by Chucky » Thu Oct 04, 2018 4:32 am
This Week in Gang Land
By Jerry Capeci
Little Nick Has A Problem With President Trump's Main Man At Main Justice
If he had a problem with mega-builder Donald Trump or one of his minions in the 1980s, he surely would have called on his crime family's construction industry guru Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano for help. Back then, Gravano controlled Teamsters Local 282, whose drivers deliver concrete to job sites, and Trump was buying concrete for many of his building projects from S&A Concrete, which was co-owned by Gambino boss Paul (Big Paul) Castellano.
But Sammy Bull would be no help for Gambino capo Nicholas (Little Nick) Corozzo today. His problem is with Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who has been a thorn in the side of bi-partisan efforts to streamline and ease the hard-nosed approach to the halfway house system at the federal Bureau of Prisons. As a result, Corozzo, who's been living in one BOP facility or another since 2008, had to go elsewhere to seek help.
Like almost every federal inmate, the 78-year-old wiseguy wants out. And to Corozzo, who currently resides at the Allenwood low security facility in White Deer, Pennsylvania, it appears that the Trump administration's cuts at BOP are going to keep him behind bars longer than he would otherwise remain. Since Trump took office, the BOP has closed 16 halfway houses across the country. It has also instituted other cutbacks along with a hiring freeze at the agency.
In a pro se motion he filed two weeks ago, Corozzo asked Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Jack Weinstein to order the BOP to designate him for placement into a halfway house "for the maximum time allowable under the Second Chance Act of 2007." Based on that calculation, he would enter a halfway house — if there was one to enter — 12 months before his scheduled release date of March 5, 2020.
Corozzo wrote that "funding cuts put in place by the Trump administration" have led to the "slashing of halfway house time for many federal inmates, many of whom have served very lengthy sentences and who badly need the proper transition time" that the facilities provide for those returning to a different society than the one they left.
Little Nick, whom Weinstein sentenced to 13 and a half years for racketeering and murder in 2008, wrote that the cutbacks have resulted in prisoners getting less than six months time in a halfway house (RRC or Residential Reentry Center in BOP speak), a return to the six-month standard that was in place prior to 2007.
Last year, when Sessions decided to close 16 halfway houses, BOP spokesman Justin Long stated that the closings were of underutilized RRCs, mostly in rural areas, and would have no impact on big cities. Long said the BOP remained "committed" to the use of halfway houses, but had cut back on them for "fiscal" reasons. The cuts would not reduce the number of RRC placements, he said.
But prison advocates and defense lawyers say BOP cutbacks have turned an already long and cumbersome process into "a nightmare." The process involve interviews by the inmate's case manager and counselor and reports to the warden and the prison's regional office even before the halfway house is contacted to see if there is any bed space available.
"Inmates have been up in arms about it for more than a year now," said one lawyer, who agreed to speak anonymously. "By rule, the process is supposed to start 18 months before the scheduled release date so that if the inmate is approved, he can get an RRC placement a year before his release date," the attorney added.
And there's no relief in sight. This year, after the House passed a Trump backed reform measure that would authorize $250 million to speed up the federal prison system's inmate re-entry program, Sessions objected to it. The Justice Department panned it in a letter to the White House, according to Tony Pugh, of the McClatchy Washington D.C. Bureau.
In its letter, Pugh wrote, the DOJ said the bill "would further and significantly erode our long established truth-in-sentencing principles, create impossible administrative burdens, effectively reduce the sentences of thousands of violent felons, and endanger the safety of law-abiding citizens and law enforcement officers."
Since Corozzo has less than 18 months remaining before his release date, it's a safe bet that his pro se motion is a good indication that the interview process for his halfway house placement hasn't begun yet. BOP officials declined to discuss that, or any aspect of Corozzo's plight.
The BOP also stated that it was unable to answer any Gang Land queries yesterday about the halfway house process, including how many there were in the New York area; how many inmates could be accommodated at one time; and how long the RRC process takes.
"With the cuts recently imposed on halfway houses," Corozzo wrote, "the amount of RRC time provided to federal inmates falls far short of the clear intent of Congress, which was to allow men and women adequate time to re-enter society and succeed." By its actions, Little Nick argued, "the BOP is working against its own professed goals and its mandate of giving men and women the best chance to successfully return to our nation's communities."
"How can three to four months or less be enough time for a person returning to society (after a lengthy incarceration) to find employment, find housing, save money, and re-integrate with their loves ones?" Corozzo asked, and answered by stating: "In failing to provide inmates the required time to make a successful re-entry, the BOP is essentially setting inmates up for failure."
To illustrate that he had made good use of the years he's spent behind bars, and that he was interested in a successful re-entry, Corozzo listed scores of educational and vocational classes and workshops he has taken at three federal prisons where he's lived since 2011.
In Leavenworth, Kansas, Little Nick took classes in real estate, nutrition, and driving a forklift. In Loretto, Pennsylvania, there was logical/lateral thinking, wrestling with life, creative writing, conversational Spanish, and resume writing. And after arriving at Allenwood, the septuagenarian wiseguy opted for physical fitness classes, taking healthy aging and beginners spinning.
"In the interests of justice, and for good cause shown," Corozzo petitioned Weinstein "to issue a Judicial Recommendation" to the BOP that he should be placed into a halfway house on March 5, 2019, so he can begin his re-entry into the outside world he left behind a full year before his max-out date.
In a brief hand-written ruling, Weinstein stated that oral arguments were "not now required," but that the U.S. Attorney's office "is respectfully requested to respond to this position in writing."
Doo Wop Singer-Turned Gambino Gangster Reprises Life After That Life
He was a Doo Wop singer, a Vietnam vet, and for a few years he worked as an artist. He also helped the feds nail three members of a murderous Mafia crew on trial with Paul Castellano when the Gambino boss was murdered by a John Gotti hit team. In a documentary set for release tomorrow, Dominick Montiglio recalls his days in The Life with his Uncle Nino and his helter-skelter After Life in the Witness Protection Program.
"I never killed anyone because I was pissed off at them. It was always business," he says in a trailer for the The Lynchpin of Bensonhurst, which is produced and directed by two former bartenders who met Montiglio back in 2002 when he was a fledgling artist selling his stuff at a Tribeca art gallery.
Wearing a 173d Airborne Brigade baseball cap, Montiglio says that when he returned home after his days as a $278-a-month U.S. Army "warrior" in Vietnam, he didn't intend to become a gangster, but soon found himself "putting hand grenades in people's cars and shooting people in the street for $250 a week" with his Uncle Nino, the late Gambino capo Anthony (Nino) Gaggi.
"You gotta live inside my head to know what it's like, you know, at 9:30 at night, shoot somebody in the middle of a crowded shopping area on 86th street, which I did," said Montiglio, a reference to a 1976 murder that he committed along with Gaggi and mobster Roy DeMeo.
As Gene Mustain and yours truly detailed in our 1992 book, Murder Machine: A True Story of Murder, Madness and the Mafia, Gaggi used Montiglio to keep tabs for him on a violent crew of drug dealers and car thieves led by DeMeo and charged with 25 murders in the 1970s and early 1980s – the largest number of killings ever charged in a federal murder indictment.
"I was the overseer of the crew, absolutely the most dangerous crew in the world," Montiglio said, noting that DeMeo and three disciples convicted at two trials at which he testified, Henry Borelli, Anthony Senter and Joseph Testa, "were the type of killers that dismembered bodies."
Montiglio, now 71, described going into an apartment behind the Gemini Lounge in Flatlands section of Brooklyn and seeing "two naked bodies hanging in the shower." He asked, "What the fuck is that?" and was told, "Don't worry, they're not staying for dinner," he recalled, with a wide smile revealing a man with a serious dental problem.
In snippets of the 118-minute documentary that are currently available online, Montiglio wears paint spattered fatigues, a Yankee baseball cap and that same smile as he dances to the 1992 tune, The Skunk, The Goose & The Fly by Tower of Power and mouths the words of the chorus: "Drunk as a skunk, drunk as a skunk;" "Loose as a goose, loose as a goose," and "High as a fly, high as a fly."
In other extracts, wearing dentures and looking much more distinguished sitting at a desk in a dark pullover sweater, he states matter-of-factly how "even before my own people tried to kill me," he had problems with Gaggi, who died behind bars in 1988 during his second trial.
"There were guys younger than me getting made so I knew right then that it wasn't Paulie," he said. "It was my Uncle Nino didn't want me to get made because he didn't want me to get my own crew, so what I did was, I put my own crew together. We were doing all mafia stuff but it wasn't a mafia crew, totally against all the rules of the family. I wasn't supposed to have a crew — which I did."
Montiglio recalled that when he was arrested in March of 1983, "The first night, there was an attorney. He said, 'I could get you out on bail by tomorrow.' I said, 'No, I'll stay right here.' I knew if I got out, I would have gotten popped."
Two decades later, long after Murder Machine outed Montiglio, and long after Borelli, Testa and Senter were imprisoned — where they still remain — Montiglio quietly moved back to Brooklyn, and began selling paintings at Pablo's Birthday, an art gallery then located in Tribeca, according to Ross Brodar, who produced and directed Lynchpin along with William Sharp.
"We were both selling art there, and I meet this interesting character, and he's living in Sunset Park, down the block from me," Brodar told Gang Land, explaining that for all intents and purposes he and Sharp began filming Montiglio and making the documentary soon after they met in 2002.
It happened, Brodar recalled, "One day when Dominick says to me, 'Listen Ross, this girl I'm with is driving me crazy, can I spend two weeks in your place till I find a place?' I got this huge studio with plenty of room. I say, 'Sure,' and two weeks turned into two years, and we became good friends."
Over the years, as Dominick bounced around the country, they met up, and Brodar and Sharp kept filming and interviewing him — as well as a NYPD detective and FBI agent in his case, old friends from Bensonhurst, and soldiers he served with in 'Nam — to put together what Brodar said was "a very intimate tale of a hell of a creative guy who did some bad stuff but who also has a lot of good qualities too."
Neither Gang Land, nor Mustain, who spent hundreds of hours talking to Montiglio in order to publish Murder Machine, has any stake, or anything to do with Lynchpin. It's available for pre-order on your cell phone or computer at an iTunes store for $9.99.
Read All About It: Mob-Tied Queens Newspaper Publisher Seeks A Break On Sentence
Patricia AdamsAfter letting a Howard Beach newspaper publisher plead guilty to the rarely charged crime of misprision of a felony — failing to report a crime by others — prosecutors have asked a federal judge to send Patricia Adams to prison tomorrow for obstructing justice in the case of a Bonanno family bookmaker convicted two months ago of misdemeanor sexual assault.
In asking for the high end of the zero to six months sentencing guidelines in her plea agreement, prosecutors say that in a lengthy tape-recorded conversation, Adams used her ties to the Bonanno family and her influence and clout as publisher of The Forum to "repeatedly threaten the victim" with public exposure "even if it was true" that she had been sexually assaulted.
Prosecutors say that in the two and a half hour-long talk — excerpts filled six pages of their sentencing memo — Adams clearly obstructed justice by telling the victim's father his daughter was "going to hurt herself" if she persisted in accusing bookmaker Robert Pisani of sexual assault.
"She could be 100% right, he could have unsnapped her bra, tried to push her head down, whatever, she can't win," Adams told the woman's father on May 14, 2017, adding that she was also "in a position where I am going to have to expose the whole situation — if we get to that point," according to the government's filing.
Prosecutors Lindsay Gerdes and Keith Edelman also cited several phone calls and cryptic texts by Adams to Pisani and his wife on the same day as evidence that she obstructed justice in their court filing with Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Kiyo Matsumoto.
In addition to punishing Adams, Gerdes and Edelman argued that a prison term was "needed to deter others" from following her lead in the future, noting that "Howard Beach" as well as "organized crime figures" were monitoring the case and that a "non-jail sentence" was "not sufficient to deter others from committing similar crimes."
In seeking a non-jail term, Adams, 60, cited her work for more than 20 years as a "community journalist" who has "lived, worked and strived to make my community better, whether for the greater good or to help organizations and individuals" before she lost her way "on Mother's Day last year."
Stating that it was very "difficult" to find the right words to "express every level of regret" that she currently feels, Adams apologized for "the error of my ways" to everyone she hurt by her actions, especially the young woman whom Pisani was convicted of "forcibly touching" in August, assuring the judge that her crime "was an isolated incident" in her life.
Attorney Sanford Talkin submitted dozens of letters from family members and friends as well as a petition signed by nearly 400 residents of Howard Beach and five nearby Queens neighborhoods seeking "no incarceration" for Adams because she had been a "dedicated advocate" for the "greater good" of the community for more than 20 years as publisher of The Forum.
Talkin wrote that Adams admits her actions were "unjustified, illegal and never should have occurred," but the lawyer argued that a mitigating factor for leniency was that his client "genuinely believed that the victim was not telling the truth" about the sexual assault because she had watched "a video recording of the victim's actions immediately following the incident."
"Any person that views the video recording could reasonably draw the conclusion that the victim's conduct immediately following the incident," wrote Talkin, wasn't consistent with that of a woman who had just been "a victim of sexual misconduct." According to court records, the woman calmly walked out of Pisani's office and out of the deli right after the alleged assault took place.
"It was from that point of view" that Adams was acting on, wrote Talkin, noting that "during the recording, Adams thoroughly explained to the father why she believed the accusations to be false and detailed the contents of the video recording" that she had seen.
The lawyer insisted that neither he nor Adams was "attempting to justify her actions," but argued that as a first time offender who was a dedicated community activist for more than 20 years, his client deserved a non-custodial sentence — the low end of her plea agreement.
This Week in Gang Land
By Jerry Capeci
[b]Little Nick Has A Problem With President Trump's Main Man At Main Justice[/b]
If he had a problem with mega-builder Donald Trump or one of his minions in the 1980s, he surely would have called on his crime family's construction industry guru Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano for help. Back then, Gravano controlled Teamsters Local 282, whose drivers deliver concrete to job sites, and Trump was buying concrete for many of his building projects from S&A Concrete, which was co-owned by Gambino boss Paul (Big Paul) Castellano.
But Sammy Bull would be no help for Gambino capo Nicholas (Little Nick) Corozzo today. His problem is with Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who has been a thorn in the side of bi-partisan efforts to streamline and ease the hard-nosed approach to the halfway house system at the federal Bureau of Prisons. As a result, Corozzo, who's been living in one BOP facility or another since 2008, had to go elsewhere to seek help.
Like almost every federal inmate, the 78-year-old wiseguy wants out. And to Corozzo, who currently resides at the Allenwood low security facility in White Deer, Pennsylvania, it appears that the Trump administration's cuts at BOP are going to keep him behind bars longer than he would otherwise remain. Since Trump took office, the BOP has closed 16 halfway houses across the country. It has also instituted other cutbacks along with a hiring freeze at the agency.
In a pro se motion he filed two weeks ago, Corozzo asked Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Jack Weinstein to order the BOP to designate him for placement into a halfway house "for the maximum time allowable under the Second Chance Act of 2007." Based on that calculation, he would enter a halfway house — if there was one to enter — 12 months before his scheduled release date of March 5, 2020.
Corozzo wrote that "funding cuts put in place by the Trump administration" have led to the "slashing of halfway house time for many federal inmates, many of whom have served very lengthy sentences and who badly need the proper transition time" that the facilities provide for those returning to a different society than the one they left.
Little Nick, whom Weinstein sentenced to 13 and a half years for racketeering and murder in 2008, wrote that the cutbacks have resulted in prisoners getting less than six months time in a halfway house (RRC or Residential Reentry Center in BOP speak), a return to the six-month standard that was in place prior to 2007.
Last year, when Sessions decided to close 16 halfway houses, BOP spokesman Justin Long stated that the closings were of underutilized RRCs, mostly in rural areas, and would have no impact on big cities. Long said the BOP remained "committed" to the use of halfway houses, but had cut back on them for "fiscal" reasons. The cuts would not reduce the number of RRC placements, he said.
But prison advocates and defense lawyers say BOP cutbacks have turned an already long and cumbersome process into "a nightmare." The process involve interviews by the inmate's case manager and counselor and reports to the warden and the prison's regional office even before the halfway house is contacted to see if there is any bed space available.
"Inmates have been up in arms about it for more than a year now," said one lawyer, who agreed to speak anonymously. "By rule, the process is supposed to start 18 months before the scheduled release date so that if the inmate is approved, he can get an RRC placement a year before his release date," the attorney added.
And there's no relief in sight. This year, after the House passed a Trump backed reform measure that would authorize $250 million to speed up the federal prison system's inmate re-entry program, Sessions objected to it. The Justice Department panned it in a letter to the White House, according to Tony Pugh, of the McClatchy Washington D.C. Bureau.
In its letter, Pugh wrote, the DOJ said the bill "would further and significantly erode our long established truth-in-sentencing principles, create impossible administrative burdens, effectively reduce the sentences of thousands of violent felons, and endanger the safety of law-abiding citizens and law enforcement officers."
Since Corozzo has less than 18 months remaining before his release date, it's a safe bet that his pro se motion is a good indication that the interview process for his halfway house placement hasn't begun yet. BOP officials declined to discuss that, or any aspect of Corozzo's plight.
The BOP also stated that it was unable to answer any Gang Land queries yesterday about the halfway house process, including how many there were in the New York area; how many inmates could be accommodated at one time; and how long the RRC process takes.
"With the cuts recently imposed on halfway houses," Corozzo wrote, "the amount of RRC time provided to federal inmates falls far short of the clear intent of Congress, which was to allow men and women adequate time to re-enter society and succeed." By its actions, Little Nick argued, "the BOP is working against its own professed goals and its mandate of giving men and women the best chance to successfully return to our nation's communities."
"How can three to four months or less be enough time for a person returning to society (after a lengthy incarceration) to find employment, find housing, save money, and re-integrate with their loves ones?" Corozzo asked, and answered by stating: "In failing to provide inmates the required time to make a successful re-entry, the BOP is essentially setting inmates up for failure."
To illustrate that he had made good use of the years he's spent behind bars, and that he was interested in a successful re-entry, Corozzo listed scores of educational and vocational classes and workshops he has taken at three federal prisons where he's lived since 2011.
In Leavenworth, Kansas, Little Nick took classes in real estate, nutrition, and driving a forklift. In Loretto, Pennsylvania, there was logical/lateral thinking, wrestling with life, creative writing, conversational Spanish, and resume writing. And after arriving at Allenwood, the septuagenarian wiseguy opted for physical fitness classes, taking healthy aging and beginners spinning.
"In the interests of justice, and for good cause shown," Corozzo petitioned Weinstein "to issue a Judicial Recommendation" to the BOP that he should be placed into a halfway house on March 5, 2019, so he can begin his re-entry into the outside world he left behind a full year before his max-out date.
In a brief hand-written ruling, Weinstein stated that oral arguments were "not now required," but that the U.S. Attorney's office "is respectfully requested to respond to this position in writing."
[b]Doo Wop Singer-Turned Gambino Gangster Reprises Life After That Life[/b]
He was a Doo Wop singer, a Vietnam vet, and for a few years he worked as an artist. He also helped the feds nail three members of a murderous Mafia crew on trial with Paul Castellano when the Gambino boss was murdered by a John Gotti hit team. In a documentary set for release tomorrow, Dominick Montiglio recalls his days in The Life with his Uncle Nino and his helter-skelter After Life in the Witness Protection Program.
"I never killed anyone because I was pissed off at them. It was always business," he says in a trailer for the The Lynchpin of Bensonhurst, which is produced and directed by two former bartenders who met Montiglio back in 2002 when he was a fledgling artist selling his stuff at a Tribeca art gallery.
Wearing a 173d Airborne Brigade baseball cap, Montiglio says that when he returned home after his days as a $278-a-month U.S. Army "warrior" in Vietnam, he didn't intend to become a gangster, but soon found himself "putting hand grenades in people's cars and shooting people in the street for $250 a week" with his Uncle Nino, the late Gambino capo Anthony (Nino) Gaggi.
"You gotta live inside my head to know what it's like, you know, at 9:30 at night, shoot somebody in the middle of a crowded shopping area on 86th street, which I did," said Montiglio, a reference to a 1976 murder that he committed along with Gaggi and mobster Roy DeMeo.
As Gene Mustain and yours truly detailed in our 1992 book, Murder Machine: A True Story of Murder, Madness and the Mafia, Gaggi used Montiglio to keep tabs for him on a violent crew of drug dealers and car thieves led by DeMeo and charged with 25 murders in the 1970s and early 1980s – the largest number of killings ever charged in a federal murder indictment.
"I was the overseer of the crew, absolutely the most dangerous crew in the world," Montiglio said, noting that DeMeo and three disciples convicted at two trials at which he testified, Henry Borelli, Anthony Senter and Joseph Testa, "were the type of killers that dismembered bodies."
Montiglio, now 71, described going into an apartment behind the Gemini Lounge in Flatlands section of Brooklyn and seeing "two naked bodies hanging in the shower." He asked, "What the fuck is that?" and was told, "Don't worry, they're not staying for dinner," he recalled, with a wide smile revealing a man with a serious dental problem.
In snippets of the 118-minute documentary that are currently available online, Montiglio wears paint spattered fatigues, a Yankee baseball cap and that same smile as he dances to the 1992 tune, The Skunk, The Goose & The Fly by Tower of Power and mouths the words of the chorus: "Drunk as a skunk, drunk as a skunk;" "Loose as a goose, loose as a goose," and "High as a fly, high as a fly."
In other extracts, wearing dentures and looking much more distinguished sitting at a desk in a dark pullover sweater, he states matter-of-factly how "even before my own people tried to kill me," he had problems with Gaggi, who died behind bars in 1988 during his second trial.
"There were guys younger than me getting made so I knew right then that it wasn't Paulie," he said. "It was my Uncle Nino didn't want me to get made because he didn't want me to get my own crew, so what I did was, I put my own crew together. We were doing all mafia stuff but it wasn't a mafia crew, totally against all the rules of the family. I wasn't supposed to have a crew — which I did."
Montiglio recalled that when he was arrested in March of 1983, "The first night, there was an attorney. He said, 'I could get you out on bail by tomorrow.' I said, 'No, I'll stay right here.' I knew if I got out, I would have gotten popped."
Two decades later, long after Murder Machine outed Montiglio, and long after Borelli, Testa and Senter were imprisoned — where they still remain — Montiglio quietly moved back to Brooklyn, and began selling paintings at Pablo's Birthday, an art gallery then located in Tribeca, according to Ross Brodar, who produced and directed Lynchpin along with William Sharp.
"We were both selling art there, and I meet this interesting character, and he's living in Sunset Park, down the block from me," Brodar told Gang Land, explaining that for all intents and purposes he and Sharp began filming Montiglio and making the documentary soon after they met in 2002.
It happened, Brodar recalled, "One day when Dominick says to me, 'Listen Ross, this girl I'm with is driving me crazy, can I spend two weeks in your place till I find a place?' I got this huge studio with plenty of room. I say, 'Sure,' and two weeks turned into two years, and we became good friends."
Over the years, as Dominick bounced around the country, they met up, and Brodar and Sharp kept filming and interviewing him — as well as a NYPD detective and FBI agent in his case, old friends from Bensonhurst, and soldiers he served with in 'Nam — to put together what Brodar said was "a very intimate tale of a hell of a creative guy who did some bad stuff but who also has a lot of good qualities too."
Neither Gang Land, nor Mustain, who spent hundreds of hours talking to Montiglio in order to publish Murder Machine, has any stake, or anything to do with Lynchpin. It's available for pre-order on your cell phone or computer at an iTunes store for $9.99.
[b]Read All About It: Mob-Tied Queens Newspaper Publisher Seeks A Break On Sentence[/b]
Patricia AdamsAfter letting a Howard Beach newspaper publisher plead guilty to the rarely charged crime of misprision of a felony — failing to report a crime by others — prosecutors have asked a federal judge to send Patricia Adams to prison tomorrow for obstructing justice in the case of a Bonanno family bookmaker convicted two months ago of misdemeanor sexual assault.
In asking for the high end of the zero to six months sentencing guidelines in her plea agreement, prosecutors say that in a lengthy tape-recorded conversation, Adams used her ties to the Bonanno family and her influence and clout as publisher of The Forum to "repeatedly threaten the victim" with public exposure "even if it was true" that she had been sexually assaulted.
Prosecutors say that in the two and a half hour-long talk — excerpts filled six pages of their sentencing memo — Adams clearly obstructed justice by telling the victim's father his daughter was "going to hurt herself" if she persisted in accusing bookmaker Robert Pisani of sexual assault.
"She could be 100% right, he could have unsnapped her bra, tried to push her head down, whatever, she can't win," Adams told the woman's father on May 14, 2017, adding that she was also "in a position where I am going to have to expose the whole situation — if we get to that point," according to the government's filing.
Prosecutors Lindsay Gerdes and Keith Edelman also cited several phone calls and cryptic texts by Adams to Pisani and his wife on the same day as evidence that she obstructed justice in their court filing with Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Kiyo Matsumoto.
In addition to punishing Adams, Gerdes and Edelman argued that a prison term was "needed to deter others" from following her lead in the future, noting that "Howard Beach" as well as "organized crime figures" were monitoring the case and that a "non-jail sentence" was "not sufficient to deter others from committing similar crimes."
In seeking a non-jail term, Adams, 60, cited her work for more than 20 years as a "community journalist" who has "lived, worked and strived to make my community better, whether for the greater good or to help organizations and individuals" before she lost her way "on Mother's Day last year."
Stating that it was very "difficult" to find the right words to "express every level of regret" that she currently feels, Adams apologized for "the error of my ways" to everyone she hurt by her actions, especially the young woman whom Pisani was convicted of "forcibly touching" in August, assuring the judge that her crime "was an isolated incident" in her life.
Attorney Sanford Talkin submitted dozens of letters from family members and friends as well as a petition signed by nearly 400 residents of Howard Beach and five nearby Queens neighborhoods seeking "no incarceration" for Adams because she had been a "dedicated advocate" for the "greater good" of the community for more than 20 years as publisher of The Forum.
Talkin wrote that Adams admits her actions were "unjustified, illegal and never should have occurred," but the lawyer argued that a mitigating factor for leniency was that his client "genuinely believed that the victim was not telling the truth" about the sexual assault because she had watched "a video recording of the victim's actions immediately following the incident."
"Any person that views the video recording could reasonably draw the conclusion that the victim's conduct immediately following the incident," wrote Talkin, wasn't consistent with that of a woman who had just been "a victim of sexual misconduct." According to court records, the woman calmly walked out of Pisani's office and out of the deli right after the alleged assault took place.
"It was from that point of view" that Adams was acting on, wrote Talkin, noting that "during the recording, Adams thoroughly explained to the father why she believed the accusations to be false and detailed the contents of the video recording" that she had seen.
The lawyer insisted that neither he nor Adams was "attempting to justify her actions," but argued that as a first time offender who was a dedicated community activist for more than 20 years, his client deserved a non-custodial sentence — the low end of her plea agreement.