Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [41]
“Something else bothered me. If the prosecution case was that weak, why hadn’t they made me an offer? They sometimes made deals even when they had solid evidence just to get a quick and inexpensive conviction. But they hadn’t reached out to me at all.
“And then Sammy’s name showed up on the witness list. Not as a prosecution witness, but as a potential witness to testify on his own behalf. I wasn’t real comfortable with that. On the opening day of the trial, though, Sammy was right there sitting at the defense table with me. I thought that maybe I was just being paranoid.”
The trial started off well for Andrew. As expected, Ralph Burzo testified that his last memory on the day of the shooting was that he was talking with Andrew. But he couldn’t swear that Andrew shot him. The prosecution called no witnesses who could identify Andrew as the gunman.
However, by a couple of days into the trial, Andrew was sure that his concerns about Sammy were well-founded. His co-defendant acted very uncomfortable around him. He was evasive and wouldn’t make eye contact. And then Andrew and his lawyer’s worst fears came true. Sammy took the stand and his testimony was far from strictly “on his own behalf.” The prosecution had its eyewitness.
“As soon as Sammy started talking, it was obvious he was the prosecution’s secret weapon,” Andrew recalls. “Anthony Gerbino and Mike Yannotti were sitting in the back of the courtroom. Anthony started hollering out things about rats and was evicted. Mike moved up to the front row, leaned forward in his chair, and stared at Sammy. You could tell Sammy was getting the message that he was a dead man. He looked at the ceiling, the floor, and the side walls. His eyes went everywhere but forward where he’d have to see Mike and me.
“Sammy was feeling the heat, but he talked anyway. He took the jury through the events of April eighth: my call to him, seeing Burzo on the street, the shooting, ditching the gun, all of it. As I listened to him, I was upset with myself that I hadn’t taken care of Sammy personally. My lawyer wrote a note on his legal pad and passed it to me. It said, ‘The fat lady just sang.’ I wrote, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and handed the pad back to him.
“Right after Sammy finished his testimony, the judge sent the jury out of the room. She then told me that so much incriminating evidence had been presented that she now considered me to be a flight risk and revoked my bail. I motherfuckered her under my breath. She asked me what I’d said. I told her I’d asked somebody to send me a sweat suit to wear in jail. As I walked past the guard in the back of the room, he said, ‘I’ve been watching this case since day one. You’d have beat this case without that guy [Karkis]. You know that, don’t you?’ Yeah, I knew it.
“During the recess my lawyer said I had two choices. I could let things stand, get convicted, and go to jail. Or I could take the stand myself and claim the shooting was an accident. He said that with all the testimony about Burzo being a stalker, I could say that when I confronted him he pulled a gun. We wrestled around and the gun went off. It was a long shot, but it was the only chance I had.
“I thought about it. Guys in the life aren’t supposed to take the stand. My situation was different; the shooting wasn’t business related. Cross examination would be limited to my case and not get into anything about the crew. I wasn’t excited about it. But I figured what the hell. Why not take the chance?
“I took the stand and committed perjury. I testified that Burzo had pulled a gun on me and I thought he was going to shoot me. In self-defense I tried to get the gun away from him and during the struggle it went off. The jury didn’t buy my lies in the least. They returned in what