The year was 1966. I tried my first federal criminal trial. I represented Willie Elker Fontaine, accused of conspiring with two accomplices to rob a Buffalo Savings and Loan. During the robbery, the manager, who lived in Williamsville, was shot and killed. This case was front page news. Willie of course denied being a co-conspirator.<\/p>\n
Admitted in 1964 I learned on the fly trying insurance defense cases for two years. My \u201cexperience\u201d taught me an important lesson: investigate; it can make all the difference.<\/p>\n
The two other co-conspirators were locked up at the Holding Center. Neither had a lawyer. Why not question one or both?<\/p>\n
I enlisted my friend, court reporter Jerry Romano to record any statements. Fortunately, we were allowed in; even luckier, one of the co-conspirators not only talked to us, he cleared Willie.<\/p>\n
At trial, this witness testified. No surprise. He reversed course and blamed Willie, claiming it was all his idea. On cross-examination the recorded jail statement that he had previously given us changed all that. It was a \u201cWoody Allen\u201d moment. Agents descended on my friend Jerry Romano to verify he had transcribed the statement correctly but it went nowhere.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve often said I won my first homicide case in the late 60\u2019s and spent the next 50 years trying to duplicate the result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The year was 1966. I tried my first federal criminal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-written-memories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4687"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4689,"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions\/4689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.ca2.uscourts.gov\/wdny-125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}