiving $6,500 a month from John for child support, which had never gone into the communal marriage pot.

“I never saw a bank balance,” he said.

This exercise seemed to make her feel a little better, but it didn't slow her shopping for the walls of shoes and designer clothing that filled her closet. Her extensive collection of dresses included three dozen in the $100 to $600 range and three dozen in the $700 to $2,000 range. She rarely, if ever, wore the same dress twice.

Nanette also insisted that Billy pay for lavish trips, and expected him to spend as much as $600 each weekend for nights out with drinks, dinner, and clubbing (averaging about $400 per weekend, depending on whether they went out both nights). They even chartered a yacht one evening to drink champagne, eat dinner, and cruise around. Billy drained his own bank account and bounced a few checks trying to keep her happy.

“It was always lopsided,” he said later, noting that this was “a point of contention in our relationship. She always wanted more.”

 

 

Sandy Baumgardner wouldn't let go of this case. Surfing around on the Internet one day in 2005, she decided to look up Eric Naposki. She found him—teaching Tae Kwon Do and boxing at the Westport Boxing Gym in Westport, Connecticut, just outside of New York City.

Cold-calling Sergeant Dave Byington, who was now in charge of the NBPD's robbery-homicide unit, they chatted about the case and she sent him a link to Eric's latest whereabouts, trying to keep the case alive and on the cops' radar on behalf of the McLaughlin family.

“We're bringing in someone to look at cold cases,” he told her, confiding that they'd always been pretty sure that Eric was the shooter.

 

 

Nanette came to Billy for help again in December 2007. After fighting John Packard over finances for more than four years, she was in debt to experts she'd hired to help her make sense of his expansive and complicated asset portfolio.

“I'm buried,” she told Billy. “I owe the forensic accountant, like, seventy-five to a hundred thousand dollars. If I don't pay it, I'm going to lose my butt.”

“I don't have the money,” Billy said.

Billy talked to a friend to see if Nanette could borrow some money, not knowing the details about how much Nanette wanted, which turned out to be $150,000. When the friend came by the house with the paperwork, Billy signed the promissory note, but he didn't read the fine print.

“That was probably one of the worst decisions I ever made,” he said later.

Although she received sizable regular monthly payments from John each month, Nanette still managed to chalk up tax liens on the Ladera Ranch house. Starting at $1,188 in July 2006, they'd grown to $37,252 by March 2009.

Nanette didn't have to borrow any money, Billy said, but she did so nonetheless. In June 2007, she got a $100,000 loan from a friend in her real estate office. Although Billy never knew anything about this loan, the friend came after Billy years later and sued him for it. Billy said it cost him $30,000 in attorney's fees to fight, and they finally settled out of court.

 

 

Although some saw Nanette as a good, loving mother, she secretly exercised some parenting techniques that certainly wouldn't win her a “Mother of the Year” award. For one, she used her daughter Jaycie as a pawn in a scheme to defraud their neighbors out of $8,000.

Seeing that Jaycie loved fashion, Nanette and Billy enrolled her in a sewing class. Then Nanette had an idea. She told her daughter to design outfits and make them herself. Jaycie and her friends could model and sell them at a fashion show, she said, then donate the proceeds to charity. Nanette had a website designed especially for the event while Jaycie got to work.

In the end, Jaycie didn't end up designing all the dresses. Nanette had some of them tailor-made. During the fashion show, some of the attendees noticed. Even worse, Nanette wrote on the website that the $8,000 in proceeds had gone to orphans in Africa when, in fact, the cash had gone into her own pockets, Billy said.

Nanette's eight-year-old daughter was learning from the master how to lie, deceive, and steal.

 

 

In the fall of 2008, Billy and Nanette were working at either end of a long desk in their home office, when he stopped to listen to her type. He was surprised and confused when he realized that she was hunting and pecking on the computer keyboard.

But her poor typing skills and phony career weren't all that she'd been hiding from him. When they decided to have a child together, he still had no idea about her sordid past.

“At the end of the day,” he said in 2012, “had I been informed, given the choice” to move forward while they were dating, or even while they were engaged, “I can certainly say today, and [even] in late 2009, I wouldn't have stayed with her.”

Yet, on December 19, 2008, Nanette gave birth to her fourth child, Cruz William McNeal.