Last Dance, Last Chance

anything on him, that he really had made contact with Arnie. He even promised Perez he would pay him $5,000 up front if he could produce a photograph of himself with Arnie Letovich. That would prove that Perez wasn’t snitching to the cops.
    Perez said he’d been curious about why Pignataro was willing to go as far as murder for hire, and Tony told him that Letovich was going to be a star witness against him in an attempted murder case. He asked him whom he had tried to kill.
    “My wife,” Tony had answered. “My wife. I’m gonna get that bitch.” Tony had gone on to confide that his wife had tried to commit suicide when she found out he had a girlfriend, as if that were outrageous enough behavior on her part to warrant reprisal of some kind.
    At this point, Perez decided that he should go to the district attorney. He didn’t need any more convincing that Tony was serious about having Letovich killed, and maybe he wouldn’t stop with that. He seemed furious at his wife, too.
    Now, Perez told the investigators that Tony had gone so far as to plot the best way to kill Arnie. Once they got used to shooting up together and Arnie trusted Perez, Tony suggested that Perez put poison in the syringe. Tony had specifically said that rat poison would probably be the best poison to use.
    But Tony was starting to get anxious. His trial for attempted murder was getting closer, even though he thought Joel Daniels could get him some delays. Tony wanted to know when Luis Perez would be released from jail. Just as soon as Luis was out, Tony wanted him to write to him at a post office box address.
    He gave Perez a precise description of Arnie Letovich, saying he was a skinny white male who looked like Jesus Christ. He had a lot of tattoos, the most outstanding of which was a Heroin King symbol. He described Arnie as looking like “a straight-up junkie.”
    With Perez’s information, the D.A.’s investigators were convinced that eventually Tony Pignataro was going to find somebody behind bars who was willing to carry out a murder for the sake of the $10,000 he was offering. His only money source was his mother, although they doubted that she would give him the money if she knew what it was for. She had been an endless source of funds for attorneys and his living expenses, however.
    One more informant was warned not to attempt to entice Tony Pignataro into a conversation. Frank Sedita told Perez that he would be violating Pignataro’s constitutional rights if he started conversations about the attempted murder case. Anything Tony might tell him would probably be ruled inadmissible by the court.
    Frank Sedita talked to the deputy superintendent of the holding center to see which, if any, of the conversations between Perez and Pignataro might have been caught on surveillance cameras. If they had been, they were gone; at the time, the tape in the gym camera was recorded over every two hours after corrections officers viewed them.
    Oblivious to the fact that the prisoners he had approached were giving the D.A.’s office play-by-play descriptions of his attempts to set up a hit, Tony Pignataro continued his solicitation of murder. And Luis Perez made regular reports to law enforcement authorities about what Tony was planning. He spoke to Special Agent Richard Caito of the Career Criminal Task Force on August 7. He said that Tony had located Letovich’s new address and even knew that he might be living with a woman named Sherry * . Perez repeated that Pignataro wanted Arnie Letovich’s death to look like a drug overdose.
     
    On August 8, 2000, Frank Sedita and Joel Daniels appeared before Judge Mario Rossetti to make motions about the date of Pignataro’s trial on the attempted murder charges. Although Daniels argued vociferously for a delay, Rossetti made it clear that he intended to proceed with the trial on October 9.
    A day later, Pignataro’s defense team made a motion to have him released from the holding center while his violation of probation appeal was pending. Frank Sedita and Carol Bridge were puzzled over why they chose this relatively late date to protest. Way back in February, Judge Wolfgang had ordered no bail and told Pignataro’s lawyers that he could reapply for lower bail, but they had waited five months to do so. Now, with the trial looming so near, Tony Pignataro suddenly was very anxious to get out of jail.
    Knowing what they knew about Tony’s animosity toward Arnie Letovich, Sedita and Bridge were