CHAPTER 13

The Trial that Was

With few words, Judge Michael Obus introduced Manuel Martinez and his defense team to a jury of Martinez’s peers. “I’m just going to introduce you to some of the participants here,” the judge told the panel. “The name of the defendant, which you may have heard when the name of the case was called into the record, is Manuel Martinez. Seated next to Martinez is his attorney, Mr. Jonathan Strauss, and also seated at counsel table is Mr. [James] Coffey, who is just assisting Mr. Strauss in this matter.

“Seated at the other counsel table,” Obus continued, “is Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann and his colleague, Ms. Soumya Dayananda.”

Thus began the criminal trial in the State of New York versus Manuel Martinez.

The first witness called to the stand by the prosecution was Moses Crespo, the door attendant on duty that fateful morning. He was sworn in and the questioning began. Crespo, a soft-spoken man who stayed in shape by riding his mountain bike to and from his doorman job at the 205 East Sixty-ninth Street apartment building from his home in Queens, was asked to speak up. Then, he was asked to verify, including through crime-scene photos, what he had seen and heard that morning. On the stand, he confirmed what he had said to police years earlier on the day of the murder.

Years later, while standing outside 205 East Sixty-ninth Street, Moses said, “I’ve been interviewed many, many times for this case.” As Moses stood on the sidewalk and described for a writer the scene from that October day and the events as they unfolded, he called George Kogan his friend: “He was my paisano, my countryman. We were both from Puerto Rico. He was a nice man, a friendly man. He was my brother.”

Back in the courtroom, Moses explained to the jury their cordial relationship: “Basically, he was a friendly person to begin with, and, besides that, we came from the same country, Puerto Rico.”

Moses also testified that in the two years he’d known George, while George lived at the apartment with Mary-Louise, he’d met George’s two sons. But he’d only once met Barbara. “One morning, I was working and she showed up at the building asking for George Kogan,” Moses testified. “She just turned around and walked away.”

“And why was that?” the prosecutor asked.

“Because I did not allow her to go into the building,” said Moses, who also testified that he saw George and Mary-Louise every day while on the job at 205 East Sixty-ninth Street.

When asked how he viewed George and Mary-Louise as a couple, Moses said, “They seemed very happy together.”

Moses started to tell the jury how the housekeeper had pounded on the lobby door to be let in just after George was shot. But as Moses began providing details, the defense objected and the court did not allow Moses to continue.

When asked what he saw after he ran outside to where George lay on the sidewalk, when he looked at George’s back, he said, “I could see some marks. It looked like bullet holes.”

He then told the jury how he’d hurried back to the apartment building to first call 911, then to notify Mary-Louise. “I didn’t mention anything was going on,” he said. “I just told her to come out, and she went out.” Moses described how, once outside, Mary-Louise lost her composure and was so distraught that she had to be restrained and led back into the apartment building. “After that,” Moses testified, “I had to stay on the door. I could not get involved with any other thing.”

On March 25, 2008, Mary-Louise Hawkins, who had flown in from her London home, took the stand and retold the events of that day, as well as details about her relationship with George, during testimony on direct examination by prosecutor Joel Seidemann and cross-examination by attorney Strauss. Calmly and matter-of-factly, she answered their questions. She testified that she’d worked for publicist Matthew Evins, who recommended her to do public relations work for the Kogans, to counteract the bad publicity they had received because of a store robbery. Mary-Louise, she told the court, first met Barbara when Barbara interviewed her, and then George. Mary-Louise told the jury how, in short order, George began courting her. She repeated in court the words she had cried out as she stood in horror at the sight of her boyfriend sprawled out on the sidewalk nearly nineteen years earlier. “It was his wife! It’s his wife!” she repeated in court.

Much had changed. By the time Mary-Louise testified at the Martinez’s 2008 trial, she was forty-six, married, and living in Europe.

When asked to describe her relationship with George after he moved in with her, Mary-Louise told the court, “He was a sweet, gentle, loving person. I felt real, real sorry for him in the beginning, because he was completely damaged, incredibly shy, and I fell in love with him and was really happy to be with him.”

They lived in a desirable area of Manhattan. Mary-Louise’s co-op was dog friendly, so they adopted a small poodle and took long walks with him in Central Park. They went to a gym three or four times a week together, she told the court, and spent time dining out, often choosing “a different nationality of food,” or staying in and cooking together. George always had his cell phone with him, and conducted business on the phone as they walked.

“We went to museums,” she said. “He was really interested in art, and so was I, so we went to a lot of museums.”

End to end, Manhattan is roughly thirteen miles in length and two miles across. George and Mary-Louise each Sunday chose a different part of New York, mapped it, and then walked to it, for exercise and to see as much of the city as they could. “We went to the Lower East Side,” Mary-Louise said. “We went to Brooklyn. There was a lot of walking, because he needed exercise, and we went to the gym three or four times a week, but it was pretty mundane for other people, I would suppose.”

They also went on business trips to Puerto Rico or to Miami, when George needed to be there. After losing her job at Evins Communications, Mary-Louise did not go back to work, and she was able to travel with him.

“How were you supporting yourself?” Seidemann asked her.

“I had an income from a commercial property I owned with my sister,” she said.

“And what was George Kogan doing to support himself at that time?”

“He had small debts that he collected from people. He had some cash. In the beginning, he manipulated things a little bit to just eke out some cash, but he was more and more strapped for cash as the contested [divorce] time grew on.”

She said the bank accounts were “all frozen.”

“And did there come a time when he had little cash, when he was strapped for cash?” Seidemann asked. If so, he asked, did she do anything to help him?

“Pretty much, yes. I put him on as an auxiliary cardholder on all of my credit cards, so that he would be able to charge stuff and wouldn’t have problems getting around. He did a lot of talking on the phone to try to move money around and try to keep assets from being foreclosed, because, since everything was frozen, properties were in danger of going into bankruptcy, really. So, he had trouble, and he would stay on the phone a lot. He would conduct business either sitting on the couch in the drawing room or on a bench in Central Park, on his cell phone.”

“Did there come a time,” Seidemann asked her, “when George was sued for divorce?”

“Yes, in February of 1989.”

Barbara occasionally called the apartment to speak with George, Mary-Louise testified. “Usually, [it was] arguments about paying bills,” she told the court. “The constant quarrels about money—it was never solved.” During that time, George had fought to hang on to his properties.

The prosecutor inquired about the apartment the she and George shared, asking Mary-Louise, “Who was paying the mortgage?”

“My dad,” Mary-Louise answered.

She also testified that George’s relationship with his sons, especially Billy, his youngest, had been strained, because of the divorce. “He tried in every way he could to keep communications open, but Billy was pretty steadfast that he was siding with his mother and couldn’t believe that his father was doing such a thing. [Billy] was understandably upset. He didn’t take it very well that his father had left his mother and sided with the mother and refused to speak to George.”

By the summer of 1990, things had improved some between father and son. “Billy had gotten into Cardozo Law School, and I helped him furnish an apartment that he was going to move into,” Mary-Louise told the court. Billy became the mediator between Barbara and George in the hopes of settling his parents’ divorce through an amicable agreement.

Scott agreed with Mary-Louise. During his testimony, he said the same: “About six months before my dad passed away, they started to become closer. My father always kept the channels of communication open, and my brother somehow just came around. And, I must say, thank God for that period of time when my brother had that closeness with him.”

In an ironic twist, Mary-Louise revealed in court what Barbara Kogan had not known. “The day before [George] was supposed to meet with Barbara and Billy, we sat down and drew up the skeleton of a way to work up an agreement,” she told the court. “There weren’t figures mentioned in this document, but it was a way to generate figures that he was hoping Barbara would agree to.”

“And what was George proposing?” the prosecutor asked.

“Basically, proposing to give her half of everything,” Mary-Louise said.

That revelation, made in open court, would be how Barbara would learn, through news reports, when it was much too late, that George had been preparing to give her half of his assets to settle their divorce and be done with it.

“And can you characterize how George felt about the possibility of reaching a settlement?” Mary-Louise was asked.

“Optimistic,” she answered. “He was optimistic.”

Seidemann also told the court that the evidence showed, in the form of a handwritten settlement proposal, that “George Kogan the very day that he was murdered was to meet with Barbara Kogan and William Kogan, his son, in an effort to bang out a settlement agreement, and George was hopeful that that’s what would happen.”

Mary-Louise also testified that, once George’s divorce was final, the two of them planned to marry and then move to Europe.

Throughout her time on the stand, Mary-Louise remained stoic, not allowing emotion to take over even as she talked about the October day her boyfriend was fatally shot and how she learned about it.

She told the court that after doorman Moses Crespo had knocked on her door, telling her that George was outside and wanted to talk to her, she walked outside to find her boyfriend “lying face down on the pavement. There were three holes in his back.”

She also testified that George did not keep a 9-to-5 workday schedule, so it would not have been easy for a would-be assassin to monitor his daily routine. About her life afterward, she told the court that, despite George’s death, she married and relocated to Europe a few years after the murder.

During his cross-examination of Mary-Louise, Strauss pointed out that Hawkins had moved in with a married man, asking her if she had “shacked up” with George. He also asked her about Barbara after she became involved with her husband. “During this time frame, had you seen Barbara?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay. You weren’t telling her, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m sleeping with your husband,’ were you?”

“No, I did not,” she answered.

The prosecutor, in redirect, asked about her boyfriend’s funeral.

“Can you explain to the members of the jury why it was you didn’t attend George Kogan’s funeral?” he asked.

“On the advice of my family’s attorney, I was advised to stay at home, because we had been hounded by the press and he really thought that my going to the funeral would just create a huge circus. And, in fact, a girlfriend of mine who looks a lot like me went hoping to support me, and she got followed by the press all the way down the street, because they thought she was I, me, so I did not go.”

“And how did you feel about it?” Seidemann asked.

“Devastated. I wanted to go, but I saw the logic,” Mary-Louise said.

On Tuesday, April 8, Ernest Bugge, by then a retired and heavily decorated detective with the New York Police Department, also testified for the prosecution. Bugge took the stand, and, upon cross-examination by Jonathan Strauss, the detective said that in October 1995, five years after the murder, he had showed Beverly Kantor a photo lineup that included Paul Prosano. Bugge admitted on the stand that Kantor was not able to identify Prosano from the lineup as the man she saw standing, holding a gun, over George Kogan.

Detective Bugge, eventually assigned to the Kogan case, assisted fellow Detective Daniel Massanova with the January 1996 arrest of Paul Prosano and his partner, Joseph McKee, for a kidnapping in which Prosano and McKee broke into the 25 Fifth Avenue ninth-floor apartment of forty-eight-year-old Frances Barnes and held her hostage for two and a half hours. Frances Barnes testified at the men’s trial in 1997.

Detective Bugge had shown the same photo array that included Prosano’s image to Wilmer Rodriguez, an employee in Martinez’s law office who’d known Paul Prosano from his visits to Martinez’s office.

“Did Wilmer Rodriguez positively identify Paul Prosano as the hit man?” Strauss asked.

“No,” Detective Bugge responded.

The prosecution needed to illustrate a connection between Martinez and the alleged hit man, Paul Prosano. So Seidemann called Paul Cardone, nephew of Peter Cardone, to the stand. The senior Cardone owned, with his wife Catherine, a gun shop in Stormville, New York, and Martinez was the shop’s accountant and tax attorney. When the nephew took the stand, he testified about his knowledge of the relationship between Frank Bongarzone, who formerly shared a cell in a Staten Island prison with Paul Prosano. Prosano was the one who’d introduced Bongarzone to Peter Cardone, who later hired him to do maintenance work at his gun shop. Martinez met both Bongarzone and Prosano when he stopped by the gun shop in the course of his financial work for the store.

Growing up, Paul Cardone told the court, he often spent summers at his uncle’s home and regularly accompanied Peter to gun shows to learn the used- and antique-gun business. He regularly saw Bongarzone, whom he referred to as “Frankie.” Cardone told the court that “Frankie was aspiring to be a gangster.”

That’s when Strauss objected.

“Relevance, your honor,” he said.

“I’ll allow it,” Judge Obus ruled, and the connection between Martinez, Cardone, Prosano, and the wannabe gangster Bongarzone was made.

*   *   *

When it came time on March 26 for Dr. Michael Marano, the emergency-room surgeon who operated on George Kogan, to take the stand, Seidemann did the direct examination. His testimony was vital to the case, because Marano, who was also the doctor on duty who evaluated George upon his arrival at the hospital, described how hard the team of surgeons had worked to save his life. The court swore in Marano as a qualified expert witness in “operability and microscopics of firearms,” according to court documents.

When it came time for jurors to hear details of the medical care, treatment, and surgery performed on George at New York Hospital, Assistant District Attorney Soumya Dayananda was the one who questioned Doctor Marano.

“I was first called to the emergency room on the date of his arrival just after the cardiac surgery team had been called, because he had been brought into the emergency room with a very low blood pressure and then suffered what we would call a traumatic cardiac arrest,” Marano said. “As part of the general surgery team, it was my responsibility to evaluate patients in that situation.”

“Now,” Dayananda asked, “when you first saw [George], at some point was he able to be stabilized?”

“He was able to be stabilized, but it took quite a bit of effort. It took approximately an hour or perhaps a bit more to restore his blood pressure so he was stable, but in a very precarious situation.”

“And once he was stabilized, what did you do?”

“Once he was stabilized in the emergency room,” Dr. Marano said, “and that required quite a bit of work mostly by the cardiac surgery team, including opening his chest and trying to stop the flow of blood into the chest temporarily, trying to suture a hole in the patient’s heart and restoring his blood pressure with many transfusions of blood. After that occurred, we did have at least a relatively low blood pressure enough that we brought him in the operating room to try to repair his other injuries.”

“And what surgeries were performed?” Dayananda asked.

“The intent of the surgery that I was involved with was to explore into the patient’s abdomen and try to repair injuries that had occurred in that location. The cardiac surgery team continued to repair the hole in the coronary arteries of the patient’s heart in the operating room and then to close his chest.”

The procedure, the doctor told the court, lasted about four hours. “It was quite a difficult operation for the patient,” Marano continued. “He was quite unstable for the majority of it and we were able to successfully get him through the surgery, but it was clear that he was deteriorating rapidly. We got him to the surgery intensive care unit, but shortly thereafter, within fifteen or twenty minutes, the patient expired [at] approximately 4 p.m. Very aggressive efforts were employed to try to save his life.”

Next, Dr. Aglae Charlot took the stand to talk about the autopsy, performed the day after George died. She testified that state’s evidence, bullet number one, entered through the middle of George’s back, close to the spine, and into the right side of the chest, “through the liver, and the exit wound was in the skin of the front of the chest.” The bullet, she said, somewhere at the scene of the crime, was not recovered.

Bullet number two, she said, went through the right side of the back, “entered the chest, went throught the liver also, and the bullet was recovered in this area,” she told the jury as she pointed to a diagram on a large screen. She said she recovered the mishapen bullet and saved it as evidence.

“Gunshot number three,” Doctor Charlot said, “was on the left side of the back of the chest, and the bullet also entered the left chest cavity, went through the lung, through the covering of the heart, and it was reported to us that the bullet was recovered by the surgeon at the time of surgery.” She described the bullet as “deformed.”

Next, the actual damaged bullet, People’s Exhibit Number 17, was shown to the jury as one of the few pieces of evidence in the case.

All told, George Kogan suffered injuries to his liver, lungs, and heart, Charlot explained: “For each one of those organs separately injured, one separately will cause blood loss, and with three of them, it just adds up. The brain was pale. There was no blood reaching the brain. It is my understanding that they tried blood transfusions, and blood was given to him in the hospital, and also fluid. It did not succeed.”

Joel Seidemann asked Charlot, “Do you have an opinion, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, as to what caused George Kogan’s death?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“And can you tell that to the members of the jury?”

“Yes. It was the injuries caused by the gunshot wounds and the bullets entering his body and his vital organs.”

Also testifying was Detective John Kraljic. In an unusual move, Kraljic was shown a sample gun—not the one used to kill George Kogan, but one the prosecution described to the jury as “similar”—a .44-caliber, semi-automatic revolver, People’s Exhibit No. 25. Investigators never found the gun used to kill George Kogan. Presentation of the sample gun to the witness made for stunning testimony. He showed the jury a large-caliber pistol that, when loaded, is powerful enough, as the LAPD SWAT officer had observed, to kill a grizzly.

Martinez’s lawyer objected to admitting the gun as evidence, so the judge called counsel to the bench to discuss it, in a sidebar, out of earshot of the jury. Strauss told Judge Obus, “I’m going to object to them introducing a gun and waving it around in front of the jury. I think it’s only done for the purposes to inflame the jury, and I don’t think it’s appropriate.” Despite the defense’s argument, Judge Obus allowed the gun in as an exhibit (a move that would not be lost on Martinez’s appellate attorney). It was admitted as being similar to a gun used in a kidnapping and robbery perpetrated by a man named Paul Prosano, although the weapon in that case was not located either. The prosecution then asked witness Frances Barnes, one of two women kidnapped by Prosano and McKee, to help prove the point by having Frances describe to the jury a weapon she’d seen Prosano handle while he held her hostage. By calling Barnes, the prosecutor tried to illustrate for the jury Prosano’s criminal background, which included the frightening episode involving Barnes and her roommate being held at gunpoint.

At 11 p.m. on March 29, 1991, Good Friday, Frances awakened in her bedroom to a stranger standing over her, pointing a gun. He told her he was a police officer, showed her his badge, and asked her if she had any weapons in the apartment. Then, a second man, also armed, brought Frances’s roommate into the bedroom. They talked about a man in the building they wanted to teach a lesson to. After a couple of hours, they took the women to the roof, looking for an exit. After not finding an escape route, they returned to the apartment. Once inside again, the men explained that they had gone to the building to teach a man who lived there a lesson, because he’d gotten one of their relatives turned onto drugs. But their ploy was interrupted and, to hide, they broke into Frances’ apartment, where they planned an escape route out of the building.

“They decided the best way out was for the four of us to go in the elevator together downstairs, past the doorman, and out into the street and into a taxicab,” Barnes testified, “The taxicab went over to Sixth Avenue, turned up Sixth, and they let us out.” The women walked back to their apartment building, where the doorman called the police. It would take nearly five years for the kidnappers to be arrested.

Then, after McKee and Prosano’s January 1996 arrests on the kidnapping charges, Peter Sadadinski, Prosano’s father, contacted Manuel Martinez for help in posting a $50,000 bond for his son’s release from jail. The case, the prosecution pointed out, linked Prosano to Martinez through their mutual friend Paul Cardone. Also, Paul Prosano had signed a letter authorizing Prosano’s brother, Peter Sadadinski Jr., to pick up Prosano’s personal belongings from a police property clerk at the 120th Precinct on Staten Island. Martinez had notarized that letter, and his signature made it a documented link tying Prosano to Martinez.

In 1997, Paul Prosano and his partner Joe McKee were convicted for the crime. The prosecutor asked Barnes, a social worker and the mother of two, about the weapon she’d seen with Prosano during the kidnapping.

“Is this the gun Paul Prosano had?” Seidemann asked as he showed her the sample snub-nosed revolver.

“It looks like the kind of gun that Tony Prosano was holding,” Barnes answered, referring to Paul Prosano by his nickname.

“How was it similar?”

“It’s a revolver. It’s got a brown handle and the same shape, same size,” she answered.

The testimony was dramatic, with the prosecutor parading a gun before the jury, even though it was not the same revolver used in the killing of George Kogan. But that didn’t matter. Absent the actual murder weapon, it was as close as the prosecution could get.

Next, Beverly Kantor, thirty-five at the time of the shooting, recounted how she’d parked her car near the entrance of 205 East Sixty-ninth Street and saw a heavyset man head toward the building’s awning. Another man was about ten to twenty feet behind him.

“I wanted to park in front of the awning, but the doorman wouldn’t let me,” Kantor testified. “So I parked here,” indicating to the jury she had parked her car just past the awning.

After she was out of her car, “I see a man walking with a couple of grocery bags and then I see another man following him,” she said. “It looks like he is following him, and he takes a gun out from the inside of his pants and he shoots the man three times in the back.”

“And can you describe to the jury—you said you saw him take the weapon out; is that correct?” the prosecutor asked.

“From the front of his pants, yes.”

“How would you describe the shooter’s demeanor at the time?”

“He was very calm. He just, you know, like you were reaching for a piece of gum, he just took—he just took the gun out and bang, bang, bang”—she lifted her arm, as if she were shooting a gun—“and then put it back in his sweatshirt, turned around, and walked up to Third Avenue and took a right.”

During the trial, in a sidebar discussion between Assistant District Attorney Soumya Dayananda and Jonathan Strauss, Dayananda asked the court’s permission to question Kantor on the stand about the statement she’d heard Mary-Louise Hawkins cry out that October morning, “It was his wife! It’s his wife!” Obus ruled against allowing the statement. Judge Obus told Dayananda, “The witness is just speculating in and of itself. Make sure your witness does not volunteer it.”

Kantor’s response to the street shooting playing out in front of her was to recoil. “I shut my car door,” she said. “I looked at the shooter first to see where he was going. He looked at me. I looked at him.”

“I didn’t know what he had in mind. And he ran back up toward Third Avenue, north. When I saw the coast was clear, I went to the victim. He was lying flat on his stomach.”

“I tried to ask him some questions,” she continued. “He had heavy breathing, and he did not respond. I could see one bullet hole. I knew three [rounds] were shot, but I just noticed one.”

“Hang on,” she told George. “Take it easy. The ambulance will be here soon.”

She was ten feet away from Kogan when he was killed and about fifteen feet from the shooter, face to face.

“He looked right at me,” she testified. “He did look at me, and I don’t know if he had a thought, but he did look at me and he did look around and that was the only thing I really captured from him, was that he looked around. He did not look nervous. He didn’t look scared, and then he put the gun back in the front of his pants, [pulled] the sweatshirt down, turned around, and walked up towards Third Avenue. He didn’t say anything.”

“Did you see him approach the victim after the victim went down?”

“He did not.”

She also said the shooter was about ten feet away from George when he was shot, which didn’t match the autopsy findings of Dr. Aglae Charlot that George was shot at point-blank range.

While Beverly Kantor saw most of the crime as it happened, she’d ducked when she saw the suspect pull the gun out of his waistband. Three other witnesses saw the shooter immediately after the murder, turning their heads toward the sound of the gunfire. But only one—the housekeeper on her way to work—saw the entire shooting as it unfolded. The other witnesses stood in stunned surprise as the aftermath of the crime played itself out before their eyes like a scene in a murder mystery. The housekeeper saw George—as he was shot, as he staggered, and as he fell face down on the rain-soaked sidewalk.

Questioning Kantor about the possibility of a robbery gone bad, prosecutor Joel Seidemann asked her, “Did you ever see him take any property from the victim?”

“He did not.”

Next, she was asked what the shooter looked like. “It’s a long time ago,” she said. “All I could really remember is that he didn’t really have a look. He had, you know, a flat affect, if that’s—that’s the best way I can describe it. Just a flat affect, and he turned around and he walked away.”

Next, Seidemann, by questioning Scott Kogan and George’s sister, Myrna Borus, tried to drive home the point that Barbara was uncaring after her husband was killed. As George Kogan lay in the hospital for six hours, his wife had called a friend to stay with her at her apartment. “So, you have George dying in the hospital and Barbara having her hair done,” Seidemann said. But Barbara’s attorney, whom she’d hired because she knew she was under investigation, had countered that accusation, saying that a friend had visited the distraught Barbara in her apartment to help her get ready to go to the hospital, in case she decided to, by combing out Barbara’s hair. Seidemann told the jury that Barbara had paid $500 for that personal, in-home salon session. He did not, however, produce proof of that sum exchanging hands or even the name of the person who styled Barbara’s hair—at least it was not in any of the documents filed with the court.

But that didn’t matter. To the prosecution, the woman, even though she was a friend of Barbara’s, was a hairdresser. During the trial, prosecutors emphasized that Kogan’s wife did not visit him at the hospital. To back up the statement, on Tuesday, March 25, 2008, George Kogan’s sister, Myrna Borus, testified for the prosecution. “She never came to the hospital,” Borus told jurors. When Borus took the stand that afternoon, Assistant District Attorney Soumya Dayananda questioned her.

Next to testify was insurance-company lawyer Richard Lutz, who told the court that private investigators for SMA Insurance of Worcester, Massachusetts, were unable to figure out if Barbara had ordered the murder of her husband. The company filed a federal lawsuit against Barbara in 1991 challenging her right to collect the cash, but it lost the suit after its lengthy private probe turned up nothing definitive. As a result, company officials had no choice but to pay out the more than $4 million proceeds to Barbara Kogan, despite the cloud of suspicion hanging over her and despite the fact that she’d called the insurance company a week before her husband’s murder. Barbara also prepaid, through an escrow account, the $2,000 premium. In the end, Lutz testified, “We were not able to determine who was responsible for the death.”

Also taking the stand on behalf of SMA insurance company was Elaine Kay-Gannon, who testified that Barbara had contacted the insurance company before George’s murder to see if she was the sole beneficiary. Seidemann questioned Kay-Gannon.

“Was this the first time you had someone call eight days before a murder to request replacement policies?” Seidemann asked her.

But before Kay-Gannon could answer, defense attorney Jonathan Strauss objected, and Judge Obus sustained the objection, not allowing the witness to answer.

Also taking the stand that day was Omar Quinones. Omar was Scott Kogan’s roommate in Puerto Rico, in the apartment the Kogan family had lived in, while the boys were growing up. Omar, the second witness of the day, was questioned about a voice message left for Scott by his mother before George Kogan was killed. The message, intended for her son, not for his roommate, instructed Scott to give a message to his father from her.

“Tell your father to get things in order or he is going to get what is coming to him,” Quinones testified. That call, he said, made him “feel uncomfortable.”

Also, Quinones said that in early October 1990, he’d had dinner with George during a visit to Puerto Rico. “George was happy, in love, and looking forward to rebuilding his life,” Quinones told the jury.

Barbara’s sister, Elaine Siegel Sokalner, testified on Wednesday, March 26, 2008, after traveling from San Juan to New York City. She was not there because she wanted to be. She had been summoned to testify for the prosecution. She told the court her sister had nothing to do with George’s murder. The bond between Barbara and Elaine was tight, and, at the time of the Martinez trial, Barbara had not yet been charged with a crime.

To the Daily News, as she was leaving the courthouse, Elaine said, “It was not [Barbara]. It is ridiculous.”

Ridiculous or not, the issue was far from over. Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann was more determined than ever to dig up evidence to implicate Barbara.

And, as if hearing Seidemann’s prayers that first week of the trial, the Daily News ran a front-page story with the headline, “Crooked lawyer on trial in ’90 hit.” The article began with, “An Upper East Side woman’s crooked divorce lawyer went on trial Monday on charges of hiring a hit man to kill her estranged tycoon husband nearly twenty years ago.” It could not have been better press for the prosecution.

*   *   *

On April 1, the Kogans’ eldest son, Scott, took the stand. He testified, often through tears, against Manuel Martinez, but his mother was also implicated, though Barbara Kogan was not the one on trial.

Also, Scott testified about an earlier statement he’d given to the grand jury in which he recalled what he described as an “odd meeting” he’d had with Manuel Martinez while Manuel and Barbara were in Puerto Rico. His mother and Manuel, Scott said, had stopped by Scott’s apartment, and sized up Scott’s stocky, muscular, square-jawed roommate, Omar Quinones, after Omar arrived home from a judo class. “He just returned from a martial arts practice session and he’s a large guy,” Scott testified. When Omar, six foot two and 250 pounds, walked into the apartment, Martinez told him, “You look like you could take a couple of slugs and keep walking.” It was an odd thing to say, Scott said. “I’ve heard lots of ways of greeting people and trying to break the ice, but this doesn’t seem regular.”

The Kogans’ oldest son also relayed that his mother at one point claimed she did not know Manuel Martinez, even though Scott had met Martinez that day in the midst of his parents’ divorce. He told his mother, “The police were down here [in Puerto Rico]. They’re asking about Manny Martinez.” Barbara’s response, Scott told the court, was, “Who’s that? I don’t know him.”

“Mom, you know I met him through you,” he told his mother. “What do you mean you don’t know him?”

But she insisted, Scott told the court, that she didn’t know Martinez.

Scott continued crying on the stand when he told the jury that his mother felt he had taken his father’s side, and she went so far as to tell her son, who suffered from asthma, that the next time he had an asthma attack, “You should die from asphixia.”

Scott testified that he’d told both of his parents that he wanted to remain neutral. “If you want someone to talk to, spend time with, I’m there,” he told his parents. “But don’t expect me to be involved in a slugfest or anything like that,” he told them. After the breakup, he often talked to his mother on the phone. But a minute or two into the conversation, when the topic of his father would come up, she would become hysterical and hang up on him, accusing him of siding with his father. His brother William, on the other hand, wanted to be there for their mother: “I used to kiddingly call him ‘the protector,’” Scott told the court. “He didn’t mind that because he felt she needed protecting at that point. He was upset with my dad and didn’t really want to talk with him or know [anything] about him.”

In the meantime, to help control the calls from his mother, Scott said, “I bought an answering machine because she would call at all hours—morning, noon, night, you know. I bought an answering machine that would take care of a lot of these calls that came in.” Also, should there be an emergency with his mother, he wanted her to be able to leave a message for him. Her emotional state, he said, wasn’t good. “She would go on talking about how she felt that my father was trying to hurt her economically,” he told the jury. His father talked about the divorce, too, including his financial state, once the judge froze the couple’s assets. “I was aware through [my father] and through others that [my father] was being supported financially through assistance from his sister, my aunt Myrna, and his brother, Lawrence Kogan.”

After Barbara filed for divorce in February 1989, Scott described how his mother flew to San Juan with her attorney Norman Pearlman and a safe-company employee who cracked a safe, installed in Scott’s bedroom in his parent’s former apartment, so she could remove her husband’s stamp and coin collections. She also moved furniture out of the home, including Scott’s bed, leaving him without a place to sleep.

“Why did your mother change so many attorneys during the divorce?” Assistant District Attorney Seidemann asked Scott.

“It coincided with the fact that during the proceedings of their divorce, my father and his attorney would try to come up with settlements to put this thing to an end, economic settlements, a deal sort of,” Scott replied. “And whenever they would come to something that was doable, my mother would have to change attorneys, and another fellow would come on board, and it would take another month or so for him to become acquainted with the facts, and then sometime shortly thereafter as soon as another apparent deal was about to take place, then there was another [lawyer] change mid-course.”

Defense attorney Jonathan Strauss then questioned Scott about his father’s operating style as a businessman. Years earlier, when interviewed by police, Scott had told detectives he had not been surprised that his father was targeted, because of George’s “aggressive business practices.” During questioning at Martinez’s trial, Scott explained away the remark by saying he’d meant to relay that his father had been a strong, no-nonsense businessman. Also, Scott told the jury, his parents’ separation had left his mother devastated after twenty-four years of marriage.

After the direct examination by prosecutor Seidemann, during a court recess, Scott declined to talk to reporters who approached him outside the courtroom. When Scott returned to the stand, Strauss cross-examined him by presenting him with an investigative report and Scott’s statement to police from 1990, asking him to read it.

“Are you familiar with those statements?”

“Yes,” Scott answered, reading what he’d told police, that he was not surprised his father died violently, considering his “aggressive business practices.” The defense didn’t ask Scott to explain further. And neither did police. No one but Scott knew what he’d meant by that comment.

Prosecutor Joel Seidemann, as soon as Scott answered, objected to the line of questioning, saying Scott’s 1990 statement to police was “speculation.”

“Sustained,” Judge Obus ruled.

A day after Scott Kogan testified, Manuel Martinez responded to Scott’s testimony by typing out a letter, dated April 2, 2008, to his defense attorney, Jonathan Strauss. It read, in part:

George Kogan was not the kind, loving human being presented to the jury by Frank Bonem, his divorce attorney, and Matthew Evins, his store’s publicist. Scott Kogan finally admitted yesterday, between tears, that his father used “aggressive” business practices.

If George Kogan owed someone $10,000, he would make them wait and wait and wait until the person finally accepted $3,000 as debt settlement. That is the George Kogan [the legal community] in Puerto Rico knew well. A scoundrel. That is the George Kogan people truly despised. That is the George Kogan Barbara Kogan experienced through the divorce. That is the George Kogan the police never investigated because the number of suspects in his murder would have been endless, not only in Puerto Rico. That is the true George Kogan who purchased Scott’s affection and loyalty. People like George Kogan behave like that as a pattern, and the jury failed to know this.

If I am convicted with “smoke-and-mirror” evidence, what do you think will happen to Barbara Kogan who collected the $4M U.S.D. insurance policies and was the plaintiff in the acrimonious divorce? A long list of George Kogan’s victims must be presented as witnesses to the jury. We need help from Puerto Rico.… The truth must emerge: Many people smiled after George Kogan was executed and police miserably failed to investigate all suspects.

Throughout the four-week trial, written correspondence like the one above was typically the way Martinez kept in communication with his attorney, rather than conversations before and after court each day.

Roger Wideman, the Federal Express deliveryman, was another witness at the scene on the fateful day George Kogan was murdered. He was about to go through the service entrance at 205 East Sixty-ninth when he heard shots fired. Wideman sat down with a New York Police Department sketch artist. The composite drawing of the suspect did not resemble Paul Prosano, the man said to be the hit man. Prosano had become the elephant in the courtroom, the unofficial suspect.

But Wideman’s wasn’t the only artist’s rendition done after the shooting. Two other witnesses, Randy Scott and Mike Rosario, who were at Central Park just after the shooting occurred, saw what they called a suspicious-looking man. Authorities, however, did not want either sketch publicly released. Strauss tried to submit the police composite sketches in court to show jurors, so they could compare the images with a photo of Paul Prosano.

The mug shot of Prosano became People’s Exhibit Number 29, and it was shown on a large-screen monitor to the jury. Prosano had never officially been named a suspect in the Kogan case, never charged, never arrested, yet the man in the photo was called “the hit man” by the prosecution.

However, prosecutor Seidemann argued that there were three witnesses, two sketches, and two sketch artists. “It’s our position,” he argued, “that you can’t use the sketches in relation to those witnesses, let alone other witnesses.” Then Seidemann cited the case of the People versus Robert Maldonado, where the judge in that case said, “This Court has long considered composite sketches to be hearsay.” Judge Obus, in Martinez’s case, ruled the same. Thus, the jury never saw the drawings of the alleged hit man, one composed by an NYPD artist with the help of witness Roger Wideman, who was delivering packages that morning and was just feet away from the killer.

Had jurors been allowed to see artists’ renderings, they would have learned that none of the sketches of the gunman, according to defense attorney Jonathan Strauss, resembled Paul Prosano. On the day the trial started, without the jury present, Strauss told the judge, “The original detectives on the case … they received descriptions from these individuals which basically matched the composite sketches, and I’m going to cross-examine them as well about the descriptions they received as part of their jobs as the investigative assigned detectives to the case.” But when it came to asking whether the witness descriptions of the gunman matched a photo of Paul Prosano, the question itself, let alone the sketches, was not allowed in court.

Despite a lack of physical evidence and eyewitnesses pointing to Paul Prosano, two days into the trial, the prosecution used its trump card to tie Manuel Martinez to the man they claimed to be the shooter. The link to Martinez was the audiotaped conversation between Martinez and Carlos Piovanetti on September 15, 1992. On that day, Carlos, while at the Westchester police station, was beeped on his pager by Martinez. Police suggested Carlos call him back so they could tape the conversation. It was 2:50 in the afternoon. After answering, Manuel asked Carlos to call back in ten minutes. Carlos was nervous, but he went along with the plan, and called Manuel back at 3 p.m. while police recorded the conversation.

Carlos told Manuel he was calling from a US post office in Manhattan at Fifty-third Street and Third Avenue. Manuel believed him. The conversation, in Spanish and translated by Virginia Blanco, who worked for the New York Manhattan DA’s office, was played to the jury. The partial transcript follows:

Martinez: Hello?

Piovanetti: What’s up?

Martinez: How are things?

Piovanetti: Well, so look, papa, um, um, guess who beeped me today.

Martinez: Who beeped you today?

Piovanetti: Uh, Westchester County Police.

Martinez: Yeah? How nice. And what did they tell you?

Piovanetti: Nothing, because I hung up when they called.

Martinez: Uh huh. What do they want to know?

Piovanetti: What do you think they want to know?

Martinez: Well, I was hoping that you, you, you said to me that you were going to be indicted in four, five days.

Piovanetti: Manny, I am getting indicted in four or five days.

Martinez: Great.

Piovanetti: I haven’t been indicted yet.

Martinez: Uh uh. Well, that, you expected that.

Piovanetti: Well.

Martinez: That—that call, right, papa? Let’s—let’s dig in. I’ll help you. I told you that I was not going to leave you stuck. What can I do for you?

Piovanetti: You tell me. What can you do for me?

Martinez: Well—

Piovanetti: I’m in the shit. What do you suggest I do?

Martinez: Well, let’s fix it. I was supposedly meeting with Lenny Cherry on Saturday. I called him. He didn’t show up. Okay. Uh, he’s willing to help. Okay?

Piovanetti: How is he going to help?

Martinez: Let’s get money from him. With information and money.

Piovanetti: What information do you think we can get from him?

Martinez: Everything you need. How he got to that, how that got started, etcetera, etcetera.

Piovanetti: You get me that information.

Martinez: And will deal with it. I—

Piovanetti: Yes.

Martinez: Carlos, the moment you told me, okay, “This is happening,” what was my answer?

Piovanetti: Yeah.

Martinez: “I’ll help you solve it.”

Piovanetti: Yes, but damn, the way you solve things sometimes. Heh, heh.

Martinez: Well, Carlos, do they or don’t they get solved? Don’t come now telling me that, that, that you feel—

Piovanetti: No, no, but … what I don’t want is an episode like, like—

Martinez: Like what?

Piovanetti: Like what happened to, uh, to, to this woman’s husband.

Martinez: Carlos. Carlos, Carlos, Carlos, Carlos. Come on. C’mon—

Piovanetti: Don’t solve it like that.

Martinez: Carlos, Carlos, Carlos, nothing will happen to you, because you have my word. Okay?

Piovanetti: I don’t want to turn into a George Kogan.

Martinez: You’re talking bullshit. Look, look, look. Nothing is going to happen to you, and don’t think like that nor start talking shit, because that’s shit, Carlos. Okay?

Piovanetti: But, remember, remember that we—

Martinez: Number one—

Piovanetti: —were told where these things came from, bro.

Martinez: Never mind, Carlos. Look, Carlos, you want solutions. I want solutions, okay? How? It isn’t going to be praying, Carlos. So then—and the way all this was structured, in a very professional way, you are covered.

Piovanetti: Uh huh.

Martinez: Okay?

Piovanetti: That, I know.

Martinez: So, then, don’t freak out, don’t panic, because you’re talking to Manny with a clear mind, a person who has his balls in the right place, who isn’t, um, flying low. Okay? We’ll deal, we’ll—we’ll solve it. He is going to bring out all the information. All that information we will use, and what has to be done will be done. If later you have to go to church and whatever, well, then, you go to church to cry and receive the Holy Communion and to hell with it.

Piovanetti: [Laughs]

Martinez: Okay? I have told you, and you have never known how to appreciate my friendship, because you don’t know the extent that I’m willing to go for a friend. Okay. That—

Piovanetti: I know.

Martinez: I am, and I will, and I’ll do what I have to do. Okay? Well, bro, I have my balls set in the right place. Paulie called me this morning. This morning, Paulie [Prosano] called me and he said to me: “Done.” That thing, that’s it, that’s it. It’s solved. Thirty to forty, fifty each, that’s it. Delivered, uh, it was delivered Saturday—Sunday, Monday, today is Tuesday. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Three days. End of story. You understand? What has to be done has to be done. Now, don’t start with this or that or the other.… Bro, what has to be done has to be done, period. And nothing else. They beeped you, they beeped you. How they got your beeper? I have no idea. But, there’s a—

Piovanetti: No, I know.

Martinez: Ah? How did they get the beeper, your beeper number? That’s very strange, but—

Piovanetti: It was given by—no. Eneida [Piovanetti’s wife] gave it to them.

Martinez: Oh, Eneida gave it to them. So, then, they called Eneida. Now, if Lenny starts to, you know—look, the only one there, seriously, the only link there is Lenny. You understand?

Piovanetti: I know that the only link there is Lenny.

Martinez: Well, then, what is it that has to be done?

Piovanetti: Whatever has to be done.

Martinez: That’s it. So, then, um, you in the front seat, me in the back seat and we go for a ride, and he’s driving, and that’s it, it’s over and, period. And let’s cut the crap, Carlos, um.

Piovanetti: Look, the, that paper—that—that—

Martinez: What paper?

Piovanetti: —that this guy notarized, um, the one you prepared for me. That would, that would hold up in court, right?

Martinez: Of course, Carlos. Of course. Carlos, Carlos. Look, Carlitos. I have, I have given you my friendship. I have told you. I have given you my friendship. You have my word. Fuck, Carlos.

Piovanetti: I’m counting.

Martinez: No, counting, counting. Look. I’m not the type who says I’m going to do something and then I don’t do it, eh? This is business. This is business, and I dig in. You can count on it. Now, I’m going to beep Lenny and I’m going to set up a meeting for tomorrow and, to get as much as I can out of him. And, then, well, that’s what toilets are for, to flush things, right?

Piovanetti: Uh huh.

Martinez: You’ll be fine. Stay calm.

Piovanetti: I’m counting on you, papa.

Martinez: You have my word.… Now, don’t you chicken out on me, because we’re going to have to do some things that maybe are not to your taste, but we’re going to have to do them. Okay, papa?

Piovanetti: As long as I get out of this shit.

Martinez: Everyone knows it. Keep cool.

Piovanetti: Okay.

Martinez: Okay. Where are you?

Piovanetti: At the pay phone, by the post office still.

Martinez: Okay, papa.

Piovanetti: Bye.

Martinez: Bye.

The most damning language in that conversation was Carlos’ mention of the murder of a “woman’s husband,” which Assistant District Attorney Seidemann told the jury was in reference to George Kogan’s murder. In other words, Seidemann contended, Carlos was telling Martinez, “I don’t want to turn into a George Kogan.”

Also damaging were Martinez’s words about Lenny Cherry, which Seidemann described as “the solicitation to murder Cherry.”

During cross examination of Carlos Piovanetti, Strauss asked if the taped conversation Carlos had with Manuel was scripted by police or the district attorney. “You were trying actively to get your friend Mr. Martinez to inculpate him in various wrongdoings?”

“I was given a script that would inculpate him. That is correct,” Piovanetti answered.

Because of the protective order, Piovanetti’s name as a witness was not disclosed to Martinez and his defense counsel until the day before Piovanetti was to testify. So, it came as a huge surprise to the defense. Martinez and Strauss sat stunned behind the defense table as Piovanetti told the jury that after George was killed, Martinez mocked him with what Piovanetti said were George’s last words. Putting his hands together over his chest, Piovanetti quoted Martinez as saying, “God save me,” as Martinez mocked Kogan falling to the ground. In reality, George Kogan’s last words were, “I’m dying,” and they were said to doorman Moses Crespo, the last one to speak to George before he fell into unconsciousness.

Martinez did not deny nor apologize for mocking George’s last moments. Martinez explained his reasoning for making fun of a man who’d just been shot with this: “The irony of those words reverberated in my brain. Here was a man who … burned all his bridges in Puerto Rico due to his aggressive business practices, living an adulterous life contrary to his Jewish beliefs, and seeking God’s salvation? Would a God-fearing man [have] done the things George did? I do not approve of his murder nor did I participate in it in any way, but I can understand it.”

*   *   *

Also testifying for the prosecution was Chad Powell, records-access officer for the New York State Department of Correctional Services. Powell was questioned by Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann about the inmate records of Paul Prosano. After the record-keeper’s testimony, Judge Obus instructed the jury that Prosano’s incarceration record had “nothing to do with the incidents at issue in this case.” It was presented during the trial and allowed in, seemingly as evidence, yet explained away afterward by the judge, who admonished the jury to not consider it. It did not make sense, other than to try to form a connection between Prosano and Martinez to connect the dots, which, basically, would have been guilt by association and not by the evidence. Because a plausible connection was not presented during the trial, Chad Powell’s testimony did not add up.

When Manuel’s former wife, Beatriz Oller, took the stand, she told the court that her husband had planned the murder-for-hire plot during a flight to Puerto Rico with Barbara Kogan. The problem with the statement was that Barbara and Manuel, according to court documents, did not take the same flight to or from Puerto Rico. They traveled separately, and on separate days, and met in the lobby of El San Juan Hotel and Casino, where Barbara’s sister, Elaine, was the casino manager.

Beatriz also testified that she and her husband had had dinner one evening with Barbara and her companion John Lyons, and that Manuel, in the course of the conversation, had suggested that Barbara “get rid of George.” On cross-examination by Strauss, Beatriz answered that she could not remember the name of the restaurant, just that it was somewhere “in New York City.” She could remember the name John Lyons, whom she said she’d met just once. She could not recall, however, when the four had had dinner, what Barbara and Lyons wore, or even what Lyons looked like. But she testified she could remember the comment her husband had made that night.

It came out in court that Beatriz Oller offered that statement to police, during her two lengthy sessions with investigators, after she’d received a letter from the New York County District Attorney’s office accusing her of helping her husband launder money.

In exchange for her cooperation against her husband in the Kogan case, Strauss asked if the allegations had been dropped.

“No,” she responded.

The DA pursued the money-laundering charges against her. A letter to her by the District Attorney’s office said she was a “partner in crime” with her husband. She was not charged in connection with the allegations, nor was her ex-husband.

*   *   *

Before Martinez’s trial, the District Attorney’s office had announced in a news release that Manuel Martinez had admitted to a friend that he’d arranged the murder of George Kogan at the behest of Barbara Kogan. In exchange, Martinez would receive $100,000.

Barbara Kogan’s attorney, Barry Levin, said the allegations were “absolutely not true.” No bank records were ever produced showing large sums of money were transferred from either Barbara’s accounts or her parents’, nor transferred to Martinez’s or his ex-wife’s accounts. Seidemann would cite, throughout Martinez’s trial, the $100,000 and $50,000 sums, saying they were used to hire a killer. To counter the lack of documentation, Seidemann contended that Manuel Martinez had flown out of Puerto Rico with $100,000 in a suitcase. For his part, Martinez insisted that had he attempted to carry out cash in a suitcase from Puerto Rico, it would have been readily discovered at the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport by inspectors with the United States Department of Agriculture, who thoroughly inspect all personal suitcases and baggage for fruits and vegetables. To back up his claim, Martinez requested and received confirmation from the USDA that this practice was, in fact, in effect back in 1990 as well. Here is the letter, dated June 9, 2010, written on USDA letterhead:

Dear Mr. Martinez:

Thank you for your letter of May 19, 2010, inquiring about the status of our Agency’s pre-departure passenger inspection program in Puerto Rico in 1990.

We can confirm that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) pre-departure passenger inspection program in Puerto Rico was functional and operating in September and October 1990. The purpose of the pre-departure passenger inspection program is to prevent harmful exotic agricultural pests and diseases from being transported to the U.S. mainland via inbound luggage from passengers travelling from Puerto Rico. Our Agency of USDA, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection service, carries out this inspection function in compliance with section 318.58 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

Sincerely,

Alan S. Green

Executive Director

Plant Health Programs

Plant Protection and Quarantine

Once the trial started, Assistant District Attorney Seidemann told the jury, “The money for the hit came from Barbara Kogan’s mother, a woman by the name of Rose Siegel.” The prosecution, however, did not produce bank records to show that monies of that amount were transferred to Manuel Martinez. Instead, entered into evidence were three small checks totaling $5,008 made out to Martinez and signed by Barbara Kogan.

One of the witnesses who did materialize was Nelson Ramirez, who Martinez was hoping would help his case. Instead, Ramirez testified that he’d seen Martinez’s wife, Beatriz Oller, with “a bump on her forehead.” Ramirez also testified that it was caused by being hit by Martinez with a skillet. But, when questioned by the defense, Ramirez, now forty-eight, a licensed nurse, and living in Hillsboro, Florida, admitted he’d never actually seen Martinez hit his wife, either with a hand or a skillet.

Still, Seidemann went so far during the trial as to compare Martinez’s abuse of his wife with that of Joel Steinberg, a disbarred attorney convicted of killing his adopted daughter as well as locking up his live-in girlfriend, Hedda Nussbaum, inside their New York City apartment and beating her to the point of disfigurement. While Martinez clearly was not an angel—in post-trial affidavits, he’d admitted to shoving his wife and getting into scuffles with her—if Martinez was a wife beater, no medical reports or police accounts materialized to be admitted as evidence to back up the prosecutor’s claims.

The most damaging testimony to Martinez came from Wilmer Rodriguez, a lawyer straight out of college who’d worked as a law clerk for Martinez. Taking the stand on Friday, April 11, 2008, he testified about a telephone call he answered at Martinez’s office the day George Kogan was killed. The 4 p.m. call was from Ivan Ramos, a Puerto Rican attorney Martinez had introduced Barbara to when she was looking for a divorce lawyer. The phone rang, and when Martinez’s secretary didn’t pick it up on the third ring, Wilmer answered.

“Is Manny there?” Ivan Ramos asked in Spanish.

“No, he is not here,” Rodriguez told him.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” Manuel had left the office about one o’clock that afternoon after he received a call, started hollering, grabbed his jacket, and, without explanation, left the office.

Ivan Ramos then asked Rodriguez, “Is he home?”

“I don’t know. Call him at home,” Rodriguez suggested.

“Wilmer, they killed George,” Ramos said.

“Who?” he asked.

“You didn’t know?” Ramos asked.

“No,” he said, and then Ramos hung up.

The next morning, Rodriguez picked up three New York newspapers on his way in, because all ran articles about George’s murder. He arrived at the office just after 9 a.m.

“When I got there, Mr. Martinez was in his office with his back turned toward me, looking out the window, and I walked in and I threw the newspapers on top of his desk and I pointed to them and I asked, “Did you have anything to do with this?”

Martinez turned around, Rodriguez said.

“His face was pale, ashy, and he told me, ‘Wilmer, this is the first time I heard of this. I almost shitted on myself. Look, I swear on the head of my son.’”

By his demeanor “and sincere look,” Rodriguez told the court, “I believed him. So I told him, ‘You know, Manny, the police will come here.’”

Manny responded, “So what? Fine.”

Then, a couple of days after the murder, a man called between eight and twelve times, asking, “Is Manny there?”

The final time he called, Rodriguez testified, the man said, “Tell him Paulie called.”

In addition, Wilmer Rodriguez told the court that Barbara’s voluminous divorce file was delivered by the office of Richard Golub, Barbara’s previous attorney, sometime before George’s murder. Rodriguez, curious, went through the file, which sat on top of Martinez’s credenza, and read a confidential report prepared by a private investigator that detailed George Kogan’s daily routine, including leaving his apartment at the same time each morning, between 9:15 and 9:35, sometimes with the couple’s poodle, sometimes without, and returning around 10:15 or 10:20. The report, Rodriguez said, included “Mr. Kogan’s movements from the mornings until the evening.” The couple typically didn’t emerge again until about 1:30 p.m., when they’d often catch a taxi. On one occasion, a waiting limousine and driver took them to a restaurant for lunch. In the evenings, they’d go out to dinner and be gone as late at 11:30 at night.

After George’s death, Rodriguez told the jury he was curious and went to the file again, looking for the private investigator’s report, but it was no longer there.

Wilmer Rodriguez testified that the last time he saw Barbara Kogan was shortly after George Kogan’s murder, at a wine-and-cheese party for Martinez’s new law office. Barbara’s divorce attorney Richard Golub was there, too.

In open court, Seidemann described Martinez as living a “fantasy life as a mobster,” sometimes wearing what the prosecutor described as a “fedora hat.” Martinez apparently was known to wear a cowboy hat, not a fedora—a low, soft-felt hat with a curled brim sometimes associated with Prohibition-era gangsters and the FBI agents who brought them to justice.

In his testimony, Steven Cerenzio, a long-time police informant and known associate of Paul Prosano, added to the image during the trial when he described Manuel as “looking official” by wearing a trench coat, making him resemble “Inspector Gadget,” a detective from the children’s TV show of the same name.

*   *   *

One day during a recess in the case, the judge took care of some housekeeping items, including Martinez’s missing legal documents. “With regard to Mr. Martinez’s property that didn’t make it over here to the Manhattan House when he was moved from Rikers, we have been in touch many times with Ms. Lyndz, who is the counsel to the Department of Corrections,” Judge Obus said. “The last message that our clerk received is that she is advised that Corrections cannot find any additional property of Mr. Martinez. I don’t doubt Mr. Martinez’s statement there is such property that exists. We did advise Ms. Lyndz about the allegations or the statements in Mr. Martinez’ letter about which officers had something to do with the property and his movement and I am hopeful that there is still something that we can do with this.

“If there was no property, then that’s one thing. If there was property [and] it’s still there, we will do what we can to get it,” he continued. “I hope that there was no property that was actually dumped somewhere.”

At the end of four weeks, both sides rested, with roughly fifty witnesses testifying for the prosecution. The defense, on the other hand, chose not to have any witnesses testify in Martinez’s defense. It’s a risky strategy, often done to send a signal that the defense believes the government has fallen short in its burden of proof. Strauss was about to learn whether or not the tactic worked.