Last Dance, Last Chance

not sentencing your mother. I’m not sentencing your brothers or your sister because they didn’t do anything wrong. You did.”
    Judge Rossetti commented on Anthony’s second chance. “You got out of jail. I would have said, ‘Thank God! I’m out of jail…I’m on my way. I’ going to get a job and start over again,’ but, by God, you didn’t do that. You have accomplished to destroy, tarnish, not only your well-respected name, your life to me has been…a charade of misrepresentation, self-centered, manipulative, disregard of the oaths and vows you’ve taken, disrespect for the law and, most important, disrespect for the value of human life.”
    Judge Rossetti commented that a piece of himself went with everyone he had to sentence, and that he felt sorry for Anthony’s family.
    “But I have to do what is just. I’m only a judge here on earth. The Judge you will finally face will give you whatever judgment that He will give you. That I can’t do. We all face that Judge.”
    As Judge Rossetti began his sentence, Anthony seemed to shrink further. At this most crucial moment, a cell phone shrilled in the courtroom, annoying the judge. The cell phone owner fumbled frantically to turn it off.
    Judge Rossetti sentenced Anthony to the top range available to him: fifteen years in prison, a sentence that was to run consecutively to the four years imposed by Judge Tills for the probation violation. Further, Rossetti said he would sign an order of protection for Debbie to begin eighteen years hence—in 2019—and continue for three years.
    Judge Rossetti urged, perhaps in vain, that Debbie and Lena Pignataro try to find a way to put their differences aside. “I never had a grandmother or grandfather that I knew,” he said a little wistfully. “But that’s not my business. That’s just an aside.”
     
    Anthony had 30 days to appeal his sentence, but for all intents and purposes, he appeared to have come to the end of the line. There would be no parole until he had served nine-tenths of his sentence. If he survives, he will be nearly 60 when he gets out of prison.
     
    Anthony Pignataro no longer has a medical degree, a wife, a home of his own, a red Lamborghini, a Cadillac, or a mistress. His children can decide whether they want to visit him in prison, talk to him on the phone, or write to him.
    The “modern-day Galileo” spends his days and nights in the Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, New York.
    He has no contact with his children.
    He did not honor his promise to tell authorities where he obtained the arsenic that he used to poison his wife.

Afterword
    A year after Pignataro’s sentencing, I had one of the most remarkable interviews of my career. Almost without exception, the victims I write about have been dead for years before I begin to research their stories, and, of course, I don’t get to talk with them. I can only describe them through the memories of the people who knew them in life. But now I was sitting at a long dining room table in a warm and friendly home in West Seneca, New York. Almost all the people who were responsible for bringing justice to Debbie Pignataro were there, too, sharing antipasto and pizza, and remembering the myriad events of almost five years: Frank Sedita, Carol Giarizzo Bridge, Chuck Craven, Sharon Simon, Caroline Rago, Shelly Palombaro, Rose Gardner, Denis Scinta, and, most gratifying to me, Debbie Pignataro herself.
    I had spoken to Debbie on the phone many times and early on learned to my chagrin at my own naivete that she wasn’t the woman Anthony had introduced to me as his wife when he called me in 1998. I had no way of knowing then that it was Tami Maxell, Anthony’s mistress, who greeted me graciously and assured me that she, “Debbie,” had written the Mass Destruction manuscript. I had been only one of a long list of people Anthony tried to con into doing what he wanted.
    If I had agreed to write a book defending him, then, I wonder: how would he have kept up his fake-wife gambit?
    The real Debbie was someone I liked instantly. She was a little shy, and I’m sure she was apprehensive that this evening was going to bring back a lot of ghosts from her past. She bustled around the kitchen, waiting on her guests, and no one who didn’t know about her long physical ordeal would have noticed the slight stiffness in her lower legs and feet. She had cleaned house for days and made a special effort to invite the prosecutorial team to her home