Gambino Case Is Expected To Fall Short of Mega-Trial

When the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn recently named 61 men and a woman on a single indictment aimed at crippling the Gambino crime family, one question that surfaced was what such a trial might look like. Between the lawyers, deputy marshals, and stacks of evidence, a courtroom can start to look crowded before the first defendant arrives, much less dozens of them.The answer, lawyers say, is that there isn’t likely to be a single mega-trial involving most of the defendants, even counting for some to plead guilty. When it comes to weighing guilt and innocence, there are limits to the number of defendants for which even the sharpest of juries can account. While each person is entitled to a jury of one’s peers, a jury alongside one’s peers could violate due process as soon as it gets difficult to remember who is alleged to have done what.“A trial that big would simply never happen,” a former Brooklyn federal prosecutor who now does white-collar defense at Kaye Scholer LLP, Daniel Alonso, said. “The level of prejudice to any defendant starts to get pretty high. In practicality, the judge will eventually split this case into a number of smaller trials.”The indictment, which runs 169 pages and describes 30 years’ worth of murders, labor racketeering, illegal gambling, and drug dealing that prosecutors attribute to the Gambino crime family, was unsealed last Thursday.The bulk of the indictment charges a racketeering conspiracy, which allows prosecutors to cast a wide net and include most anyone they believe to have played a role, no matter how minor. Indicting many people at a go works to the advantage of prosecutors. It is likely to ensure that the case doesn’t head to trial for a long time, as defense lawyers are confronted with sorting through a mountain of evidence and the presiding judge goes one by one through the motions of each defendant. That time lag could encourage individual defendants to plead guilty or cooperate in an effort to get the thing over with. By pleading guilty, some defendants might find they are able to serve most of or even an entire jail sentence by the time co-defendants head to trial, lawyers said.That is doubly true for the defendants who can’t make bail.“When somebody is locked up in pre-trial detention, they’re likely going to be squeezed to cooperate,” a former federal prosecutor who now handles organized crime cases as a criminal defense attorney, Ephraim Savitt, said.In the meantime, a mass indictment may also slow down the bail process by requiring defense lawyers to coordinate their efforts.A lawyer for one of the defendants told the New York Times that naming all the defendants on a single indictment is “merely an attempt to detain people without bail for many, many months, which is contrary to the Constitution of the country.”The lawyer, Joseph Corozzo, is representing his father of the same name, whom prosecutors say is the consigliere of the Gambino family.Mass arrests and indictments are not unheard of, especially in racketeering cases in federal court. The local benchmark for large scale trials is the 17-month “Pizza Connection” trial that began in 1985 with 22 defendants accused of running a network of pizza restaurants as a front for a drug ring.More recently, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn named 61 people in a criminal complaint alleging they had participated in staging fake accidents to bring false insurance claims. The same office also once indicted 27 people at once on charges that Local One of the elevators construction union had run a no-show jobs scheme.The main reason for assembling a big indictment, instead of a series of smaller cases, may have less to do with courtroom strategy than with grabbing the attention of the public.“Its about the big splash you get from having a very large indictment,” a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, Andrew Hruska, who is now at King & Spalding LLP, said.

Gambino Case Is Expected To Fall Short of Mega-Trial

Gambino Case Is Expected To Fall Short of Mega-Trial

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