LAST DANCE, LAST CHANCE - and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Ralph wrote to his father that April 2000, and he asked him some hard questions.

  “I have a lot of unanswered questions,” he wrote. A topic I would like to start on is why you are telling everybody that Mom put you in jail for your probation violation. Do you know how hard it is for me to go with Grandma to help her buy a new car (You know I love cars!) and hear her say bad things about Mom? It hurts. And what is this about heroin? And heroin with Tami? Was Mom responsible for that? I can’t believe you sometimes. I just want to ask why? Why did you have to be so stupid? Even I know not to do that sort of thing. You’re a doctor; you should definitely know right from wrong. That was wrong!”

  Ralph pleaded with his father to confess the truth to Lena Pignataro and admit his own flaws.

  “Mom can’t even afford the mortgage nowadays…we may have to move. How come Grandma can’t help out? She always used to…She definitely doesn’t care about Mom because that’s what you’re putting into her head, and I can tell by the way she talks about her.

  “Well, write me back, but I don’t want to hear just excuses.” Ralph sounded more like the father than the son. “This letter is sincerely between you and me…I would absolutely love it if you stopped telling Grandma some things to make her feel otherwise and give me back the relationship I used to have with her. I feel like I lost all of that now. Please help out Dad; I know you want to in your heart! None of us ever wanted any of this to happen.”

  But all Ralph got from his father were excuses. He had no money. He couldn’t help them.

  “I will always love you, too & and don’t you forget that,” Anthony wrote to Ralph. “I’m sorry for what grandma says. It’s not my fault. She is very stubborn. I never told her it was mom’s fault for my probation violation. I also told her to stop saying anything about mom!!

  “Your letter said, ‘Please help out, Dad.’ I do want to & I could as soon as this is over and I go back to work. Take care of mom. Hold onto the house till I get back to work. I’m sure you remember I told you I could help with the house as soon as I get out. I promise you.”

  Ralph had just turned 13. How was he going to pay the mortgage? But his father brushed that off. On May 10, 2000, Anthony wrote and reminded his children that his birthday was in two days and he would like a card.

  “Please do not believe what you hear. A son and a daughter need their [sic] father. And I will be there for both of you. I’ll never stop fighting till I prove my innocence…

  “Grandma has to get rid of Polo. He’s too much for her. I want to know if you both could take him for me till I get home. I don’t want to lose him. Please help!!”

  A week later, Pignataro wrote to Ralph with complicated instructions on how to start the hot tub, but then suggested he wait until he got home from jail, which would be soon.

  Officially, Ralph and Lauren weren’t even living at home yet, although caseworkers looked the other way as the family court hearings dragged on and on. Anyone who saw the children sob as they had to be pulled away from the mother they loved and forced to leave their own home would have understood their tears. It was an open secret that they were virtually living at home in West Seneca.

  In late May, Anthony wrote to Ralph to explain who the real culprit was in the breakup of their family.

  “Apparently, it is the District Attorney—D.A. Frank Sedita—who tore our family apart in September. The D.A.’s investigators talked to and scared Tami. She gave them the last card I had given her in late June or early July [1999]. The D.A. gave the card to Denis and told him I had given it to Tami while mom was in the hospital. Then Denis gave it to mom. I swear on both grandpas’ graves that I never sent the card when they said I did & and I wasn’t seeing Tami. All this will come out in the trial anyway because Tami will say so!! Besides she’s married to someone else now.”

  It never occurred to Anthony, apparently, that bringing up his mistress wasn’t the sort of thing most men would discuss with a thirteen-year-old son. He was too intent on putting the blame on Sedita. And, of course, he was still lying: Tami Maxell had admitted to Frank Sedita that Anthony had sent her the romantic card begging her to come back to him in August 1999—exactly when Debbie lay in the hospital fighting to live.

  Anthony continued to insist that Sedita was the cause of all their troubles. “Then in February D.A. Frank Sedita got Judge Tills to sign an order preventing me from talking to mom without mom asking me to.”

  “After breaking up our family & putting me in jail, Sedita now seeks to put me away for 25 years. We won’t let that happen!! I still love mom. I love you & I still love Lauren and I always will. I will never stop fighting for my family. I don’t blame mom for what the D.A. did. She couldn’t have known what they were up to…Please try to keep Polo for me. Take care of mom and Lauren.

  “I love you so much,

  “DAD”

  Anthony wasn’t far off when he characterized Frank Sedita as his enemy, but not for the reasons he gave his son. Sedita had seen the devastation of Dan and Sarah Smith’s family, and the struggles of Debbie Pignataro, and he did want to prosecute the former doctor. Sedita and Carol Bridge were already prepared to go ahead with their case against Anthony Pignataro when they began to get a lot of help. Apparently, Anthony hadn’t been any more popular in jail than he was in the straight world.

  Carol Bridge laughed as she described the rush to snitch on Tony. “We never had so many informants. We had a conga line of them coming across Delaware Avenue to tell us about Tony Pignataro.”

  The first informant was not a jail inmate, although he was a man who “knew things.” Mr. X had once been a patient of Tony’s. Back in 1997, he had overheard the doctor complaining to his staff about patients who owed him money. Being an expert in collecting money, Mr. X let Dr. Tony know that he could probably help him get what was owed. But the doctor said that wasn’t what he needed help with; what he was really looking for was someone to kill his wife.

  “I took him seriously when he wanted to know if I could do it. I told him I’d get back to him on that.”

  However, when Mr. X came in to get the final check on his hair implants, Pignataro hadn’t brought the subject up again. Mr. X was relieved, as he had no intention of hurting a woman. When he’d read in the paper about Debbie, he had recalled the conversation. But he didn’t want to get involved. “I just wanted to tell someone,” Mr. X told Chuck Craven.

  This occurred months before Sarah Smith died.

  They already had one witness who was willing to testify that Pignataro was thinking about killing his wife: Arnie Letovich. Arnie was prepared to get up on the witness stand, even though he knew that Tony would be furious.

  However, the conga line continued. A woman named Trixie* talked to Frank Sedita, Craven, and Finnerty about her ex-husband, Paulie Cavalini*, who was in the Erie County Holding Center waiting disposition on a federal charge. Cavalini agreed to talk to the prosecutors. He described Tony Pignataro, beginning, as everyone did, with the bolts in his head. He remembered Tony as being weird and a “loner.”

  But Paulie and Tony had played a card game called International Spades to pass the time. The subject of Tony’s prosecution on the poisoning case had come up, and the ex-doctor had bragged that “they can’t put the arsenic in my hands.” He said that the only one who might keep him from being found innocent was Arnie Letovich.

  Of course, Tony added that he was innocent. Either his wife had done it to herself, or maybe her mother had done it, because she was over at his house at least five days a week.

  Tony was very upset with Arnie, and he told Paulie Cavalini that he had found out that Arnie was going to court on May 23.

  Cavalini said that Tony was looking for someone to either beat up Arnie or kill him before he could do harm to Tony’s defense case. Paulie also recalled that Tony had said his girlfriend would never say anything about him to hurt him. Tami was in his pocket, and so was his mother. Paulie said Tony called his mother a lot from jail.

&nbs
p; As always, Sedita told Cavalini that there was no deal, other than that anything he said during this interview would not be used against him. He also instructed him not to try to entice Pignataro into further conversation. It wouldn’t matter what Tony said under those circumstances; it would be “fruit of the poisoned tree” and could not be used against him in any trial.

  Cavalini said he didn’t want anything from the D.A.’s office. He just didn’t like Tony Pignataro.

  On May 19, Pat Finnerty heard another version of Tony Pignataro’s thirst for revenge from an inmate. Mohammed Kwamba* said he had been housed with Pignataro a couple of times. He described Tony as keeping things very close to his chest, but he had told Kwamba that he knew that a man and two women were going to be key witnesses against him in his trial, and that they were people he used to do heroin with.

  Kwamba said that Tony was extremely frightened about what the man might say in his testimony. He had asked Kwamba to help him “scare the shit” out of Arnie Letovich so that Arnie wouldn’t testify. He had asked Kwamba to find out through his Muslim friends in the holding center the exact pod and cell where Letovich was being held.

  Kwamba had the impression that Tony was testing him. He had found out where Arnie was and reported that to Pignataro. Satisfied that he could count on Kwamba, Tony then asked him to spread the word among his friends to put pressure on Arnie so he would be too frightened to testify.

  Tony had bragged to him that he was a doctor, Kwamba said, and he would never have gone after his wife and kids in any way he knew could be detected. But, when Kwamba asked him directly if he did do the poisoning, he only replied, “They will never find out.”

  Then Tony winked at Kwamba in a conspiratorial way. Pignataro had apparently believed that he could persuade Kwamba to assist him by offering to pay for a better attorney for him if he did what Tony wanted. What he didn’t know was that Kwamba had already accepted a plea bargain and didn’t need an attorney. Kwamba had only been toying with him, seeing how far he would go.

  Feeling that he had Kwamba on his side, Pignataro asked him to get him some tobacco and other items that were contraband. Kwamba had assured him he would check with his circle of friends, but he’d never delivered anything to Tony.

  Kwamba, too, was warned by the district attorney’s office not to speak to or solicit information from Pignataro unless Tony himself started a conversation, and even then to limit himself to listening only. Kwamba said that Tony kept to himself most of the time and spoke only to a very few of the other inmates in the holding center.

  Thanks to his mother, Anthony Pignataro had two of the most outstanding criminal defense attorneys in Buffalo representing him. But he was clearly not content to let Joel Daniels and Brian Welsh speak for him. He thought his plan was far superior and much more expedient. He was confident that he knew his way around the jail system. With his savvy and his mother’s money, he could find insiders who would either frighten the witnesses against him or kill them to eliminate any chance that they could testify. Arnie Letovich, in particular, was the potential witness who worried Pignataro.

  By July, he had found another likely hit man. And now it was a hit man he was looking for. After five months in jail, Anthony wanted to make sure that he didn’t face another prison term at the end of the one he was already serving.

  This time, the informant who contacted Frank Sedita was a native of Puerto Rico: Luis Perez*. Luis was thirty-five, and although he was housed in a different pod than Pignataro, they could see each other through their cell doors, and, like everyone else in the jail, Perez had noticed the man with bolts in his head. Later, they spoke often in the gym.

  Tony was fluent in Spanish, and the two conversed in both English and Spanish. Tony explained that he was a surgeon and that he had gone to school in Puerto Rico, and they shared memories of Perez’s home territory.

  They had many conversations, the last on July 8, 2000. After they moved past casual comments, Perez said that most of their discussions had been about Tony’s need to find someone to kill a witness against him: Arnie Letovich—whom Tony called “his problem on the West Side.”

  Tony explained that Letovich had copped heroin for him. He promised Perez that he would cop for him, too, although he warned him that Letovich would want to hold back a couple of bags for himself. Tony said that at the time of his own most recent arrest, he had quickly discovered where Letovich was being housed. He was in the Delta wing then, but Tony now believed Arnie had been moved to a rehab center over on Delaware Avenue. He was still seeking someone who could hurt Arnie enough to keep him from testifying.

  Perez told Sedita that he had listened to what Pignataro had in mind. Tony was prepared to pay big money to have Letovich killed. He asked Perez if he or someone he knew might be willing to do that for money. He had worked out a plan that he thought would be foolproof. Through his sources, he knew that Arnie was due to be released from the rehab clinic within a few days, and he wouldn’t be hard to find.

  Whenever they met, Perez said, Tony had brought up the subject of killing Letovich. He thought it would be prudent if Perez spent some time convincing Arnie that he was his friend. The best way, Tony suggested, was for Luis to get him high, so that Arnie would trust him and expect that they would shoot up when they were together. It never occurred to Tony that Arnie Letovich might have kicked his habit while he was in rehab.

  To be sure that Perez was carrying out Tony’s plans, he wanted him to have someone take a picture of him and Letovich together. That way, he would know that Perez wasn’t trying to pull anything on him, that he really had made contact with Arnie. He even promised Perez he would pay him $5,000 up front if he could produce a photograph of himself with Arnie Letovich. That would prove that Perez wasn’t snitching to the cops.

  Perez said he’d been curious about why Pignataro was willing to go as far as murder for hire, and Tony told him that Letovich was going to be a star witness against him in an attempted murder case. He asked him whom he had tried to kill.

  “My wife,” Tony had answered. “My wife. I’m gonna get that bitch.” Tony had gone on to confide that his wife had tried to commit suicide when she found out he had a girlfriend, as if that were outrageous enough behavior on her part to warrant reprisal of some kind.

  At this point, Perez decided that he should go to the district attorney. He didn’t need any more convincing that Tony was serious about having Letovich killed, and maybe he wouldn’t stop with that. He seemed furious at his wife, too.

  Now, Perez told the investigators that Tony had gone so far as to plot the best way to kill Arnie. Once they got used to shooting up together and Arnie trusted Perez, Tony suggested that Perez put poison in the syringe. Tony had specifically said that rat poison would probably be the best poison to use.

  But Tony was starting to get anxious. His trial for attempted murder was getting closer, even though he thought Joel Daniels could get him some delays. Tony wanted to know when Luis Perez would be released from jail. Just as soon as Luis was out, Tony wanted him to write to him at a post office box address.

  He gave Perez a precise description of Arnie Letovich, saying he was a skinny white male who looked like Jesus Christ. He had a lot of tattoos, the most outstanding of which was a Heroin King symbol. He described Arnie as looking like “a straight-up junkie.”

  With Perez’s information, the D.A.’s investigators were convinced that eventually Tony Pignataro was going to find somebody behind bars who was willing to carry out a murder for the sake of the $10,000 he was offering. His only money source was his mother, although they doubted that she would give him the money if she knew what it was for. She had been an endless source of funds for attorneys and his living expenses, however.

  One more informant was warned not to attempt to entice Tony Pignataro into a conversation. Frank Sedita told Perez that he would be violating Pignataro’s constitutional rights if he started conversations about the attempted murder case. Anything Tony might tell him w
ould probably be ruled inadmissible by the court.

  Frank Sedita talked to the deputy superintendent of the holding center to see which, if any, of the conversations between Perez and Pignataro might have been caught on surveillance cameras. If they had been, they were gone; at the time, the tape in the gym camera was recorded over every two hours after corrections officers viewed them.

  Oblivious to the fact that the prisoners he had approached were giving the D.A.’s office play-by-play descriptions of his attempts to set up a hit, Tony Pignataro continued his solicitation of murder. And Luis Perez made regular reports to law enforcement authorities about what Tony was planning. He spoke to Special Agent Richard Caito of the Career Criminal Task Force on August 7. He said that Tony had located Letovich’s new address and even knew that he might be living with a woman named Sherry*. Perez repeated that Pignataro wanted Arnie Letovich’s death to look like a drug overdose.

  On August 8, 2000, Frank Sedita and Joel Daniels appeared before Judge Mario Rossetti to make motions about the date of Pignataro’s trial on the attempted murder charges. Although Daniels argued vociferously for a delay, Rossetti made it clear that he intended to proceed with the trial on October 9.

  A day later, Pignataro’s defense team made a motion to have him released from the holding center while his violation of probation appeal was pending. Frank Sedita and Carol Bridge were puzzled over why they chose this relatively late date to protest. Way back in February, Judge Wolfgang had ordered no bail and told Pignataro’s lawyers that he could reapply for lower bail, but they had waited five months to do so. Now, with the trial looming so near, Tony Pignataro suddenly was very anxious to get out of jail.

  Knowing what they knew about Tony’s animosity toward Arnie Letovich, Sedita and Bridge were uneasy. Either he was going to see to it himself that Arnie was silenced, or perhaps he was planning to run.

  There was a third possibility. He needed a reason to get $10,000. Tony might have been planning to tell his mother it was bail money, knowing that she wouldn’t even consider paying a hit man.