Courtroom 302 (48 page)

Responding to Mandeltort’s questions, Clevan relates how he and Lenard had decided to go bike riding, and that Lenard had realized his bike needed air.

“Why did you go to Bridgeport?” Mandeltort asks.

“ ’Cause the air free over there,” Clevan says.

Clevan tells about meeting a Mexican youth, William Jaramillo, on their return trip and playing football with him and his cousins on a school playground. After the game he and Lenard were pedaling slowly in the general direction of home, Jaramillo walking between them, when they were confronted by a white youth on a side street. Mandeltort asks Clevan to get down from the witness stand and point out this person if he sees him in the room.

During a long day in a courtroom, jurors often find their attention wandering. They yawn and fidget and examine their nails. But they’re spellbound now, as Clevan strides confidently across the well of the hushed courtroom toward the defense table. He stops directly in front of Caruso, whose gaze is aimed at the gray carpet. Caruso seems to notice the bright green dress slacks and green felt shoes in front of him. His eyes flicker up to Clevan’s face and down again. Clevan stares straight at Caruso. He points. “It’s him.” In the jury box, everyone’s drinking it in. “A Kodak moment,” Berlin says later.

Back on the stand, Clevan says Caruso hit him behind his ear. He says he heard Caruso say, “Fuck this nigger, get off your bike.” Then he saw Caruso hit Lenard in the head, and Lenard’s head snap backward into the wall behind him. Lenard jumped off his bike and ran east on 33rd, Clevan says, while he himself managed to escape by running in a different direction, south on Shields.

At a police station the next day, he picked Caruso out of a lineup as the attacker, he says. Yes, he did initially pick another youth—codefendant Victor Jasas—out of an earlier lineup, and say he was the original attacker; but when he viewed the second lineup, which included Caruso, “I realized that I had picked the wrong one” the first time, he says.

Genson presses him about this on cross.

“You were positive when you said Jasas was the one that attacked you, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You identified him as the one that hit you and hit Lenard, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“But only one man attacked you and Lenard?”

“Yes,” Clevan says. “After I had viewed the second lineup, I told the officer, I said the first lineup I had viewed, it was the wrong person I had picked.”

COURTROOM IDENTIFICATIONS
are quite persuasive, maybe more than they deserve to be. It isn’t hard for a witness to find the defendant in the courtroom; at 26th Street, he’s usually the only black person at the defense table. Clevan’s job was somewhat harder, and not only because the defendant is white. One of the four lawyers Genson has hired to help him with the case, twenty-seven-year-old Michael Pagano, looks an awful lot like Caruso: he has short dark hair, an olive complexion, a diminutive build, and similar features. He is dressed like Caruso on this first day of the trial—dark suit, white dress shirt, and tie. “I think they were hoping he’d catch a finger,” Mandeltort tells me later. “When you’re going against someone like Genson, you have to figure on those kinds of things.” Before opening statements, the prosecutors asked Locallo in chambers to bar the defense from having Caruso and Pagano sit next to each other at the defense table, as they had during jury selection the previous day. “Judge, it’s obvious what the purpose is, what they’re doing,” Mandeltort said. But Genson pled not guilty. “I am perfectly capable of doing something like that,” he told the judge. “I just didn’t do it.” Locallo declined to tell the defense who could sit where. And Pagano was next to Caruso when Clevan made his ID.

But as Genson brought out on his cross, Clevan had seen Caruso several times on the TV news since the attack and once at a pretrial hearing. And Berlin had shown him photos of Caruso “a lot of times,” as Clevan had acknowledged. How could anyone know the basis of his courtroom ID?

This was chiefly an eyewitness case in Genson’s mind. It boiled down to whether the jury should trust the IDs of Clevan and of William Jaramillo, the Hispanic youth who was also present at the beginning of the attack. Genson hadn’t done an eyewitness case in recent years, and so when he’d taken on Caruso, he’d boned up on the subject. What he learned, he says, was that misidentifications are commonplace.

Genson had wanted the jury to hear from Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the University of California at Irvine and the nation’s most prominent expert on eyewitnesses. As Genson outlined in a pretrial filing, Loftus would have testified that eyewitnesses err frequently, particularly when identifying a person of another race. This testimony was especially relevant, Genson had told Locallo before the trial, because Clevan and Jaramillo had both waffled on their IDs at the police station, first picking Jasas as the initiator of the attack and then switching to Caruso. Loftus
would have also informed the jury that suggestions from police to a witness regarding their expectations, even subtle and unintended ones, greatly increase the chance of error. Genson maintained that this was relevant because the second lineup had been so suggestive. Caruso had been in the same position Jasas had been in—on the far left—and he’d been dressed similarly to Jasas.

Loftus had written five books on eyewitnesses and testified in 225 cases. “
It may fairly be said that she ‘wrote the book’ on the subject of eyewitness perception, memory retention and recall,” the Arizona Supreme Court once observed. But like most of his colleagues at 26th Street, Locallo takes a dim view of eyewitness experts. In barring Loftus’s testimony, Locallo said he trusted the jury to use its common sense in deciding how much stock to put in Clevan’s and Jaramillo’s identifications. “She can write all the books she wants,” Locallo would say later. “I don’t have much faith in these self-styled experts.”

ON WHAT WAS TO HAVE BEEN
the trial’s second day, a Friday, the defense comes to court without its captain. In the judge’s chambers, Sam Adam tells Locallo that Genson can’t get out of bed because of severe back pain. He asks that the trial be postponed until Monday. Mandeltort and Berlin say they have no objection.

The judge and the lawyers then head into the crowded courtroom to put the continuance on the record. The jury is still in the jury room. But now, when Adam formally makes his request, Mandeltort says that since Caruso has four other lawyers representing him, the trial should proceed. Locallo, taken aback, eyes Mandeltort momentarily. (“I thought it was very comical,” the judge says later. “All of a sudden Ellen is playing to the crowd.”) Locallo tells Mandeltort he doesn’t think the trial should go forward at this point without Caruso’s chief lawyer. The case will resume on Monday with or without Genson, he says. He calls the jury into the courtroom, explains the postponement and apologizes for it, then dismisses the panel for the weekend.

Mandeltort this morning has on pearls and a powder-blue dress suit she bought for the trial. Now that the jury has seen the suit, however briefly, she doesn’t think she can wear it a second time during the trial. “I wasted a perfectly good fucking new suit,” she says before leaving the courtroom.

GENSON IS BACK
on Monday. The gallery is full again. It’s now William Jaramillo’s turn to point the finger at Caruso.

The nineteen-year-old Jaramillo, hefty and broad-shouldered, has a wide impassive face, bushy eyebrows, a mustache, and thick black hair. He lives
in a neighborhood southwest of Bridgeport. He tells the jury that on the day in question, he was playing football with two younger cousins on a Bridgeport playground when Lenard and Clevan came by on their bikes and asked to join the game. He and his cousins didn’t know either youth, but they were glad to have more players. When the five boys were finished playing, Jaramillo walked his two cousins home and then accompanied Lenard and Clevan as they pedaled east down Bridgeport streets. Jaramillo was walking between them. At the corner of 33rd and Shields, a white youth “walked up to me and said, ‘What are you looking at?’ ” he recalls.

Berlin asks Jaramillo to get down from the stand and see if this white youth is in the room. Jaramillo walks into the well of the courtroom and points at Caruso.

Back on the stand, Jaramillo says he didn’t respond when Caruso asked him what he was looking at. He heard Caruso say something about “this nigger” as he hit Clevan in the back of the head, knocking him to the ground. Then Caruso punched Lenard in the head, sending Lenard reeling into the building behind him—Jaramillo says he heard a “crunch” as Lenard’s head hit the wall. Lenard collapsed to the ground, his bike on top of him. Clevan fled south on Shields; Lenard got up and ran east on 33rd, pursued by Caruso and two other youths. Jaramillo says he picked up the two bikes Lenard and Clevan had left behind and carried them to his uncle’s house. Then he and his uncle went to the police station to report the attack. At the station, he first picked Victor Jasas out of a lineup as the attacker at 33rd and Shields; then he picked Caruso. On Genson’s cross, Jaramillo says his initial identification of Jasas was simply a mistake.

JARAMILLO HIMSELF
had been arrested just two weeks before he testified, a fact Genson would have brought out on cross—had he known about it.

In the early morning hours of August 31, 1998, Jaramillo and two other young men allegedly used a baseball bat to break windows in twenty cars on the 1100 block of West 18th Place in Chicago. The three accused offenders were charged with criminal damage to property and released on recognizance bonds.

Prosecutors are required to disclose to the defense any pending charges against their witnesses because of the inherent potential for bias—a witness could shade his testimony to help the state in return for favorable treatment in his own case. To adhere to this obligation, prosecutors do criminal history checks on their witnesses before trial, and usually again when the trial begins. “Ideally, you want to do it the day of [the witness’s testimony], but that doesn’t always happen,” Berlin will tell me after the trial. It didn’t happen
in Jaramillo’s case, the prosecutors will say; Berlin and Mandeltort will maintain they didn’t learn of Jaramillo’s arrest during Caruso’s trial, either from a criminal history check or from Jaramillo himself. (Jaramillo wouldn’t return my calls.)

“It would have been a good hook on cross,” Genson will say about Jaramillo’s arrest, when I learn of it and tell him about it after the trial. Jaramillo would have had a motive to stick resolutely to his identification of Caruso at trial, according to Genson. The defense lawyer will add that he feels certain the prosecutors knew about the arrest. “They held it back, I’m sure they did. I’m sure he [Jaramillo] would have run to them after his arrest and said, ‘Help me.’ ”

Criminal damage to property is a felony if the damage exceeds $300. In May 1999, after seven continuances, the state will drop its case against Jaramillo.

WHEN DEPUTY RHODES ESCORTS
the jurors through the hallway between the courtroom and the elevators, Caruso’s father is often within their view, leaning against a wall and studying a New American Bible. His hair has grayed remarkably since the last pretrial court date four days before the trial began—a product not of stress but of hair dye, contend a few cynics, including Deputy Guerrero, who has also noted how quickly the elder Caruso closes the Bible after the jury passes. Caruso Senior’s wife, Sherry, lingers in the hallway as well, a rosary in one hand, a bottle of nitroglycerin pills in the other.

Most of the spectators attending the trial are relatives or friends of the Carusos. During recesses they don’t hesitate to talk up Caruso’s innocence in the hallway.

“I saw the whole thing, and it wasn’t Frankie that did the beating,” Rocco LaMantia says during one such recess. LaMantia’s father, Joseph “Shorty” LaMantia, was a codefendant of Caruso Senior in their 1982 extortion case. The elder LaMantia, another reputed member of the outfit’s 26th Street Crew, pled guilty to racketeering in 1996. According to Rocco LaMantia, it wasn’t Frank Junior who beat Lenard, it was some other Bridgeport kids who he hopes are caught and punished one day, because, he says, no innocent young boy should be treated the way Lenard was.

But LaMantia goes on to defend most of the assaults on blacks in Bridgeport, some of which he says he’s also witnessed. The beatings aren’t really racial, he says; they’re just attempts to keep the neighborhood safe. They’re usually administered to lawbreakers—most of whom he says happen to be black. “Are we racists because we take care of our own?

“We don’t rape our women,” LaMantia says. “We don’t kill each other.
But the black man today doesn’t want to be responsible for his actions. He doesn’t take care of his children. He doesn’t want to work. I think they have to quit blaming everybody else for inequalities, for their misfortunes.”

LaMantia, thirty-nine, has had his own misfortunes, court records show. In 1995 he was convicted of aggravated robbery and impersonation of a police officer, for which he got probation and a year of home confinement. He also has misdemeaner convictions for weapons violations and theft. Seventeen years ago he was charged with murdering his girlfriend, twenty-year-old
Martha DiCaro, who was shot in the LaMantia home one night in 1979. DiCaro’s mother told police her daughter went to the LaMantia home that night to break up with Rocco. And one of DiCaro’s friends told police that LaMantia once said that if he caught his girlfriend with anyone else, he’d kill both of them, and that his father would pay $20,000 to get him off.

LaMantia had opted for a bench trial, and the judge acquitted him. The judge was Thomas Maloney.

“
I DON
’
T RECALL,
” Thomas Simpson tells the jury the following day. Again and again and again.

Simpson is the other friend—besides the late Mike Cutler and the missing Richard DeSantis—who gave police a damning account of Caruso’s words and actions on the night of the attack.

Simpson is only twenty-five, but he’s already been convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, two robberies, and a burglary. He’s tall, fair, blue eyed, and dyed blonde. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt and a gold neck chain, his appearance less formal than that of the silver-haired, deeply tanned, navy-suited lawyer who’s accompanied him to court. Simpson and the lawyer were in the courtroom the preceding day, after the jury was dismissed, for a hearing regarding Simpson’s desire to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Locallo found “no basis” for Simpson’s professed concern that his testimony might be self-incriminating. The judge told Simpson he’d be required to testify when the trial resumed the following day. Over the protests of Simpson’s lawyer and his parents, Locallo also ordered Simpson kept under guard in a hotel overnight. Given DeSantis’s disappearance and Cutler’s murder, the judge considered it a reasonable possibility that if he let Simpson go home for the evening, he wouldn’t be back in the morning. “The stakes are high in this case,” Locallo explained to Simpson’s parents in his chambers. “And I’m not going to take any chances.… I can’t afford to lose any more witnesses.”