Mack, Giorgianni and Mack's brother Ralphiel Mack were indicted in December on multiple counts of extortion, mail fraud, wire fraud and bribery
TRENTON - In a lengthy and pointed rebuttal to a motion filed by attorneys in Trenton Mayor Tony Mack’s public corruption case, government lawyers said the defense’s attempt to throw out wiretap evidence is “meritless” and the idea of a separate trial for Joseph “JoJo” Giorgianni is based on “tenuous grounds.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office’s response to the defense lawyers’ 13-point bid was filed late yesterday. In addition to point-by-point refutations of each defense attempt to throw out evidence for the upcoming trial, the prosecution’s motion reveals new details about the case.
It includes Mack’s reaction as he was arrested at his Berkeley Square home last year and informed he was being charged with attempted extortion.
“I never did that, never in my life,” Mack allegedly said on Sept. 10, 2012.
Mack, Giorgianni and Mack’s brother Ralphiel Mack were indicted in December on multiple counts of extortion, mail fraud, wire fraud and bribery.
The charges stem from a sting operation that commenced just weeks after Mack took office in 2010. The FBI used cooperating witness who allegedly fronted bribe money in exchange for official influence with a fake downtown parking garage project.
Judge Michael A. Shipp is set to hear arguments from both sides about the key evidence on Nov. 21. The trial is expected to start in January.
The pretrial motions center around the hours of recorded wiretaps collected by the FBI, which intercepted Mack’s cell phone calls for six months in 2012 and Giorgianni's for long before that.
Federal law lays out specific guidelines for when wiretapping is allowed, and mandates that authorities get a federal judge to sign off on authorization for the tap and renew it every 30 days.
In their filing, the government acknowledges to the defense claim of receiving unauthorized wiretap recordings outside the days that were authorized, but says those happened because of “errors made by the telephone carriers.”
The prosecution will not be relying on any information gleaned from those intercepts, the filing said, and the government attorneys have not listened to them.
Lawyers from the U.S. Attorney’s Office fought against virtually every request made by the defense attorneys, who filed their motion last month. The prosecution denied that the 76-page affidavit for the first wiretap authorization was “bare-bones” as the defense claimed, looking to quash the idea that all the wiretaps coming after can be thrown out as “fruit of the poisonous tree.”
The prosecution’s filing also opposes giving Giorgianni a separate trial from Ralphiel and Tony Mack because of possible objections that could be raised to the testimony of government cooperator Charles Hall III, a former city employee who has already pleaded guilty to extortion.
The prosecution was open, however, to going through recordings that were difficult to hear with the defense and reaching an arrangement on them at a later date.
Included as part of the motion are detailed lists of just some of the large amount of evidence given to the defense. This discovery included wiretaps, video and audio recordings made inside City Hall, audio of meetings at the Princetonian Diner, Amici’s, and the Pub restaurant in Hamilton, and recorded conversations between Hall and Tony Mack at Mack’s home.
The FBI’s investigation became public knowledge with raids on the three defendants’ homes in the pre-dawn hours of July 18, 2012.
During those searches, FBI agents allegedly seized marked money from Ralphiel Mack’s home, firearms from Giorgianni’s house, and financial records and "documentary evidence" from Tony Mack.
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