Last Dance, Last Chance

until they were ready.
    Sedita and his team continued to gather witnesses who recalled the seamy, shadowy life Anthony had lived after his release from jail on his first conviction. One informant was a woman named Doris Kline * . During the first months of 1999, Doris had lived with Arnie Letovich.
    She said she had met Tony several times when he came over to her house about twice a week to get heroin.
    “Did you ever see him with a woman?” Sedita asked.
    She nodded, saying that he had brought a woman with him in the spring of 1999. Doris only knew her first name: Tami.
    Asked to describe Tony Pignataro, Doris said he drove a late-model black Cadillac, and that he struck her as “nervous, paranoid, and arrogant.” She described a night when he had unbolted his toupee from the top of his head to demonstrate his invention. That had to be Pignataro; there weren’t a lot of men in Buffalo with bolts in their heads.
    “Once,” she said, “he actually asked if he could date my daughter. She’s only twenty-three, and he has to be in his mid-forties. I didn’t like that idea.”
    As for Arnie and Tony, she said they always seemed to get along well. Arnie copped the heroin, and Tony paid for it. She said she’d left Arnie in June 1999, but there was no big flaming breakup; their relationship had just kind of worn itself out. Arnie had never been physically abusive to her.
     
    In March 2000, Anthony Pignataro was sentenced to sixteen months to four years in prison for violating his probation. That was a minor sentence compared to what might lie ahead. Buffalo residents were beginning to follow the Pignataro saga with great interest as significant events in the case were reported by the local media more and more frequently.
    Because the grand jury was about to meet to consider the evidence in Debbie’s poisoning case, Joel Daniels still refused to let Anthony take the witness stand in the marathon family court trial, which continued endlessly. He said he wouldn’t even let his client take the stand and invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination because of the criminal investigation that everyone knew was going on.
    Anthony, who looked as if he was eager to take the witness chair, listened to his attorneys and remained at the defense table. He had always considered himself to be extremely talented in persuasion, but for once he allowed someone else to hold the reins. Frank Sedita and Denis Scinta would have been delighted if he had overridden Daniels’s advice. But he didn’t.
    Debbie hoped against hope that the neglect hearings were over, but they weren’t. On March 10, Judge Marjorie Mix refused to dismiss the child neglect proceedings against the Pignataros in her court. A trial was scheduled for June 13, when both Debbie and Anthony would be defendants. Frank Sedita appealed Judge Mix’s decision to the appellate division of the state supreme court in Rochester.
    It was such a long spring.
    In a hearing on April 4, Joel Daniels argued that “Deborah Pignataro has a long sordid history as a pill-popper” and said, “She very well may be lying” when she claimed that she had not tried to kill herself with arsenic after her 15-year-old marriage collapsed. That angered Frank Sedita. He protested that Daniels was trying to interfere with an upcoming grand jury probe into the causes of Debbie’s poisoning.
    It would have been a hard time for even the most confident of women. For Debbie, still in her wheelchair, it was totally humiliating. She had taken a lot of pain pills, muscle relaxants, and tranquilizers to deal with five surgeries on her neck, the disintegration of her marriage, and her way of life since the awful day when Sarah Smith suffered her fatal lack of oxygen in the operating room. But all those pills had been prescribed by Debbie’s doctors, and many of them had disappeared down Anthony’s throat.
    Every secret corner of Debbie’s life had been poked at, probed, and held up for the world to see. All of Anthony’s mistresses, all of her perceived failures. If it hadn’t been for Sharon Simon, Shelly, her mother, and her cousin Denis—who sometimes turned to wink at her in court when it got too painful—she wondered how she could bear to face Anthony, his attorneys, his mother, and the clamoring media.
    On April 4, an Erie County grand jury began hearing evidence that might convince them to bring an indictment against Anthony Pignataro in the poisoning of his wife. All