Key witness in high-profile sex, drug-trafficking trial is dead

If his trial had not been postponed from the original June 21 start date, “that witness would have testified already,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph M. Tripi said.

Now, jurors may never know about what the witness would have said in court, Tripi said.

The young woman contacted the FBI on March 14 to report her mother and roommate had found dead rats on their cars where she lived, prosecutors previously said.

Tripi mentioned the dead rats when revealing the witness had died.

The prosecutor said the circumstances of her death are being investigated, but Steven Cohen, a defense lawyer for Gerace, said the witness died by suicide. He added that she was under “pressure from the U.S. Attorney’s Office” to testify against Gerace.

The woman, whose name was not said during the court hearing, was a friend of Gerace’s who was also on the defense’s witness list, Cohen said.

“Peter is devastated by the loss of his friend,” Cohen said after Friday’s hearing. “And for Tripi to have raised the issue of rats is disgusting, because there’s no connection between Peter and the alleged dead rats on the car. We don’t know how that came about.”

She is the second person with connections to the case who has died.

Federal prosecutors described John L. Michalski, a State Supreme Court justice who later died by suicide, as an unindicted co-conspirator in Gerace’s sex-trafficking case, because of evidence showing him to be a customer of “high-end prostitution.”

“The two people who are now deceased took their own lives and would have been very beneficial witnesses for Peter,” Cohen said. “The witness who just killed herself this past week was on my witness list. She was one of my key witnesses. I had a folder of questions I was going to ask her.”

Cohen said the woman had reached out to Gerace, who remains in pretrial custody. But Cohen said he would not allow Gerace to respond to her for fear that prosecutors would claim he was trying to tamper with a witness.

The woman faced criminal charges of her own, and she told Gerace that prosecutors told her she would be prosecuted unless she testified against him, Cohen said.

“The problem with the government is that they believe that every witness is theirs as a matter of right, and that they can go to anyone and say, ‘if you don’t cooperate with us, we will bring charges and we will prosecute you for other crimes,’ “ Cohen said. “They have ability to put enormous pressure on someone.”

Under that kind of pressure, Cohen said, potential witnesses will ask themselves, “Do I tell a lie against a criminal defendant? Or do I lose my children? Or do I go to jail myself? That is patently unfair.”

Gerace faces up to life imprisonment on charges that he bribed a federal agent, conspired to distribute controlled substances, maintained Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club in Cheektowaga as a drug-involved premises and victimized vulnerable women by exploiting their drug addictions in order to coerce them into engaging in commercial sex acts with him, his friends and associates.

Prosecutors are dealing with some vulnerable witnesses, and that is why they’re concerned about how long the trial is taking to start.

Tripi revealed the death of the witness as U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo asked about Gerace’s legal representation.

Cohen has said Gerace intends to fire him over “irreconcilable” differences in legal strategy, but the defendant has struggled to arrange new legal representation while in custody.

Tripi raised his concern about whether Gerace was trying to delay the trial for a tactical advantage.

“I don’t think there’s a tactical reason for the delay here,” Vilardo said.

Vilardo has received information from Gerace – which has not been made public – about his unhappiness with Cohen.

Cohen has said Gerace’s dissatisfaction with his legal representation stems from not following through with some of Gerace’s instructions that Cohen said were at odds with his trial strategy.

Vilardo will not release Cohen from the case until there is new counsel.

The judge ordered Cohen to assist Gerace in finding new counsel.

“You’re not in jail,” Vilardo said. “You can find lawyers.”

Vilardo told Cohen to report back at the next court proceeding on Aug. 18 how the new attorney’s schedule can accommodate the Oct. 23 trial start.

“From the government’s perspective, this case has to go Oct. 23rd,” Tripi said.

Federal authorities have accused Gerace of bribing Joseph Bongiovanni, at the time a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, and conspiring to engage in drug trafficking and human trafficking at Pharaoh’s. Prosecutors have charged the now-retired Bongiovanni with accepting $250,000 in bribes from drug dealers whom he thought were associated with Italian organized crime and shielding them from arrest, as well as providing them with information about investigations and cooperating sources. Both have pleaded not guilty. Both are scheduled to stand trial together.

In May, a June trial start day was postponed to Aug. 14 when defense attorney James P. Harrington, who had represented Bongiovanni since April 2020, was allowed to withdraw from the case for medical reasons. Attorneys Robert Singer and Parker MacKay were named as replacements, and they were given 89 days to prepare for trial.

Then, the trial date was pushed back to Oct. 23 after U.S. District Judge John L. Sinatra Jr. removed himself from the case, prompting it to be reassigned to Vilardo.

When Vilardo set the Oct. 23 trial date, he characterized it as “cast in stone.”

“I’m very sympathetic to what Mr. Tripi is saying about getting this trial tried,” Vilardo said Friday. “I want to get this done, and it will get done.”

Cohen denied trying to delay the trial, and pointed out his opposition to postponing the June trial start date.

“We’ve been pushing this case all along, especially with Peter rotting in jail,” Cohen said.