Last Dance, Last Chance

Sedita and Carol Bridge were already prepared to go ahead with their case against Anthony Pignataro when they began to get a lot of help. Apparently, Anthony hadn’t been any more popular in jail than he was in the straight world.
    Carol Bridge laughed as she described the rush to snitch on Tony. “We never had so many informants. We had a conga line of them coming across Delaware Avenue to tell us about Tony Pignataro.”
    The first informant was not a jail inmate, although he was a man who “knew things.” Mr. X had once been a patient of Tony’s. Back in 1997, he had overheard the doctor complaining to his staff about patients who owed him money. Being an expert in collecting money, Mr. X let Dr. Tony know that he could probably help him get what was owed. But the doctor said that wasn’t what he needed help with; what he was really looking for was someone to kill his wife.
    “I took him seriously when he wanted to know if I could do it. I told him I’d get back to him on that.”
    However, when Mr. X came in to get the final check on his hair implants, Pignataro hadn’t brought the subject up again. Mr. X was relieved, as he had no intention of hurting a woman. When he’d read in the paper about Debbie, he had recalled the conversation. But he didn’t want to get involved. “I just wanted to tell someone,” Mr. X told Chuck Craven.
    This occurred months before Sarah Smith died.
    They already had one witness who was willing to testify that Pignataro was thinking about killing his wife: Arnie Letovich. Arnie was prepared to get up on the witness stand, even though he knew that Tony would be furious.
    However, the conga line continued. A woman named Trixie * talked to Frank Sedita, Craven, and Finnerty about her ex-husband, Paulie Cavalini * , who was in the Erie County Holding Center waiting disposition on a federal charge. Cavalini agreed to talk to the prosecutors. He described Tony Pignataro, beginning, as everyone did, with the bolts in his head. He remembered Tony as being weird and a “loner.”
    But Paulie and Tony had played a card game called International Spades to pass the time. The subject of Tony’s prosecution on the poisoning case had come up, and the ex-doctor had bragged that “they can’t put the arsenic in my hands.” He said that the only one who might keep him from being found innocent was Arnie Letovich.
    Of course, Tony added that he was innocent. Either his wife had done it to herself, or maybe her mother had done it, because she was over at his house at least five days a week.
    Tony was very upset with Arnie, and he told Paulie Cavalini that he had found out that Arnie was going to court on May 23.
    Cavalini said that Tony was looking for someone to either beat up Arnie or kill him before he could do harm to Tony’s defense case. Paulie also recalled that Tony had said his girlfriend would never say anything about him to hurt him. Tami was in his pocket, and so was his mother. Paulie said Tony called his mother a lot from jail.
    As always, Sedita told Cavalini that there was no deal, other than that anything he said during this interview would not be used against him. He also instructed him not to try to entice Pignataro into further conversation. It wouldn’t matter what Tony said under those circumstances; it would be “fruit of the poisoned tree” and could not be used against him in any trial.
    Cavalini said he didn’t want anything from the D.A.’s office. He just didn’t like Tony Pignataro.
    On May 19, Pat Finnerty heard another version of Tony Pignataro’s thirst for revenge from an inmate. Mohammed Kwamba * said he had been housed with Pignataro a couple of times. He described Tony as keeping things very close to his chest, but he had told Kwamba that he knew that a man and two women were going to be key witnesses against him in his trial, and that they were people he used to do heroin with.
    Kwamba said that Tony was extremely frightened about what the man might say in his testimony. He had asked Kwamba to help him “scare the shit” out of Arnie Letovich so that Arnie wouldn’t testify. He had asked Kwamba to find out through his Muslim friends in the holding center the exact pod and cell where Letovich was being held.
    Kwamba had the impression that Tony was testing him. He had found out where Arnie was and reported that to Pignataro. Satisfied that he could count on Kwamba, Tony then asked him to spread the word among his friends to put pressure on