Propublica
This is part of a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.
Edwin Oliva, a 29-year-old petty thief and drug addict, says he was a wreck as he sat in a chair in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office in winter 1995. A year earlier, he'd told police a lie that helped implicate a possibly innocent man in a murder. Now, prosecutors wanted him to repeat his story in court; he wanted to take it back.
Oliva says he had been on a crack and heroin binge at the time he'd made his initial claim, and that he told prosecutors he implicated the man only because of relentless pressure from police. A statement he had signed — asserting that he had heard a young man named Jabbar Collins discussing a murder plot days before a man wound up shot to death in a Brooklyn apartment building — was a fiction that detectives had fed him.
But the prosecutors, Oliva says, weren't having it. Collins, the man Oliva had fingered, had already been arraigned based in part on Oliva's word. Collins, then 21, was sitting in a Rikers Island jail cell awaiting trial, and the Brooklyn District Attorney's office was intent that he stay behind bars for a very long time. Oliva was going to be a critical witness, whether he liked it or not.
When Oliva refused to testify, the prosecutors, led by senior Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione, threatened to charge him with conspiracy to commit murder, Oliva says. Prosecutors then held Oliva for several days at Lincoln Correctional Facility, a minimum-security prison in Harlem. But Oliva held firm.
"I refused to testify to a lie," he said in a sworn statement submitted years later in federal court.
Vecchione's team, Oliva says, finally found a way to leverage him: Oliva was out of prison on a work release program, so prosecutors got the privilege revoked, and on March 1, 1995, Oliva was transferred to Ulster Correctional Facility, a maximum security state prison two hours north of New York City.
Oliva was brought back to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office for a meeting with Vecchione's partner, Assistant District Attorney Charles Posner. According to Oliva, Posner told him that he could have his work release privileges restored if he'd testify against Collins.
"I felt trapped and desperate," Oliva said. "And so I agreed."
Oliva took the stand against Collins, insisting that his testimony was not a result of any agreement with prosecutors. And Vecchione, in a powerful closing argument, vouched for Oliva's credibility.
"He saw something. He heard something," Vecchione told the jury. "Someone asked him about it. And he is telling what he saw and he is telling what he heard. Nothing else."
Jabbar Collins was convicted of murdering Abraham Pollack, a rabbi from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and spent the next 15 years in prison. But he eventually gained his freedom through a rare federal petition in 2010, one asserting that prosecutors and police had invented, distorted and withheld evidence in his case. And now Collins is suing for $150 million, naming the individual prosecutors and detectives as defendants along with the city.
Based on an assortment of prosecution and government documents, as well as a number of sworn statements, Collins and his lawyer have asserted a staggering array of misconduct on Vecchione's part:
Vecchione, they charge, coerced an illiterate drug addict named Angel Santos to testify against Collins by physically threatening him and sending him to jail for a full week. Vecchione, they claim, persuaded a minor drug dealer named Adrian Diaz to testify by chasing him down in Puerto Rico and helping him avoid violating the terms of his probation. In court, they maintain, Vecchione suborned perjury; he concocted cover stories about how Collins' family threatened one or more witnesses. And while Collins spent a decade and a half in a state prison, Vecchione oversaw an effort to deny Collins access to the information that might have freed him.
In a series of filings in state and federal court, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office has refuted Collins' claims of misconduct. Officials say Oliva was promised no deal for his testimony; Santos took the stand voluntarily; Vecchione took no special steps to protect Diaz in exchange for his testimony; and the office handled Collins' requests for records in good faith.
Today, Vecchione, 63, remains a senior figure in the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes. Hynes has stood by him, heralding Vecchione as a principled lawyer and an effective prosecutor. Both Vecchione and Hynes refused to be interviewed for this article.
Benjamin Brafman and Alan Dershowitz, two prominent defense lawyers who say they have known Vecchione for years, cautioned against concluding Vecchione was guilty of what has been alleged.
"These allegations are based largely on unproved claims made in an adversarial complaint," the lawyers said in a letter. "They have not yet been subjected to the full truth testing mechanisms of a judicial proceding."
"In our view," they asserted, "Mr. Vecchione has not been found to have committed any judicial misconduct."
A review of Vecchione's career shows that he has been a lightning rod for criticism for years. In a 1993 murder case, Vecchione was accused of withholding a cooperation agreement between himself and a key witness. State judges have chastised him for over-the-top behavior in court. Some defense lawyers, judges and former colleagues have said Vecchione is an all-too-willing lieutenant to Hynes, a loyalist interested in making headline-producing cases and then winning them at all costs.
Vecchione's aggressive pursuit of Clarence Norman, the onetime Brooklyn political kingpin, failed to produce what the district attorney's office most hoped it would — evidence that judgeships were for sale in Brooklyn.
Vecchione tried to prosecute a former FBI agent for helping arrange the murders of gangsters, only to have the case fall apart in embarrassment when it was revealed that Vecchione's chief witness was disastrously unreliable.
And just last year, a prosecutor leading a sex trafficking unit overseen by Vecchione resigned amid accusations that she had withheld a victim's recantation in a high-profile rape case.
For many legal experts, defense lawyers and advocates for the wrongly convicted, Vecchione is a prominent example of a troubling aspect of the American criminal justice system: Prosecutors who are implicated in misconduct often seem immune from meaningful punishment.
A recent investigation by ProPublica looking at more than a decade's worth of court records found that New York judges don't routinely refer prosecutorial misconduct to state panels that handle attorney discipline, even when they overturn convictions and upbraid prosecutors for constitutional violations. State disciplinary panels, when they do get referrals, rarely impose meaningful sanctions. The city's district attorneys lack the will to punish their subordinates, perhaps out of fear of embarrassment. All told, ProPublica found 30 cases in which judges reversed convictions based on misconduct by New York City prosecutors. Just one of these prosecutors was publicly disciplined.
The pattern is much the same across the country. The Northern California Innocence Project reviewed 12 years of court opinions and found that California prosecutors were hardly ever disciplined after convictions were overturned because of their misconduct.
Frederic Block, the federal judge presiding over Collins' civil lawsuit, has expressed something like amazement at Hynes' unwillingness to sanction Vecchione.
"I'm just puzzled why the district attorney did not take any action against Vecchione," Block said in court last fall. "To the contrary, he seems to ignore everything that happened. And an innocent man has been in jail for 16 years."
Hynes appears more willing to investigate detectives who might have helped make bad cases. Earlier this month, his office said it would review 50 murder cases handled by a single retired Brooklyn homicide detective. The action came after Hynes supported the release of a man who had been wrongly convicted based on the work of the detective, Louis Scarcella. So far, there's been no indication that Hynes' review of that case, or the larger case review, will extend to the prosecutors who investigated side by side with Scarcella for years, attending the same possibly suspect lineups, accepting the now supposedly dubious confessions, vouching for the witnesses Scarcella helped identify.
Collins' lawyer, Joel Rudin, is not at all surprised. Rudin has a long record of holding the city's prosecutors accountable. He's won millions of dollars in settlements from the city for wrongfully convicting people, and maintains a long list of cases in which prosecutors have broken ethics rules to win convictions, all without disciplinary sanctions. Often those prosecutors have been promoted after state and federal judges have excoriated their conduct.
Rudin's allegations against Vecchione and the office he works for are built on a formidable assortment of depositions, prison records, sworn affidavits and a review of state appellate court records. Rudin is scheduled to depose Vecchione on June 14.
Jabbar Collins — guilty or not — never got a fair trial. Two federal judges have declared it so. Both have been unsparing in condemning the conduct of Vecchione. Block, who is handling the civil lawsuit, has said in open court that he's eager to dig deeper.
"This was horrific behavior on the part of Vecchione," Block said. "We are going to have a civil proceeding, and all of this is going to be uncovered. I kid you not."
Hynes, meanwhile, does not seem outwardly concerned about Vecchione's record, or any damage it might have done to his office. As he runs for a seventh term, Hynes has agreed to have his office be the subject of a prime-time CBS television show, "Brooklyn DA."
A Second Coming
Brooklyn in the early 1990s was rife with racial tension, particularly between the borough's large Jewish and African-American populations. The conflict was most visible in Crown Heights, where in 1991 the mutual suspicions erupted in several days and nights of unrest.
The newly elected Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles "Joe" Hynes, quickly found himself on the hot seat. The Jewish vote had helped him win office, but he had reason to fear losing that support: In October 1992, his prosecutors failed to convict a 16-year-old black man named Lemrick Nelson for chasing down a 29-year-old rabbinical student and stabbing him to death during the 1991 disturbances. Hynes' handling of the case eventually became the subject of a damning state critique.
Under fire, Hynes wound up benefiting from the work of a prosecutor recently returned to his ranks. Mike Vecchione — who had begun his career in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office 15 years earlier, followed by a career as a defense lawyer — had come back to the office at Hynes' urging. Vecchione, a seasoned trial lawyer, was soon made chief of Hynes' homicide bureau, taking on the most sensitive cases involving Jewish victims.
There were more than a few, and Vecchione consistently won convictions.
There was the 1992 case of 15-year-old Tziporah Yagodayev, strangled to death on the Williamsburg Bridge. Vecchione proved that a drug-addicted thief named Raymond Vargas was the killer, sending him away for 25 years to life. Later that year, a 37-year-old Hasidic mother died after being stabbed more than 35 times during a botched robbery. Vecchione won a murder conviction by showing that the defendant's palm matched a bloody handprint found at the crime scene. When Vecchione emerged from the courtroom, he got a hero's welcome from a group of overjoyed Hasidic women.
"He's very smooth and confident in the courtroom," said Alan Vinegrad, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who once helped prosecute a kidnapping case with Vecchione. "He's an excellent trial attorney. He had a great rapport with witnesses and could talk to real people in a real way."
Vecchione, who had grown up in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, first came to work in the office in 1973 when Eugene Gold was the district attorney. He had gone to St. John's University, and graduated as part of the first class of Hofstra University's law school. He then took a job as a junior prosecutor.
His illusions of legal grandeur, however, were roughed up a bit on his very first day in criminal court.
"I was so proud, standing right in front of the bench, wearing my brand new suit," Vecchione wrote in a 2009 book about his role in a famous police corruption case. "I was officially part of the great American tradition of jurisprudence. And then the judge, wearing the solemn robes of his office, cleared his throat, opened a top drawer in his desk, and spit right into it. And then closed the drawer. Well, so much for majesty."
Vecchione said in the book that his first major case was a mob murder, and winning it meant more than anything to him. In a closed office late at night, preparing for trial, Vecchione said he came across a report that called into question the integrity of his main witness.
"It would have been absolutely nothing for me to take that report and tear it up or just throw it away," Vecchione wrote. "No one would have known the difference. Not one person. I would be lying if I said the prospect of getting caught didn't enter my mind. It did."
Vecchione said he kept the report in the file and went to trial. He lost.
"One lie leads to another and another and another," Vecchione said in explaining his decision. "And then the whole house of cards falls down."
In the coming years, Vecchione won dozens of cases. Cases with loads of evidence, and cases with less than overwhelming proof.
"He had a passion for trying cases. He was very aggressive," recalled Tommy Dades, a retired New York City detective who worked for years with Vecchione and who collaborated with him on the 2009 book. "Other prosecutors would want a video of the guy with a gun doing the shooting. Mike would say, 'Tommy, get me a case, and we'll try it. Corroborate it, and we'll try it.'"
After a decade in the office, Vecchione left to start his own practice, and he proved to be a respected defense lawyer, too. One of his more noteworthy accomplishments came in a murder case involving a battered woman who killed her abusive husband by setting him on fire with cleaning fluid. The woman was found guilty of a lesser charge — criminally negligent homicide — and spared prison time.
Back for a second stint in the district attorney's office, and piling up noteworthy triumphs, those who worked alongside Vecchione said his confidence only grew.
"Even back in the '70s, he looked at himself as a tough guy, a take-no-prisoners kind of guy," said one Brooklyn judge. "But at the time, nobody knew where he'd end up."
