Dispute over customer’s bill could end up costing NSTAR

A Dorchester man has discovered that, even if you pay your bill, NSTAR might say you didn’t.

Gregory J. Duarte, a former high school history teacher, says he always paid his gas and electric bills on his property in Dorchester.

But in 2005, NSTAR filed a lawsuit against him in Dorchester District Court, claiming that Duarte owed the utility company $7,210.09 in unpaid charges.

It took Duarte two years and a trial to prove to a judge that NSTAR was wrong. After he won, he found that he may have spent more money on attorneys’ fees than if he had simply coughed up the money NSTAR said he owed it in the first place.

“Going through the process was potentially more expensive than acquiescing to what I saw as fraud,” he says. “But it was worth it because I didn’t feel comfortable and didn’t feel it was the right thing to do [to just pay the bill]. This is not the way it should work. Consumers should not be bullied by monopolies that should have the public trust.”

Now Duarte is suing the utility to stop it from bullying other consumers. But, instead of apologizing, NSTAR is fighting him tooth and nail.

‘They wouldn’t listen’

Duarte no longer even owned the building in Dorchester when he received notice that he was being sued in District Court for failing to pay his electric bills. He scrambled to respond, but when he tried to contact NSTAR to correct what he assumed was a billing mistake, all he got was silence, Duarte says.

“They wouldn’t listen to any explanation, wouldn’t entertain dialogue with me,” he recalls. “I called NSTAR; I faxed them papers; and I called their lawyer a couple of times.”

So Duarte wrote a letter to the court explaining that he had cancelled his NSTAR account when he sold the building. Then he got his own lawyer, Boston attorney Colette Manoil.

Manoil told Duarte that if he did not owe NSTAR money, he probably could litigate the case on his own. But Duarte, concerned about NSTAR’s behavior, thought he might need her help.

He was right. NSTAR was determined to take him to trial.

‘Smoke and mirrors’

“NSTAR didn’t have a shred of evidence that Duarte owed this bill,” Manoil says. “Not a shred.”

She knows, because she asked to see proof many times, in letters and official demands to NSTAR and its lawyers. But the lawyer representing NSTAR in the case, Thomas M. Palmer, never even sent her a copy of Duarte’s supposedly unpaid bill, Manoil says.

At one point, in response to a detailed list of questions from Manoil, Palmer filed a court document that answered nearly all of them with the word “Deny.”

Palmer also made it difficult for Manoil to talk to him, she says. He did not appear in court for several pre-trial conferences in the case and sent another lawyer in his place. And he did not respond to Manoil’s phone calls any more than he responded to Duarte’s, she claims.

Eventually, Manoil began sending him documents by messenger, just to be sure he received them.

The first time Duarte appeared before Boston Municipal Court Judge Lawrence E. McCormick, the judge urged the lawyers on the case to “work through this.” The second time, he warned NSTAR that if it did not produce proof that Duarte owed the bill, “the court’s going to be very unhappy.”

At one point, according to Manoil, the judge asked Palmer if NSTAR would accept $1,000 to make the case go away.

“Palmer said no!” she recalls.

When contacted by Exhibit A, Palmer said, “Obviously, I would love to comment, and I think the facts of the case, once they come to light, would explain my conduct. But I can’t comment.”

Duarte, meanwhile, doesn’t buy Palmer’s promised explanation. “It was smoke and mirrors, if you ask me,” he says.

‘Bullied by a giant’

On May 29, 2007, NSTAR’s case crumbled at trial.

Instead of bringing a copy of the bill to the courtroom, Palmer produced computer printouts of what he said were NSTAR’s collections records and called a witness from NSTAR’s collections department to interpret them.

Because NSTAR’s evidence was so flimsy, the judge ultimately found in favor of Duarte. But while Duarte won the case, he had gone into debt defending himself.

So Duarte and his lawyer decided to sue NSTAR in Superior Court. Hoping to win damages to cover the cost of Duarte’s legal fees, they charged the utility with “abuse of process” and “malicious prosecution.”

NSTAR fought the case, arguing that it had done nothing wrong by filing the lawsuit against Duarte. In court documents, the utility accused Duarte of filing a frivolous lawsuit and asked the judge to dismiss the case.

But this spring, Superior Court Judge Nancy S. Holtz sided with Duarte. In a stinging decision that allowed the case to continue, she made it clear that she thought the utility had sued Duarte in an attempt to scare him into paying money he did not owe.

“NSTAR did not appear to have any intention of proving its case but rather appeared to have brought this action in the hope that the mere existence of a civil action would be enough to extract a sum of money from the defendant,” she wrote. “But that is not the law and any reasonable plaintiff would be well aware of this simple fact.”

So, with the legal fees in the case continuing to mount, the battle between Duarte and NSTAR rages on. {EXA}

By Julia Reischel

 julia.reischel at exhibitAnewsboston.com