William Weld famously won 109 out of the 111 cases his office prosecuted when he was the United States attorney for Massachusetts. I am quite proud to be one of the two blemishes on his career, along with my former law partner Nancy Gertner. All it took was overzealous prosecutors, unscrupulous federal agents, a lying witness (hardly unusual in federal criminal trials), and the basement of a dingy coffee shop.
In 1981, Weld, a blue-blooded, Harvard-educated Mayflower descendant became the U. S. attorney for Massachusetts. When Weld assumed office, a number of high profile political corruption cases recently had splashed across the Boston Globe’s pages; Weld saw official corruption as his primary target, both because of its seeming ubiquity and, I suspect, due to the utility that prosecuting such cases might have on his nascent political career.
Weld wanted to fry a big fish, and it seemed that he had the perfect target: then-Mayor of Boston Kevin Hagan White. There was only one problem: White seemed cleaner than Caesar’s wife. Consequently, Weld did the next best thing—he started at low level corruption and eventually worked his way up to the boss.
Weld, and his First Assistant Mark Wolf (later appointed a judge of the United States District Court) started with a bureaucrat in the Boston Redevelopment Authority named George Collatos. In 1982, Collatos was caught in a tape-recorded sting attempting to extort $45,000 from a contractor. Fearing three years in federal prison, Collatos jumped at a deal that was offered: He would have his sentence reduced if he would testify as to who higher up in city government was involved in the extortion. Collatos would be the first domino in a line leading straight to the mayor’s office.
Collatos was not close enough to Mayor White to claim that he knew first-hand of any of the mayor’s suspected wrongdoings; instead, Collatos focused his testimony on the man who would become Gertner’s and my client: Theodore “Teddy” Anzalone, a confidant, fundraiser, and friend of the mayor. Collatos claimed that Anzalone, acting for White, solicited an $8,000 cash bribe from the C.E. Maguire Company of Providence, a company with contracts to provide engineering services to the massive rebuilding projects undertaken at the time by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Weld’s strategy was as clear as it was common among prosecutors: If he could get Anzalone through Collatos, he could get White through Anzalone. In prosecutorial parlance, the prosecutors “were climbing the ladder.”
Having been turned onto Anzalone by Collatos, Weld and Wolf searched hither and yon for something prosecutable. They settled on three charges. The first centered on the $8,000 extortion; the second was a money laundering charge involving a birthday party for the mayor’s wife; the third was a money laundering charge involving the transfer of $100,000 cash. Taken together, Weld and Wolf thought, the charges represented a clear conspiracy to hide money that was, itself, ill-gotten through extortionate activities on behalf of the mayor. Never mind that they did not have a clear linkage between the alleged extortion money and the laundering: Weld and Wolf obviously thought was that the jury would make that link on its own.
As Anzalone’s attorneys, Gertner and I recognized that the link between the money laundering and extortion charges was tenuous at best. After some initial hesitation, the trial judge, the late A. David Mazzone, agreed and granted Anzalone’s motion to separate (“sever” in legal jargon) the trial for extortion from the money-laundering trial. In this way, the jurors would not create any unsubstantiated link between the sets of charges.
The money-laundering trial came first. Anzalone was acquitted on the charge attached to the mayor’s wife’s birthday party—the evidence was, simply, too thin—but convicted on the charge relating to the moving of the $100,000. Anzalone had broken up the cash into increments of less than $10,000 each; in doing so, the bank did not have to report the transactions under then-applicable federal currency regulations, Gertner and I argued. While Anzalone had no obligation to report his bank transactions to the Department of the Treasury, and the bank had no obligation to report any cash transaction under $10,000, the judge reasoned (incorrectly as it turned out) that Anzalone’s breaking up the transactions represented an act that caused the bank to fail in its legal duty to report large cash transactions. Anzalone’s supposed obligation to facilitate the bank’s filing of a “CTR” was woven by the judge out of whole cloth.
Anzalone’s sentence was stayed while Gertner and I worked on his appeal. Meanwhile, the prosecutors figured that they had a golden opportunity to turn him into a witness against Mayor White. They moved along quickly with the extortion trial. The extortion trial, one must remember, hinged on the testimony of the extortionist-turned-government-witness Collatos. If the jury were to believe Collatos, Anzalone could face more federal prison time. Lucky for the defense, however, extortion can an addictive and intoxicating drug, and Collatos was not about to quit.
A few months before the trial was to commence, Anzalone reported a remarkable story to Gertner and me. He said that Collatos had invited him out for coffee at La Bella’s Coffee House, a place whose outstanding feature was the noticeable grime on the floor, table, seats, and walls. It was a place where, as I once told a reporter, after you ate there, “you wanted to wash [not only] your hands but also your feet.” In the hardly “bella” surroundings, Collatos threatened Anzalone that he would either testify to Anzalone’s guilt of extortion despite knowing that he was completely innocent, or, if paid $200,000 by the mayor through Anzalone, Collatos would testify truthfully.
Anzalone, ever the intelligent client, said that he would think about it, and rushed over to Gertner’s and my office, located nearby in the North End/Waterfront neighborhood, to report Collatos’s threat.
Gertner and I realized immediately and instinctively that we had a golden opportunity to destroy the government’s case. If we could somehow prove that Collatos was trying to extort Anzalone—and that he was asking to be bribed to tell the truth—we knew that the government’s case would implode. The only problem was how to prove Collatos’s actions. We couldn’t make Anzalone wear a wire: In Massachusetts, it is illegal to surreptitiously record somebody’s voice without his or her consent or a court order. And we couldn’t ask for Anzalone simply to testify to Collatos’s actions: it would be one alleged extortionist’s word against another’s. Gertner and I hatched a different plan.
Anzalone had a longtime relationship with LaBella’s owner Emilio Cuchiella, better known as Bobby LaBella. We came up with a way to utilize the friendly turf to our advantage. We reasoned that while it was illegal to tape-record someone’s voice, it was not in the least illegal to take notes on what someone was saying.
Beneath the table at which Anzalone and Collatos would be sitting was a trap door leading to the basement. The cellar made the dingy restaurant look like the Ritz Carleton: The dust, noxious air, and close quarters were enough to make anyone queasy. We secreted ourselvees into that cramped space: Gertner’s and my research assistant, Thomas Viles (now a successful litigation attorney at a nationally-known firm); John Wall, a former Justice Department prosecutor who was then in private practice (who has since died – a great loss to the Boston legal community); and a court stenographer, who had no idea what was ahead of her—she wore a cocktail dress in anticipation of a meeting in a cafe.
We arrived at 7 o’clock, an hour before the meeting was to take place. The five of us set up the basement listening post, and after a quick test run, I left to join Gertner at our office. The stenographer, on seeing the basement, became immediately nervous. After a few minutes in those cramped, dusty, hot quarters, she hit her head, saw a mouse, and stormed out so quickly she left behind her steno machine. It was up to Wall and Viles to take notes.
At the appointed time, Collatos arrived at the coffee shop and met with Anzalone. Like the script to a bad movie, Collatos engaged in detailed exposition, once again reiterating the extortion plot, the 200,000 dollars, and his ultimate knowledge of Anzalone’s innocence. Collatos had even concocted a method for Mayor White to transfer the $200,000 to him in a manner that would not cause undue suspicion – White could buy a worthless nag of a retired racehorse from Collatos for the princely sum. Viles and Wall dutifully took notes, hearing every word from their dank and dusty quarters. Anzalone turned down the deal and left the coffee shop. Viles and Wall waited until the coast was clear and left for well-deserved showers.
What did Gertner and I do with our case-shattering evidence? We sat on it. If we had turned it over to the prosecution, it would have given them a chance to change their theory of the case in order to refrain from using Collatos as a witness; we wanted them to stay focused on Collatos as their star witness.
And star witness he was – just not for the prosecution. When Collatos took the witness stand, he laid out a well-rehearsed story about Anzalone’s extortion plot. During cross examination, however, Gertner, a superb cross-examiner, caught him off guard:
Gertner: Directing your attention now to a meeting — to April 27, 1984, between eight and nine p.m. — do you remember being in LaBella's Coffee Shop on that evening? Collatos: No, I do not.
Gertner: Do you remember saying to Ted Anzalone, "I am in your corner, but I need some help"? Do you remember anything like that?
Collatos: No, I do not.…
Gertner: Do you remember Ted Anzalone saying to you, "George, if you tell the truth, I'll be fine"?
Collatos: I don't recall that conversation at all.
Gertner: Do you remember telling Ted Anzalone on April 27th that you know that Anzalone did not threaten or promise Slocum anything? Do you remember that?
Collatos: I don't recall that conversation at all.
Gertner: Do you remember saying to Anzalone that "I am not going to hang for that, I'm not going to do it. On my daughters, I'd go to jail for them, but no one else. I want money." Do you remember saying that?
Collatos: That's not even my way of talking. No, I never said that.
Gertner: It's not your way of talking?
Collatos: I never said anything like that.
Gertner: Do you remember saying — I'll clean up the language a bit — "I'll lie. I don't give a f___ about him, the mayor"? Do you remember saying that?
Collatos: No, I don't.
Gertner: Do you remember saying, "I'm going to tell the truth, but if I have to answer a certain way I'm going to tell them what they want to hear"? Do you remember that?
Collatos: No, I don't.
Gertner: Do you recall saying, "You better make that man understand that if you have to punch him in the nose — tell him to go to jail one night — he'll understand"? Do you remember saying that?
Collatos: No, I don't ever remember saying anything like that.
Gertner: Do you remember saying, "____ the mayor. Let him burn"? Any words like that?
Collatos: Sorry, I don't recall anything like that.
Gertner: We are talking about an April 27th meeting at LaBella's Coffee Shop between 8 and 9 p.m.
The court: Do you have any memory at all of that specific meeting between 8 and 9 p.m. on the 27th of April?
Collatos: No, I don't.
Collatos was caught and, despite his attempts to play dumb, he must have realized it. The prosecution and the judge were a bit confused. After the initial line of questioning, due to a technical trial rule, Gertner and I were required by the judge to indicate to him, at a hushed conference held at the side-bar of the judge’s bench outside the jurors’ earshot, the factual and legal basis for the cross-examination. We described to the judge and the prosecution the whole sordid affair at LaBella’s—the threats, the basement, everything.
The prosecutors erupted in outrage. After all, here it was the defense that had engineered the sting, a tactic normally left for the prosecution team. They tried to argue that the judge should exclude this evidence from the jury’s knowledge. They argued surprise. In reality, they must have known it was a lost cause, as Gertner and I had no legal or ethical obligation to report to them prior to the Collatos’s attempted extortion. We had merely given the feds a taste of their own medicine.
Not to be outdone, the prosecution had one more chance to make their case: They could attempt to intimidate Viles and Wall—the two witnesses to Collatos’s “testi-lying.” To make their point, federal agents paid Viles a late-night visit at his girlfriend’s house, and implied that he was now under investigation for a number of crimes, including misprision of a felony, a statutory crime for failing to report a witnessed felony to the authorities. They made a similar visit to Wall.
To Wall’s credit, the former DOJ prosecutor was not dissuaded from testifying: he took the witness stand and described the LaBella incident. (We spared the paralegal this task.) The prosecution’s case thus utterly destroyed, the jury acquitted.
We were left only with the matter of the money laundering charge. Gertner and I reasoned in the Court of Appeals that a citizen does not have an obligation to conduct business in such a way as to maximize transactional visibility; he only has an obligation to do what the law, as it stands at the time, requires. In other words, Anzalone was under no obligation to report to the government how he was dividing up his deposits, as long as he was following the letter of the law when he did it. The appellate court agreed with us. In a unanimous decision issued July 1, 1985, the judges vacated the conviction.
In the end, however, when fighting against the federal government, nearly all victories become at least partially Pyrrhic. Kevin White was not indicted, but the fight to take him down convinced him to forego another run for mayor. He left office to take a job at Boston University. Anzalone, while vindicated in the eyes of the law, had to give up lawyering after FBI agents visited nearly every one of his clients in the course of the investigation; he took a job maintaining buildings owned or managed by his wife Joanne, a real estate agent. As for Weld, despite his failure to get White, the media still portrayed him as a “crusading prosecutor.” He won the Massachusetts governorship in 1990 and was reelected four years later.
But Weld’s quixotic attempt to gain the Republican presidential nomination failed, and he retreated to a lucrative practice in law and investments in New York City. One of the prosecutors – Mark Wolf – went on to become a judge (later the Chief Judge) on the federal district court in Boston, while another – Robert Cordy – was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Gertner served for 14 years on the federal district court bench during which she enjoyed a comfortable relationship with Judge Wolf. (She left the federal bench in 2011 and took a position on the Harvard Law School faculty.) Gertner and I get together occasionally at a café or restaurant (LaBella’s has long since disappeared from the landscape) to discuss this and that, but it’s hard each time not to recall how the Anzalone prosecution was wrecked by a dose of truth about the quality (or lack thereof) of the government’s chief witness.