Last Dance, Last Chance

Arnie so he would be too frightened to testify.
    Tony had bragged to him that he was a doctor, Kwamba said, and he would never have gone after his wife and kids in any way he knew could be detected. But, when Kwamba asked him directly if he did do the poisoning, he only replied, “They will never find out.”
    Then Tony winked at Kwamba in a conspiratorial way. Pignataro had apparently believed that he could persuade Kwamba to assist him by offering to pay for a better attorney for him if he did what Tony wanted. What he didn’t know was that Kwamba had already accepted a plea bargain and didn’t need an attorney. Kwamba had only been toying with him, seeing how far he would go.
    Feeling that he had Kwamba on his side, Pignataro asked him to get him some tobacco and other items that were contraband. Kwamba had assured him he would check with his circle of friends, but he’d never delivered anything to Tony.
    Kwamba, too, was warned by the district attorney’s office not to speak to or solicit information from Pignataro unless Tony himself started a conversation, and even then to limit himself to listening only. Kwamba said that Tony kept to himself most of the time and spoke only to a very few of the other inmates in the holding center.
    Thanks to his mother, Anthony Pignataro had two of the most outstanding criminal defense attorneys in Buffalo representing him. But he was clearly not content to let Joel Daniels and Brian Welsh speak for him. He thought his plan was far superior and much more expedient. He was confident that he knew his way around the jail system. With his savvy and his mother’s money, he could find insiders who would either frighten the witnesses against him or kill them to eliminate any chance that they could testify. Arnie Letovich, in particular, was the potential witness who worried Pignataro.
    By July, he had found another likely hit man. And now it was a hit man he was looking for. After five months in jail, Anthony wanted to make sure that he didn’t face another prison term at the end of the one he was already serving.
    This time, the informant who contacted Frank Sedita was a native of Puerto Rico: Luis Perez * . Luis was thirty-five, and although he was housed in a different pod than Pignataro, they could see each other through their cell doors, and, like everyone else in the jail, Perez had noticed the man with bolts in his head. Later, they spoke often in the gym.
    Tony was fluent in Spanish, and the two conversed in both English and Spanish. Tony explained that he was a surgeon and that he had gone to school in Puerto Rico, and they shared memories of Perez’s home territory.
    They had many conversations, the last on July 8, 2000. After they moved past casual comments, Perez said that most of their discussions had been about Tony’s need to find someone to kill a witness against him: Arnie Letovich—whom Tony called “his problem on the West Side.”
    Tony explained that Letovich had copped heroin for him. He promised Perez that he would cop for him, too, although he warned him that Letovich would want to hold back a couple of bags for himself. Tony said that at the time of his own most recent arrest, he had quickly discovered where Letovich was being housed. He was in the Delta wing then, but Tony now believed Arnie had been moved to a rehab center over on Delaware Avenue. He was still seeking someone who could hurt Arnie enough to keep him from testifying.
    Perez told Sedita that he had listened to what Pignataro had in mind. Tony was prepared to pay big money to have Letovich killed. He asked Perez if he or someone he knew might be willing to do that for money. He had worked out a plan that he thought would be foolproof. Through his sources, he knew that Arnie was due to be released from the rehab clinic within a few days, and he wouldn’t be hard to find.
    Whenever they met, Perez said, Tony had brought up the subject of killing Letovich. He thought it would be prudent if Perez spent some time convincing Arnie that he was his friend. The best way, Tony suggested, was for Luis to get him high, so that Arnie would trust him and expect that they would shoot up when they were together. It never occurred to Tony that Arnie Letovich might have kicked his habit while he was in rehab.
    To be sure that Perez was carrying out Tony’s plans, he wanted him to have someone take a picture of him and Letovich together. That way, he would know that Perez wasn’t trying to pull