By Sam Wood

Faith might move mountains, but can a small piece of plastic move a four-bedroom house?

In this dismal real estate market, lots of people think so, provided that the plastic is a figurine of St. Joseph.

Local shops that sell religious paraphernalia are reporting phenomenal sales of tiny statuettes of St. Joseph – the earthly father of Jesus and the patron saint of the home and house sellers – to real estate agents and homeowners.

“We have over 5,000 items in our store,” said Norma DiCocco, who owns the St. Jude Shop in Havertown. “And you know what the No. 1 item is? The St. Joseph statue.”

DiCocco buys the figurines by the gross. Real estate agents purchase up to a dozen at a time. DiCocco estimated she had sold 6,000 to 8,000 diminutive Josephs in the last year.

They’re hardly a deal breaker. A two-inch figure sells for as little as $1.39. Home-selling kits – with more ornate, stone-colored figurines; a prayer card; and a short history – sell for $5.95 and up.

“It wasn’t until the real estate market really tanked that St. Joseph took off the way it did,” said Dan Loughman, president of Roman Inc. of Bloomingdale, Ill., which distributes the St. Josephs nationally.

“It was always a best-seller, but now it’s a super-best-seller,” he said. “It sells everywhere. You can find it in hardware stores, gift shops and religious stores.”

And not only Roman Catholics look to St. Joseph for help.

“It’s not unusual for people of other faiths to come in a little sheepishly and ask, ‘Do you have that statue you use to sell your home?’ ” said DiCocco’s son, Robert.

On a blustery, snow-swept day last week, Connie Berg, an Abington real estate agent who is Jewish, conceded that she needed a small miracle as she walked with a shovel to a four-bedroom home in the township’s Meadowbrook section.

“This is a fabulous house – brand-new roof, white picket fence, plenty of gorgeous space – but it needs some help. It’s been on the market since August,” said Berg, a 26-year veteran at Prudential Fox & Roach.

She scraped at the ice-glazed earth near a fence post and loosened a few inches of frozen dirt. She planted her two-inch St. Joseph statue head down, feet pointing toward the heavens, face pointed toward the house.

“There’s an entire ritual to it,” she said as she filled in the hole. “And you have to remember where you planted it so you can dig it up after the house sells.”

Berg said she believed in the power of St. Joseph to help move stalled properties.

“It really does help,” she said. “It seems to work no matter what faith you are. Recently we planted one, and in three weeks the house sold.”

The practice of burying St. Joseph isn’t officially condoned by the Roman Catholic Church, said Stephen J. Binz, a biblical scholar and author of St. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent, a lighthearted look at the phenomenon.

“It’s pop spirituality and not endorsed by any religious organization,” Binz said. “And like all grassroots phenomena, the origin of the practice is very hard to track down.”

The most common story attributes the custom to an order of medieval nuns who placed medallions in the ground in the hope of gaining a new convent. They did.

Binz encountered the St. Joseph phenomenon after several frustrating months of trying to sell his own house in Little Rock.

“My Presbyterian Realtor suggested that I bury a statue of St. Joseph in the yard,” Binz said. “I dismissed it as a ridiculous and superstitious practice. I wasn’t about to bury anything to get what I wanted from God.

“But after a few more months of waiting, I decided to give it a prayerful try. My house sold within a week. Coincidence? Who knows. Would it have sold anyway? Who can tell?”

Robert DiCocco said there was more to the ritual than burying the statue.

“The most important part of it is saying the novena, the prayer that accompanies the statue, for nine days,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how big or small the statue is. It’s the devotion and the prayer that’s important.”

And, say believers, sellers in search of a little divine intervention don’t even need a front yard to bury a St. Joseph.

For condo owners, a potted plant on a windowsill will suffice, said Kathy Victor, who works at the St. Jude religious-goods shop on Cottman Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia.

“We had a couple from Ocean City, Md., who had a Rita’s Water Ice franchise they wanted to sell,” Victor said. “They bought one to put in the freezer because they didn’t have a piece of ground to bury him.”

At a Center City townhouse near Third and Lombard Streets, broker Mike McCann and a client buried a St. Joseph in a backyard garden plot.

The 1760 house, a three-bedroom that once was a bakery, has been on the market for five months and has been repriced twice, from $769,000 down to $699,000.

“I’m going to make sure I say the prayer faithfully,” McCann said. ” ‘Ask, believe, trust’ is what it says on the box it came in. And, hey, it’s made in the U.S.A.”

John Badalamenti, an associate broker at Weichert Realtors in Collegeville, keeps a St. Joseph on his desk. He recommends the figures when all else fails.

“But first,” he said, “I offer a few other thoughts: Make sure the house is properly priced, take care of deferred maintenance, and consider paying the buyer’s closing costs in a slow market.”

Sent to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, it has spent the last few months in its own tank, getting healthy and putting on weight.

The center, which doesn’t have the space or money to keep the seal, has done all it can do. But because the seal can’t hunt, it can’t be released into the ocean.

Unless a new home can be found – an aquarium or a zoo – the harbor seal will be euthanized.
“We’re a rehab, not a display facility,” said Bob Schoelkopf, director of the stranding center. “Bottom line is, if nobody takes him, that’s the only choice we have. ”

While Schoelkopf indicated time was running out, a spokeswoman for the federal agency that oversees marine mammals was more optimistic, saying the stranding center would not be held to a deadline.

Another seal, a gray pup found in Asbury Park, also needs a permanent home. A nor’easter in March tossed it against a 12-foot jetty and broke its back.

“She can’t move her rear flippers,” Schoelkopf said. “But she can still swim quite well. ”
Finding new homes for the seals has been frustrating, he said.
“Most zoos don’t want animals that are marred in any way or deformed,” Schoelkopf said.
The Cape May County Zoo volunteered to take the blind harbor seal, but federal officials found the zoo did not have the proper permits or a licensed facility.

“They are just not set up to take these animals long term,” said Teri Frady, spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service in the Northeast.

The Adventure Aquarium in Camden is unable to give the seals a home. Officials there are getting ready to renovate their outdoor exhibits and looking to place their own seals in temporary homes, said Denise Aster, the aquarium’s husbandry director.

“We hoped it could be us,” Aster said, “But with our renovations, the timing isn’t good. ”
The Philadelphia Zoo can’t take them, either.
“We don’t have an appropriate facility for the seals or a license, so we can’t have them here,” said Andy Baker, vice president in charge of the zoo’s animal programs.

A resort in San Diego volunteered to take one of the seals, but Schoelkopf turned down the offer after an inspection.
“There are still some possibilities,” Schoelkopf said. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed. ”
Two zoos out west have expressed an interest, “but neither has called us back yet,” Schoelkopf said.
The Fisheries Service is also trying to place the animals.
“No one has laid out a deadline,” Frady said. “We’re confident we will be able to find these animals a home. In the last seven years, we’ve been very, very successful in placing animals that can’t be released back into the wild. ”

Frady acknowledged the stranding center couldn’t keep the animals if it wanted to.
“I think of stranding centers as a hospital,” she said. “You don’t live at a hospital. It’s a care space for an animal that needs treatment now. And you want to free it up for animals that need to be in the hospital. ”

Gray seals can usually be found near ocean shores anywhere from the Mid-Atlantic states to Newfoundland, Canada. Harbor seals can range into Arctic waters.

At the stranding center, the gray seal pup has put on a lot of weight and can now climb out of the water. And Schoelkopf thinks there’s a chance that, down the road, its nerves could regenerate and it could start moving its rear flippers again.

The blind harbor seal is growing accustomed to people. It rushes to feed when its keepers tap on a metal bucket. Fortunately for stranding center volunteers, it knows the difference between a human hand and a fish, Schoelkopf said.

For the moment, it’s living it up in luxurious accommodations.
“He’s in an air-conditioned room in a 25-foot-long tank all by himself,” Schoelkopf said. “Just the air-conditioning is costing us $1,300 a month. I’d like to have other animals with him. But he’s not sighted, and we don’t want to take the risk that he’ll lash out and take a bite.

“We don’t need any other injured seals. “

In the end, she found much more than a new circle of friends.
Batt found a house – and even helped build it. Now she’s helping build the rest of her neighborhood.
“It’s been the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Batt, who moved into her Clayton home in May with her 11-year-old son, Brandon.

Batt is one of the first residents to occupy a 12-home subdivision being built by volunteers from Gloucester County Habitat for Humanity. Organizers say it is the largest Habitat project under construction in the Northeast.

Three homes, including Batt’s, now stand on what was once a trash-strewn patch of woods just south of Glassboro. Construction on the remaining nine houses, which will be sold at cost to low-income families, begins next month.

Each house is valued at about $120,000, said Al Connors, executive director for Gloucester County Habitat for Humanity. “That makes it affordable for people,” Connors said. “If they’re making $25,000 to $30,000 a year, it’s within their reach. ”

The 4.5-acre lot was given to Gloucester Habitat by the the Gloucester County Office of Economic Development, which has already contributed $375,000. The total cost of the project is $1.4 million.

A freshly paved cul-de-sac, named Len Blowe Court after a Gloucester Habitat volunteer who recently died, is already lined with sidewalks.

“It looks very weird now with it all cleared out and the roads and the flattened lots,” Batt said. “It was just trees before. ”

Batt started volunteering in 2004 for Habitat’s Gloucester affiliate. Because each Habitat affiliate receives no money from the parent organization, Batt’s first tasks included coordinating the group’s casino night and walkathon fund-raisers.

One day, fellow volunteers asked her a life-changing question.
“They asked me why I hadn’t applied for a house,” Batt said. She was was a perfect candidate. Because she was living with her parents in Clayton, she met all of Habitat’s requirements: She had no home or inadequate housing, her income was low, and she was willing to put 400 hours of sweat equity into Habitat projects.

Batt already had put hundreds of hours into Habitat. She wasn’t making much money selling medical equipment, but could afford to make payments on a modest mortgage.

Batt was approved.
“I was ecstatic,” she said. “I always joked I’d be out of my parents’ house before I turned 30. I cut it close. I just turned 30. ”

As her single-story home took shape, Batt did more than fund-raising. Every weekend, she was at the site. She learned basic construction skills from fellow volunteers.

“It was a crash course in homebuilding,” she said. “Every Saturday, I never knew what I’d be asked to do. It was tough. It was hard work. But it was awesome. ”

She cut the mocha-brown vinyl siding on her three-bedroom home.
“I was very good at it,” she said. “And I had never done anything like that before. ”
As construction progressed, Batt learned that several of the volunteers helping to build her house were also on the list to be her future neighbors.

“They’re wonderful people, friendly and open,” she said. “It’s nice knowing who they’re going to be. ”
Because Gloucester County Habitat is the holder of her mortgage, her no-interest house payments will go back into the Habitat pot to help build her neighbors’ houses, said Connors.

Batt said she planned to continue to volunteer for Gloucester County Habitat, both as a fund-raiser and as a builder.
“It’s still a part of me,” she said. “It was good for me. So I have to pass it on. “

Last March, she said, she mixed him a cocktail of orange juice and antifreeze, hoping it would kill him. The concoction only made him violently sick.

So Tubertini, who was formally charged yesterday with attempted murder, researched other poisons on the Internet and settled on cyanide. On three separate occasions, she mixed a lethal dose into his food, she told investigators.

Ronald Tubertini, a retired Burlington County police officer, noticed the odd chemical taste. He left his lunches unfinished.

In mid-June, Karen Tubertini, 46, filed for divorce and took her three young children to live in Cherry Hill.
A week after she moved out, Ronald Tubertini, 49, became suspicious.
He was mowing the lawn on June 29 when he ran over a garbage bag. A white powder drizzled out. Inside was a box of potassium cyanide. He recognized the scent.

He called his former employer, the Lumberton Police Department. Inside the couple’s home, officers found a bottle of liquid cyanide on a spice rack over the kitchen stove. They also found shredded documents with the words death, poisoning and symptoms.

Karen Tubertini surrendered to the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office on Friday night.
Over the weekend, she told investigators she had become overwhelmed with the stress of managing her husband’s excavating business. As bookkeeper, she had failed to make mortgage payments on the family’s home on Fostertown Road. She also neglected to make eight payments on the family’s Pennsylvania farm. Both properties faced foreclosure, she told investigators.

She had considered suicide, but changed her mind because she did not want to abandon her children. Instead, she “decided to ‘punish’ Ronald Tubertini by killing him,” according to an affidavit of probable cause.

In an interview with a detective, she admitted to serving her husband a lethal cocktail. She also admitted to serving him cyanide three times, according to the affidavit.

Ronald Tubertini told police his marriage had been strained during the last six months. He said he thought it was because his wife was going through menopause.

Karen Tubertini’s mother, Lorraine Bollentini, attended her daughter’s first court appearance yesterday.
“I can’t imagine her doing that,” Bollentini said, as she stepped outside of the courtroom into a waiting phalanx of television cameras. “There has to be more to it. ”

Bollentini said she knew her daughter’s marriage “was bad. ”
“She made a foolish mistake,” Bollentini said. “I don’t think she knew what she was doing. ”
Karen Tubertini, charged with attempted murder, was being held last night at the Burlington County jail after failing to post $350,000 bail. Superior Court Judge John A. Almeida ordered her to have no contact with her husband or the couple’s children. The children are staying with relatives in Cherry Hill.

Jack Yator, 22, of Port Norris, was arraigned in Cumberland County Superior Court and ordered held on $500,000 bail.
Rosa Maguire, 27, who was three months pregnant, suffered severe brain injuries Aug. 1 when she was struck by an SUV near her Laurel Lake home. The Cumberland County woman, who had a 9-month-old son, died Thursday night. Her unborn child also died, police said.

Prosecutor Ronald J. Casella said Maguire’s family has asked that no further information be released.
“The family is having a tough time. They’ve been in shock,” Casella said. “They’ve asked that their privacy be respected. They are making funeral arrangements. ”

Initial police reports had painted Yator as a member of the violent Bloods gang. Yesterday, however, Casella said there is no evidence that Yator, who is white, has any ties with the gang, which is primarily black.

“We don’t have any confirmation that he is with any violent gang,” Casella said. “Our position is that it’s irrelevant. This wasn’t a gang-related event. Saying so only demeans the victim. The victim and her family have nothing to do with any gangs. ”

The road rage attack began about 1 a.m. Aug. 1.
Michael Maguire, Rosa’s husband and a chef in Atlantic City, was returning from work to the couple’s Commercial Township home. Maguire narrowly missed Yator’s 2001 Ford Explorer as it was pulling out of a driveway. Yator, with three passengers in the SUV, raced after Maguire and followed him to Maguire’s house, police said.

Rosa Maguire was drawn by the commotion and got into her husband’s car. They chased Yator’s SUV down a dead-end road and blocked it in with their car. Rosa Maguire got out. She was standing between the car and a tree when Yator allegedly gunned the engine and drove the SUV over her as her horrified husband watched.

Millville police captured Yator within the hour. The three passengers were questioned and released.
Yator had been jailed July 31 on criminal mischief charges after he used a baseball bat to smash a neighbor’s pickup truck, causing about $2,000 in damage, authorities said. Hours before Rosa Maguire was run over, he posted $5,000 bail and was released.

Casella said his office was awaiting the results of toxicology tests to determine if Yator was drunk or on drugs at the time of the road-rage incident.

In addition to murder, Yator has been charged with causing death while driving with a suspended licence and leaving the scene of a fatal accident.