Cleaning up Joe Hynes’ mess

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, February 25, 2014, 9:16 PM

By Harry Siegel

Forget about it, John. This is Brooklyn.

If any one case captures the stinking, spreading mess six-term Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes left in the office of the man who defeated him, Ken Thompson , it’s the “grid kid” slaying.
That was the tabloid wood in 2003, when Fairfield University student Mark Fisher made his first foray into the city. The 19-year-old football star met three male classmates for drinks in Manhattan. There he met another student he was flirting with, and, drunk, followed her to a late-night house party in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.
Hours later, Fisher’s body was wrapped in a blanket on a quiet side street, his face bruised from a beating presumably delivered before he was shot five times.
The partying teens quickly lawyered up, leaving investigators frustrated and unable to press charges even as one suspect, known knucklehead Antonio Russo, cut off his signature braids and left for California hours later. Facing mounting criticism for failing to make a case and with an eye on a tough reelection bid, Hynes sent in his “elite team,” led by rackets chief Michael Vecchione and star trial attorney Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi .
Suddenly — a Vecchione trademark — witnesses began stepping up to testify against both Russo and his friend, John Giuca, who hosted the house party.
In a trial with two separate juries, Nicolazzi, who came in with a perfect trial record, took the much tougher, entirely circumstantial case against Giuca, whom no witnesses or physical evidence placed at the apparent scene of the crime.
Using a series of overlapping, sometimes conflicting accounts — from Giuca’s girlfriend, his longtime friend and Ditmas Park neighbor Al Cleary (who’d himself been seen as a person of interest at least through the grand jury, where he waived his immunity to testify) and finally a junkie named John Avitto, who claimed to have heard a confession — she laid out a theory in which Giuca either felt disrespected or, to toughen up his purported crew, had instructed Russo “to go show that guy what’s up.”

Calling Giuca “Tony Soprano” and a “self-styled mafioso,” she told the jury it didn’t matter if he was there when Fisher was killed, since “you know this defendant is every bit involved in this crime.”
The jury convicted both men of murder. Giuca got 25 to life, and will first go up for parole in 2029.
But the trial left more loose ends than clear answers. One juror was recorded afterward admitting he knew Giuca, lied about it in jury selection and pressed others to find him guilty. A witness repeatedly described as uncooperative with the initial investigation was later hired straight out of law school as a Brooklyn ADA. Vecchione’s reputation is in tatters.
And three witnesses, including Avitto, have recanted their trial testimony, risking perjury charges to do so (the other two now swear they were pressed into delivering false accounts by the DA), according to a letter from Giuca’s current lawyer, Mark Bederow, asking Thompson to revisit the case.
In a second letter from Bederow the DA received Monday, ex-ADA and law professor Bennett Gershman, who wrote the book “Prosecutorial Misconduct,” took aim at Nicolazzi, claiming that “in order to win a murder conviction in a high-profile case [she] recklessly disregarded a prosecutor’s overriding responsibility . . . that only reliable and trustworthy evidence be presented,” and instead used “misleading, deceptive and inflammatory tactics.”
Returning to Avitto, Nicolazzi’s surprise final witness, who, the defense was given no opportunity to prepare for: Not only was his testimony “almost certainly false,” Gershman writes, but “from the record it appears that ADA Nicolazzi knew it was false.” This is the witness whom she personally vouched for with the jury at least three times: “you know you could trust him.”
Avitto testified that while at Rikers, he overheard Giuca confess in a conversation with his father. But Giuca’s father couldn’t speak after strokes years earlier.
Worse, Avitto testified he’d volunteered to expose Giuca and received no consideration from the DA. In fact, he’d had seven serious violations of his rehab program (he admitted to only one in his testimony), any one of which should have triggered a substantial prison sentence. In one instance, writes Gershman, Nicolazzi privately vouched for Avitto with a judge to keep him from jail.
So Avitto lied in his Giuca testimony, and Nicolazzi apparently knew, both when he claimed just one violation, and again when he said he had no arrangement with the DA.
“The case you’re calling about is a complicated one,” said Thompson spokeswoman Sheila Stainback. “But it was carefully reviewed, tried and upheld by the appellate division. We have Mr. Bederow’s letters and they are being reviewed. Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi is a respected and outstanding prosecutor who has an exemplary trial record.”
It is complicated, and guilt and innocence may be lost behind the haze of the trial. But even giving Nicolazzi — who has had a sterling reputation in a sometimes troubled office, and is now leading the probe of 50 convictions tied to former Detective Louis Scarcella, like Vecchione a provider of suspiciously miraculous witnesses that led to bad convictions — every benefit of the doubt, Gershman’s claims warrant a substantial response.
Thompson has his work cut out cleaning up after Hynes. He could start with Giuca.


http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/cleaning-joe-hynes-mess-article-1.1701831