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for $5,685 to the bank to fulfill the compromise settlement terms, and the case was dismissed.

Fanning’s willingness to mix it up with opponents didn’t stop at the courthouse steps. “I’m a fighter,” he told one interviewer. “I don’t let people push me around.” In January 1999, Fanning was charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon—his shoes—after he kicked and punched the maintenance man at his condominium complex on the morning of December 31, 1998. The two men had a history of animosity over a junked convertible in the parking lot, which maintenance worker Robert Lynch said he had asked Fanning to move. On this morning, Lynch said he found a Christmas tree in Fanning’s stairwell and a “nature trail” of pine needles. He knocked on Fanning’s door, which Fanning opened and then closed without a word, Lynch said. Angered by the reaction, Lynch unwisely dragged the discarded tree out into the parking lot and put it on top of Fanning’s old convertible.

Later that day, Lynch encountered Fanning and his brother David, and they beat him badly, according to the district attorney. “They seriously attacked me. John Fanning kicked me in the face,” Lynch said. “They threw me into the wall. They got me really good.” His cheek was fractured and the area around his eyes cut up. He needed stitches in two places and was laid up for a week, Lynch told the judge in the case. Lynch was charged with malicious destruction of property for damaging Fanning’s old car but wasn’t ordered to make any restitution. After he finished three months of pretrial probation, the charge against him was dismissed.

The criminal proceedings against the Fanning brothers continued for more than three years. After the beating, John Fanning moved out of the sixty-six-unit complex and into the big house on Summit Avenue. His brother David moved into Fanning’s old apartment and was later charged with a new count, intimidating a witness, after he allegedly threatened Lynch and warned him to drop the case. “He came up to my car and punched on the window and tried to get in,” Lynch said at a court hearing. Since all sides had been ordered to stay away from each other, Lynch

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