March 9, 2023 • 48 mins
On October 12, 2003, Mark Fisher was found shot and killed in a driveway in Brooklyn, NY after spending the night hanging out with a group of his peers, including John Giuca and Antonio Russo. Upon interrogation, a few of the people that Mark had been with late the night before led police to believe that John and Antonio were involved in Mark’s murder. Despite no physical evidence and no eyewitnesses linking him to the crime, John was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison solely based on witness testimony.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
In recording our coverage of John Juca's case, we realized
that there are simply too many twists and turns for
one episode, so we split this episode in two and
are releasing both at the same time. On October eleventh,
two thousand and three, three groups of college kids, one
from Long Island, another from Brooklyn, as well as New Jersey,
(00:20):
ran into one another at a bar on the upper
east side of Manhattan. A mutual friend among them, Angel
DiPietro knew Brooklyn night Albert Cleary, as well as her
Fairfield University classmate Mark Fisher, a football player from New Jersey.
When the night started to wind down and all of
the trains of Long Island, New Jersey had stopped running,
Albert Cleary's friend, twenty year old John Juca, offered up
(00:42):
his house in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for an after party and
a place to crash. A few of John and Albert's
friends joined, including a neighborhood tough guy named Antonio Russo.
Sometime before six am, Angel and Albert walked to his
nearby house. Since Angel was the only person Mark Fisher knew,
he left to find his way over to Albert's with
(01:03):
Antonio Russo and soon ended up fatally shot without his
wallet on the driveway across from Albert Cleary's house, a
blanket from John's house at its feet. In the immediate aftermath,
Antonio Russo cut his dreadlocks and absconded to California. A
police investigation revealed that other voices and a carridor were
(01:23):
heard before the gunshots. Albert and Angel denied any knowledge,
and soon statements were made that alleged that John Juca
was involved. The motivations and level of involvement varied, but
with this many witnesses placing blame on John. There had
to be something to it. But this is wrongful conviction.
(01:52):
Welcome back to ronful conviction. Today, we have a story
that was front page news all over New York City
when it happened, with flaring head line, salacious headlines about
want to be Brooklyn gangsteries who allegedly conspired at an
after party to kill a suburban college football star who
just happened to be in their midst, when in fact,
there were no gangsters, only a group of friends, and
(02:15):
the murder was not a group effort at all. The
only group effort here who took the form of multiple
conflicting false statements against a member of that group. John
Juca and John is calling in from prison and upstate
New York right now. John, I'm sorry you're here under
these circumstances, but we're very honored to have you. The
only good news in this whole, miserable story is that
(02:35):
his attorney is Mark Bettera and Mark is one of
the most respected criminal defense attorneys in the New York
area and beyond. Mark, Welcome to RONFA Conviction. Glad to
be here. Thanks for having me and Mark. Why was
this such a high profile case? This was a big
one at the time. I was a prosecutor in Manhattan
and I remember it in real time, just reading tabloids
(02:56):
on the subway going to work. It was in the
fall of two thousand. It felt like there was an
update on this flawed investigation every day. It was the
grid kid murder case, because you had a situation where
the victim was the all American son that any parent
wish they had as a child. Mark Fisher was a
nineteen year old, good looking college football player from New
(03:19):
Jersey who went to Brooklyn for the first time in
his life, and unfortunately he ended up dead on the street,
and certainly that's the kind of thing that is going
to feed the tabloids and get the public attention. So
the Gridkid murder case became sensational from day one, and
(03:40):
that moniker actually referred to the admitted grid Kid killer,
John's co defendant, Antonio Russo. But somehow John's face was
also plastered on the front page of those tabloids as
if he was some sort of criminal mastermind or co
conspirator to somehow actually involved. The prosecution never actually decided
(04:05):
on any one theory. They just put all this stuff
out there and the press ate it up, and of
course this media firestorm polluted to jurypool. Now don't forget
the HBO series The Sopranos was an absolute cultural phenomenon
at this time. Is the only thing people were talking
about is seeing So this story of the death of
(04:26):
a promising suburban kid allegedly at the hands of these
wanna be mafia city kids was like it was the
imperfect storm. It just captured everybody's imaginations. By the time
his trial came around, you actually had the prosecutor comparing
him to Tony Soprano and talking about ordering hits to
(04:46):
build up street credibility for a non existing gang, which
in fact was just a bunch of knucklehead teenagers in
Brooklyn calling themselves names. And this alleged gang was called
the Ghetto Mafia. Right, So, John, what actually was the
Ghetto Mafia? Oh? My god, it was a bunch of
kids hanging out. We had some people who who used
(05:06):
to hang out with us who never even heard of
our name, some people who considered it a joke, and
there were other people who didn't. One thing was never
was an actual gang. John was just a regular nineteen
year old Brooklyn kid. So let's talk about your life
before all of this, John, You grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Right,
It's like a little enclave in Flatbush called Profitt Park South.
(05:28):
I guess you could say I grew up in a
regular middle class upbringing. First, I went to public school
PS one thirty nine. Then I went to Catholic school
around third grade when my mother met my stepfather. So
your parents broke up when you were young, Yes, when
I was five years old my stepfather, but consider him
like my father. Also, I didn't look at it as
a negative thing. Really, My real father went on to
get married again, and that woman who he married already
(05:51):
had kids, so he had a family over there too,
and I considered them family also. I looked at it
as I had two fathers, like two men in my
life who loved me and wanted to see me succeed
and supported me. And your biological father ended up suffering
a stroke when you were nineteen, which ended up having
relevance in this case. But at that time, like you said,
both he and your stepdad were supportive of you. You
(06:12):
were trying to succeed as an actor and actually got
some work as a teenager. Yes, I was on School
of Rock. I got to meet Jack Black, the guys
from Lauren Order, Lawn Order like Ten Signs. I played
a dead kid on Lauren Order. I remember one funny
story that I'm on Lauren Order and I'm the dead
kids on lane on the pavement, and I have fake
blood all over my head and everything, and I remember
(06:32):
the two actors, Jerry Orbach and the other one, the
two main cops, Jerry Orback and Chris Noth. Yeah, and
they have to kneel down and search my pockets. I
have a pair of keys that they're supposed to take
out of my pockets, and so Jerry or guys kneels
down and he kneels right on the keys and he's
son of a bitch and they're like cat and then
they shouted like four, five, six, seven times. They keep
(06:54):
trying to shut his things keep going wrong. And then
I had smoke some weeks before I went. I think
I was like six seventeen years old, and this is
not part of script. And he goes it smells like marijuana,
and they're like, cat, what are you talking about. He's like,
I don't know, it smells like marijuana. And my stepfather
(07:17):
is looking at me like, oh my god, I'm gonna
kill you. That's incredible, and Jerry orback rest in peace.
I can just picture it in my mind right now.
And your stepfather was there too, So it sounds like
you had this great sort of blended Brady bunch sort
of a family situation. And can you tell us about
the woman at the center of it. And I'm talking
about your mom, Dorene, And I know her from rallies
(07:40):
and events and calls and texts, and she's just a
pillar of strength and somebody I admire greatly. Yeah, but
she was reckon. Let's stay at home, Mom, she was
more I guess you could say liberal minded. Like my
house was the house where a lot of kids from
the neighborhood used to come and she used to feed them,
or we used to play basketball in the backyard or whatever.
(08:00):
She always told me that law enforcement was a good guys.
I remember this going up. She was encouraging me to
go to John Jay, encouraging me to become a cop,
her brother as a correction officer, my uncle Eddie. That's
another crazy irony about your story, which is that while
you were pursuing an acting career, you were also studying
criminal justice at John Jay College. Yes, and what you
(08:20):
learn about the criminal justice system in school is just
one hundred and eighty degrees from the reality of the
criminal justice system. They say that you have all these rights,
and they're not going to arrest people unless this standard
is MATT, and then they don't get convicted unless this
standard is MATT and go on, and it's just none
of that is true. Yeah, you saw those standards go
out the window pretty quickly when the false statements that
(08:41):
were used to obtain your arrestaurant and conviction didn't even
form a cohesive narrative. Now, one of the people who
gave false testimony against you was your girlfriend at the time,
Lauren Calciano. Now we're going to read from her recantation later.
But you two had started dating in high school, right.
She was my first love. I was with her since
I was about coronal fifteen or sixteen. I thought I
(09:02):
wanted to get married and everything. We were young. Why
he used to practically live at her house sometimes, or
I knew her whole family. You ended up hiring her
family's attorney, Sam Gregory, who had previously represented her father,
Sal Calciano. He was head of paintenance in the World
Trade Center. He went to federal prison because the World
Trade Center got robbed. They said it was about four
(09:22):
million Americans. This has been the nineties. Sometimes. For whatever
her father's mistakes were, the DA was eventually able to
use her father's situation, among other things, in order to
coerce her false testimony against you. They were also able
to coerce or incentivize your friend Albert Cleary as well,
who was arguably closer to this incident than you were.
(09:42):
Albert's mother, Susan Cleary, was the vice president of the
King's County GOP Executive Committee, the group in Brooklyn that
can authorize what is known as a Wilson pecula, which
allows a candidate from another party to run on that
party's ticket, and it can be used in order to
run unopposed or in the case when a candidate loses
the party's primary election. Whether or not that was a
bargaining ship used to keep her son's name out of
(10:05):
the investigation, that's something we'll never know. A lot of
people say the system is broken. I don't think it's broken.
I think it's working exactly how they intended it to work,
as like battering ram for the rich and powerful. Yeah,
and as we've seen in cases like yours, the prosecutor's
office will use high profile cases for publicity with the
hope of reaping those benefits come election time. Now, back
(10:25):
in two thousand and three, the DA was Charles Joe
Hines who was facing a primary challenge in two thousand
and five, and wouldn't you know that he stretched out
this investigation and prosecution. You guessed it to occur right
before the election. He ended up winning both the primary
and the general. Now, anyone who's familiar with our podcast,
it's familiar with the problems in Brooklyn during the Hines era.
(10:46):
Nineteen thirteen is a really dark period for criminal justice
at Brooklyn. Hines was a political creature of the first order.
That office back then was known as the poster child
for wrongful convictions. Maybe in the last ten or fifteen
years would people have really been paying attention to the
problem of wrongful convictions. I think a lot of the
(11:08):
momentum on this really started when people like Ken Thompson
were running against Hines ten years ago and exposing bad
case after bad case that was coming out of the
Hines Brooklyn DA's office. And this is exhibit A. John
Juca to this day is exhibit A. And many of
the people who worked under Hines, who were responsible and
(11:29):
complicit and so many of the wrongful convictions of that
era are still there today. And those who have moved
on to private practice or even careers in media, like
the trial prosecutor in this case, Anna sigon Netalazzi. Those
former Hines adas, their reputations in public fates are arguably
tied to the political fate of the Brooklyn DA's office.
(11:49):
In terms of the graduates of the Hines DA's office,
this trial prosecutor was their superstar and the biggest red
flag in a case like this when a trial prosecutor
markets themselves as I'm a homicide DA and I've never
lost a case. I have a perfect record and old
trial record. Let me tell you something, if you won,
(12:11):
you're cheating. And after John's conviction, you know all this marketing.
This is a successful DA. She's on TV today as
an expert on everything that's right in criminal justice, and
it would have been humiliating for the Brooklyn DA to
take her down. For years after this conviction, John's was
her number one marketing pitch on her greatest hits, and
(12:34):
after two post conviction hearings and litigation and covered extensively
in the media, when one judge of the New York
Court of Appeals ripped the prosecutor a new one and
basically all but called her corrupt and deliberately violating his rights.
All the references to John's heroic conviction have been scrubbed
(12:55):
from the record, which makes you wonder, if you're proud
of this conviction and proud of what you've done, why
you would do that? Why would anyone be proud of
what should be It really should be illegal sending an
innocent man to prison and effectively compounding the tragic loss
of another young man's life. So let's get to the incident,
(13:17):
the crux of everything we're discussing. Of course, I'm referring
to the awful night of October eleven into the twelfth
of two thousand and three. It was Columbus Day weekend.
Mark Fisher, who went to Fairfield University in Connecticut, and
some of his friends went to the city and partied.
John Juca and his friend Albert Cleary and a few
others also went to the city, and the groups ended
(13:40):
up being connected through a very interesting person in this
sordid process named Angel DiPietro, who was a college classmate
and theoretically friend of Mark Fisher, who also was friendly
with Albert Cleary. Angel Dpietro's father was a prominent Long
Island defense attorney. As well. You had the Brooklyn contingent,
(14:01):
which was John Albert Cleary, and two more neighborhood friends,
Angel d Pietro and her friend Meredith Denahan from Long
Island and Mark Fisher, who had come in from New Jersey,
and they met at a bar on the upper east
side of Manhattan, which at the time was known to
college kids for being the home of many bars that
had pretty loose id policies. Right and so now it
(14:23):
was getting late and the Long Island and New Jersey
kids had to figure out a way home on the train.
The last train left, the next one didn't leave till
some time the next morning, so they were stranded. So
I opened my house to them. In the cab, it
was me, Albert, Mary Mark, and Angel. Me and Albert
paid for the cab. And then after we got there,
(14:43):
a few more people showed up. I'm pretty sure it
was Tommy. Jimmy, my brother was home and Antonio Russo.
Russo had a house right behind John, so they were
certainly friendly from the neighborhood now. Antonio Russo was a
strongly built high school dropout who wore dreadlocks and sold weed,
which was the reason he gave for coming over to
John's house in a twenty eighteen interview with the cops
(15:05):
to sell weed to some of those who were interested,
and according to three people, Russo had a gun in
his waistband both before and after the murder. One of
those three people said they had been threatened with it
he's the tough guy. He's a little bit crazy, not
in the legal sense, just in the real world sense.
He's the resident tough guy. He's making everyone uncomfortable, but
(15:26):
for now he's supplying weed to this otherwise fun after
party at John's house. Now, at some point, Mark Fisher
made some sort of a faux pa that served as
an alleged motive. Everybody was drinking, a couple of people
were smoking weed at one point, and Marks out on
a table. And we're in a big deal right sitting
(15:46):
on a table. I've never heard that be cited as
a reason to kill anyone. And what's nice about Antonio
Russo's statement to detectives in twenty eighteen is that it
takes some of the guesswork out of what actually happened. Now,
Russo said that he and Fisher went to the ATM
together so Fisher could buy weed. The receipt said four
(16:07):
twenty three, but according to the bank it was an
hour behind. This was five twenty three am. So, Russo
and Fisher returned to John's house a little after that. Now,
Albert and Angel were there when they returned, so they
soon left together to go to Albert's which was only
a couple of blocks away. They were there when they
came back from the a TM, Yes, and then they
(16:28):
slip out. They say they said goodbye to people, but
I don't remember them saying goodbye to anybody. I just
remembered them disappearing without me Mark, by the way, both
of whom had a reasonable expectation that they'd be sticking
with Angel and Albert, which was their only connection to
this after party. Now we're not sure why they were
left behind, but nonetheless, Meredith had fallen asleep and before
Mark actually did you called Albert at five fifty seven
(16:51):
am to let him know that Mark was on his
way over, and then Russo left with him. Correct Now,
it was cold out right, so Mark asked if he
could take the blanket that he had draped over his shoulders,
And that becomes an interesting topic of conversation or evidence,
if you could call it that, later on. What we
know is that forty minutes later, Mark Fisher was shot
and killed in front of one fifty Argyle Road, which
(17:14):
was just a few blocks from John's house and directly
across the street from Albert's, directly across the street from
Cleary's house. Correct Now, According to Google Maps, this is
about a five minute walk less than a quarter of
a mile, so we're not sure what happened in those
other thirty five minutes. The free floating radicals, if you will,
are Mark Fisher, Antonio Russo, Angel Dpietro, and Albert Cleary.
(17:36):
Now from this two eighteen detected report, Russo said that
while on Argyle Road, he pulled out his German Luger
nine millimeter, which belonged to him and him alone. He
took Fisher's wallet and told him to run before firing
a shot at the ground to let Fisher know that
the gun was real and loaded. He then fired a
(17:57):
shot at Fisher, who fell to the ground. When Fisher
asked him why he had shot him, Russo emptied his
clip into him, killing him on the spot. Now, Russo
said that there was a woman in a car who
could identify him. When he was fleeing the scene, he
got rid of the wallet and a sewer near his house.
It was later recovered by police. Now, immediately after the crime,
(18:17):
Antonio Russo did a few things that a guilty person might.
He used to wear braids his whole life, and he
shaved his head. Russo then decides to take a vacation
in California for a month and just disappear, and it'll
become clear that Russo's twenty eighteen account is definitely missing
a few details, but what is absolutely certain is that
he said he did this alone with his own gun.
(18:40):
The other interesting factor was the people who lived on
Argyle Road. They heard voices right before the shots, and
the woman whose bedroom was right above the driveway where
Mark was found heard car doors opening and closing. Also
heard young voices, and she was adamant that one of
them was a female voice. Right the ocument of one
(19:03):
fifty Argyle Road, Hiroko Swarnick said that she was awakened
by her dog barking and heard the sound of a
car door opening and shutting, which was later clarified to
be a van door. The Clearies owned a van. Swarnick
went on to say that the view from her second
story window was obstructed by foliage, but she heard more
than two young people talking. The conversation specifically did not
(19:26):
sound like an argument, and one of the voices was female.
She said that she went back to bed, and a
bit later she and her husband heard gunshots and called police.
Mark Fisher's body had been shot five times. The blanket
from John's house lay underneath his feet, and there were
abrasions on his right hand and the right side of
his face, suggesting that he had been in a fight
with someone who was left handed. While the suggestion of
(19:47):
that physical evidence is not proof positive of anything. John
is in fact a righting and also visible in the
crime scene photos is a petite, bare footprint left in
the mud. But none of those details were even brought
up at trial, and neither was what the police heard
from neighbors. They did a canvas of the neighborhood. Some
people said that they heard shots. Some people said that
(20:10):
they heard a flighting van door and also saw a
dark colored car speeding away curiously. Antonio Russo also mentioned
in that twenty eighteen report being seen by a woman
in a car while he fled on foot. And by
the way, he's not left handed either. I believe Albert
Cleary is left handed. Now let me be clear, I'm
(20:31):
not going any farther than that accusing him of anything.
But Albert Cleary also had a vehicle of similar make
and model that was described by the witnesses on Argyle Road.
Our working theory has always been that Albert and Angel
stumbled in to Russo doing something bad and didn't want
(20:55):
to get involved in coming after him because he's a monster.
And I'm not using Albert and Angel of murders or
anything like that, but there is a ton of credible
evidence that suggests that they were not honest about what
they knew. One of the things which is really troubling
is at the party, Russo comes in, and Russo's got
(21:16):
long dreadlocks, and he's a tough guy. He sticks out
like a sword thumb. And when Angel talks to the
cops and she says, tell us all the people at
the party, she never mentions Russo at all. In fact,
she says it's just like a bunch of white guys.
Now Russo is not white. But she told her friend,
her then boyfriend, that there was a really scary guy there.
(21:37):
When trial comes around, Angel identifies John, which is not
a big deal, just oh yeah, that's the guy whose
house we went to. And she's describing the people there,
remember Russo sitting at the table too. They're on trial.
At the same time, She's never asked to identify Russo,
not even asked. The reality is Russo said he saw
(21:57):
a girl. The neighbors heard a girl. There's the footprint
that you described by their own admission. Albert and Angel
are across the street, now, wouldn't you know it? Who
do you think the only people on the block when
they interviewed people at the houses who said they didn't
hear anything, which is completely unbelievable, because I've been to
this neighborhood and the neighbor's driveways or maybe at most
(22:19):
twenty thirty yards across the street from the other neighbor's
front doors, six thirty in the morning on a Sunday,
and there's boom boom, boom, boom, boom boom, and no
one in the clearye house. Here's the thing. And if
you talk to some of the neighbors, they and they
told us this when everybody came out, obviously, I mean,
it's kind of a big deal in the neighborhood like that,
nobody came out of the Cleary house. The morning after
(22:56):
the murder, Him and Angel d Pietro decided to clean
the garage after partying all night, which is a bizarre thing.
Before they quickly decamped to her Long Island home, where
they hung out with her criminal defense father all day
a place Cleary had never been before. What does that
(23:18):
all mean? Who's to say? But this is highly bizarre
conduct in the grand scheme of what happened here. And
as I mentioned, Angel's father, James D. Pietro, was a
prominent defense attorney. He's a prominent lawyer, well respected lawyer,
close friend to Hines, frequent financial donor to Hines. Interestingly,
Angel had plans to follow in her dad's footsteps and
(23:41):
later passed the bar. And then a short time later
she gets hired as a prosecutor to the point where
her and Nicolozzi are colleagues for years. Who's ever heard
of this? So a short time later she got hired
as a prosecutor in the Brooklyn DA's office. You can't
make this up, so okay, So back to the immediate aftermath.
At around ten am that morning, Angel began receiving phone
(24:04):
calls from family and friends of Mark Fisher, and she
told them that Meredith Denahan had given Mark train fare
and he had taken a train around eight or nine am. Now,
in initial interviews, Angel also told detectives that she had
spoken of Meredith on the morning of October twelfth, who
allegedly told her that Mark had woken John up around
six am and asked where to catch a train, but
(24:24):
Meredith denied that this conversation ever took place. She didn't
talk to Mary for some period of time because Mary
was pissed at her for what she believed was being abandoned.
Mary is her like Garden City friend, but she doesn't
go to Brooklyn that often and she's left at this
house by herself. She's pissed off because she thinks Angel
(24:46):
is sneaking out to stoop Cleary and just snuck out
and left her there. So this is what Meredith told
investigators on October fourteenth, So this is two days in
and they knew that Angel wasn't telling the truth. And
Mark Fisher's friends and family old investigators the same thing.
They had a hard time getting a straight answer from Angel.
Everyone who was concerned about Mark Fisher is asking where's Mark?
(25:08):
Where's Mark? An Angel is telling different stories about when
his friends were calling or when he left. And in
two thousand and four, late spring, early summer, a key
point of emphasis for law enforcement was Angel, and you
could see they spent a lot of time tracking her
and trying to interview her friends and roommates, and they
all said, we didn't believe her. She's telling different stories.
(25:31):
We basically cut her off. We didn't want to be
associated with her anymore after this. And the people who
believe Angel is not telling the truth more than anyone
else are Mark Fisher's family. They have from day one
accused her and Cleary of not telling the truth. They
went so far as to sue the both of them
(25:53):
after their son was murdered and John was convicted, and
they wanted to sue Albert An Angel. They asked the
DA for this police paperwork that talked about these neighbors
on Argyle Road, who said we heard a girl, we
heard a girl, and the Brooklyn Day's response was we're
not giving you that. They were protecting Angel even back then.
It at least appears as if some deal was made
(26:13):
with her, or perhaps with her father, to keep her
out of the crosshairs. So this is all super interesting,
But what the hell does this have to do with
John's guilt or innocence. How do the vulnerabilities of Albert
and Angel having maybe seen Russo commit this crime and
covering for that fact. How does this get directed towards
John and this narrative with the Ghetto Mafia. When the
(26:36):
cops interviewed Antonio Russo a couple of days after the murder,
he is the one who planted the seed in the
cops ears that there was this big tough gang named
Ghetto Mafia, of which John and others were involved in,
and that they could have been behind this. As soon
as I found out that the police wanted to talk
to me, I went right there to the priestinct. As
(26:57):
a matter of fact, Lauren Calciano drove me. That was
the seven Old Precinct detectives, which are the same guys
who stuck a punger of the guy to ask a
Noluima And for those who don't remember the awful case
of Abner Luima, embrace yourself. It was nineteen ninety seven
and the seventieth Precinct, or the seven oh as it
(27:17):
was called, and mister Luima was effectively kidnapped by police
from the scene of a fight outside of a club.
They accused him of assaulting one of the four police
officers with them, then brutally beat him and went back
at the seventieth Precinct. They sexually assaulted mister Luima with
a broken broomstick. And yes, it's actually even worse than
(27:38):
it sounds. This spark national outrage and protest here in
New York. And so these officers knew that you knew
that story. They tried to like subtly threaten me with
that too. When I was in the precinct, they said,
you have to use the bathroom. I said, I don't
have to use the bathroom because you have to use
the bathroom. I'm like what, And they took me to
the bathroom and then tried to question me in the bathroom,
(27:59):
and I'm like, oh, my fucking god, unfucking believable. These
fucking dirt bags. I'm guessing that this was before your
lawyer got there, right before my lawyer got there. They
just wanted me to either confess or blame someone. That's
when my lawyer cut the interviews. Often he said, that's it.
That's the only thing you guys want to hear. That's say,
(28:20):
we have nothing more to say. So these are the
tactics that we're being used in the initial investigation back
in the fall of two thousand and three, and as
the Prosecutor's office took over, things may have been more delicate, perhaps,
but still very sinister and very serious. And it appears
that Albert Cleary was under the same sort of intense pressure.
Now Cleary had denied knowing anything, and he actually had
(28:43):
his lawyer go on national TV to say, we're cooperating,
we know nothing. They even commissioned a polygraph in which
Cleary passed the polygraph in which he said, I don't
know anything about this. I've been truthful, I've told the
police everything I know, which i'll sensibly at that time
was I know nothing. But a few months later, after
(29:04):
you got pressured, according to Cleary, he knew everything. And
what becomes clear is that he had become their star
witness against you. So, John, when did you get the
feeling that this investigation had shifted and the heat was
being directed towards you? When they appointed this elite investigative
unit consisting of Brooklyn's ada's and Major Case Squad detectives,
(29:26):
and Michael Veckion was spearheading that team. So even with
Albert shouting from the rooftops that he quote passed a
polygraph saying that he didn't know anything, this elite investigative
you that headed by the now disgraced Michael VECCHIONI had
Albert ready to say whatever the hell he could dream
up in order to save himself, and as we mentioned,
(29:49):
he wasn't the only one. The two most important pieces
of false testimony centered around when Albert and your girlfriend
at the time, Lauren Calciano, met up with you at
your house sometime on October twelfth, in the aftermath of
the murder. What the DA claims is later that night
or the day, according to Lauren, that John is meeting
with his girlfriend, Lauren and Albert in his bedroom. According
(30:13):
to the DA, he tells them what happened, and according
to Cleary, John tells him Mark disrespected my house by
sitting on a table and it pissed me off. So
I told Russo take my gun and show him what's up.
Basically gave the order. Lauren, again ostensibly at the exact
(30:37):
same meeting, says what happened is John told us Russo
had approached him that night and said I want to
rob Mark. Can I borrow your gun? And John, ever,
the loyal friend that he is, would say, here, take
my gun. She claims it's during the day. Albert claims
it's at night. Albert's claiming John's talking about ordering a hit,
(31:00):
Lauren's talking about Russo asking them for a gun. And
the common denominator here is that both of these witnesses
had denied for a year knowing anything until they were
pressured and threatened with all kinds of things. Lauren was
threatened with her future, very embarrassing details about her personal life.
Albert was threatened with jail, perjury, all kinds of things.
(31:24):
He was on probation for kicking the crap out of
somebody a few months earlier. And so, at a bare minimum,
you have conclusive proof that either one of Lauren or
Albert take your pick. I would argue it doesn't even matter,
just demonstrates they're all full of shit. But you have
conclusive proof that the prosecution has no problem calling at
(31:44):
least one witness it knows is flat out perjuring themselves. Now, Cleary,
you also added to that story that you know, I
was talking to John and this guy Rob Legister, the
head of ghetto mafia, and John and Row We're talking
about how we don't have enough street credibility, so we
need to catch your body. Legister, at the time was
(32:05):
a college student in North Carolina, and we of course
have a sworn AFFI David from this legister guy saying
this is all a bunch of nonsense. He's never called
to testify to any of this. But yet at the
trial you have Nicolozzi talking about Capo's soldiers orders Tony Soprano.
It's insane. So these are the two falls statements that
eventually got John indicted at a secret grand jury. Now,
(32:28):
Antonio Russo had already been arrested in November two thousand
and four. Why that took so long, nobody knows. After
Russo got arrested, that was it, I thought, And then
I went shopping. It was a couple of days before Christmas,
on December twenty first, two thousand and four, and I
bought a whole bunch of Christmas gifts for everyone. And
I was on my way home to put up the
Christmas tree for my mother and I had I was
(32:50):
walking home with a whole bunch of bags from Macy's
and all different places, and they were there in front
of my house and then Detective Burns too, we've been
being good. I said, yeah, what are you doing here?
And he said, put your hands behind your back. And
then when they put me in the car. I could
hear they called Chione and I could hear on the
(33:12):
phone because it's so loud, and we're sitting in a
quiet car, and he is laughing hysterically and he said,
wish you were marry Christmas while he was just laughing
like a cool, evil motherfucker. Their use. So you spent
(33:36):
Christmas on Riker's Island, and with a Class A one felony,
you weren't given any chance to bond out, so you
were stuck there for the next nine months. I thought
it would have took much longer because every person who
was there for an A one filmy or s serious
case like that, a murder case was taken at least
two or three years, and they rushed my case to
trial in eight months. Because of that election, Joe Hines
(33:59):
had a Areas primary challenger stage Senator John Sampson, and
if he lost, he may have had to call in
a favor from Albert's mother on the King's County Goop
Executive Committee. And I'm not a conspiracy guy, but that's
who you call. But as part of his taxpayer funded
election campaign, he was making a big splash in the
media with your case, the grid kid killer case as
(34:19):
they called it, and they didn't plan on losing, so
they needed to support their two false witnesses with more bullshit,
and it went out and found another friend of yours
with a vulnerability to exploit, a guy named Anthony Bahari
who played the part of another alleged mafia soldier whose
job it was to get rid of the gun. Yes,
(34:41):
he was another witness who satisfied the formula of claimed
for a year and a half that he didn't know anything,
but after being heavily pressured, claimed that the morning after
the homicide that John called him up and asked him
to do him a favor and pick up an item
and leave it on the corner for somebody else to
(35:05):
pick up and Beharry testified that he looked at the
item and that it was a firearm. So that testimony
was potentially very damaging, but it's problematic for a lot
of reasons. He was threatened with losing his son, with
being prosecuted for actually possessing the gun, which is a
(35:27):
legal fiction. The gun was never recovered. The DA was
threatening to prosecute him for possession of a gun that
they had no evidence of where it was, or whether
it was operable, or anything else. It was alleged that
John and Bahari had called each other back and forth
to plan how he would leave the gun under a
box on the street for some mystery buyer who would
(35:48):
leave the money in its place. All they had to
do to prove that that wasn't true would get these
phone records, and then what case with this many coerced
and or incentivized witnesses and a total lack of any
concrete evidence would be complete without a jailhouse snitch. So
in walks John of Vito, who did time at Rikers
(36:09):
while you were there. He had a burglary charge and
was eventually sentenced to a drug rehab program with the
burglary sentence suspended pending his completion of the program, and
I believe a probation period. But he fell off the wagon,
and now all of a sudden he had a story
to tell, and in swoop the Brooklyn DA's office to
snatch up another willing participant in John's railroading. So you
(36:29):
and Antonio Russo went to trial together. So you're in
the same courtroom, but you had two separate juries, which
I'm led to understand is meant to streamline the process,
save money, and then say if there's a jury misconduct issue,
then they don't have to toss both convictions. So same trial,
separate juries, right, red jury and green jury. All the
(36:52):
green jury. So we've gone over three of the four
substantive witnesses, Albert Cleary, Lauren Calciano, and Anthony Bahari. Lauren
and Anthony both were canted under oath, as as the
jailhouse snitch John A. Vito, whose testimony were about to
cover Mark tell us about the state's case. The jury's
being told essentially that Juca's childhood friend, Albert Cleary's going
(37:13):
to come in and tell you that John, as a
member of this gang ghetto mafia, told Albert that they
wanted to increase their street credibility, so they needed to
kill someone that Mark Fisher sat on a table in
his family room. This was such an act of disrespect
that it made Juca rage to the point where he
(37:34):
told Antonio Russo, take my gun and you go out
and you quote unquote show Fisher what's up, which apparently
is their way of saying shoot him. I remember that
he tried to say that. I told Russo to wait
in the bushes and ambush him on Turner Plate, which
is a block away from my house. Meanwhile, it was
(37:57):
obviously based on nine on one coals where the body
was found and the blood. There was no blood trail
from Turner all the way to his house, so it
was just an obvious lie. Also, and he pushed the
one PM phone call up to eleven, which Angel d
Pietro testified falsely too as well. So you had called
Albert just before one pm that day. Phone wreckers corroborated that,
(38:20):
but both of them testified to an eleven am call,
So it might be plausible that you were the alleged
source of all of their shady information during the immediate aftermath.
Now there's something else about Albert's time on the stand.
Nicolozzi brought up the polygraph he had taken to prove
he didn't know anything about the crime, but in a
very misleading context. She really is slick Nikolozzi. When he
(38:43):
was on the stand, after he says the exact opposite
of that polygraph, he says he does know the desert,
he does know everything about it. She asks him, didn't
you take a polygraph? And he said yes, And then
of course knowing polygraphs aren't admissible in court, so she
knew Gregory would object and it was a firm, so
(39:04):
that's it. The jury thought that he took in past
the polygraph about what he was saying. Now, it was
never cleared up that he took a polygraph to the
exact opposite of what he was saying. Now, that is
really devious. Now they called your ex girlfriend Lauren Cassiano
to the stand, whose testimony just can't be squared with
(39:24):
Albert Cleary's version of the same exact conversation between the
three of you on October twelfth. Both stories could not
be true. There could not have been the same meeting
that Albert and Lauren are talking about. And Albert's talking
about John complaining about disrespect and ordering Russo to commit
a murder, when Lauren is saying, no, what happened as
Russo said, I just want to rob the guy? Can
(39:45):
I borrow your gun? If that wasn't a red flag,
I don't know what is. And John, this was the
first time that you were hearing the one time love
of your life falsely implicating you in a murder that
was crushed. She stared at me the whole time she
was up there, and it wasn't like a malicious like
she wasn't staring me down. She was looking at me
(40:07):
like as if she was saying I'm sorry with her eyes.
I had a conversation with my stepsister about that. She
was like, she's being forced to do this for Zavila.
To me, she's telling you, I'm sorry. So at this
point the jury had heard from Bihari, Angel DiPietro, as
well as from Lauren and Albert, and to anyone paying attention,
it would have to be clear that one or both
(40:28):
of these versions of events simply were not true. So
at the last minute they pull a hail Mary. This
guy John A Vito, who is a jailhouse snitch, and
he claims that I was in jail with John, and
I was having visitation in Riker's Island the same time
John was, and he was with his father and two women,
and a Veto says I overheard John in response to
(40:52):
the question from his father, why did you have a
gun with you? John said, I don't know, I just did,
and in essence acknowledge have a gun. What the jury
never learns is that John Juca's father, prior to this
jailhouse visitation, which did happen, by the way, and it's
not surprising that the snitch would use a kernel of
(41:14):
truth that could be documented by looking at jail records.
But what the jury didn't know, and presumably the DA
didn't know it, was that John's father had a series
of debilitating strokes and as a result, he couldn't speak.
He couldn't say what a Vito said that he said,
He could only say one or maybe sometimes he would
(41:36):
string two words together. At the time. Had a veto
even sat close enough to hear your conversation. He sat
somewhere near us, but he didn't obviously sit close enough
to actually hear my father. Because he did, he would
have made up a better life. The jury also didn't
know that the family relatives, the women who were present,
would have strenuously denied that occurred. They have sworn under
(41:59):
oath and Davis that this never happened. And there was
even more to this false testimony where a Vito claimed
to hear incriminating statements directly from John, this time completely
changing the location of the crime. The murder unquestionably is
on Argyle Road. The shots were heard by the residents,
but a Vito says, No, what happened is John told
(42:19):
me that he went to the ATM with Mark Fisher, which,
as you also said earlier, was an hour before the murder.
But this is what snitches do. They read papers, they
see the news, and they concoct. He says, when Mark
Fisher withdrew money at the ATM that John told me
he pulled out a gun pistol whip, Mark Fisher beat
him up, and then Russo took the gun and shot him.
(42:40):
So the story changes dramatically. On top of the fact
that this is coming from a jailhouse snitch who again
was trying to avoid a prison sentence, and they're moving
the murder location. This is beyond absurd. So what did
Sam Gregory do about a veto? Unfortunately he didn't even
(43:00):
know about John Evito until right before a trial. There's
no offer proof, meaning here's what he's going to say.
There's no notice to the defense that, oh, by the way,
we're going to argue through this witness that Juco was
physically there and did it. So he wasn't prepared to
try a case on a theory other than the nonsense
inconsistencies that was going to come out of Lauren and Albert.
(43:23):
The defense had been aware of this from the beginning.
They could have tactically prepared differently. He could have prepared
to have John's father's doctor testified to his father's limitations,
or the two women could have testified to the actual
substance of the conversation. Instead, they're caught with their pants
down now. The defense did argue in their summation that
the mere fact that they called the Vito as a
(43:44):
witness was kind of a hail mary because Lauren and
Albert had imploded telling inconsistent stories. That was a credible
argument that led the prosecutor to respond that John Avito
was just for once in his life, being a good guy,
motivated to do the right thing, and that's the only
reason he's cooperating, and that was just a baldfaced lie.
(44:08):
So they squashed his problems in exchange for testimony for
the time being. They kept him out of jail despite
repeated violations in a mandatory prison sentence, and then once
he was no longer needed a year later, when he
violated the program again, they threw him out with the
trash and into prison he went. When he no longer
had any value to them. So this exchange of leniency
(44:31):
for testimony represents just one Brady violation. But there's another
major one in which Russo admitted to a fellow in
maintenamed James Ingram, to acting alone. And we'll get into
that Ingram evidence in more detail later, but back to trial.
So now they go from two conflicting versions of this
crime to three convicting versions of this crime. Not only
are they different, they're internally incompatible. You can't square any
(44:54):
one of the stories with the other. You had he
gave Russo a gun for a robbery, or he ordered
the murder for street credibility, or he told him to
show him what's up because he disrespected him by sitting
on the table, or he was there himself at the ATM.
And the concern here is you throw enough mud, however inconsistent.
(45:14):
It is that the risk and concern is that any
jurors says, if all of these people are saying he
did something, I may not know what the hell he did,
but he's sure as hell must have done it. Aren't
They not supposed to or not allowed to offer conflicting
theories of the crime. They're really supposed to take one
theory and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Not give
(45:35):
the jurors Chinese food menu of different theories, because then
you might have some jurors that believe this, some journeys
that believe that. It's called a unanimity issue where they
have to be unanimous about something. Yeah, to offer a
menu of theories and basically say it doesn't matter, you
know he did it, which is essentially what the summation
(45:55):
amounted to, is not consistent with due process, and it
leads to a jury possibly being six jurors say what
if he ordered a murder? Four jurors saying what if
he gave him a gun for a robbery? And what
if two jurors say, maybe he was physically there, Okay,
but we all agree he did it. Okay, guilty, that's absurd,
(46:17):
But that's what happened. It was the worst day of
my life. I was sentenced to twenty five to life
on October nineteenth, two thousand and five. Every idea you
could form in your mind full short of the reality
of how bad that is. It's like bleak, hopeless, stabilitating misery.
(46:39):
It's crippling. The depression in this space go through just
thinking about how I wasn't even alive for twenty five
years at that point when I got sentences, so I
don't even I didn't even know what twenty five years
to set life. In Part one of John Jeffer's story,
you heard about all of the different characters and circumstances
(46:59):
that led his arrest and conviction. Now here about his
epic battle through post conviction in Part two available now.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction special thanks to
our amazing production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea, Jeff Clyburne,
(47:20):
and Kevin Wards, with research by Lalla Robinson. The music
in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated
composer Jay Ralph. Make sure to follow us on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava
for Good. On all three platforms, you can also follow
(47:41):
on TikTok and Instagram at its Jason Flam. That's It's
Jason Flam. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts in the Association a Signal Company Number one
In recording our coverage of John Juca's case, we realized
that there are simply too many twists and turns for
one episode, so we split this episode in two and
are releasing both at the same time. On October eleventh,
two thousand and three, three groups of college kids, one
from Long Island, another from Brooklyn, as well as New Jersey,
(00:20):
ran into one another at a bar on the upper
east side of Manhattan. A mutual friend among them, Angel
DiPietro knew Brooklyn night Albert Cleary, as well as her
Fairfield University classmate Mark Fisher, a football player from New Jersey.
When the night started to wind down and all of
the trains of Long Island, New Jersey had stopped running,
Albert Cleary's friend, twenty year old John Juca, offered up
(00:42):
his house in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for an after party and
a place to crash. A few of John and Albert's
friends joined, including a neighborhood tough guy named Antonio Russo.
Sometime before six am, Angel and Albert walked to his
nearby house. Since Angel was the only person Mark Fisher knew,
he left to find his way over to Albert's with
(01:03):
Antonio Russo and soon ended up fatally shot without his
wallet on the driveway across from Albert Cleary's house, a
blanket from John's house at its feet. In the immediate aftermath,
Antonio Russo cut his dreadlocks and absconded to California. A
police investigation revealed that other voices and a carridor were
(01:23):
heard before the gunshots. Albert and Angel denied any knowledge,
and soon statements were made that alleged that John Juca
was involved. The motivations and level of involvement varied, but
with this many witnesses placing blame on John. There had
to be something to it. But this is wrongful conviction.
(01:52):
Welcome back to ronful conviction. Today, we have a story
that was front page news all over New York City
when it happened, with flaring head line, salacious headlines about
want to be Brooklyn gangsteries who allegedly conspired at an
after party to kill a suburban college football star who
just happened to be in their midst, when in fact,
there were no gangsters, only a group of friends, and
(02:15):
the murder was not a group effort at all. The
only group effort here who took the form of multiple
conflicting false statements against a member of that group. John
Juca and John is calling in from prison and upstate
New York right now. John, I'm sorry you're here under
these circumstances, but we're very honored to have you. The
only good news in this whole, miserable story is that
(02:35):
his attorney is Mark Bettera and Mark is one of
the most respected criminal defense attorneys in the New York
area and beyond. Mark, Welcome to RONFA Conviction. Glad to
be here. Thanks for having me and Mark. Why was
this such a high profile case? This was a big
one at the time. I was a prosecutor in Manhattan
and I remember it in real time, just reading tabloids
(02:56):
on the subway going to work. It was in the
fall of two thousand. It felt like there was an
update on this flawed investigation every day. It was the
grid kid murder case, because you had a situation where
the victim was the all American son that any parent
wish they had as a child. Mark Fisher was a
nineteen year old, good looking college football player from New
(03:19):
Jersey who went to Brooklyn for the first time in
his life, and unfortunately he ended up dead on the street,
and certainly that's the kind of thing that is going
to feed the tabloids and get the public attention. So
the Gridkid murder case became sensational from day one, and
(03:40):
that moniker actually referred to the admitted grid Kid killer,
John's co defendant, Antonio Russo. But somehow John's face was
also plastered on the front page of those tabloids as
if he was some sort of criminal mastermind or co
conspirator to somehow actually involved. The prosecution never actually decided
(04:05):
on any one theory. They just put all this stuff
out there and the press ate it up, and of
course this media firestorm polluted to jurypool. Now don't forget
the HBO series The Sopranos was an absolute cultural phenomenon
at this time. Is the only thing people were talking
about is seeing So this story of the death of
(04:26):
a promising suburban kid allegedly at the hands of these
wanna be mafia city kids was like it was the
imperfect storm. It just captured everybody's imaginations. By the time
his trial came around, you actually had the prosecutor comparing
him to Tony Soprano and talking about ordering hits to
(04:46):
build up street credibility for a non existing gang, which
in fact was just a bunch of knucklehead teenagers in
Brooklyn calling themselves names. And this alleged gang was called
the Ghetto Mafia. Right, So, John, what actually was the
Ghetto Mafia? Oh? My god, it was a bunch of
kids hanging out. We had some people who who used
(05:06):
to hang out with us who never even heard of
our name, some people who considered it a joke, and
there were other people who didn't. One thing was never
was an actual gang. John was just a regular nineteen
year old Brooklyn kid. So let's talk about your life
before all of this, John, You grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Right,
It's like a little enclave in Flatbush called Profitt Park South.
(05:28):
I guess you could say I grew up in a
regular middle class upbringing. First, I went to public school
PS one thirty nine. Then I went to Catholic school
around third grade when my mother met my stepfather. So
your parents broke up when you were young, Yes, when
I was five years old my stepfather, but consider him
like my father. Also, I didn't look at it as
a negative thing. Really, My real father went on to
get married again, and that woman who he married already
(05:51):
had kids, so he had a family over there too,
and I considered them family also. I looked at it
as I had two fathers, like two men in my
life who loved me and wanted to see me succeed
and supported me. And your biological father ended up suffering
a stroke when you were nineteen, which ended up having
relevance in this case. But at that time, like you said,
both he and your stepdad were supportive of you. You
(06:12):
were trying to succeed as an actor and actually got
some work as a teenager. Yes, I was on School
of Rock. I got to meet Jack Black, the guys
from Lauren Order, Lawn Order like Ten Signs. I played
a dead kid on Lauren Order. I remember one funny
story that I'm on Lauren Order and I'm the dead
kids on lane on the pavement, and I have fake
blood all over my head and everything, and I remember
(06:32):
the two actors, Jerry Orbach and the other one, the
two main cops, Jerry Orback and Chris Noth. Yeah, and
they have to kneel down and search my pockets. I
have a pair of keys that they're supposed to take
out of my pockets, and so Jerry or guys kneels
down and he kneels right on the keys and he's
son of a bitch and they're like cat and then
they shouted like four, five, six, seven times. They keep
(06:54):
trying to shut his things keep going wrong. And then
I had smoke some weeks before I went. I think
I was like six seventeen years old, and this is
not part of script. And he goes it smells like marijuana,
and they're like, cat, what are you talking about. He's like,
I don't know, it smells like marijuana. And my stepfather
(07:17):
is looking at me like, oh my god, I'm gonna
kill you. That's incredible, and Jerry orback rest in peace.
I can just picture it in my mind right now.
And your stepfather was there too, So it sounds like
you had this great sort of blended Brady bunch sort
of a family situation. And can you tell us about
the woman at the center of it. And I'm talking
about your mom, Dorene, And I know her from rallies
(07:40):
and events and calls and texts, and she's just a
pillar of strength and somebody I admire greatly. Yeah, but
she was reckon. Let's stay at home, Mom, she was
more I guess you could say liberal minded. Like my
house was the house where a lot of kids from
the neighborhood used to come and she used to feed them,
or we used to play basketball in the backyard or whatever.
(08:00):
She always told me that law enforcement was a good guys.
I remember this going up. She was encouraging me to
go to John Jay, encouraging me to become a cop,
her brother as a correction officer, my uncle Eddie. That's
another crazy irony about your story, which is that while
you were pursuing an acting career, you were also studying
criminal justice at John Jay College. Yes, and what you
(08:20):
learn about the criminal justice system in school is just
one hundred and eighty degrees from the reality of the
criminal justice system. They say that you have all these rights,
and they're not going to arrest people unless this standard
is MATT, and then they don't get convicted unless this
standard is MATT and go on, and it's just none
of that is true. Yeah, you saw those standards go
out the window pretty quickly when the false statements that
(08:41):
were used to obtain your arrestaurant and conviction didn't even
form a cohesive narrative. Now, one of the people who
gave false testimony against you was your girlfriend at the time,
Lauren Calciano. Now we're going to read from her recantation later.
But you two had started dating in high school, right.
She was my first love. I was with her since
I was about coronal fifteen or sixteen. I thought I
(09:02):
wanted to get married and everything. We were young. Why
he used to practically live at her house sometimes, or
I knew her whole family. You ended up hiring her
family's attorney, Sam Gregory, who had previously represented her father,
Sal Calciano. He was head of paintenance in the World
Trade Center. He went to federal prison because the World
Trade Center got robbed. They said it was about four
(09:22):
million Americans. This has been the nineties. Sometimes. For whatever
her father's mistakes were, the DA was eventually able to
use her father's situation, among other things, in order to
coerce her false testimony against you. They were also able
to coerce or incentivize your friend Albert Cleary as well,
who was arguably closer to this incident than you were.
(09:42):
Albert's mother, Susan Cleary, was the vice president of the
King's County GOP Executive Committee, the group in Brooklyn that
can authorize what is known as a Wilson pecula, which
allows a candidate from another party to run on that
party's ticket, and it can be used in order to
run unopposed or in the case when a candidate loses
the party's primary election. Whether or not that was a
bargaining ship used to keep her son's name out of
(10:05):
the investigation, that's something we'll never know. A lot of
people say the system is broken. I don't think it's broken.
I think it's working exactly how they intended it to work,
as like battering ram for the rich and powerful. Yeah,
and as we've seen in cases like yours, the prosecutor's
office will use high profile cases for publicity with the
hope of reaping those benefits come election time. Now, back
(10:25):
in two thousand and three, the DA was Charles Joe
Hines who was facing a primary challenge in two thousand
and five, and wouldn't you know that he stretched out
this investigation and prosecution. You guessed it to occur right
before the election. He ended up winning both the primary
and the general. Now, anyone who's familiar with our podcast,
it's familiar with the problems in Brooklyn during the Hines era.
(10:46):
Nineteen thirteen is a really dark period for criminal justice
at Brooklyn. Hines was a political creature of the first order.
That office back then was known as the poster child
for wrongful convictions. Maybe in the last ten or fifteen
years would people have really been paying attention to the
problem of wrongful convictions. I think a lot of the
(11:08):
momentum on this really started when people like Ken Thompson
were running against Hines ten years ago and exposing bad
case after bad case that was coming out of the
Hines Brooklyn DA's office. And this is exhibit A. John
Juca to this day is exhibit A. And many of
the people who worked under Hines, who were responsible and
(11:29):
complicit and so many of the wrongful convictions of that
era are still there today. And those who have moved
on to private practice or even careers in media, like
the trial prosecutor in this case, Anna sigon Netalazzi. Those
former Hines adas, their reputations in public fates are arguably
tied to the political fate of the Brooklyn DA's office.
(11:49):
In terms of the graduates of the Hines DA's office,
this trial prosecutor was their superstar and the biggest red
flag in a case like this when a trial prosecutor
markets themselves as I'm a homicide DA and I've never
lost a case. I have a perfect record and old
trial record. Let me tell you something, if you won,
(12:11):
you're cheating. And after John's conviction, you know all this marketing.
This is a successful DA. She's on TV today as
an expert on everything that's right in criminal justice, and
it would have been humiliating for the Brooklyn DA to
take her down. For years after this conviction, John's was
her number one marketing pitch on her greatest hits, and
(12:34):
after two post conviction hearings and litigation and covered extensively
in the media, when one judge of the New York
Court of Appeals ripped the prosecutor a new one and
basically all but called her corrupt and deliberately violating his rights.
All the references to John's heroic conviction have been scrubbed
(12:55):
from the record, which makes you wonder, if you're proud
of this conviction and proud of what you've done, why
you would do that? Why would anyone be proud of
what should be It really should be illegal sending an
innocent man to prison and effectively compounding the tragic loss
of another young man's life. So let's get to the incident,
(13:17):
the crux of everything we're discussing. Of course, I'm referring
to the awful night of October eleven into the twelfth
of two thousand and three. It was Columbus Day weekend.
Mark Fisher, who went to Fairfield University in Connecticut, and
some of his friends went to the city and partied.
John Juca and his friend Albert Cleary and a few
others also went to the city, and the groups ended
(13:40):
up being connected through a very interesting person in this
sordid process named Angel DiPietro, who was a college classmate
and theoretically friend of Mark Fisher, who also was friendly
with Albert Cleary. Angel Dpietro's father was a prominent Long
Island defense attorney. As well. You had the Brooklyn contingent,
(14:01):
which was John Albert Cleary, and two more neighborhood friends,
Angel d Pietro and her friend Meredith Denahan from Long
Island and Mark Fisher, who had come in from New Jersey,
and they met at a bar on the upper east
side of Manhattan, which at the time was known to
college kids for being the home of many bars that
had pretty loose id policies. Right and so now it
(14:23):
was getting late and the Long Island and New Jersey
kids had to figure out a way home on the train.
The last train left, the next one didn't leave till
some time the next morning, so they were stranded. So
I opened my house to them. In the cab, it
was me, Albert, Mary Mark, and Angel. Me and Albert
paid for the cab. And then after we got there,
(14:43):
a few more people showed up. I'm pretty sure it
was Tommy. Jimmy, my brother was home and Antonio Russo.
Russo had a house right behind John, so they were
certainly friendly from the neighborhood now. Antonio Russo was a
strongly built high school dropout who wore dreadlocks and sold weed,
which was the reason he gave for coming over to
John's house in a twenty eighteen interview with the cops
(15:05):
to sell weed to some of those who were interested,
and according to three people, Russo had a gun in
his waistband both before and after the murder. One of
those three people said they had been threatened with it
he's the tough guy. He's a little bit crazy, not
in the legal sense, just in the real world sense.
He's the resident tough guy. He's making everyone uncomfortable, but
(15:26):
for now he's supplying weed to this otherwise fun after
party at John's house. Now, at some point, Mark Fisher
made some sort of a faux pa that served as
an alleged motive. Everybody was drinking, a couple of people
were smoking weed at one point, and Marks out on
a table. And we're in a big deal right sitting
(15:46):
on a table. I've never heard that be cited as
a reason to kill anyone. And what's nice about Antonio
Russo's statement to detectives in twenty eighteen is that it
takes some of the guesswork out of what actually happened. Now,
Russo said that he and Fisher went to the ATM
together so Fisher could buy weed. The receipt said four
(16:07):
twenty three, but according to the bank it was an
hour behind. This was five twenty three am. So, Russo
and Fisher returned to John's house a little after that. Now,
Albert and Angel were there when they returned, so they
soon left together to go to Albert's which was only
a couple of blocks away. They were there when they
came back from the a TM, Yes, and then they
(16:28):
slip out. They say they said goodbye to people, but
I don't remember them saying goodbye to anybody. I just
remembered them disappearing without me Mark, by the way, both
of whom had a reasonable expectation that they'd be sticking
with Angel and Albert, which was their only connection to
this after party. Now we're not sure why they were
left behind, but nonetheless, Meredith had fallen asleep and before
Mark actually did you called Albert at five fifty seven
(16:51):
am to let him know that Mark was on his
way over, and then Russo left with him. Correct Now,
it was cold out right, so Mark asked if he
could take the blanket that he had draped over his shoulders,
And that becomes an interesting topic of conversation or evidence,
if you could call it that, later on. What we
know is that forty minutes later, Mark Fisher was shot
and killed in front of one fifty Argyle Road, which
(17:14):
was just a few blocks from John's house and directly
across the street from Albert's, directly across the street from
Cleary's house. Correct Now, According to Google Maps, this is
about a five minute walk less than a quarter of
a mile, so we're not sure what happened in those
other thirty five minutes. The free floating radicals, if you will,
are Mark Fisher, Antonio Russo, Angel Dpietro, and Albert Cleary.
(17:36):
Now from this two eighteen detected report, Russo said that
while on Argyle Road, he pulled out his German Luger
nine millimeter, which belonged to him and him alone. He
took Fisher's wallet and told him to run before firing
a shot at the ground to let Fisher know that
the gun was real and loaded. He then fired a
(17:57):
shot at Fisher, who fell to the ground. When Fisher
asked him why he had shot him, Russo emptied his
clip into him, killing him on the spot. Now, Russo
said that there was a woman in a car who
could identify him. When he was fleeing the scene, he
got rid of the wallet and a sewer near his house.
It was later recovered by police. Now, immediately after the crime,
(18:17):
Antonio Russo did a few things that a guilty person might.
He used to wear braids his whole life, and he
shaved his head. Russo then decides to take a vacation
in California for a month and just disappear, and it'll
become clear that Russo's twenty eighteen account is definitely missing
a few details, but what is absolutely certain is that
he said he did this alone with his own gun.
(18:40):
The other interesting factor was the people who lived on
Argyle Road. They heard voices right before the shots, and
the woman whose bedroom was right above the driveway where
Mark was found heard car doors opening and closing. Also
heard young voices, and she was adamant that one of
them was a female voice. Right the ocument of one
(19:03):
fifty Argyle Road, Hiroko Swarnick said that she was awakened
by her dog barking and heard the sound of a
car door opening and shutting, which was later clarified to
be a van door. The Clearies owned a van. Swarnick
went on to say that the view from her second
story window was obstructed by foliage, but she heard more
than two young people talking. The conversation specifically did not
(19:26):
sound like an argument, and one of the voices was female.
She said that she went back to bed, and a
bit later she and her husband heard gunshots and called police.
Mark Fisher's body had been shot five times. The blanket
from John's house lay underneath his feet, and there were
abrasions on his right hand and the right side of
his face, suggesting that he had been in a fight
with someone who was left handed. While the suggestion of
(19:47):
that physical evidence is not proof positive of anything. John
is in fact a righting and also visible in the
crime scene photos is a petite, bare footprint left in
the mud. But none of those details were even brought
up at trial, and neither was what the police heard
from neighbors. They did a canvas of the neighborhood. Some
people said that they heard shots. Some people said that
(20:10):
they heard a flighting van door and also saw a
dark colored car speeding away curiously. Antonio Russo also mentioned
in that twenty eighteen report being seen by a woman
in a car while he fled on foot. And by
the way, he's not left handed either. I believe Albert
Cleary is left handed. Now let me be clear, I'm
(20:31):
not going any farther than that accusing him of anything.
But Albert Cleary also had a vehicle of similar make
and model that was described by the witnesses on Argyle Road.
Our working theory has always been that Albert and Angel
stumbled in to Russo doing something bad and didn't want
(20:55):
to get involved in coming after him because he's a monster.
And I'm not using Albert and Angel of murders or
anything like that, but there is a ton of credible
evidence that suggests that they were not honest about what
they knew. One of the things which is really troubling
is at the party, Russo comes in, and Russo's got
(21:16):
long dreadlocks, and he's a tough guy. He sticks out
like a sword thumb. And when Angel talks to the
cops and she says, tell us all the people at
the party, she never mentions Russo at all. In fact,
she says it's just like a bunch of white guys.
Now Russo is not white. But she told her friend,
her then boyfriend, that there was a really scary guy there.
(21:37):
When trial comes around, Angel identifies John, which is not
a big deal, just oh yeah, that's the guy whose
house we went to. And she's describing the people there,
remember Russo sitting at the table too. They're on trial.
At the same time, She's never asked to identify Russo,
not even asked. The reality is Russo said he saw
(21:57):
a girl. The neighbors heard a girl. There's the footprint
that you described by their own admission. Albert and Angel
are across the street, now, wouldn't you know it? Who
do you think the only people on the block when
they interviewed people at the houses who said they didn't
hear anything, which is completely unbelievable, because I've been to
this neighborhood and the neighbor's driveways or maybe at most
(22:19):
twenty thirty yards across the street from the other neighbor's
front doors, six thirty in the morning on a Sunday,
and there's boom boom, boom, boom, boom boom, and no
one in the clearye house. Here's the thing. And if
you talk to some of the neighbors, they and they
told us this when everybody came out, obviously, I mean,
it's kind of a big deal in the neighborhood like that,
nobody came out of the Cleary house. The morning after
(22:56):
the murder, Him and Angel d Pietro decided to clean
the garage after partying all night, which is a bizarre thing.
Before they quickly decamped to her Long Island home, where
they hung out with her criminal defense father all day
a place Cleary had never been before. What does that
(23:18):
all mean? Who's to say? But this is highly bizarre
conduct in the grand scheme of what happened here. And
as I mentioned, Angel's father, James D. Pietro, was a
prominent defense attorney. He's a prominent lawyer, well respected lawyer,
close friend to Hines, frequent financial donor to Hines. Interestingly,
Angel had plans to follow in her dad's footsteps and
(23:41):
later passed the bar. And then a short time later
she gets hired as a prosecutor to the point where
her and Nicolozzi are colleagues for years. Who's ever heard
of this? So a short time later she got hired
as a prosecutor in the Brooklyn DA's office. You can't
make this up, so okay, So back to the immediate aftermath.
At around ten am that morning, Angel began receiving phone
(24:04):
calls from family and friends of Mark Fisher, and she
told them that Meredith Denahan had given Mark train fare
and he had taken a train around eight or nine am. Now,
in initial interviews, Angel also told detectives that she had
spoken of Meredith on the morning of October twelfth, who
allegedly told her that Mark had woken John up around
six am and asked where to catch a train, but
(24:24):
Meredith denied that this conversation ever took place. She didn't
talk to Mary for some period of time because Mary
was pissed at her for what she believed was being abandoned.
Mary is her like Garden City friend, but she doesn't
go to Brooklyn that often and she's left at this
house by herself. She's pissed off because she thinks Angel
(24:46):
is sneaking out to stoop Cleary and just snuck out
and left her there. So this is what Meredith told
investigators on October fourteenth, So this is two days in
and they knew that Angel wasn't telling the truth. And
Mark Fisher's friends and family old investigators the same thing.
They had a hard time getting a straight answer from Angel.
Everyone who was concerned about Mark Fisher is asking where's Mark?
(25:08):
Where's Mark? An Angel is telling different stories about when
his friends were calling or when he left. And in
two thousand and four, late spring, early summer, a key
point of emphasis for law enforcement was Angel, and you
could see they spent a lot of time tracking her
and trying to interview her friends and roommates, and they
all said, we didn't believe her. She's telling different stories.
(25:31):
We basically cut her off. We didn't want to be
associated with her anymore after this. And the people who
believe Angel is not telling the truth more than anyone
else are Mark Fisher's family. They have from day one
accused her and Cleary of not telling the truth. They
went so far as to sue the both of them
(25:53):
after their son was murdered and John was convicted, and
they wanted to sue Albert An Angel. They asked the
DA for this police paperwork that talked about these neighbors
on Argyle Road, who said we heard a girl, we
heard a girl, and the Brooklyn Day's response was we're
not giving you that. They were protecting Angel even back then.
It at least appears as if some deal was made
(26:13):
with her, or perhaps with her father, to keep her
out of the crosshairs. So this is all super interesting,
But what the hell does this have to do with
John's guilt or innocence. How do the vulnerabilities of Albert
and Angel having maybe seen Russo commit this crime and
covering for that fact. How does this get directed towards
John and this narrative with the Ghetto Mafia. When the
(26:36):
cops interviewed Antonio Russo a couple of days after the murder,
he is the one who planted the seed in the
cops ears that there was this big tough gang named
Ghetto Mafia, of which John and others were involved in,
and that they could have been behind this. As soon
as I found out that the police wanted to talk
to me, I went right there to the priestinct. As
(26:57):
a matter of fact, Lauren Calciano drove me. That was
the seven Old Precinct detectives, which are the same guys
who stuck a punger of the guy to ask a
Noluima And for those who don't remember the awful case
of Abner Luima, embrace yourself. It was nineteen ninety seven
and the seventieth Precinct, or the seven oh as it
(27:17):
was called, and mister Luima was effectively kidnapped by police
from the scene of a fight outside of a club.
They accused him of assaulting one of the four police
officers with them, then brutally beat him and went back
at the seventieth Precinct. They sexually assaulted mister Luima with
a broken broomstick. And yes, it's actually even worse than
(27:38):
it sounds. This spark national outrage and protest here in
New York. And so these officers knew that you knew
that story. They tried to like subtly threaten me with
that too. When I was in the precinct, they said,
you have to use the bathroom. I said, I don't
have to use the bathroom because you have to use
the bathroom. I'm like what, And they took me to
the bathroom and then tried to question me in the bathroom,
(27:59):
and I'm like, oh, my fucking god, unfucking believable. These
fucking dirt bags. I'm guessing that this was before your
lawyer got there, right before my lawyer got there. They
just wanted me to either confess or blame someone. That's
when my lawyer cut the interviews. Often he said, that's it.
That's the only thing you guys want to hear. That's say,
(28:20):
we have nothing more to say. So these are the
tactics that we're being used in the initial investigation back
in the fall of two thousand and three, and as
the Prosecutor's office took over, things may have been more delicate, perhaps,
but still very sinister and very serious. And it appears
that Albert Cleary was under the same sort of intense pressure.
Now Cleary had denied knowing anything, and he actually had
(28:43):
his lawyer go on national TV to say, we're cooperating,
we know nothing. They even commissioned a polygraph in which
Cleary passed the polygraph in which he said, I don't
know anything about this. I've been truthful, I've told the
police everything I know, which i'll sensibly at that time
was I know nothing. But a few months later, after
(29:04):
you got pressured, according to Cleary, he knew everything. And
what becomes clear is that he had become their star
witness against you. So, John, when did you get the
feeling that this investigation had shifted and the heat was
being directed towards you? When they appointed this elite investigative
unit consisting of Brooklyn's ada's and Major Case Squad detectives,
(29:26):
and Michael Veckion was spearheading that team. So even with
Albert shouting from the rooftops that he quote passed a
polygraph saying that he didn't know anything, this elite investigative
you that headed by the now disgraced Michael VECCHIONI had
Albert ready to say whatever the hell he could dream
up in order to save himself, and as we mentioned,
(29:49):
he wasn't the only one. The two most important pieces
of false testimony centered around when Albert and your girlfriend
at the time, Lauren Calciano, met up with you at
your house sometime on October twelfth, in the aftermath of
the murder. What the DA claims is later that night
or the day, according to Lauren, that John is meeting
with his girlfriend, Lauren and Albert in his bedroom. According
(30:13):
to the DA, he tells them what happened, and according
to Cleary, John tells him Mark disrespected my house by
sitting on a table and it pissed me off. So
I told Russo take my gun and show him what's up.
Basically gave the order. Lauren, again ostensibly at the exact
(30:37):
same meeting, says what happened is John told us Russo
had approached him that night and said I want to
rob Mark. Can I borrow your gun? And John, ever,
the loyal friend that he is, would say, here, take
my gun. She claims it's during the day. Albert claims
it's at night. Albert's claiming John's talking about ordering a hit,
(31:00):
Lauren's talking about Russo asking them for a gun. And
the common denominator here is that both of these witnesses
had denied for a year knowing anything until they were
pressured and threatened with all kinds of things. Lauren was
threatened with her future, very embarrassing details about her personal life.
Albert was threatened with jail, perjury, all kinds of things.
(31:24):
He was on probation for kicking the crap out of
somebody a few months earlier. And so, at a bare minimum,
you have conclusive proof that either one of Lauren or
Albert take your pick. I would argue it doesn't even matter,
just demonstrates they're all full of shit. But you have
conclusive proof that the prosecution has no problem calling at
(31:44):
least one witness it knows is flat out perjuring themselves. Now, Cleary,
you also added to that story that you know, I
was talking to John and this guy Rob Legister, the
head of ghetto mafia, and John and Row We're talking
about how we don't have enough street credibility, so we
need to catch your body. Legister, at the time was
(32:05):
a college student in North Carolina, and we of course
have a sworn AFFI David from this legister guy saying
this is all a bunch of nonsense. He's never called
to testify to any of this. But yet at the
trial you have Nicolozzi talking about Capo's soldiers orders Tony Soprano.
It's insane. So these are the two falls statements that
eventually got John indicted at a secret grand jury. Now,
(32:28):
Antonio Russo had already been arrested in November two thousand
and four. Why that took so long, nobody knows. After
Russo got arrested, that was it, I thought, And then
I went shopping. It was a couple of days before Christmas,
on December twenty first, two thousand and four, and I
bought a whole bunch of Christmas gifts for everyone. And
I was on my way home to put up the
Christmas tree for my mother and I had I was
(32:50):
walking home with a whole bunch of bags from Macy's
and all different places, and they were there in front
of my house and then Detective Burns too, we've been
being good. I said, yeah, what are you doing here?
And he said, put your hands behind your back. And
then when they put me in the car. I could
hear they called Chione and I could hear on the
(33:12):
phone because it's so loud, and we're sitting in a
quiet car, and he is laughing hysterically and he said,
wish you were marry Christmas while he was just laughing
like a cool, evil motherfucker. Their use. So you spent
(33:36):
Christmas on Riker's Island, and with a Class A one felony,
you weren't given any chance to bond out, so you
were stuck there for the next nine months. I thought
it would have took much longer because every person who
was there for an A one filmy or s serious
case like that, a murder case was taken at least
two or three years, and they rushed my case to
trial in eight months. Because of that election, Joe Hines
(33:59):
had a Areas primary challenger stage Senator John Sampson, and
if he lost, he may have had to call in
a favor from Albert's mother on the King's County Goop
Executive Committee. And I'm not a conspiracy guy, but that's
who you call. But as part of his taxpayer funded
election campaign, he was making a big splash in the
media with your case, the grid kid killer case as
(34:19):
they called it, and they didn't plan on losing, so
they needed to support their two false witnesses with more bullshit,
and it went out and found another friend of yours
with a vulnerability to exploit, a guy named Anthony Bahari
who played the part of another alleged mafia soldier whose
job it was to get rid of the gun. Yes,
(34:41):
he was another witness who satisfied the formula of claimed
for a year and a half that he didn't know anything,
but after being heavily pressured, claimed that the morning after
the homicide that John called him up and asked him
to do him a favor and pick up an item
and leave it on the corner for somebody else to
(35:05):
pick up and Beharry testified that he looked at the
item and that it was a firearm. So that testimony
was potentially very damaging, but it's problematic for a lot
of reasons. He was threatened with losing his son, with
being prosecuted for actually possessing the gun, which is a
(35:27):
legal fiction. The gun was never recovered. The DA was
threatening to prosecute him for possession of a gun that
they had no evidence of where it was, or whether
it was operable, or anything else. It was alleged that
John and Bahari had called each other back and forth
to plan how he would leave the gun under a
box on the street for some mystery buyer who would
(35:48):
leave the money in its place. All they had to
do to prove that that wasn't true would get these
phone records, and then what case with this many coerced
and or incentivized witnesses and a total lack of any
concrete evidence would be complete without a jailhouse snitch. So
in walks John of Vito, who did time at Rikers
(36:09):
while you were there. He had a burglary charge and
was eventually sentenced to a drug rehab program with the
burglary sentence suspended pending his completion of the program, and
I believe a probation period. But he fell off the wagon,
and now all of a sudden he had a story
to tell, and in swoop the Brooklyn DA's office to
snatch up another willing participant in John's railroading. So you
(36:29):
and Antonio Russo went to trial together. So you're in
the same courtroom, but you had two separate juries, which
I'm led to understand is meant to streamline the process,
save money, and then say if there's a jury misconduct issue,
then they don't have to toss both convictions. So same trial,
separate juries, right, red jury and green jury. All the
(36:52):
green jury. So we've gone over three of the four
substantive witnesses, Albert Cleary, Lauren Calciano, and Anthony Bahari. Lauren
and Anthony both were canted under oath, as as the
jailhouse snitch John A. Vito, whose testimony were about to
cover Mark tell us about the state's case. The jury's
being told essentially that Juca's childhood friend, Albert Cleary's going
(37:13):
to come in and tell you that John, as a
member of this gang ghetto mafia, told Albert that they
wanted to increase their street credibility, so they needed to
kill someone that Mark Fisher sat on a table in
his family room. This was such an act of disrespect
that it made Juca rage to the point where he
(37:34):
told Antonio Russo, take my gun and you go out
and you quote unquote show Fisher what's up, which apparently
is their way of saying shoot him. I remember that
he tried to say that. I told Russo to wait
in the bushes and ambush him on Turner Plate, which
is a block away from my house. Meanwhile, it was
(37:57):
obviously based on nine on one coals where the body
was found and the blood. There was no blood trail
from Turner all the way to his house, so it
was just an obvious lie. Also, and he pushed the
one PM phone call up to eleven, which Angel d
Pietro testified falsely too as well. So you had called
Albert just before one pm that day. Phone wreckers corroborated that,
(38:20):
but both of them testified to an eleven am call,
So it might be plausible that you were the alleged
source of all of their shady information during the immediate aftermath.
Now there's something else about Albert's time on the stand.
Nicolozzi brought up the polygraph he had taken to prove
he didn't know anything about the crime, but in a
very misleading context. She really is slick Nikolozzi. When he
(38:43):
was on the stand, after he says the exact opposite
of that polygraph, he says he does know the desert,
he does know everything about it. She asks him, didn't
you take a polygraph? And he said yes, And then
of course knowing polygraphs aren't admissible in court, so she
knew Gregory would object and it was a firm, so
(39:04):
that's it. The jury thought that he took in past
the polygraph about what he was saying. Now, it was
never cleared up that he took a polygraph to the
exact opposite of what he was saying. Now, that is
really devious. Now they called your ex girlfriend Lauren Cassiano
to the stand, whose testimony just can't be squared with
(39:24):
Albert Cleary's version of the same exact conversation between the
three of you on October twelfth. Both stories could not
be true. There could not have been the same meeting
that Albert and Lauren are talking about. And Albert's talking
about John complaining about disrespect and ordering Russo to commit
a murder, when Lauren is saying, no, what happened as
Russo said, I just want to rob the guy? Can
(39:45):
I borrow your gun? If that wasn't a red flag,
I don't know what is. And John, this was the
first time that you were hearing the one time love
of your life falsely implicating you in a murder that
was crushed. She stared at me the whole time she
was up there, and it wasn't like a malicious like
she wasn't staring me down. She was looking at me
(40:07):
like as if she was saying I'm sorry with her eyes.
I had a conversation with my stepsister about that. She
was like, she's being forced to do this for Zavila.
To me, she's telling you, I'm sorry. So at this
point the jury had heard from Bihari, Angel DiPietro, as
well as from Lauren and Albert, and to anyone paying attention,
it would have to be clear that one or both
(40:28):
of these versions of events simply were not true. So
at the last minute they pull a hail Mary. This
guy John A Vito, who is a jailhouse snitch, and
he claims that I was in jail with John, and
I was having visitation in Riker's Island the same time
John was, and he was with his father and two women,
and a Veto says I overheard John in response to
(40:52):
the question from his father, why did you have a
gun with you? John said, I don't know, I just did,
and in essence acknowledge have a gun. What the jury
never learns is that John Juca's father, prior to this
jailhouse visitation, which did happen, by the way, and it's
not surprising that the snitch would use a kernel of
(41:14):
truth that could be documented by looking at jail records.
But what the jury didn't know, and presumably the DA
didn't know it, was that John's father had a series
of debilitating strokes and as a result, he couldn't speak.
He couldn't say what a Vito said that he said,
He could only say one or maybe sometimes he would
(41:36):
string two words together. At the time. Had a veto
even sat close enough to hear your conversation. He sat
somewhere near us, but he didn't obviously sit close enough
to actually hear my father. Because he did, he would
have made up a better life. The jury also didn't
know that the family relatives, the women who were present,
would have strenuously denied that occurred. They have sworn under
(41:59):
oath and Davis that this never happened. And there was
even more to this false testimony where a Vito claimed
to hear incriminating statements directly from John, this time completely
changing the location of the crime. The murder unquestionably is
on Argyle Road. The shots were heard by the residents,
but a Vito says, No, what happened is John told
(42:19):
me that he went to the ATM with Mark Fisher, which,
as you also said earlier, was an hour before the murder.
But this is what snitches do. They read papers, they
see the news, and they concoct. He says, when Mark
Fisher withdrew money at the ATM that John told me
he pulled out a gun pistol whip, Mark Fisher beat
him up, and then Russo took the gun and shot him.
(42:40):
So the story changes dramatically. On top of the fact
that this is coming from a jailhouse snitch who again
was trying to avoid a prison sentence, and they're moving
the murder location. This is beyond absurd. So what did
Sam Gregory do about a veto? Unfortunately he didn't even
(43:00):
know about John Evito until right before a trial. There's
no offer proof, meaning here's what he's going to say.
There's no notice to the defense that, oh, by the way,
we're going to argue through this witness that Juco was
physically there and did it. So he wasn't prepared to
try a case on a theory other than the nonsense
inconsistencies that was going to come out of Lauren and Albert.
(43:23):
The defense had been aware of this from the beginning.
They could have tactically prepared differently. He could have prepared
to have John's father's doctor testified to his father's limitations,
or the two women could have testified to the actual
substance of the conversation. Instead, they're caught with their pants
down now. The defense did argue in their summation that
the mere fact that they called the Vito as a
(43:44):
witness was kind of a hail mary because Lauren and
Albert had imploded telling inconsistent stories. That was a credible
argument that led the prosecutor to respond that John Avito
was just for once in his life, being a good guy,
motivated to do the right thing, and that's the only
reason he's cooperating, and that was just a baldfaced lie.
(44:08):
So they squashed his problems in exchange for testimony for
the time being. They kept him out of jail despite
repeated violations in a mandatory prison sentence, and then once
he was no longer needed a year later, when he
violated the program again, they threw him out with the
trash and into prison he went. When he no longer
had any value to them. So this exchange of leniency
(44:31):
for testimony represents just one Brady violation. But there's another
major one in which Russo admitted to a fellow in
maintenamed James Ingram, to acting alone. And we'll get into
that Ingram evidence in more detail later, but back to trial.
So now they go from two conflicting versions of this
crime to three convicting versions of this crime. Not only
are they different, they're internally incompatible. You can't square any
(44:54):
one of the stories with the other. You had he
gave Russo a gun for a robbery, or he ordered
the murder for street credibility, or he told him to
show him what's up because he disrespected him by sitting
on the table, or he was there himself at the ATM.
And the concern here is you throw enough mud, however inconsistent.
(45:14):
It is that the risk and concern is that any
jurors says, if all of these people are saying he
did something, I may not know what the hell he did,
but he's sure as hell must have done it. Aren't
They not supposed to or not allowed to offer conflicting
theories of the crime. They're really supposed to take one
theory and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Not give
(45:35):
the jurors Chinese food menu of different theories, because then
you might have some jurors that believe this, some journeys
that believe that. It's called a unanimity issue where they
have to be unanimous about something. Yeah, to offer a
menu of theories and basically say it doesn't matter, you
know he did it, which is essentially what the summation
(45:55):
amounted to, is not consistent with due process, and it
leads to a jury possibly being six jurors say what
if he ordered a murder? Four jurors saying what if
he gave him a gun for a robbery? And what
if two jurors say, maybe he was physically there, Okay,
but we all agree he did it. Okay, guilty, that's absurd,
(46:17):
But that's what happened. It was the worst day of
my life. I was sentenced to twenty five to life
on October nineteenth, two thousand and five. Every idea you
could form in your mind full short of the reality
of how bad that is. It's like bleak, hopeless, stabilitating misery.
(46:39):
It's crippling. The depression in this space go through just
thinking about how I wasn't even alive for twenty five
years at that point when I got sentences, so I
don't even I didn't even know what twenty five years
to set life. In Part one of John Jeffer's story,
you heard about all of the different characters and circumstances
(46:59):
that led his arrest and conviction. Now here about his
epic battle through post conviction in Part two available now.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction special thanks to
our amazing production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea, Jeff Clyburne,
(47:20):
and Kevin Wards, with research by Lalla Robinson. The music
in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated
composer Jay Ralph. Make sure to follow us on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava
for Good. On all three platforms, you can also follow
(47:41):
on TikTok and Instagram at its Jason Flam. That's It's
Jason Flam. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts in the Association a Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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