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, ran into one another at a bar on the upper
East side of Manhattan. A mutual friend among them, Angel DiPietro, New Brooklyn night Albert Cleary, as well as her Fairfield University classmate Mark Fisher, a football player from New Jersey. When the knight started to wind down and all of the trains of Long Island and New Jersey had stopped running, Albert Cleary's friend, twenty year old John Juca, offered up his house in Flatbush, Brooklyn for an after party at
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 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 at a car door were 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 buried. But with this many witnesses placing blame on John. There had to be something to it. But this is wrongful conviction.
Welcome back to wronful conviction. Today, we have a story that was front page news all over New York City when it happened, with flaring headlines, salacious headlines about want to be Brooklyn gangsters 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 the
murder was not a group effort at all. The only group effort here took the form of multiple conflicting false statements against a member of that group, John Juka, and John is calling in from prison in upstate New York right now. I'm sorry you're here under these circumstances, but we're very honored to have you.
Thank you.
The only good news in this whole, miserable story is that his attorney is Mark Bedow, and Mark is one of the most respected criminal defense attorneys in the New York area and beyond. Mark, Welcome to Rofel 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 on the subway going to work. It was in the fall of two thousand and 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 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 grid Kid murder case became sensational from day one, and.
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 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 the jury pool. Now, don't forget the HBO series The Sopranos was an absolute cultural phenomenon at this time. It's the only thing people were talking about it. So this story of the death of a promising suburban kid allegedly at the hands of these wannabe 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 build up street credibility for a non existent 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 exactly was the Ghetto Mafia?
Oh? My god, it was a bunch of kids hanging out. We had some people who who used to hang out with us who never even heard of that 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, you know, 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 flat Bush called Prospect Park South. 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 considered 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 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 support me.
Then 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 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 Law and Order. I was on Lawn Order like ten times. I played a dead kid on Law and Order. I remember one funny story that I'm on Law and Order and I'm the dead kids. I'm laying on the pavement and I have fake blood all over my head and everything, and I remember the two actors, Jerry or Back and the other one, the two main.
Cops, Jerry or Back and Chris nods.
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 Orban kneels down and he kneels right on the keys and he's son of a bitch and they're like caught. And then they shoot it like four, five, six, seven times. They keep trying to shoot it. Things keep going wrong. And
then I had smoked some weed 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, cut and what are you talking about. He's like, I don't know, it smells like marijuana. And my stepfather's looking at me like, oh my god, I'm going to kill you.
That's incredible, and Jerry or back 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, Doreen, And I know her from rallies and events and calls and texts, and she's just a pillar of strength and somebody I admire greatly.
Yeah, but she was a recogd 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 neighborood used to come and she used to feed them, or we used to play basketball in the backyard or whatever. She always told me that law enforcement were the good guy. I remember this growing up. She was encouraging me to go to John Jay, encouraging me to become a comp Her brother is a correctional 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 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 mad, and then they don't get convicted unless this standard is met, and on and just none of that is true.
Yeah, you saw those standards go out the window pretty quickly when the false statements that were used to obtain your arrest, warrant 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 hers since I was about I don't know, fifteen or sixteen. I thought I wanted to get married and everything. We were young. Why used to practically live at her house sometimes I knew her whole family.
You ended up hiring her family's attorney, Sam Gregory, who had previously represented her father, sal Cassiano.
He was head of the events in the World Trade Center. He went to federal prisons because the World Trade Center got robbed. They said it was about four million Americans, So this is in 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. 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 pacula, 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 party's primary election. Whether or not that was a bargaining ship used to keep her son's name out of 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 a 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 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 is familiar with the problems in Brooklyn during the Heinz era. Nineteen ninety to twenty thirteen is a really dark period for criminal justice in 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 when people have really been paying attention to the problem of wrongful convictions, but I think a lot of the 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 Juka to this day is exhibit A.
And many of the people who worked under Hines, who were responsible and 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 Sega Nicklazzi. Those former heinz Adas, their reputations in public fates are arguably tied to the political fate of the Brooklyn DA's office.
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.
Her trial record, let me tell you something, if you want thirty six a poker in a row, 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 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 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, the crux of everything we're discussing. Of course, I'm referring to the awful night of October eleventh 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 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 Dipietro's father was a prominent Long Island defense attorney as well. So you had the Brooklyn contingent, which was John Albert Cleary, and two more neighborhood friends, Angel di 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 eastide 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 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 sometime 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, a few more people showed up. I'm pretty sure it was Tommy. Jimmy, my brother was home, and then 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 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 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 pas that served as an alleged motive.
Everybody was drinking, a couple of people with smoking weed. At one point Marks out on a table and we're going a big deal.
Right sitting 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 guest work out of what actually happened. Now, Russo said that he and Fisher went to the ATM together so Fisher could buy weed. Their re seat said for 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 UTM, Yes, and then they slip out. They say they said goodbye to people, but I don't remember them saying goodbye to anybody. I just remember them disappearing.
Without Meredith or 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 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 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 Di Pietro, and Albert Cleary. Now from this twenty eighteen detectives 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 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 at a sewer near his house.
It was later recovered by police. Now, immediately after the crime, Antonio Russo did a few things that a guilty person might.
He used to wear braids in 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.
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 ocumen of one point fifty Argyle, wrote Heroko. Swornick 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. Swornick 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 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 Fischer'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 on the right side of his face, suggesting that he had been in a fight with someone who was
left handed. While the suggestion of that physical evidence is not proof positive of anything, John is in fact a writing 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 in 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 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 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 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 has got long dreadlocks, and he's a tough guy. He sticks out like a sore 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. When trial comes around, Angel identifies John, which is not a big deal, just oh yeah, that's the guy who's 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 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 neighbors driveways are maybe at most twenty thirty yards across the street from the other neighbor's front doors.
Six point thirty in the morning on a Sunday, and there's boom boom, boom, boom, boom boom, and no one in the Cleary house. Here's the thing. And if you talk to some of the neighbors and they told us this when everybody came out, obviously, I mean it's kind of a big deal in a neighborhood like that. Nobody came out of the Cleary house. The morning after the murder.
Him and Angel DiPietro 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 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 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 calls from family and friends of Mark Fisher, and she told them that Meredith Denahan had given Mark trainfair and he had
taken a train around eight or nine am. Now, in initial interviews, Angel also told detectives that she had spoken to 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 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 is sneaking out to stup 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 is concerned about Mark Fisher is asking Where's Mark? Where's Mark? And 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.
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 after their son was murdered and John was convicted, and
they wanted to sue Albert and 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 DA'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 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 cops interviewed Antonio Russo a couple 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 pricing. As a matter of fact, Lauren Calciano drove me that was the seven oh Precinct detectives, which are the same guys who stuck a punger up the guy's ass abnue Luima.
And for those who don't remember the awful case of abnue Luima, embrace yourself. It was nineteen ninety seven and the seventieth Precinct, or the seven OZ as it 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 when back at the seventieth precinct they sexually assaulted mister Luima with a broken broomstick,
and yes, it's actually even worse than it sounds. This sparked national outrage and protests 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. They said, 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. And I'm like, oh, my fucking.
God, un fucking 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 cuts the interviews often he said, that's it. That's the only thing you guys want to hear. That's it. 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 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 send. At that time was I know nothing. But a few months later, after he 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 Adas and Major K Squad detectives, and Michael Vickione 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, 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 twelve, 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 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 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, 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. 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 as shit. But you have conclusive proof that the prosecution has no problem calling at least one witness it knows is flat out perjuring themselves,
now cleary. He also added to that story that you know, I was talking to John and this guy Rob Register, the head of ghetto mafia, and John and Raw We're talking about how we don't have enough street credibility, so we need to catch your body. Legister at the time was a college student of 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 fallse statements that eventually got John indicted at a secret grand jurie. Now, 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 one, 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 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 that have 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 Recione and I could hear on the phone because it's so loud, and we're sitting in a quiet car, and he is laughing hysterically, and he said, wish you to marry Christmas while he was just laughing like a cool evil for the fucker their youth.
So you spent Christmas on Riker's Island, and with a Class A one felony, you weren't giving 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 film or so 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 had a seat as primary challenger Stge 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 GOP 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 they called him, and they didn't plan on losing, so they needed to support their two false witnesses with more bullshit and 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, 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 pick up, and Biharry testified that he looked at the item and that it was a firearm. So that testimony was potentially very damaging, but was problematic for
a lot of reasons. He was threatened with losing his son, with being prosecuted for actually possessing the gun, which is a 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 leave the money in its place.
All they had to do to prove that that wasn't true was 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 Johnavito, who did time at Rikers 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 DIA's office to snatch up another willing participant in John's railroading. So you 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.
The green jury.
So we've gone over three of the four substantive witnesses, Albert Cleary, Lauren Calciano, and Anthony Bajari. Lauren and Anthony I'm both recanted under oath, as has the jail house snitch John DeVito, whose testimony were about to cover Mark tell us about the state's case.
The jury's being told essentially that Juka's childhood friend, Albert Cleary's going 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 jukea rage to the point where he 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 obviously based on nine one one calls 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 a one PM phone call up to eleven, which.
Angel d Pietro testified falsely to as well. So you had called Albert just before one pm that day. Phone wreckers corroborated that, 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. Nicolazzi 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. Nicolosi when he was on the stands after he says the exact opposite of that polygraph, He says he does know who did this, and 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 course, so she knew Gregory would object and it was a firm soul.
That's it.
The jury thought that he took and past that polygraph about it 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 Colciana to the stand, whose testimony just can't be squared with Albert Cleary's version of the same exact conversation between the three of you on October twelve.
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 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 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 as obvious 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 of these versions of events simply were not true.
So at the last minute they pull a Hail Mary. This guy John Avito, 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 Avito says I overheard John in response to 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 truth that could be documented by looking at jail records. But what the jury didn't know, and presumably the DA didn't know, was that John's father had a series of debilitating strokes and as a result, he couldn't speak.
He couldn't say what Alvito said that he said, He could only say one or maybe sometimes he would string two words together at the time.
Had a Vito 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 if he did, he would have made up a better lie.
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 oath and to Davis if 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 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 with Mark Fisher beat him up and then
Russo took the gun and shot him. 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 Vito?
Unfortunately he didn't even know about John Avito until right before a trial. There's no offer of 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 Juca 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. If 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 testify 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 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 bald face lie.
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 for testimony represents just one Brady violation. But there's another major one in which Russo admitted to a fellow inmate named James Ingram to acting alone. And we'll get into that Ingram evidence and 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 one of the stories with the other. 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. It is that the risk and concern is that any juror 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 it. 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 the jurors Chinese suit menu of different theories, because then you might have some jurors that believe this and some jurors that believe that. It's called the 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 amounted to. It's not consistent with due process, and it leadsleads 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, 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. It's crippling, the depression and the space go toward just thinking about how I wasn't even alive for twenty five years at that point when I got sent into side, I don't I didn't even know what twenty five years that was.
In Part one of Jean Dreufa's story, you heard about all of the different characters and circumstances that let his arrest and conviction. Now hear 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, Any Chelsea, Jeff Clyburn, and Kevin Wartis, with research by Lyla 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 on TikTok and Instagram at its Jason Flamm. That's It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good podcasts in association with signal Company Number one