The Big Heist

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  Macedonio’s tactic was to question Valenti again about details of things he had first been asked by Argentieri: the Katz burial, the Lufthansa heist, the loansharking. The defense attorney indicated through her questions that Valenti had told the FBI different things about the heist, the burial, and the other crimes. But sometimes the questioning got bogged down in details, like whether it was a “post hole digger” or a “shovel” that Asaro and Burke had brought to dig the burial pit in the basement of the house on 102nd Road. They were both the same thing, with slight variations, explained Valenti.

  On the Lufthansa heist, Macedonio raised the possibility that while Valenti had testified that Asaro was present at all the planning sessions for the robbery, he had told the FBI that his cousin wasn’t present for at least one of the meetings. These were small points and for the most part Macedonio didn’t ask Valenti to describe again in detail what Asaro allegedly did during the heist. But she did suggest that Valenti might be sculpting his testimony from what he read about the heist in the newspapers.

  “The first individual that you came upon, did you learn his name?” asked Macedonio.

  “Yes,” answered Valenti.

  “How did you learn his name?”

  “He had a badge on, Kerry Whalen, and I took the badge off him, and I placed it on me.”

  “You didn’t read about that in the newspaper?”

  “Read about it? That was me. I didn’t have to read about it.”

  “Certainly some time has passed since the Lufthansa heist?”

  “I think my memory is pretty well.”

  But on one point, Valenti gave an answer to Macedonio, which conflicted with Sal Vitale’s recollection about how he and Massino went to pick up the Lufthansa jewelry. Vitale had said he drove Massino to meet Asaro, who then gave the Bonanno gangster a briefcase filled with the gold chains, watches, and bracelets. However, under questioning by Macedonio, Valenti said Massino alone came to visit him and that he, not Asaro, passed him the case. There was no mention of Vitale being present. It was a contradiction and either Vitale or Valenti was mistaken—or perhaps lying.

  Macedonio also tried to cast doubt over Valenti’s story that after ripping off Lufthansa, the robbery crew went to his house on Blake Avenue to stash the loot and count it in the dead of night in a dwelling where thirteen lived, twelve of whom were asleep. There was also a dog named Beauty, a street dog Valenti had adopted and was protective about, even when questioned by the attorney.

  “And Beauty was a barker, wasn’t she?” Macedonio asked.

  “No, she wasn’t. She was a sickly dog,” replied Valenti.

  “She was always sickly?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of dog was Beauty?”

  “She was a street dog.”

  “A mutt?”

  “That’s cruel.”

  Much of Macedonio’s cross-examination dug deeper into Valenti’s checkered history, one filled with duplicity, cheating, lying to federal agents, and overall unreliability as a friend. He admitted that when he fled to Las Vegas around 1990 it was because he had cheated Bonanno mobster Anthony Spero out of around $25,000—money he was owed by Asaro—and then cooked up a crazy story about having given the cash to a man in a brown bomber jacket. At that point, Valenti had to get out of town and went west fast, leaving his wife and kids in the lurch. It was the start of a star-crossed fifteen years he would spend in the desert.

  Once in Las Vegas, the hapless Valenti admitted that he started committing a series of other crimes with a man who was actually an FBI informant. He took up with another woman who sued him for money he supposedly stole. To make matters worse, Valenti fell under the control of an FBI undercover agent who plied him with stolen casino chips and got him involved in various fake invoicing and fraud schemes. Valenti couldn’t have picked worse partners in crime, and in the end he was arrested and sentenced to eight months in prison. To add insult to his many indignations, when Valenti got out of prison he was arrested in Las Vegas for jay walking and went right back to jail for a short stint.

  Another vignette brought out by Macedonio showed in the end how mercenary Valenti had been in the face of Asaro’s own sentimentality and kindness. When Asaro’s father Jerome died in 1977, his son took two of his prized cufflinks and had them made into rings. Asaro respected his father, as did Valenti, so a set of matching gold rings made from the cufflinks seemed appropriate. The ring didn’t stay long with Valenti.

  “So it was a gesture of love, fair to say?” asked Macedonio.

  “Yes, it was,” answered Valenti.

  “And what did you do with your copy of the ring?”

  “I hocked it.”

  So great was Valenti’s need for cash that he said he also got rid of Jerome Asaro’s old car when it was given to him following the old man’s death.

  One of the last questions the attorney asked had to do with the weeks before his work as a secret informant came to an end just before the remains of Katz were found in the Ozone Park basement. For reasons that were never illuminated, Valenti felt the need on Father’s Day to call Asaro. He wanted to tell him he loved him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “WHAT IS THIS, WATERGATE?”

  SITTING THROUGH DAYS OF TESTIMONY, including three involving his turncoat cousin, Vincent Asaro, never a guy to keep his emotions in check, was steaming. When Valenti was on the stand, Asaro made sure that he had a clear line of sight to the witness box to scowl at him and moved his seat or asked that a computer screen be moved so he could keep the witness in a withering stare. Asaro also knew that whatever was left of his life was in the balance and didn’t like the way he saw the case unfolding in the courtroom. The testimony was damning and he knew it. Defense attorneys Macedonio and Ferrone did their best on cross-examination, but there wasn’t much they could do to trip up government witnesses.

  “He is fucking lying!” Asaro exclaimed more than once in a voice that could be heard by spectators—let alone the prosecutor, court personnel, and likely the jurors.

  As Valenti testified, Asaro could be seen getting more animated with his attorneys and mouthing the word “liar.” His family members in the courtroom could also be overheard by one reporter saying, “These are some fairy tales.... They gave him a book to memorize.... He should get an Academy Award.”

  Asaro would badger the attorneys so much that Ferrone finally had enough and moved her seat to a spot away from him to a place at the other end of the defense table. Argentieri also had enough of Asaro’s sotto voce remarks, and asked Ross to have the defense keep him muzzled.

  The testimony didn’t get any easier for Asaro to stomach as the case progressed. Peter Zuccaro was an old Gambino crime-family associate and admitted killer who turned government witness years earlier. Asaro didn’t like him ever since Zuccaro killed a dog in self-defense, an act for which the canine-loving Asaro wanted to kill him in retaliation, according to Valenti. For his part, Zuccaro had his own standards, and once said he didn’t care much for those in the mob who wanted to shoot people near a Catholic church. Asaro could only sit and stew as Zuccaro, who had the hard look of a Mafia operative, told the jury that Frank Burke admitted to him that he drove in the van with Valenti the night of the Lufthansa heist. This corroborated some of Valenti’s testimony about the heist. Burke added that Valenti never did get his cut from the Lufthansa heist because it was taken by Asaro, according to Zuccaro.

  “Frankie said that Vinny kept it and beat him for it,” said Zuccaro, explaining how the real problem was with the way Burke’s father was not paying people fast enough.

  In a push to show the impact of the murder of Paul Katz on his family, the prosecution called the dead man’s son Lawrence as a witness. Katz’s wife Delores had died in 2001, and although she had given police lengthy statements about his last days, including some about her suspicions about police involvement in her spouse’s death, there was no way to introduce them into evidence. Prosecutors hoped that Lawrenc
e, who was only about five years old when his father disappeared, would humanize the murdered man and tug at the heart strings of the jury.

  Asaro and his attorney could only watch as Larry Katz spoke haltingly about his father and how his father had gotten arrested in the weeks before he died. Katz seemed ill-at-ease on the stand, and his apparent discomfort just might make the jury feel more sympathetic to him. He didn’t relish the idea of having to talk about his father’s criminal record, his arrest, and the fact that it appeared he was dealing in stolen merchandise.

  One incident from Katz’s son’s testimony stood out about the time of his father’s arrest. After making bail, the elder Katz came home to the family apartment building in Lefrak City, an apartment complex near Corona. Spotting his father coming up the walk, Larry Katz ran up to him with a toy gun and handcuffs and jumped into his arms. Fresh out of jail, Paul Katz uncomfortably looked at the toys and said, “I’ve had enough of those for a while,” the son remembered.

  The stress in the Katz household was obvious, and Larry remembered his parents constantly fighting with his mother concerned about the characters her husband was involved with. To show that Paul Katz was talking with law enforcement, his son confirmed to Assistant U.S. Attorney Alicyn Cooley that an NYPD officer named Sal Petix called the apartment. As if to make the story poignant, Cooley had Larry Katz recall how his parents became mellow and peaceful when they talked about plans to move out of the city and escape upstate, into a house that his father drew a picture of for the children.

  The day his father disappeared on December 6, 1969, Larry Katz remembered his parents arguing one last time. His father got a telephone call and told his wife he was going to go out to meet someone. The parents started one more verbal spat.

  “They were arguing about him not leaving, and he said he had to go, and that my mom told him to take one of the kids,” remembered Larry Katz. “He said, no. And she said, ‘At least take the dog,’ and he said no. And he grabbed his jacket, said, ‘If I’m not back in a couple of hours, call the cops.’”

  That was the last time Larry Katz ever saw his father. Fear seemed to pervade the Katz household for years. It was a sad story, and wisely Macedonio decided not to cross-examine him. Seasoned defense attorneys know that the questioning of a bereaved family member can backfire badly.

  If Asaro didn’t like sitting through the Katz testimony, he certainly didn’t look forward to what FBI special agent Michael Byrnes and the famed forensic anthropologist Brad Adams had to say. They testified about the macabre dig in the basement of the Burke house on 102nd Road. Byrnes described everything from the breaking of the concrete, the methodical sifting of the soil and the discovery of the bones, the teeth and the hair in the pit. Adams fleshed things out, in a manner of speaking, by noting the various anatomical finds and the fact that the remains had been in the ground for over five years. This was the place where Katz’s body was buried in 1969 and where, despite an earlier disinterment, some of his remains were left behind.

  “We have portions representing the head. We have teeth from the head. We have bones from the neck. We have bones from the torso. We have bones from the chest, and we have bones from the hand,” Adams told the jury. When necessary, Argentieri had him illustrate things by showing photographs of the pitiful bone fragments found in the basement.

  It was then up to Frances Rue, a criminalist in the office of the New York City Chief Medical Examiner, to describe how the science of DNA put a name to the bones in the pit. Testimony about the intricacies of laboratory analysis, kinship studies, and placement of alleles on human chromosomes can be mind-numbing. But the bottom line was that Rue said with certainty that the bones in the pit were those of Paul Katz, father of Lawrence and Ilsa, his two children who had given samples of their genetic material for comparison. Rue’s certainty was greater than 99.99 percent, carried forward by a few fractions of a decimal point—but never 100 percent. The bones were those of Paul Katz, no question, she said.

  By November 3, 2015, the government’s case had essentially wound down. The defense would bring in one witness—former Lufthansa worker Kerry Whalen who testified that he had seen a man identified as Angelo Sepe and Thomas DeSimone who accosted him outside the terminal and not Valenti. He also recounted the way he was forced into the van at the point of a gun.

  “They threw me on my back. The driver stuck a pistol deep into my—into my brain, my left eye,” remembered Whalen. “And with my right eye, I could see two bullets the size of submarine torpedoes. And I just thought they were going to kill me. I assumed I was dead then.”

  Whalen also described under questioning by the defense attorney how the Lufthansa ID he was wearing on his jacket was never taken by any of the robbers, a direct contradiction to what Valenti had said when he testified. On cross-examination, the government questions seemed aimed at painting Whalen as a crank who was angry at the way the FBI and previous prosecutors had treated him, to the extent that he even demonstrated with placards outside the courthouse. But Whalen essentially stuck to his story that he saw Sepe and DeSimone in the van and that his airline ID was never taken from his jacket—all points that directly contradicted Valenti.

  There was one more defense witness, Carmine Muscarella, a relative of Valenti, who essentially testified that he gave Valenti a check for some money from the sale of property because he was family and not out of fear of Asaro. This was done to rebut the allegation that Muscarella was an extortion victim even though he admitted knowing about Asaro’s reputation as a mobster.

  “I was not afraid,” Muscarella told the jury, adding that he made the payment to Valenti because he was being a proverbial pain in the ass about the $3,000. When asked by Macedonio why he later agreed to lend Asaro $2,500, Muscarella said that he felt sorry for him.

  “Vincent Asaro is a very proud man, and for him to even come to me to ask to borrow money because he was in financial dire straits, I am sure was very humiliating to him, to actually come and ask me for money because he had been so down on his luck,” said Muscarella

  * * *

  With Asaro’s decision not to testify, the trial was on the final lap and from what had gone on for the past two weeks in Ross’s courtroom, it looked and sounded like Vincent Asaro was in a great deal of trouble. Valenti wasn’t shaken in his testimony, and other witnesses corroborated some of his story. However, there were some contradictions in the testimony and some of the extortion charges seemed weak, particularly that involving John Zaffarano and Muscarella, and all of the FBI agents who testified admitted they never saw Asaro commit a crime in all of the many hours of surveillance. It would be up to the prosecution and defense to try and make one final bid to convince the jurors about Asaro’s guilt or innocence.

  * * *

  Summations are the final chance prosecutors and defense attorneys get to spin the case before the jury. They are bound by the facts, but the attorneys can appeal to the commonsense when trying to give their interpretation of the facts. The prosecution will tell how there is no other possible conclusion than guilt. The defense will hammer away at the presumption of innocence and show how the evidence is not so clear and that there is a reasonable doubt about guilt.

  On Friday, November 6, 2015, it was Alicyn Cooley’s job to pull together the various strands of the government’s case to convict Asaro. The prosecution goes first on summations and with an indictment covering events over four and a half decades old what Cooley had to say wasn’t going to be done in ten minutes. With the jury in the box and the press packed into the court, along with a goodly number of people from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Cooley began the long march to convince the jury that Asaro was guilty. For about six hours, Cooley spoke to the jurors. Six hours. Even the summation in the case against Joseph Massino went on for only about three hours. The danger in long summations is that jurors will tire and lose their focus. In this case, Cooley needed a long time to sketch out the evidence.

  Asaro’s forty-five years as a gan
gster was on trial in the case, Cooley reminded the jury. She branded him the “ultimate tough guy” who profited from years of criminal activity and killed people along the way.

  Asaro, insisted Cooley, “lived by and enforced the Mafia’s code—death before dishonor.” Her summation was relentless. Cooley spent her time alternately reading from portions of the over 3,500-page trial transcript encompassing seventy witnesses. She played audio clips of the many tapes Valenti had made of Asaro, ones that showed how dissolute the life of an aging mobster had become. But the tapes also were solid proof that Asaro was involved in the Lufthansa heist and profited handsomely from it, said Cooley.

  The prosecutor also reminded the jury that while Katz’s murder may have taken place decades earlier, “justice can still be reached.”

  Of course, there were breaks in Cooley’s summation. But such lengthy presentations had the added danger of making it appear that the prosecution wasn’t sure of its evidence and whether it tied together well enough to convince the jury. Asaro was overheard to say of the summation: “It’s absolutely ridiculous . . . a five-hour summation? What is this, Watergate?”

  Macedonio had a Sisyphean task before her. The conventional wisdom around the courthouse was that Asaro would be convicted. Valenti seemed to be credible, and if the jury believed him, then Asaro would for the rest of his life be looking to the U.S. government for support in his old age—not from Social Security but from the hospitality of the Bureau of Prisons. So, it would be up to Macedonio in her summation to go deep into the evidence and show the jurors why they shouldn’t believe Valenti—or any of the other Mafia turncoats—and why the government’s case was so flimsy. She tried to do that by appealing to commonsense and using some inventive graphic techniques along the way.

  There were photographs from forty-three years of surveillance of Asaro by police and the FBI, but not once did they catch him committing any crimes, said Macedonio. Instead, the images showed Asaro getting coffee, kissing people on the street, and sitting at curb side. Macedonio mocked the notion of Asaro being part of a secret society when she reminded the jurors of pictures showing he and his friends openly on the street. There was no crime of guilty by association in the United States, she stressed.