Tampabay: Phone box takes a hard pounding

Phone box takes a hard pounding

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN

BROOKSVILLE -- For three months, he fought with BellSouth to stop billing him for his neighbor's calls.

On Thursday, Joseph Germinario let his hammer do the talking. Moments after getting a $515.19 phone bill, he drove to his neighbor's house, bill in hand. When Jamie Spacco did not come to the door, Germinario marched back to his white pickup truck, retrieved his hammer and smashed the phone box on her telephone pole. Then he drove home.

"I said that would be the last long-distance call she'd make at my expense," Germinario said.

Later that night he was making a call of his own for someone to bail him out of the Hernando County Jail.

After Spacco had heard the pounding outside her house on Redrose Avenue, she watched in horror as Germinario whacked away at her telephone box. After he left, she called police from a nearby pay phone. Germinario, 35, of 14146 Bowie Road, was charged with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor.

"I looked out my bedroom window, and I said, "Holy crap.' I couldn't believe it," Spacco said Friday during a phone interview, her sister's boyfriend having restored her service somehow.

"If he had (just) come over here and talked to me about this," she said. "He didn't have to go off the wall like that. If there's anybody he should be mad at, it's BellSouth."

That he is, Germinario said. But there's plenty of wrath left over for Spacco. He said he told her three months ago about the crossing of their phone lines after he caught his 10-year-old son listening to an "X-rated conversation" about a party.

He asked Spacco to call the phone company to fix the problem and launched into a marathon session of phone calls to BellSouth himself -- 15 and counting -- to fix the problem with the second telephone line in his house used as a fax machine for his general contracting business.

Though last month he was credited $400 for a contested bill, he keeps getting charges from 900 numbers, three-way calls and collect calls from the Hernando County Jail.

"On one page here I have approximately 27 phone calls collect at $2.10 a piece," he said. "You know where they came from? The Hernando County Jail. You know who I met at the Hernando County Jail last night? My neighbor's husband."

While in lockup relating his phone woes to an amused corrections officer, Germinario was approached by a fellow inmate. The man, James Spacco, is Jamie Spacco's husband, who promised Germinario he would talk to his wife and have her drop the charges.

Jamie Spacco confirmed her husband, transferred to the jail from prison in preparation for his release within the next month, talked to her about the incident.

But she doesn't plan on dropping the charges until her husband comes home so he can handle the problem.

"I don't want (Germinario) to come and bother me," she said.

Though Spacco told a St. Petersburg Times reporter she called BellSouth to fix the problem, Hernando County Sheriff's Office records state that she told police she did not contact the phone company after Germinario approached her a few weeks ago. She heard no more about it until Germinario began pounding on her phone box Thursday at 5 p.m.

BellSouth regional manager Larry Strickler said he could confirm that three or four repair reports have been filed over the past few months on Germinario's account. But Germinario said the problem remains. He suspects a lightning zap fused the wires but can't prove it.