Of the dozens of wedding chapels in Las Vegas, none looms so large as A Little White Wedding Chapel. Britney Spears was married there. So was Michael Jordan. Last Valentine's Day, Mayor Oscar Goodman helped couples renew their vows there. The chapel's owner, Charolette Richards, has been in the business of "special weddings" since the late 1950s, according to the chapel's website. Once she even brought a group of Elvis impersonators to a wedding exposition in Germany.
"God has given me this special ministry to marry these people," she writes on the website. "I want for nothing because I have God to fulfill all of my needs."
But in recent months, Richards has faced lawsuits from five disgruntled ex-employees. Three former drivers settled with her this past February, but two other ex-drivers have sued Richards for racial and religious discrimination. They depict the chapel's atmosphere as not one of warm God-fearing goodness, but of stifling religious conformity, with Richards getting rid of employees who don't tow the line when it comes to the Lord. With a suit brought by one-time driver Thomas Mindiola, the chapel's clumsy attempts to disparage Mindiola have been more telling than the facts of the suit itself.
Of course, the city's wedding chapel industry is well known for its unconventional operations. Handbillers who try to solicit business for the chapels get quite nasty in their competition for new couples ("For Love and Money," July 31, 2003). Obviously, "chapel" doesn't always mean "religious" in this town.
Charolette Richards declined to be interviewed by the Weekly for this story. "At this time the company does not wish to comment on these matters," adds Anthony Martin, attorney for the chapel.
In a brief interview last week, one of Richards' employees, Rose Ann Henry, defended her boss. Henry began 17 years ago as a wedding coordinator. Now she's a supervisor. "I have a lot of respect for Charlotte," Henry says. "She used to live in the back with her children when she first started up. She was the first to marry (a couple) in a hot-air balloon, the first to do limos."
Now these suits, says Lance Atchison, Mindiola's old supervisor, are "punching a hole in her boat."
Thomas Mindiola calls himself a "regular guy that wanted to go to work, feed my family, take care of my kids, do my job. That's all I wanted to do. And she took it all away from me." The 57-year-old had put in five years as a driver at the chapel, starting in 1997. He had never had any complaints. "I had a good record," he says. "I was a good employee. I was there always on time. I did my job."
His job was to pick up people from hotels or airports and help them get hitched, then send them back into the world, newly wed. On occasion he would take clients to the marriage bureau to get their licenses. He didn't earn a great hourly wage, but with tips he made a decent living.
Once a month, on average, Richards held a staff meeting with the drivers. She began and ended these meetings with prayer. Everyone got in a circle and held hands, and Richards led the prayers. She took them very seriously. "But it wasn't the kind of a prayer that would say 'Take care of my drivers,'" says Mindiola. "It was more or less, 'Take care of the chapel.' The prayers were to benefit her and her corporation."
Although Mindiola was a Baptist, he was uncomfortable with the workplace prayer. He says no one was allowed to beg off the sessions, which he says were mandatory and usually ran several minutes. "It was like we had to go in there, they'd shut the door and nobody could leave," he says. "If you got up and left during a prayer you might as well say good-bye."
Good-bye to your job, that is. So he and his colleagues went along with the prayers. They went along when Richards, according to Mindiola, tried to get employees to attend services in California and Arizona hosted by Benny Hinn, the controversial televangelist whom NBC's Dateline suggested was a fraud in an exposé a few years ago. (Mindiola says a few people actually went.) "We were making decent money. Nobody really wanted to complain. Sometimes you tolerate things that aren't right."
That strategy of tolerance finally broke down on July 23, 2002, when Richards asked Mindiola to lead the day's closing prayer. This was a first—she had never asked anyone to lead prayer before. Mindiola was stunned. How am I supposed to do this, he thought, looking around at 20 other employees. "I felt that it was wrong for me to be forced—not just asked—to participate in these kinds of rituals. Which they were."
Somehow he stumbled through it. Richards was apparently pleased. "You were speaking directly to my heart, Thomas," Atchison recalls her saying to Mindoliola before embracing him. Afterward he approached Atchison, his supervisor, who was in charge of maintaining the limos and dispatching the drivers. "She embarrassed me," Mindiola said. "It's not my place to say the prayer. I come here to work. I don't come here to go to church."
Atchison promised to do what he could. Like Mindiola, he was making good money and was willing to go along with things he didn't like, but he had made a policy that if any drivers complained, he'd "back their play." So in his report to his manager, he noted that Mindiola was uncomfortable leading the prayer.
According to the American Center for Law and Justice, employers are legally entitled under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to hold "regular devotional meetings for employees ... Moreover, active participation of management in these meetings does not make them discriminatory." But the meetings must be voluntary and the ACLJ recommends they be held before or after work.
The following Monday, July 29, Mindiola called to get his schedule for the week. The chapel's manager told him he was fired—for insubordination, he later learned. As far as he was concerned, what else could the explanation be but that Richards was getting back at him for his complaint about leading the prayer?
According to a motion filed by the chapel's attorneys, Richards had no knowledge of Mindiola's complaint at the time of her "termination decision"—therefore it could not have been the reason behind his dismissal. But Atchison's memo also mentioned purchasing new driver ID badges, which he says Richards approved. "She's trying to justify her firing me," Mindiola says. "She won't come to the realization that she fired me because of the prayer."
A few months after he was fired Mindiola went to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and got a right-to-sue letter. He filed his suit in January 2003, in U.S. District Court; last year he moved it to state court. His charges were straightforward: religious discrimination, age discrimination, and retaliation—all in violation of Title VII. But the case has turned into a battle over the authenticity of a series of letters and memos that turned up in Mindiola's personnel file, after he was fired. These documents all paint Mindiola as a poor worker, or a bigot. Mindiola maintains they are phonies. "(It) was all a bunch of lies."
• A "First Warning" memo appears in Mindiola's file, dated August 2001. It instructs Mindiola to sign the document to indicate he's received it and understood it. The memo does not indicate about what Mindiola is being warned. There is a signature on the page, which looks nothing like Mindiola's signature on another document. It is written with such an illegible chicken scratch that the name is indecipherable.
• Defense attorneys hired forensic document examiner David Moore to pore over these and other documents that had Mindiola's signature to see if they were forged. Moore concluded that the questionable signatures—including the one on the First Warning memo —"did not contain any of the features that are often associated with simulations or tracings."
• Mindiola tells the Weekly that Moore was looking at copies, not originals. "They hired him," he says. "They don't look like my signature, and I told them that. They're not my signature. That's for them to prove in court."
• In a memo from Bruce Peterson, a supervisor, dated September 3, 2002, Peterson claimed that Mindiola, during a casual conversation with the other limo drivers, told them that Richards was a bitch, and "that he had her wrapped around his finger, and that she would do whatever he wanted her to do. He was also extremely unkind to another of our employees, including making disparaging remarks about her personal appearance. When he came in to ask Ms. Richards for his job back, Mr. Mindiola never denied having said those things."
Atchison says Peterson had been fired earlier that summer and wasn't around in September. In a deposition, Peterson said that he was still working on September 3, and that the signature on the letter was his. But he also told attorneys that he didn't write the letter.
• On February 4, 2003, employee Rose Sharpe claimed in a memo on Little White letterhead that she attended the July 23 drivers meeting. "When our meeting was concluded," she wrote, "Thomas Mindiola asked Charolotte Richards ... for permission to do the closing prayer. She said, 'That would be fine.' We all held hands and Thomas gave a very nice closing prayer."
"All of these documents are questionable," Atchison wrote in a letter to the chapel's attorney, Anthony Martin. "For example—Rose Sharpe was not at the driver's meeting on July 23, 2002. I did not see here there and her name was not on the mandatory sign-in sheet for that meeting." In another deposition, former manager Ron Hunter said the same thing.
A memo from Rose Ann Henry, also dated February 3, indicates that she and Mindiola "attended social functions together and whenever food was served he always began the meal with a prayer." In another memo, written the same day, she writes that she had seen and heard Mindiola call Spanish couples "cheap."
Two other memos from February 4, from drivers David Vasquez and Rickey Ormond, describe Mindiola as a bigot who harassed black customers and denigrated Vasquez for being Mexican. Nowhere do Henry or Vasquez comment on the fact that Mindiola is, himself, Mexican.
Both Vasquez and Ormond would later sue Richards themselves, along with two other drivers. All four were black or Hispanic. In their class-action suit, filed last October, the foursome claimed that they, like Mindiola, "were forced to participate in group prayer sessions. It was made clear to plaintiffs that failure to participate in such prayer sessions would lead to adverse employment conduct, including termination." The chapel, through its lawyers, denied the allegations in court records but did not elaborate with details.
This past February all but Ormond settled. Their attorney, Sharon Nelson, declined to discuss the terms of the deal, citing a confidentiality agreement. Ormond said he couldn't discuss his case, but when asked about the settlement deal of the other three, he told the Weekly they "settled for peanuts. She's just such a conniving woman, it's just unbelievable."
For their part, defense attorneys paint Atchison as a biased witness. He, too, was fired from A Little White Wedding Chapel in September 2003, after depositions he gave on the Mindiola case. He, too, has a Title VII retaliation complaint pending with the EEOC. "However, what particularly distinguishes Mr. Atchison from most witnesses, even biased ones, is the extent to which, long before his own termination and administrative proceeding, Mr. Atchison allied himself with plaintiff and attempted to aid and abet his lawsuit."
But other ex-employees echo many of his thoughts. Chip Bendel was a minister for six years at Little White, from 1995 to 2001. He followed the rule that most employees at most businesses try to follow—don't complain, don't raise any problems. Most of the ministers at the chapel then were men. One of the female ministers kept "hounding me about what I thought of women ministers." He tried to dodge the question, but finally he offered to take his colleague out for coffee and explain his thoughts on the subject.
They never made it to coffee before Bendel was asking how she could reconcile a passage from 1 Timothy Chapter 3, which states that bishops must be, among other requirements, "the husband of one wife"—which to his mind more or less ruled out women bishops or ministers.
"I just don't believe that part of the Bible," the female minister said.
Half an hour later, Bendel was in Richards' office, trying to explain himself. Richards pulled a Bible down from her shelf, read the passage in question, and then dramatically slammed the book on the table. "I believe the Bible is true," he recalls her saying, "and that's that. You're OK."
Great, thought Bendel, as he was leaving. She has respect for the Bible.
"I should have known better. I should have kept my mouth shut."
He called in for his work assignment the next day and was told there was no work. No work the day after that, nor the day after that. No work for two weeks, until Bendel got the hint—no more work, period.
"She's so neurotic," he says. "She goes from grabbing you and pulling to walking through the building screaming and yelling with customers because someone didn't answer the phone until the second time."
"I think she had triple personalities," says Jesse Diaz, who worked as a minister at the chapel from 1993 to 2000. "Sometimes she'll come in and be in good moods, and sometimes she'd come in in the most rotten moods you'd ever see her in. She pretends to be a minister of the gospel but she does the opposite of what a minister should be. She's a hypocrite."
Since he was let go, Mindiola has struggled to scrape by. He collected unemployment for a few years, but had a hard time finding work in the business. Having to put a reference down, he says, sunk his efforts to find another job. Richards wouldn't vouch for him, he says, and how was he to explain five empty years to new employers? Last July a District Court judge dismissed Mindiola's religious and age discrimination charges but kept on the table the retaliation charge.
Settlement talks have gone nowhere. "It is the company's position that Mr. Mindiola's claims are meritless," attorney Martin wrote to one of Mindiola's old attorneys, back in 2003. "Nevertheless, the company's prepared to entertain any serious offers of settlement. However it appears as if Mr. Mindiola is not interested in settlement, given that he has yet to provide the company with a specific monetary amount for settlement purposes. Therefore the company is unable to counter Mr. Mindiola's 'offer' until such time that Mr. Mindiola provides a real dollar offer, rather than merely demanding that he 'be paid a substantial sum' to resolve this matter."
The chapel at some point did make an offer. Mindiola wouldn't say for how much but he described it as a "slap in the face."
"They're trying to financially squeeze me," he says. The suit has caused a lot of strain on his marriage, financially and personally.
Mindiola's trial is expected to begin sometime this month or in May. Mindiola now lives in Southern California. He doesn't miss the 24/7 pace of Las Vegas. "Even on a day off it never felt like there was a day off." Especially in that most Vegas of enterprises.
"The wedding business," says Bendel, "is the biggest, screwiest thing I ever saw."