Last Dance, Last Chance

tested positive for lidocaine, codeine, diazepam, midazolam, and thiopental—all drugs administered by Anthony Pignataro.
     
    Chuck Craven and Pat Finnerty began learning everything they could about anesthesia. The advent of the Internet had made it possible to find out anything about anything, and they punched in their questions and rapidly got up to speed. As soon as they learned the basics, the two investigators began to interview doctors who specialized in anesthesia.
    When they compared what they learned to the sedatives and painkillers that had been given to Sarah Smith, they were stunned.
    “We knew he wasn’t meeting standards in the proper care of a patient,” Craven said. “So now we had something to hang our hat on.”
    They moved ahead, gathering evidence to present the case of Sarah Smith’s death to a grand jury. At the same time, the New York State Board of Health continued its meticulous investigation to see whether Anthony’s medical license in that state should be suspended permanently.
    For the moment, Anthony had continued seeing patients. His opinion was that Sarah Smith had been taking some over-the-counter herbal additives she hadn’t told him about. In Anthony’s opinion, that was the only way his anesthesia could possibly have harmed her. As always, Anthony Pignataro believed that he never made mistakes. Any problem had to be the patient’s fault.

12
    F rank A. Sedita III, now head of the Homicide Investigation Unit of the Erie County D.A.’s office, would be designated as the assistant district attorney working on the case of Sarah Grafton Smith. Like most of those involved in this medical tragedy, Sedita’s family went back many generations in Buffalo. His grandfather, Frank A. Sedita, had been the sixty-third mayor of Buffalo, and he had been an awesome hero to his son and his grandsons.
    The first Frank Albert Sedita was born in New Orleans in 1907, one of eight children of Italian immigrant parents. When the Seditas moved to Buffalo, Frank was 4, and by the age of 10, he was selling newspapers on downtown street corners to help support his family. As his son and grandson would do later, he attended Canisius College, but he had to work his way through as a busboy and a salesman.
    It was 1931 and the height of the Great Depression when Frank Sedita earned his law degree; the next year he was admitted to the bar. He had many jobs over the next several decades: deputy sheriff, secretary of the Division of Water, city clerk, and city court judge. As a judge, he saw the plight of the homeless and the alcoholic, and he worked to help them. As the city’s mayor for three terms, he quelled incipient race riots in Buffalo and appointed blacks for the first time to high city positions. The African-American population had come to Buffalo in large numbers in the 1860s as they escaped from the South through the Underground Railway. With Canada just across the water, Buffalo was a prime passageway, but many running from slavery chose to stay. Mayor Sedita gave them respect, just as he fought for urban renewal.
    He was a man ahead of his time, dealing with issues that most of America would ignore until much later. “FAS,” the first, was a staunch Democrat and the first mayor of a large city to endorse John F. Kennedy in 1960.
    Ill health forced Mayor Frank Sedita to resign in 1973, and he died at 68 on May 2, 1975. His mammoth desk now sits in the foyer of Frank Sedita III’s home in the city’s historical section, North Buffalo. It is the young prosecutor’s proudest possession.
    Frank A. Sedita, Jr., is a New York Supreme Court judge, and Frank III’s cousin Joe is an attorney. “He’s the smartest of all of us,” Sedita comments. Perhaps. The fact is that they are all smart.
    As in so many other East Coast cities, Buffalo’s 305,000 residents belie its small-town atmosphere. Families who settle there don’t leave, and connections are forged through decades. Buffalo has seen its struggles, first with the history-changing excavation of the Erie Canal and then with both the wealthy and the criminal elements, who flocked to the crowded harbor to make their fortunes.
    But by the 1990s, Buffalo was designated an All-American City. Today, it is a city rich in tradition and culture. The legal community is tight, and friendly��at least outside the courtroom.
    In the 1930s and 1940s, all the Italian Buffalonians lived on the west side. Three generations ago, the first Frank