Chapter 51

“Ralph Salierno Didn’t Do What They Say He Did”

Jury A filed in at 9:45 A.M. the next day—Tuesday, March 23, 2004. Their turn. They consisted of nine men and five women. All but one was white. There was one black male.

Salierno was already in the courtroom, looking about as studious as possible, wearing his dark suit and his black-rimmed glasses.

Salierno’s defense attorney, Seth Muraskin, began his closing argument by thanking the members of the jury for their patience. Because of the special nature of the trial, the juries had been asked to get up and down a lot during the course of their testimony, and for putting up with that inconvenience, Muraskin thanked them.

He said, “Ralph Salierno didn’t do what they say he did. He did not conspire with anyone to do anything. There’s a lot you did not see. There is a lot you were not shown. There was no physical evidence to suggest or even link him to this crime. No DNA. No fingerprints. No bloodstains. Absolutely nothing. There’s nothing that puts him where they want him to be.”

Muraskin said that the story, as the prosecution told it, was fiction.

“It never happened,” he said. “It was a confabulation based on snippets of fact and plenty of lies. And lies from whom? The biggest collection of drug addicts, drug dealers, convicted felons, rats, and liars.”

All lies. The white van they had heard so much about? It didn’t exist. There wasn’t a shred of believable evidence that the van ever existed.

“Lucas Schmitt, who procured the van with his credit car, couldn’t ID Salierno,” Muraskin said. “They asked him about the guy who got the van and he described Paget.”

Muraskin told the jury that Salierno’s predicament had a lot to do with previous statements made by a fellow named Michael Alexander. Alexander was the guy who had been arrested for grand larceny by the NYPD, the one who had provided information during his interrogation, who was the first to supply authorities with the name Scott Paget.

And it was Paget, in turn, who had implicated Salierno. Yet, where was Mike Alexander? Everything hinged on Mike Alexander’s word, and yet when they presented their case, he was not called as a witness.

“The silence coming from that chair is deafening. The prosecution benefited from Mike Alexander’s absence,” Muraskin said.

The defense attorney then turned his attention to a witness who did testify, Michael “Big Balls” Fiaccabrino—the guy who said Salierno gave him first dibs to drive the white van to Long Island.

“This guy testifies against my client, and suddenly, by the magic of his cooperation, he gets a thirty-seven-month sentence,” Muraskin said. The sentence may or may not have seemed too short to the jury. Three-plus years is a bit more than a slap on the wrist.

Muraskin then hit upon his favorite subject—the bogus nature of Ralph Salierno’s confession under the grilling of the case’s lead investigator, Detective Anderson.

“Police drove Salierno from Westchester to Suffolk, and never asked him if he wanted a lawyer,” he said. His tone told the jury that the outrageousness was beyond comprehension.

Then he tried to communicate the ultimate creepiness and danger of an Anderson interrogation. “Imagine being in an eight-by-eight windowless room where Anderson is king. Imagine being in Anderson’s world. Imagine being alone, cut off from the outside world,” he said.

He asked the jury to believe his client’s claim that it was Paget and not he who had pulled the trigger. He had only been speaking for a little more than a half hour, but he was through. He had tried hard, but had little with which to work. Either the jury believed Salierno’s confession—or they did not. They believed Salierno’s alibi witness—or they did not.

After Muraskin ended his argument, a class of high-school girls filed solemnly into the courtroom to observe the proceedings. They had missed the day’s opening act.