Tragic (47 page)

“And did you know Vince Carlotta by sight?”

“Yes, he came to Sean’s funeral, but Charlie didn’t,” Devulder said, then choked up. “I saw him again going toward Marlon’s the night he was murdered. He gave me and my friends all the money he had in his pockets—thirty bucks, I think—and told me to come down to the union offices the next day and he’d see if he could do more for me. I was a little on the down and out, you see.”

Devulder shook her head sadly. “I told him not to go to that meeting with Charlie Vitteli. I told him to go home to his wife and child. I had a bad feeling in my bones. But Vince said he had to go; that it was for Sean and the other guys.”

Recalling her warning, Devulder began to cry lightly. Karp stepped forward and handed her the box of tissues that was on the witness-box ledge. He waited patiently for her until she’d calmed and sat dabbing at her eyes and nose with the tissue. Then, gently, he led her through a series of questions, beginning with getting her to describe the events of the night of the murder.

“My friends and me were Dumpster diving in the back of the alley when two guys jumped out of an older car and walked into the entrance of the alley,” she recalled. “They were dressed in black, and it was obvious they was up to no good. We were afraid they’d find us, so we hid real good, way back in the shadows, and we were ready to slip out our secret way between the buildings if we had to.”

However, the men had remained at the mouth of the alley, one of them smoking cigarette after cigarette, until they apparently received some signal from the car across the street. “They pulled stocking masks over their faces. It was pretty dark, but there was a little bit of light from a streetlamp and I could see that one of them had a gun. I don’t know why I did it—I was scared to death—but for some reason, I crept toward them. And when they
jumped out, and I heard voices, I went all the way to the front and looked out.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw four men sort of facing toward me—Mr. Carlotta, Vitteli, that creepy guy Joey Barros who’s always with him, and some younger guy I didn’t recognize. The two guys in the ski masks had their backs to me. One was behind the other, and the guy in front had a gun pointed at Mr. Carlotta.”

“Then what happened?”

“Mr. Carlotta put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a gun,” Devulder said, then nodded at the defense table, “but he grabbed Vince’s arm and pulled it down.”

“What, if anything, did anybody say?”

“Mr. Carlotta called Vitteli a son of a bitch.”

“You sure he wasn’t speaking to the gunman?”

“I’m positive,” Devulder said. “He looked down at his arm and then right at Vitteli and said it.”

“How far from these men were you?” Karp asked.

The woman thought about it for a moment, then nodded toward the courtroom doors. “About from here to the back of this room,” she said.

“And how’s your eyesight?”

Devulder chuckled. “Not so good close up,” she said. “But eyes like an eagle for anything over ten feet. I can see that guy in the back row has an American flag pin on his lapel.” She pointed and all eyes turned to look in that direction at an older man whose hand now self-consciously went to the pin she’d described.

“Now, returning to the confrontation,” Karp continued, “what, if anything, did the defendant, Charlie Vitteli, say?”

“He looked at the guy with the gun and yelled, ‘Do it!’ ”

“He yelled, ‘Do it’? You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“You sure he didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it’?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Plain as day I heard him yell, ‘Do it!’ And that’s
when the guy shot Vince.” Devulder sniffled and wiped at her nose with the tissue. “Then he shot him again.”

“What, if anything, did Charlie Vitteli say after that?”

“He told the two guys in the ski masks to take their wallets and watches. That’s what they did. Then he told ’em ‘get the fuck out of here,’ pardon my language but that’s what he said, and then they ran back across the street to the car.”

“What happened after that?”

“People were starting to come out of Marlon’s. So Charlie ran over to Vince and started acting like he was trying to save him. He yelled for help. That younger guy was yelling for help, too.”

Karp walked over to the prosecution table and picked up the plastic bag containing the bloodstained handkerchief. Returning to the witness stand, he held it up. “Mrs. Devulder, do you recognize this handkerchief?”

Devulder shuddered as she nodded. “Yes. It’s the handkerchief I picked up out of the fire barrel in front of the alley the night Vince was murdered.”

“Can you tell us how it came to be there?”

“Joey Barros threw it in.”

“Do you know where Joey Barros got it from?”

“Not really,” she replied with a shrug. “When they heard the shots, my friends came to get me—I was sort of frozen in place, I was so frightened. We stayed in the shadows when the cops and ambulance arrived, and the folks with the media. But we poked our heads out a bit to see what was going on and Vitteli saw us. He was standing with Barros and that younger guy. Scared us to death. We ducked and ran to the back of the alley and hid behind the Dumpster. We were going to run for the secret path when I seen Barros’s silhouette at the mouth of the alley looking in, but he didn’t see us in the dark. Then he tossed something in the barrel.”

“Were you still in the alley when the police arrived?”

Devulder nodded. “Yeah, but we squeezed into a little crack between
the buildings. We saw their flashlights and heard some footsteps, but you have to come right up to the crack or you wouldn’t know it’s there. So no one saw us.”

“As best as you can recall, when did you retrieve the handkerchief?”

Heaving a sigh, Devulder said, “It was a couple of hours later and we were cold as hell, so we, real quiet-like, tiptoed forward. Everybody was gone. My sister, Rosie—and I think of her as my sister—was going to make a fire, but I looked in the barrel and saw that.” She pointed at the handkerchief. “I picked it out and put it in a paper bag for safekeeping.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted something, I wanted proof of what Vitteli did. He spilled the blood of a good man, just like he did with Sean.”

Returning the handkerchief to the prosecution table, Karp asked, “Mrs. Devulder, did we have occasion to meet after this trial began?”

“Yes.”

“Had we ever met before that?”

“Well, I seen you in court during the trial of them two boys.”

“Alexei Bebnev and Frank DiMarzo?”

“That’s them,” she agreed. “You were real nice and polite. You said, ‘Good morning, ladies.’ ”

“Did we have any other conversation at that time?”

“No, that was it.”

“Did we eventually have a longer conversation?”

Devulder nodded. “Yes. You caught me and my friends sneaking into the courtroom during lunch.”

“What were you doing in here?”

“I was going to leave that handkerchief where Charlie sits.”

“Why?”

“I wanted him to know that the blood of Vince Carlotta wasn’t going to be so easy to get rid of . . . that someone out here knew what he’d done, even if he got off.”

“Why not turn it in to the police?” Karp asked. “Or bring it to me?”

Devulder bit her lip. “I was scared. Charlie Vitteli gets away with everything. He killed my Sean and a couple of other good men because of that so-called accident, and nothing happened. And he helped kill Vince Carlotta, and it didn’t seem like anybody was doing anything about it. I thought he would find a way to kill me, too, if he knew I seen what he done and that I had the handkerchief.”

“After I discovered you and your friends in the courtroom, did you agree to give a statement to Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma, who is sitting at the prosecution table over there?”

“Yeah,” Devulder said with a small wave to Guma. “I told him what I just told you, and he asked me a lot of questions.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Devulder,” Karp said. “I have no more questions.”

On cross-examination, Kowalski noted that Devulder and her friends had attended both the earlier trial and the current trial. “So you knew what was being said by other prosecution witnesses, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t have to hear what they said,” Devulder replied. “I was there, and I know what I saw and I know what I heard. That handkerchief proves I was there.”

“It proves that you were in possession of it when you met with Mr. Karp,” Kowalski retorted.

Devulder frowned and her eyes flashed. “I already said this, I don’t lie.”

Moving on, Kowalski hammered away at Devulder’s reasons for not coming forward sooner, hinting that it was part of a prosecution plan to spring her on the defense—without going too far with his conspiracy theory and raising the judge’s ire. But she held firm to her story, as she did when he noted again that she blamed Vitteli for her husband’s death.

“I did, and I do,” Devulder said. “But that’s not why I’m here.” Now infuriated, she partly rose out of her seat as she fixed Vitteli
with her glittering eyes and pointed at him. “I’m here because that man . . . that evil man . . . grabbed Vince Carlotta’s arm so that he couldn’t defend himself and then told the man with the gun to shoot him. I heard it and I saw it, and there’s nothing that anybody can say otherwise.”

With that, Kowalski suddenly must have decided that he was only digging a deeper hole and said he had no further questions. Dismissed from the witness stand, Devulder kept her eyes on Vitteli as she stepped down and passed him. Reaching the gate, she turned her head and walked down the aisle, where she was met by her two companions. The three then left the courtroom with their heads held high.

Kowalski never recovered from the beating delivered by Anne Devulder and the colossal collapse of the defendant’s case. His summation reminded Karp of a boxer leaning against the ropes, absorbing blow after blow, just hoping to stay on his feet until the final bell. The defense attorney made some halfhearted gratuitous references to Jackie Corcione’s “extravagant homosexual lifestyle,” and repeated his assertions, with one small change, that “barring the testimony of murderers and a woman who admits her hatred for my client” there was nothing to tie Charlie Vitteli to the conspiracy to murder Vince Carlotta.

Then it was Karp’s turn. Only he was the boxer throwing the jabs, crosses, uppercuts, and haymakers at the reeling defense. After an hour and a half of pummeling the defense, he held up the magazine photograph in its plastic sleeve and recalled the scene of Vitteli having to fold a copy of the photograph four times to fit it into his wallet. “As you can see, it was folded once . . . to fit into a Bible.”

Putting the photo back down on the table, Karp offered the jury his closing thoughts. “We now know this was not just some homicide, not just a stabbing, or shooting—as serious and horrible as those cases are, too. This case transcends those, because what we witnessed here in this courtroom was an extraordinary evil.
An evil that directed bullies in the night, who under the cover of darkness, hid in an alley to stalk and prey upon the innocent and defenseless. And for what? To keep his power, his privilege, his ill-gotten gains. This evil, the defendant Vitteli, operated in a realm that shocks our consciences. We know from the evidence that his decision to execute the deceased, Vince Carlotta, revealed that he has no soul and that he inhabits a netherworld where there are no constraints on satisfying desires; take what you want and kill whoever gets in your way; blame others for the crimes you commit. That’s Charlie Vitteli.”

Karp let the thought sink in as the jurors glanced at the defendant and then back to him. “Let’s take a brief moment to try to understand three of the witnesses you heard from who were also involved in this heinous, unjustified act: William ‘Gnat’ Miller, Frank DiMarzo, and Jackie Corcione. As they testified, they will pay a serious price and spend years and years in prison for the parts they played. We need to remember how it is they came forward and what the compelling issue was for them, which we now know was that they still retained a sense of their humanity; they couldn’t live with the guilt, their consciences wouldn’t let them. We’ve learned firsthand, haven’t we, that guilt is a powerful motivator that murders sleep and steals men’s souls?”

Karp turned to face his adversary. “Assuming they have a soul to steal.”

Over at the defense table, Charlie Vitteli’s head slowly rose. His face had turned the color of an eggplant and his hard, dark eyes were filled with rage and hatred. Sensing an eruption, Kowalski put a hand on his arm and said something into his ear. Vitteli gritted his teeth and dropped his head again.

Looking back at the jurors, Karp said, “We now know beyond any and all doubt that Vince Carlotta was not murdered in the course of a robbery. He wasn’t killed in a sudden outburst of unplanned violence. It was a setup; a calculated, cold-blooded execution to prevent Vince Carlotta from discovering Charlie Vitteli’s
so-called retirement fund. But for Vitteli’s evil on the night of December fifth in an alley in Hell’s Kitchen, Vince Carlotta would have returned home into the waiting arms of his wife, Antonia, and watched his son grow up. Without Vitteli, none of this tragedy would have happened; he was the master puppeteer pulling all the strings.”

Karp took a few steps back to the prosecution table and picked up the bag containing the bloodstained handkerchief before returning to the jury box. “And lest we forget, there is one more witness in this case, one whose voice you haven’t heard but whose blood testifies as surely as it would if he could take the stand. Blood that Charlie Vitteli cannot wipe from his hands and throw away as casually as he threw away the life of Vince Carlotta.”

Holding up the handkerchief, he concluded, “With this blood, Vince Carlotta is very much here in this court and he cries out for all of us to do justice. And I know that you will do just that.”

As Karp turned to go back to his seat, he glanced at the defense table and saw that Charlie Vitteli was staring at him. But the anger and hatred were gone from his eyes, replaced by fear and the certain knowledge that his doom was sealed.