2012
BRIDGEPORT -- It's a Thursday afternoon and Assistant State's Attorney Craig Nowak sits hunched over a desk in a small, windowless room in the Main Street courthouse listening to the whirr of a rectangular cassette recorder by his right elbow.
There are two voices on the tape. The steady monotone of the investigator, repeating the same question over and over, and a second voice, one that rises and falls with either expectation or despair. That is the voice of Thomas "Tommy" Marra Jr. on the recording, and he is desperate to make a deal.
The recording is ancient to Nowak; he was only 15 when it was made.
But on Oct. 23 he will be sitting in a Danbury courtroom defending the judicial system as Marra once again tries to extricate himself from a life prison term. Barely a week didn't go by in the 1980s when Marra's name wasn't on the front pages of Connecticut newspapers. He was the gangster of Bridgeport, the stolen car kingpin and finally the crazed killer who stuffed his victims in metal drums, which he dumped in the harbor.
In one case the only clue he left for investigators was a foot in a sneaker.
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Now, an older and less healthy Marra is seeking one last chance to get out of prison under the state's often used civil habeas corpus procedure, which he is using to sue the state, claiming he didn't get a fair trial in the criminal system and that tape-recorded evidence against him should have been thrown out.
Among other things, he claims the foot is a fake.
But Nowak is confident Marra's suit will fail before a judge.
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"It's crazy the amount of evidence they had against this guy," said Nowak, who claims Marra is just rehashing previous unsuccessful arguments.
"He is a very interesting individual with a colorful past, some of which may have been overblown by the press," said his longtime lawyer Frank Riccio. There are "a lot of unanswered questions regarding his convictions," he said.
Marra has been called "Bridgeport's gangster" in national media, but he doesn't quite fit the mold of Boston's James "Whitey" Bulger, or even a Nucky Thompson, the onetime scourge of Atlantic City and inspiration for cable television's "Boardwalk Empire."
Marra is short, chubby, with a hedge of brown hair under his nose, and is known for his puppy dog eyes. In younger days he had a mop of curly brown hair.
And in past interviews, even Marra would only call himself a car thief.
Born on the city's East Side on Oct. 6, 1953, he developed an early interest in cars -- mainly other people's.
While Marra's father and uncle ran a garage on the city's East End, towing cars legally for the city, the young Marra had other ideas that included "stealing" cars for owners so they could collect the insurance money. Years later, wearing handcuffs, Marra directed police to an area of the boat ramp in Seaside Park, where he had been dumping stolen cars for years.
Police said they found so many submerged vehicles, they could practically walk to Long Island by stepping on the roofs.
Marra would get himself out of lengthy prison stays by practicing his other occupation: professional snitch But that didn't always work out too well for him.
National news
In August 1981, FBI agents approached Marra and told him they wanted him to help snare then-Bridgeport Police Superintendent Joseph Walsh. Walsh had been a thorn in the feds' side and they were hoping to use Marra to catch Walsh taking a bribe.
They gave Marra some cash and wired him up, and he went to a meeting with Walsh at a downtown parking lot.
But Walsh was tipped to the plot and he had his cops hiding in the shadows. He quickly called them into play as Marra offered him the money.
News photographers, who had gotten a call from Walsh, captured the image for all to see of Marra shoved face down onto the trunk of a car, his pants down around his ankles revealing the microphones attached to his boxers. Marra's FBI handlers found themselves held at gunpoint when they tried to intercede.
In an interview seven years later, Marra claimed he was the one who tipped Walsh off, through a third party. And he bemoaned the fact that he never got credit.
"Now the feds want a piece of me and Joe Walsh wants all of me," he complained.
In January 1982, Marra was convicted of selling a stolen car to a University of Bridgeport student and sentenced to a five to 10-year prison term. He remained free on an appeal bond until March 1985, when the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction.
But on the night before he was scheduled to turn himself in, he was shot in the abdomen at close range outside his Clark Street home. Police determined that he was shot from about three feet away, with a .38-caliber bullet.
But Marra was never able to identify his assailant. With his intestines badly damaged, he spent months in the hospital and in rehabilitation, and ended up with a reduced prison term.
The investigation
In April 1983, members of the State Police auto theft unit began an investigation of Marra after receiving information that Marra had formed a stolen car ring that was sending stolen cars for sale around the country. As part of the probe, detectives began putting pressure on Marra's associates to rat him out. During the early part of that investigation they met frequently with Marra associate Richard Noel and Daniel Sherman.
Then Sherman disappeared in November 1983.
Police said they had Noel, who was 29 at the time, ready to testify against Marra. Then in January 1984, Noel disappeared, never to be found.
Months earlier, another Marra associate, Paul Rice, 22, had been found shot in the head along Interstate 95 in the Bronx. At the time, Rice was going to be a key witness against Marra in a federal check forgery case.
As a result of Rice's death, the case against Marra was dropped.
Then in February 1984, 15-year-old Alex Palmieri, who worked for Marra but had started talking to investigators, also vanished.
Police were now convinced that Marra was behind the disappearances. But it would be two more years before they finally arrested Marra, first for having Noel kidnapped, and then for the murder of Palmieri.
That's when State Inspector John "Jack" Solomon managed to convince Marra's two lieutenants to testify against Marra in exchange for immunity. But it was Marra's own mouth that played a bigger role in getting him convicted of both crimes.
"Tommy was his own worst enemy," said Robert Lacobelle, who successfully prosecuted Marra for the Noel kidnapping and Palmieri murder. "He thought he could talk his way out of anything; he tried to talk his way out of prison but instead he talked his way into a couple of murders."
Lacobelle said that following his arrest for the two crimes, Marra agreed to tape interviews with Solomon.
"He believed that if he told Jack a story, that Jack wasn't going to check it," Lacobelle said. "But Jack checked out everything he said -- and found it wasn't true."
The Noel trial
In June 1988, Marra, then 34, went before an all-female, six-member Superior Court jury on charges of first-degree kidnapping, conspiracy to commit first-degree kidnapping, attempted kidnapping and arson, all connected to the disappearance of Noel.
Because they had never found Noel's body -- or even a trace of it -- prosecutors didn't believe they could try Marra for his murder, even though they were convinced Noel was dead.
In a previously tape-recorded interview, Marra had told Solomon that Noel had been murdered by J.W. Ownby of Kansas City, Mo., his partner and the southern link to Marra's stolen car ring. Then later, he told Solomon he believed Noel was still alive, hiding out somewhere.
On the witness stand Marra testified, that while he had nothing to do with Noel's disappearance, he was now of the opinion that either Noel was in witness protection or in a barrel at the bottom of Bridgeport Harbor, courtesy of Ownby.
But Marra's lieutenants, Nicholas Byers and Frank Spetrino, testified that Marra ordered them to kidnap Noel -- but they denied ever doing it.
Prosecutor also presented a letter that Marra had written to another associate from prison asking him to take care of Byers and Spetrino "cowboy style," so they couldn't testify against him.
In the end, Marra was convicted of the charges.
But in a classic Marra twist, police scuba divers sweeping the Housatonic River in Stratford during the Noel trial found a steel drum with human remains in it.
The remains are believed to be all that was left of Daniel Sherman.
In April 1989, prosecutors were preparing to try Marra for the Palmieri murder when Marra was arrested in prison for selling a stolen sports utility vehicle to one of his prison guards.
Once again, Marra's own words got him arrested. When police searched his prison cell, they found a cassette recorder in which Marra had taped himself talking about selling the car to the guard.
`But boss, but boss...'
In December 1989 Marra was put on trial in Bridgeport Superior Court for the murder of 15-year-old Alex Palmieri.
Unlike the Noel case, prosecutors this time had a body, or least a piece of one. In June 1986, a woman walking with her young child along the beach in Seaside Park came upon the stump of a foot in a sneaker.
And while DNA testing was not available at that time, police were convinced it was Palmieri's.
During the Noel trial, Marra, while on the witness stand, had blurted out that his lieutenant, Byers, had beaten Palmieri to death with a baseball bat in the garage of Marra's home on Clark Street. But in previous interviews with police and a news reporter, Marra had claimed Palmieri was alive and well and living in Argentina.
At trial Lacobelle again relied on the testimony of Byers and Spetrino. They testified that on Feb. 6, 1984, Marra had told them to bring Palmieri to Marra's house.
When Byers said he asked Marra why, he said his boss replied that he needed help putting Palmieri "in a barrel."
The two men testified they brought Palmieri into the garage where Marra handed Spetrino a baseball bat and ordered home not to let Palmieri leave.
Spetrino said he hit Palmieri with the bat a few times until the boy lay unconscious on the floor. But as they began dragging the body toward an open refrigerator, the teenager woke up and began crying, "But boss, but boss."
The two witnesses said Marra then grabbed the bat and "went wild on his head."
But even with bits of his brain and bone on the garage floor, they said Palmieri continued crying, "But boss, but boss," as they loaded him into the refrigerator, which they put in the back of a rented van and drove to the harbor.
And as the refrigerator began to sink under the waves, Spetrino swore he could still hear Palmieri's cries, "But boss, but boss!"
Marra was convicted of the murder.
No end in sight
While the 59-year-old Marra sits in a cell at the Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, where he is locked up until at least 2102, he has not been idle. He continues to file motion after motion for a new trial.
Last year, the state Supreme Court refused his request to have DNA taken from Palmieri's family after Marra contended the disembodied foot did not belong to his former associate. And in his bid for new trials in the Noel and Palmieri case to be heard Tuesday, Marra claims his trial counsel was ineffective and should have worked harder to keep out his tape recorded interviews with police.
In his small office, Nowak sorts through boxes of evidence as he prepares to argue a case from two decades ago.
"This case has been a long, strange trip," he said, quoting from a Grateful Dead song of the era. "I just hope to finally bring it to an end."
dtepfer@ctpost.com; 203-330-6308; http:// twitter.com/dantepfer