A Long Way From Sicily

These days Vinnie Bologna often takes the five-minute drive home from work to eat lunch with his wife Laura in the family's airy, peach-colored kitchen.

The room has the immaculate feeling of kitchen in which the dishes have just been finished and the next project is about to be launched.

After overcoming a nightmare of legal battles, Vinnie and Laura Bologna are now focusing on that next project--raising their kids.

A machinist for the Cambridge pharmaceutical company Biogen who is studying electronics at night and raising three children, Bologna seems a happy man.

With three kids under eight years old, his wife Laura--who met Vinnie at a software company where they worked in the 1980s--says it is now best for her to stay home and raise the children.

But the mention of rent control conjures up bitter memories.

The Bolognas describe themselves as a struggling, working-class family, and say they sympathize with rent control's stated goal of aiding the disadvantaged. Yet after their experience with the system, they do not feel it is oriented toward those goals.

After purchasing the house in 1984 and obtaining occupancy and building permits from the city, they began a two-year renovation.

In the late summer of 1986 two women moved into the main residence. Only 10 months later, they stopped paying rent and sued the Bolognas for overcharging rent.

The tenants' suit opened a Pandora's box of allegations by the rent-control board, many of them regarding the renovation work. But the couple insists the board knew about the work that was taking place but said nothing at the time.

"They were waiting for us to finish to tell us that we finish to tell us that we shouldn't have done it," Vinnie Bologna says.

The Bolognas were surprised by the suit--and disgusted by the way it was handled.

"The lawyer that they got to sue us, he used to work with the rent-control officers, and the hearing officer used to work for him. They were all buddy-buddy," Bologna says.

The Bolognas' battle escalated into a full scale, three-ring legal circus. They eventually appealed the case to the state's Supreme Judicial Court, where they lost it on what they describe as a legal technicality.