New York Paternity Fight May Have Millions of Ripples
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Nina Montepagani with a photo of Dr. Sebastiano Raeli, who she says is her father.
By WILLIAM GLABERSON and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: April 15, 2011

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IT is a small case, really, easily lost among the thousands in New York City’s courts.
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Brooklyn Collection/Brooklyn Public Library

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1951. Nina grew up there in the 1950s.

A retired schoolteacher named Nina Viola Montepagani, born in a hospital in Brooklyn in 1952, files a lawsuit to change her birth certificate.

She wants to remove the name of her father.

Or, at least, the man who said he was her father. Who acted like her father. Who treated her, until the day he died, with complete, selfless love.

His name was Giuseppe Viola. He was a proud, hard-working man who returned to the same town in southern Italy four times to find four wives. He worked as a laborer and as an elevator operator before moving upstate. Illiterate, he still made a show of reading the newspaper. His second wife, Anna, was Mrs. Montepagani’s mother. They lived in the early 1950s in three plain rooms in Williamsburg in a walk-up on Lorimer Street where the tenants shared a bathtub in the hall.

But this striving if spartan immigrant existence masked a far more complex reality, one that was only hinted at.

Maybe it was in the apartment, when Giuseppe was out working, or maybe it was at the coat factory where Anna sewed buttons, that she wrote the letters. They were anguished, emotional, miserable. And they were written to a prosperous young Italian doctor named Sebastiano Raeli.

“If I would ever tell this story to someone, it would seem impossible to believe. It seems something out of a novel,” Anna Viola wrote to Sebastiano in 1957, when Nina (“beautiful child,” Anna wrote) was 5.

It seems she had known Sebastiano in Rome before she came to join Giuseppe in Brooklyn. Nina was born about eight months after she arrived.

“How much pain I carry in my heart! How much humiliation,” Anna wrote.

Nina Montepagani always felt the entry under “father” was not literally true. “I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere,” she said recently. There had been clues: oddly similar names, family stories and a piece of paper with an address in Rome carried in Giuseppe’s wallet for decades.

The decision by the New York courts about whether to delete Giuseppe Viola’s name from the old birth certificate could help reshape one of the most rigid rules of American law: the presumption that infants born to married women are the children of their husbands. The law often changes slowly to catch up with ideas about family, and Mrs. Montepagani’s challenge offers a snapshot of one case that could help erode a rule that dates from a long-ago world.

It could also have a ripple effect that could cross the seas and affect a considerable fortune.

When Dr. Sebastiano Raeli died a few years ago, officially childless, he left $100 million behind; that ambitious young doctor had ended up owning a small hotel empire. He left it to a university, but Italian law allows children to claim up to half of their parents’ estates, will or no will.

That is, unless a document across the ocean, in New York City, says someone else is your father.

And so, a suit is filed. Court documents — old letters, photographs, affidavits and passports — and interviews in New York and Rome tell the story behind the case.

Dr. Raeli’s widow doesn’t want to talk about the woman in America trying to remove the name of another man from her birth certificate. Her lawyer said she had nothing to say about “an episode that involves personal and familial relationships.”

Mrs. Montepagani’s story is not a novel, but can read like one. Nina Viola Montepagani has been preoccupied with the riddle of her two fathers for decades, said Barbara Kittelsen, a friend since they were teenagers. “She’s thought about it every day of her life.”

Anna’s Chapter

Anna Aliano turned 28 in the summer of 1950 in the small southern Italian town of Montemurro. She was a pleasing-looking woman with high cheekbones. According to family lore, she had already had her heart broken once by a Montemurro boy.
Then Giuseppe Viola arrived, looking for a bride. He was originally from Montemurro, having left more than 40 years earlier. But when his first wife died, he returned to find a new one. He was 58 that summer, childless and 30 years older than Anna. He was a short, balding man with a round face. But he wore a white suit. He may have seemed a rich American, as immigrants can back home.
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www.montemurrosulweb.it

Montemurro, Italy, around the 1950s. Anna Aliano and Giuseppe Viola met there.
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Courtesy of Nina Montepagani

Ms. Montepagani's birth certificate. Joseph (Giuseppe) Viola is listed as her father. She is appealing a New York City judge's refusal to delete Mr. Viola's name and leave the space blank.

Anna and Giuseppe were married on Sept. 30, 1950. In October, the groom left to return to the apartment in Williamsburg, his passport shows. The bride went to Rome, where she awaited the papers that would allow her into America.

In Rome, court documents claim, she met a Sicilian with a square face from a family of means, Sebastiano Raeli. A young doctor, he was three years older than Anna. If there was a romance, its story is lost. Mrs. Montepagani said an aunt once told her she saw Dr. Raeli cry when Anna left for America on Oct. 11, 1951. Mrs. Montepagani’s suit claims that the date of her conception was most likely the previous month.

On the June 24, 1952, birth certificate that listed Giuseppe Viola as the father, there was no obvious entry concerning Sebastiano Raeli. But the full first name of the child, who would be known throughout her life as Nina, may have been a hint from her mother: Sebastiana.

The next month, July 1952, the child was christened at St. Nicholas Church in Brooklyn. Around that time, a picture was taken, according to the court record.

It shows Anna in a flowered dress standing next to none other than Sebastiano, evidently visiting Brooklyn from Italy. He is holding a baby.

Mrs. Montepagani, 58, has few memories of those first years: her mother and her in matching pink dresses; a trip to Coney Island. But she recalls a darkening mood in the apartment in Williamsburg. Anna called Giuseppe “il Vecchio” — the old man. They fought, and the mother told the child not to call the old man “Daddy.”

But in one of her letters to Sebastiano at the time, dated July 1957, Anna was bitter toward him as well. “I would have preferred never to have known you,” she wrote, “so that this whole story never would have come to pass.”

Two months later, at 35, Anna Viola died of cervical cancer at Kings County Hospital.

Giuseppe’s Chapter

Giuseppe Viola was the child’s father on the birth certificate and in life. He raised her and, Mrs. Montepagani said, “adored me my whole life, and vice versa.”

He was a proud man, honored by a job in the 1950s as an elevator man in Rockefeller Center, and vain in touching ways. Though he did not know how to read, he would study the newspaper, sometimes upside down.

After Anna died, he again ventured to Montemurro and married another woman. The family then moved to an Italian neighborhood in Albany, where he worked as a parks groundskeeper. When his third wife died, in 1966, he went back to Montemurro yet again, this time marrying a woman from the next town over.

Nina, he would say, was his only child, but he had a poignant habit. For years, he carried in his wallet a piece of paper he could not read. On it was an address in Rome: Dr. Raeli’s. He kept it should the child need help in an emergency.

There was a lot that was unspoken. When the fourth wife came, she brought an 18-year-old son, Biagio Nasca.

Now 59, Mr. Nasca recalled that he was taken to meet Dr. Raeli in Rome before he left, and that the doctor gave him a gift for Nina. It was a frumpy green-and-white sweater. The teenage Nina never wore it.

But she wrote Dr. Raeli in adolescent angst about all the changes in her life. He quickly made an appearance, the lawsuit says; he flew to Albany. “He said, ‘She belongs to me; she should come with me,’ ” Donata De Luise, an Albany woman who was at the meeting, recalled recently. Nina, who was 16, cried, she said. Nina stayed in Albany.

By the 1970s, Nina was a young woman. On a trip to Florence, she met Mauro Montepagani, a tourists’ portrait painter who was five years older, outside the Uffizi Gallery. He became her husband and the father of her two children.

Back home in Albany in 1977, Nina asked Giuseppe directly about Dr. Raeli.

He put his head down and she saw tears. “He said: ‘Why are you talking about this? I never talk about this,’ ” she said.

Giuseppe died in 1987, at the age of 95. She said she had seen him every day. “It was just a joy to me to sit next to him and watch TV,” she said.
Dr. Sebastiano Raeli was unmarried for much of his life. He was busy building what would become a hotel empire of more than 800 rooms in the neighborhood near Rome’s Termini railway station. There are nine hotels, each with red-lettered signs and simple furnishings.
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Photo courtesy of Nina Montepagani.

Nina Montepagani says this photo shows her as a baby, with her mother, Anna, and Dr. Sebastiano Raeli.
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Courtesy of Nina Montepagani

Giuseppe Viola, who raised Nina and is listed as her father on her New York City birth certificate.

He had begun the hotel business in space he first rented as a medical office, and he ran it for years with a woman 19 years his junior, whom he eventually married in 2004, when he was 85.

He was ascetic in his habits and compulsive about his nutrition, limiting carbohydrates and measuring portions. He was a passionate bicycle racer, with trophies lining the walls of his austere penthouse in one of his properties, the Hotel Archimede. The couple “lived very simply,” said Anna Maria Varrone, who has worked for the hotels for years.

The doctor could also be argumentative, said a nephew, Paolo Raeli, a real estate developer in Rome, who said his uncle had a series of disputes with family members.

In New York, Mrs. Montepagani taught in the Troy schools; Mauro Montepagani worked as a laborer in a bakery warehouse. Their children were born in the 1980s, Julia and Joe, who was named for Grandfather Giuseppe, “Joe” from Montemurro.

In 1994, Mrs. Montepagani had her own cancer scare. She called Dr. Raeli; a round of intense contact began. There were family visits in Italy in 1995 and 2000. In a letter to Julia when she was 12, he wrote: “In regards to the relationship between your mother and me, it is very delicate,” according to a copy of the letter filed in court.

He mentioned “my role as grandfather.” He offered advice. Julia Montepagani, 26, remembered recently how, during a visit at the austere penthouse, “he was always telling us how to eat and the right way to live, like he had discovered the right way to do it.”

In 2000, he sent Mrs. Montepagani specific instructions for her daily diet: 200 grams of fruit — “preferably apples” — garlic and onion at each of five meals a day.

But by the next year, something had changed. An Italian lawyer wrote Mrs. Montepagani. He called her “a mythmaker,” flatly stated that Dr. Raeli had denied he was her father and demanded a DNA test to be done in Italy. She said she feared a setup and declined.

In 2006, Rome’s Tor Vergata University announced that Dr. Raeli and his wife had promised all of their property to the school. Officials of the university say it may be, at $100 million or more, the largest gift ever to an Italian college. The announcement quoted Dr. Raeli as saying they had done the good deed “because we don’t have children.” University officials said they were watching the outcome of Mrs. Montepagani’s court action closely.

The Lawsuit

In 2001, an Italian judge dismissed a suit Mrs. Montepagani had filed there to stake her claim as Dr. Raeli’s daughter, saying she could not begin a legal challenge there because of one seemingly simple fact: Her birth certificate in Brooklyn listed Giuseppe Viola as her father.

So in 2009, with a New York lawyer, Lawrence B. Goldberg, she began an unusual case against New York City as the custodian of records to delete the name of Giuseppe — whom she had seen every day and had called her father — from her official past. City officials say that even though there are more than 38,000 applications a year to change birth certificates, there are only perhaps a dozen to simply remove a father’s name and to leave, in its place, a blank.

The city has fought her in court, arguing that she does not have enough evidence and that changes to birth certificates must be granted cautiously in an era of identity theft and terrorism.

In two rulings over the past year, a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan, Michael D. Stallman, agreed and seemed skeptical of her claim to be the daughter of a wealthy Italian. “Petitioner,” he noted, “was born during the marriage of her mother to Joseph Viola.” The law’s presumption that children born to married parents are “legitimate” is one of the strongest in the legal system, he wrote.

Some family law specialists say such a stern test may be outdated, as families have changed and the social stigma of children born to unmarried parents has eroded. Mr. Goldberg filed arguments in March in a state appeals court in Manhattan asserting that the modern law must be more flexible.

“Somehow,” he said in an interview, “the judge locked us into the social mores of the 1950s,” when Anna Viola may have said in a Brooklyn hospital that the father of the child she named Sebastiana was, of course, her husband, Giuseppe.

Nina Viola Montepagani acknowledged that one reason for the case was “$50 million.” But there was another, she said, after all these years. It was, she said, because “I exist. I am.”