Last Dance, Last Chance

nor will I ever trust him again with my children. Please help us to get on with our lives without him…I don’t know how they will feel in the future regarding their dad, but the choice is theirs—he’s still their father…”
     
    There were dozens of letters to Judge Rossetti about the sentencing to come. Aside from Anthony’s mother and some of his siblings, they all came from neighbors and friends who had no sympathy at all for his plight.

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    A nthony Pignataro��s sentencing was delayed for three weeks, but on Friday, February 9, 2001, he finally faced Judge Mario Rossetti. As with so many convicted felons who have awaited sentencing in a jail cell for months, his skin was the greenish-white shade of jail pallor. He wore his own invention, his snap-on toupee, but it looked bizarre because his head was shaved beneath it, and it didn’t blend smoothly with his own hair as it had been designed to do. Although he was still close to six feet in height, he seemed much diminished, a shadow of the super-confident persona he’d always affected.
    He didn’t look dangerous, but perhaps that was the image he wished to project on this cold morning in Buffalo. As Donn Esmonde of the Buffalo News observed, Pignataro had missed his calling. “[He] should have taken a few acting classes and headed for Hollywood. Instead of a felon, he could have been a star.”
     
    Frank Sedita and Carol Bridge were present to represent the People, and Joel Daniels sat beside Pignataro.
    “There has been a presentence report,” Frank Sedita said. “In my thirteen years as a prosecutor, it’s probably the most comprehensive and detailed presentencing report I’ve ever seen.”
    And it was. It was all there: a written survey of a man’s life, a word picture eerily similar to the painting of Dorian Grey that festered and streaked and aged in a locked room while the human form of the character remained youthful and unlined. Anthony’s sins against his patients, his fellow physicians, and his family had piled up year after year, and now most of them had been found out. All the plastic surgery and workouts that had been designed to keep him looking young for his age had been erased by alcohol, heroin, failure, and long confinement.
    Frank Sedita said he had nothing further to add to what was already on the record. He did, however, wish to speak to a last-minute letter Anthony had given Judge Rossetti—a letter the prosecutor had just read.
    “The defendant claims that he has had several ‘heartfelt discussions with Mrs. Pignataro’—that’s a quote—regarding her expressed desire for the leniency of this Court towards Mr. Pignataro. I showed her the letter, and she denied the claim by Mr. Pignataro.”
    Continuing his custom of whittling a fine edge off the truth, Anthony had tried a final foolish deception. He had written a letter in his own handwriting to Judge Rossetti to explain that he and Debbie had reconciled. That was not true, Debbie said firmly. There was not a wisp of truth in the letter. In the past year, Debbie had never discussed a reconciliation with Anthony, and she shook her head faintly as she realized he was trying to convince Judge Rossetti of that.
    Indeed, Debbie was within a week of receiving her final divorce decree.
    Even though she had been vindicated, this was a difficult day for Debbie. She had had such hope for Anthony—for them both. Now it had all turned to ashes, and she was sitting in yet another courtroom. At least she was walking under her own power, and everyone who had supported her was there with her: Denis Scinta, her mother, her brother, her cousins, Sharon Simon, Shelly Palombaro. They were all there beside her in the front row of the gallery as the man she had once loved waited to hear his sentence.
    Sedita reminded the judge that Pignataro had promised in his plea bargain to admit to being a second felony offender at the time of sentencing. He added that Debbie had asked that there be a restraining order of protection against Anthony for three years after he served his maximum sentence. No one knew yet what that would be, but she feared that whenever Anthony got out of prison he would head for her door.
    As for Anthony’s two sentences, it was to be expected that Frank Sedita preferred that they run consecutively—one right after the other—while Joel Daniels wanted them to be concurrent. If Daniels got his way, Anthony would get two prison sentences for the price of