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By Bill Dedman Investigative reporter

Here's a situation for all you aspiring managers: If you were the boss at a U.S. government agency and one of your employees complained that she was afraid of a co-worker's religious practices, what would you do?

Would it change your decision if the religion were Wicca, and the employee feared her co-worker because she thought she might cast a spell on her?

Here's how the Transportation Security Administration handled it:

It fired the witch.

Each person's story is unique, but what happened to Carole A. Smith gives us a glimpse of the work life of the 400,000-plus Wiccans in the United States. And it sheds light on work life at the TSA, where the 40,000-plus public employees who keep bad people and bad things off of airplanes have started voting this month on whether to join a union.

At New York's Albany International Airport on March 12, 2009, transportation security officer Smith was called into the office of the No. 2 TSA boss there, the assistant federal safety director for law enforcement.

Smith, then 49, was a probationary employee, on the job for just seven months. Records show that she'd had several minor disciplinary actions — she'd forgotten her name tag one time, had been a few minutes late, had stayed too long on break — but the agency classified her performance as “satisfactory.”

She was in the top 10 percent in Albany at catching weapons on the X-ray machine. She passed her skills test on the first try. She caught a woman on her way to Vietnam with $30,000 in cash. And she didn't mind working with the passengers — her training as a massage therapist kept her from being squeamish, as some officers were, about patting down elderly and special-needs passengers.

The assistant director told her he was investigating a threat of workplace violence. He said that her former mentor in on-the-job training, officer Mary Bagnoli, reported that she was afraid of Smith because she was a witch who practiced witchcraft. She accused Smith of following her on the highway one snowy evening after work and casting a spell on the heater of her car, causing it not to work. Well, actually, Bagnoli said she hadn't seen Smith's car, but she had seen Smith. “I thought to myself,” Smith recalls, “what, did she see me flying on my broom?”

'That's not what Wicca is'
Carole Smith proudly acknowledges being a witch, a practitioner of Wicca, the pagan religion. She does have a broom, too, but just for show. Not all Wiccans use the word witch, but Smith and some others are reclaiming it as a term of respect, sometimes said to mean “wise woman.” She says she had told at least one person at work about her beliefs. But as for hexes, no, Smith said Wiccans don't go in for that sort of foolishness.

Matthew Rivera  /  msnbc.com

Carole Smith said she's never minded a bit of good-natured ribbing about witches. And two of her three cats are black. But she said the comments from TSA co-workers and supervisors were more akin to  bullying, and made it harder for her to do her job in airport security.

“I was dumbfounded,” Smith said. “I told him, that's not what Wicca is. We don't cast spells. That's not witchcraft. That's black magic or voodoo or something else. To put a spell on a heater of a car, if I had that kind of power, I wouldn't be working for TSA. I would go buy lottery tickets and put a spell on the balls.”

The assistant director, Matthew W. Lloyd, testified later that he realized immediately there was no genuine threat of workplace violence. Smith hadn't followed anyone home — that's the only highway going toward her home from the airport. It was just a personality conflict made worse by fear of an unfamiliar religion.

He had a suggestion for Smith. She should enter into a formal mediation session with Bagnoli, her accuser, through the TSA's Integrated Conflict Management System, or ICMS. The mediation “would be a good venue to dispel any misconceptions” that her co-worker had about her religious beliefs, he told her.

“He wanted me to go to ICMS and sit down with Mary and explain my religion to her,” Smith said. “I'm like, 'No.' I refused to do that. It's not up to me to teach her my religion. I mean, would I have to go down and sit with her if I was Jewish?”

Twice, Smith left Lloyd’s office in tears and had to be coaxed back inside to continue the discussion. The assistant director testified later that he had not found her behavior to be insubordinate. But when Smith received her termination letter, there it was. The fact that she “left room twice and had to be instructed to return” was listed as one of the reasons justifying her firing.

'Where did you park your broom?'
The assistant director had received the allegation a week earlier, on March 4, 2009. He immediately sent a memo, titled “Conflict Mitigation Measure,” to the TSA supervisors at Albany: Keep the two women on separate shifts, and don't let them take breaks at the same time, he wrote, while he investigated the workplace violence complaint.

Smith learned of the memo only when it was also listed on her termination letter. The memo — a step the TSA took because of the co-worker’s religiously grounded complaint that Smith put a hex on her car, a complaint which the agency determined to be unfounded — is listed as another reason justifying her termination.

Matthew Rivera  /  msnbc.com

An unidentified security officer pats down a passenger at the Albany, N.Y., airport. As a massage therapist, Carole Smith said she didn't mind doing the patdowns, which some other workers objected to.

When she learned of the complaint, Smith said, she realized why everything at work had changed that week.

“Where did you park your broom?” she said one co-worker asked her. “Why don't you come to work in your pointy hat?” She said one shift supervisor told another, “She's going to put a hex on me.”

Smith said she's never minded a bit of good-natured ribbing about the popular mythology of witches. Two of her three cats are black. She loved “Wicked” on Broadway. But this was something else, more akin to high school bullying. It made it hard to do her job, too.

“If I called for bag checks on the X-ray, no one would come and do them. I was treated like I was not even there sometimes,” she said. “It was very demeaning. I was constantly walking on eggshells and checking my back.” She said another employee yelled at her in a baggage room, in front of other employees and a supervisor, “Get her the hell out of here! I can't stand to look at her!” A co-worker advised her to transfer to another airport.

'I don't feel safe here'
While still unaware of the complaint about witchcraft, Smith reported the harassment in an e-mail on March 5 to the big boss, the TSA federal security director at Albany, Brian Johansson. She asked for his help, and she told him she had reported the harassment to the ombudsman of the TSA, an informal counselor who is supposed to help employees resolve problems in a safe space outside of the chain of command.

Johansson already knew Smith. She had complained to him previously about being harassed by Bagnoli and her friends.

The two women had a history: Bagnoli had been Smith's first mentor on the job. They didn't get along. Smith said Bagnoli told her repeatedly that she would get fired if she violated any rules. One day, she said, when Smith hadn't followed protocol for checking cameras, Bagnoli and her boyfriend, a supervisor, called her into a small booth, the kind of room where a passenger would be given a private security screening. She was ordered to sit at the table and to read the procedures manual, while the two of them stood behind her. Smith said she found all of this threatening or at least off-putting, so she asked for another mentor, and one was assigned.

After that, Smith said, Bagnoli would verbally harass her. She complained to Johansson several times. For example, she e-mailed him on Dec. 5, 2008: “My days here with Mary have never gotten any better no matter how many times I apologized to her (for what I have no clue).” Johansson replied sympathetically, “I am very sorry to hear about this. Don't give up hope just yet.” In an e-mail to another manager, Johansson described Bagnoli and other employees who criticized Smith at a staff meeting (for her plan to bring in a massage table to offer free massages for employees on her day off) as a “lynch mob.” Smith filed a complaint on March 2, 2009, just days before she was accused of casting spells, saying Bagnoli continued to harass ...(Continue Reading at MSNBC)