...And Never Let HerGo

reduced to the status of paralegals, running errands for Tom. And despite the fact that they had been invited to stay on his team, court watchers could not help but notice the body language at the defense table. Joe Oteri kept widening the gap between himself and Tom, and often turned his back on his client. Tom’s notes were passed to his lawyers in a flurry of white. They barely glanced at them before they shook their heads slightly.
    The defense witnesses were weak—character witnesses, some of whom affirmed that Anne Marie had often called Tom at his office, one who had seen him out at dinner once with a woman “who had a very full head of hair,” some who apparently had been called to dispute the depth of Anne Marie’s affection for Mike Scanlan. The E-mail was trotted out again, full of banter, trivia, and menus. Bob Donovan was called for an exhaustive examination that might ferret out conflicting statements made to him by Debby MacIntyre.
    In a case that had become more and more convoluted, the defense called an unlikely ally: Squeaky Saunders—the man whom Tom had prosecuted in the days when he was a young criminal attorney. When Ferris Wharton pulled the Saunders case file to prepare for cross-examination, he was fascinated to read that Squeaky, who was still incarcerated, had been convicted of shooting his victim in the head and attempting to dispose of the body in the Delaware River, where it was soon discovered. Judging from the placement of the blood on the missing sofa from Tom’s great room, it was likely that Anne Marie had also been shot in the head. It was almost as if Tom had refined the MO of the Saunders case, correcting, he thought, Squeaky’s mistake by disposing of Anne Marie’s body far out in the ocean.
    Squeaky’s testimony, however, dealt not with murder but with his assessment of Nick Perillo as an untruthful prison snitch who was not to be believed. In a trial rife with interesting headgear, Squeaky held his own; he wore a towering turban.
    In his cross-examination, Wharton suggested that Squeaky was testifying for Tom because he hoped his murder conviction might beoverturned if he could prove prosecutorial misconduct—something he had been claiming for two decades. If he helped Tom now, Wharton suggested, it was possible that Tom might admit errors in the 1975 trial in which he had been one of the prosecutors.
    Joe Oteri was furious and jumped to his feet to object. “That’s totally unethical of Mr. Wharton!”
    Wharton, usually slow to anger, responded, “If he’s going to accuse me of something unethical, I demand an apology in open court.”
    It was a frustrating trial, made more so by the rising heat in the courtroom and the spectators packed into every spare corner of space. Judge Lee knew that tempers were bound to flare and he watched the combatants carefully. Usually he was able to defuse situations with his wry humor before the court and in sidebar conferences. But ever since Tom had attempted to fire his attorneys en masse, morale was low. Joe Oteri told a reporter that some mornings he felt like pulling the covers over his head instead of going to court.
    Joey Capano was scheduled to appear next in Tom’s defense. Although he looked as handsome and tanned as ever, Joey confided to reporters that his health was not good; he feared he had inherited Louis Sr.’s heart trouble. In what seemed like one long run-on sentence, he described his heart attacks and his sixteen cardiac surgeries. He said his wife, Joanne, had once inadvertently saved his life as she reached for the phone to call 911 in the middle of the night. “I wasn’t breathing,” he said. “She thought I was dead, but she leaned on my chest when she grabbed the phone and revived me.”
    As he took the witness stand, Joey had five weeks to go before yet another surgical procedure on his heart. Marguerite had so many worries about her boys. Unlike Louie, Joey was a very casual dresser, his former-wrestler’s body straining at the seams of his jacket. As he gestured, reporters saw that he had lost a fingertip on one of his hands (he had caught it between two boats).
    Joey testified that Tom had come to him in March of 1996 for advice on what to buy Gerry to show how grateful he was because Gerry had been so nice to Tom’s daughters. “I suggested that he purchase something such as a cooler,” he said. “I said Gerry could always use one of those.” There had been nothing at all ominous about