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NEWSDAY article: Courtroom Buffs, February 13, 2000

WASHINGTON POST article on 50th Anniversary of Levittown, May 27, 1997

NEWSDAY article on Levittown real estate value, January 24, 1997

Newsday

Courtroom Characters
Trial buffs can tell prosecutors and defense lawyers a thing or two about how to run a trail...and they often do

WHEN FRED PAPARCURI passes Nassau District Attorney Denis Dillon in the halls of the county courthouse, he likes to lodge an unusual complaint."What happened? Crime isn't what it used to be," he'll kid the prosecutor.That's a good thing, right?

Not for Paparcuri. There used to be a time when a "Long Island" in answer to "Where are you from?" got a raised eyebrow, an incredulous grin, a choked guffaw.Long Island, as Paparcuri likes to boast, has given the rest of the country great made-for-the-tabloids courtroom drama. There was the guilty plea of teenage prostitute Amy Fisher, the trial of notorious serial killer Joel Rifkin, the bizarre legal maneuvers of Colin Ferguson, the mentally disturbed Long Island Rail Road gunman who insisted on serving as his own attorney.

"The unusual was typical. The usual was not," Paparcuri said, reflecting on that golden period in the early to mid-'90s when Long Island - and in particular Nassau County - seemed to generate unlimited fodder for talk shows and tabloids. "You used to turn around and ask yourself, 'Is this a cheap drama that I'm watching on TV?' "

Paparcuri should know. While America got a view of the Fisher, Rifkin and Ferguson sagas that was framed by the corners of a television set, the 68-year-old retired assistant school superintendent got a front-row seat. To be precise, he got the front-row seat nearest the jury and against the wall.

Placing his ear against the marble wall, Paparcuri says, improves the acoustics and allows him to hear better in the courtroom. For the past 12 years, in fact, Paparcuri has had a prime seat for most of the high-profile cases that have swept through the courthouse.

He's a court buff, one of a tightly knit group of no more than a dozen retired folk who prefer sentencings to shuffleboard, brilliant closings to bingo, and legal intricacies to line dancing. To the people in the courthouses they frequent, buffs become an integral part of the legal landscape, as much a part of the community as the full-time court officers or clerks. And although they like to say they are there simply to watch the stories unfold, by their constant, attentive presence they sometimes wind up playing a minor role in the drama they are observing.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys alike will pull them aside after court to get their take on how an argument went. Newspaper and TV reporters caught in traffic have relied on the buffs when they've missed newsworthy court happenings. And they make a sometimes cold courtroom seem warmer to the judges who see them every day.

Although they like to brag that they've seen Amy sob and Ferguson rant, many will tell you the best cases have unfolded in nearly empty courtrooms. Some of the most compelling drama happens to ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, they say.

Corner one of the guys - and they're almost exclusively guys - on a courthouse bench and he'll give you an earful. Invite a gaggle of them to lunch and they'll dish you gossip on prominent lawyers, regale you with stories about the past lives of current judges, and lament Nassau County's recent dearth of compelling crime.

"So what do you think? Is he guilty or not?" asks Paparcuri as he sets his tray on a table at the Hofstra University cafeteria, the court buffs' preferred lunch spot during breaks at Federal District Court in Uniondale, where they've been gathering recently. Paparcuri says that lawyers seem to work better in federal court, because of the stricter decorum and sometimes more exacting legal standards.

"The same lawyers perform better," he adds.Paparcuri and three other court buffs have gathered on the day of closing arguments in the trial of Cpl. Joseph Bergen, the Nassau jail supervisor convicted late last month of trying to cover up the fatal beating of inmate Thomas Pizzuto in January, 1999. Although only two squeezed into the small second-floor courtroom to watch closing arguments, all have followed at least some of the trial, and have filled in the gaps with news reports and firsthand accounts from their buddies.

"Guilty," proclaims Dante Ciaffa, 70, a retired manager in hospital construction who's been hanging around courthouses for about 10 years. His response gets laughter and boisterous kidding. "Dan always goes with guilty. Dan has the highest batting average!" says Herbert Cantor, 87, of Levittown. Since most juries hand up convictions, Ciaffa's friends claim he plays it safe by proclaiming everyone guilty.

Ciaffa protests. "What we think is one thing. What the jury thinks is another," he says. "I still feel you have to get the whole picture."

"Too bad he doesn't do that!" says Paparcuri. In the jail case, Paparcuri was impressed by defense attorney Benedict Gullo'sclosing arguments, which he felt raised reasonable doubt about the credibility of some of the witnesses. But Ciaffa insists that no fancy arguments will influence this jury.

"This is a common-sense case," he tells his friends, explaining that a simple reading of the facts - that Pizzuto was so brutally beaten that the corporal must have known the report he wrote saying Pizzuto had slipped in the shower was false - would sway the jury.

Talk of the Bergen trial gradually mutates into reminiscences of trials past, many of which took place in the Nassau County courthouse in Mineola, where the buffs spent most of their time until their recent move to federal court.The trials whose details linger long after the jury speaks are the ones that surprise, either by a single gruesome image, a spectacular closing argument or by a twist in the tale that catches even seasoned buffs off guard.

For Ciaffa, it is a single gruesome image that makes one murder case indelible. In a 1992 case, an 18-year-old, Yong Ho Han, was tried for stabbing to death 15-year-old Chang Seok Ean, in an argument a year earlier. Han was also charged with second-degree attempted murder in his attack on Chang Seok's younger sister, Youna, who was then 12. Han, who was convicted on both charges, allegedly stabbed Youna about 30 times with an 8-inch kitchen knife. Prosecutors displayed a photo of the knife still plunged into Youna's neck. Ciaffa said the image stays with him, despite a lifetime of construction work that he said had inured him to bloody injuries and accidents. "I can see that like it was yesterday," he said. Youna survived, but was blinded in one eye.

While Ciaffa says he doesn't recall what it was that first lured him into the courthouse, Paparcuri remembers clearly. A few years before retiring, he was called for jury duty on a drug case. During a recess, he stuck his head inside the courtroom next door, where a murder trial was under way. "I said to myself, when I retire maybe I'll come down here," he said.

Now, Paparcuri spends a few days a week in the federal courthouse with his cohorts, seeing it as an alternative to senior centers and other traditional retirement activities. "It's as social as much as it's keeping your mind stimulated," he said.

Tony Astore, a 70-year-old retired sanitation worker from Levittown, said the courthouse drama is a great conversation piece. When I get home I tell my wife about it and we talk about it. It gives us something interesting to talk about." "Hey, it's better than a soap opera," said Ciaffa.

Though Paparcuri and the other buffs come to be entertained, defense lawyers and prosecutors say they end up serving a useful purpose."They provide a great service to the whole system," said defense attorney Stephen Scaring. "They represent a knowledgeable core group that is monitoring what occurs in the courtroom. Their presence provides at least some control that things are going to proceed in a proper fashion."

Hempstead attorney Frederick Brewington agreed. "Sometimes the fact that you do have other bodies present may impact how persons comport themselves," he said. "It's the same concept that if there are cameras in the courtroom, people might not do things they might ordinarily do if no one was watching."

Scaring and Brewington say they regularly turn to the buffs during lunch breaks or recesses to hear their evaluation of a particular argument or cross-examination. "The most important thing for me is that jurors can't talk back to you, so it's hard to know whether the point you made was effective," Scaring said.

The same is true for prosecutors. "ADAs [assistant district attorneys] will get a perspective they could not otherwise get, for example, if they took for granted something the jury should know and one of the court buffs will say he didn't understand it," said Ed Grilli, the Nassau district attorney's spokesman.

For their part, the court buffs are alternately boastful and modest about their role as unofficial attorneys' assistant. "Most lawyers talk to us, and the better lawyers make a point of talking to us," said Cantor, a retired auto parts store owner. Ciaffa said he takes the role very seriously, and disputes some lawyers' assessment that buffs are pro-prosecution. What interests a buff as an uninvolved onlooker may not be what's important to a case, he says. "I try to be careful about what I say to both sides. I try to zero in on a pertinent item that might be specific to the charge," he said.

Though they try to be truthful, the buffs admit they have a hard time telling a lawyer he bombed an argument or examination. So what do they say to the unfortunate lawyer? "You never know how the jury will decide."

Attorney William Keahon said their advice has come in handy in a few murder trials, when, during a recess between direct- and cross-examination, "I may have felt I was going to go a certain way on my cross-examination. Their specifics on what they felt showed a lack of credibility directed me in a different way in my cross and it helped."

Court buffs have also become involved in deeper ways, immersing themselves in a fashion that Scaring said borders on inappropriate. For example, in a 1996 case that Cantor says remains his favorite, a 27-year-old man, James Pette, was charged with beating his 90-year-old grandmother to death. When the prosecution offered Pette a plea bargain that would have left him with little jail time, he declined. Paparcuri and other buffs tried to convince Pette's family to reconsider. "We tried to tell them, 'You're going against Fred Klein,' " said Paparcuri. " 'Why don't you take the deal?' "

The buffs consider Klein, chief of the Nassau district attorney's major crimes bureau, to be the best prosecutor in the county. "I'll watch Fred Klein try a guy charged with spitting on the sidewalk if I get a chance," Paparcuri says.

Klein said he was unaware that the buffs had approached the family, but said "these guys are all gentlemen. I know they wouldn't do anything to hurt anybody." Pette was eventually convicted and sentenced in 1997 to 25 years in prison. One year later, the verdict was overturned by an appellate court and Pette took a plea bargain of 3 to 9 years. "To begin with, the mother of the boy and the daughter of the victim was the same person. It was a very tense position for her. Where do her loyalties lie?" Cantor asked.

Though the buffs may be more seasoned than a first-time juror, "they're still people and they react to a large extent in the same way that a jury would as the evidence is received," Scaring said.

Sometimes it is not the defendant but the court personnel that make a trial interesting, the buffs say. In 1987, when AIDS was widely feared and its means of spreading still largely unknown, court officers handling a robbery defendant suspected of having the disease refused to handle him without wearing rubber gloves. The case was before Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan, and defense attorneys argued the officers' gloves might prejudice the jury. Her solution? "She had all the guards come in in dress uniforms," so they could wear rubber gloves under their dress gloves, said Paparcuri, chuckling.

Boklan is one of the court buffs' favorite judges. She has known some of them since she was an assistant district attorney. When she ran for a judgeship, Boklan said, some of them helped hand out her campaign literature. "It's almost like having a friend suddenly appear," Boklan said. "You're in a kind of cold environment, and suddenly a friend would walk in with a smile."

Other times it is the spectators that make a case unforgettable. For example, several buffs sat in on the 1994 federal trial of wrestling showman Vincent McMahon Jr., who was eventually cleared of charges that he unlawfully distributed steroids to his professional wrestlers. "You would expect that wrestling fans would be a bunch of boobs," said Paparcuri. "It was the exact opposite. They were an intellectually sophisticated crowd."

While the buffs say they relish the days when real-life Long Island played like a script snatched from the Movie of the Week, they admit that at least one of the big-name cases - Amy Fisher's - was actually a flop in terms of legal intrigue. "To me it seemed to have lost some of its importance" when the media descended on the courthouse, Ciaffa said. "It was more interesting talking with the media than it was actually getting involved with the case."

Paparcuri was equally disappointed. "The place was packed," he said. "I'd never seen so many people from TV. Geraldo Rivera and Japanese photographers . . . It puzzled me and I thought, 'How does this case bring this kind of notoriety? What is there in it that warrants worldwide attention?' "

Though they are passionate about courtroom drama, none of the buffs say they wish they had been lawyers instead of school superintendents, sanitation workers, construction managers or auto parts store owners.

"I had a very successful career in construction," Ciaffa insists. "I wouldn't do it any different." Paparcuri agrees. "I wouldn't want to be a lawyer. I don't know if I'd like to be married to these cases. If it's really good, great. But if it isn't, I want to get up and move on the the next case."

For Paparcuri, one good case involved an ordinary bank-robbery conviction in federal court that got relatively little press coverage. "There were twists and turns that you wouldn't believe," he says. "If you saw it on TV you'd turn it off because you'd say, 'This is ridiculous, it can't be true.' "

The case involved a young woman, Tracy Kallman, as the defendant. "You see this young beautiful girl, dressed very conservatively. Like a nun," Paparcuri recalls. "She's sitting at the defense table and I find that she's charged with robbing a bank! And she looks like an angel!" As the trial opens, the prosecution plays an FBI tape of the woman discussing the robbery with a friend. The friend, who participated in the heist, tells her she believes the defendant's husband is going to turn them in. The defendant's response? "This sweet, sweet girl, dressed so demurely, says every four-letter word you could think of."

The story only got better, Paparcuri says. As he recounts it, the defendant and her friend, Laura Sloboda, a bank teller, started joking one day. Why not rob a bank, they ask each other. "Before you know it, it becomes an idea," Paparcuri says. The two devise a plan, and Kallman enters the bank, hands a note to her friend the teller, and runs off with thousands of dollars. They get away with the stunt. The heist is forgotten until years later, when the defendant's husband, Peter LeMay, an Army Ranger, discovers his wife is having an affair. He mails a pipe bomb to her boyfriend, but the device is intercepted and LeMay - who later pleaded guilty to the crime - is arrested and thrown in jail. Then, LeMay - motivated by jealous rage and hoping to strike a deal with the prosecutors - tells the FBI about his wife's long-ago bank robbery.The FBI convinces Sloboda, who pleaded guilty to larceny, to participate in an undercover sting. She agrees, and her taped conversation with Kallman is the one prosecutors play at the start of the trial.

Once the trial begins, the story only becomes stranger. Prosecutors call the jailed husband as a witness. When the lawyers are called to confer privately with the judge, LeMay catches his estranged wife's eye. Incredibly, Paparcuri says he sees the husband mouth, "Do you still love me?" "I'm, like, dying. I can't believe this," Paparcuri says. Moments later, the husband points to his finger and mouths, "Are you still wearing my ring?"

"He was still very much in love with her!" Paparcuri says, his eyes aglow.

QUOTE PULL-OUTS

) Dante Ciaffa, 70, of Rockville Centre,on Amy Fisher: ‘That case was like a three-ring circus It was more interesting talking with the media than it was actually being involved with the case.’

2) Herbert Cantor, 87, of Levittown, on Joel Rifkin: ‘It was a sad case, a case that really got to you on many levels .How many tragedies there are in people’s lives that we are completely unaware of.’

3) Fred Paparcuri, 68, of Hicksville, on Colin Ferguson:‘To see the victims come on the stand and pour ohearts was incredible. They had to face this guy who was so horrendous, and who was questioning them as though this thing didn’t happen.’

4) Tony Astore, 70, of Levittown, on the trial of Robert Golub, convicted in the 1989 killing of 13-year-old neighbor Kelly Ann Tinyes :‘The Golub family would come in and be guarded, and the other family, whenever they came into the courtroom, they had words [with the Golubs]. They were so angry. We thought he was really guilty, but the [defense] lawyer put up a good case.’

ILLUSTRATION/PHOTO:

1) Newsday Photo by Karen Wiles Stabile - Ken Kunken of the Nassau County district attorney's office is surrounded by, from left, court buffs Dante Ciaffa, Herbert Canot, Tony Astore and Fred Paparcuri. 2) From left,

Paparcuri, Ciaffa, Cantor and Astore look at old photos as Nassau DA spokesman Ed Grilli looks for others. 3) Newsday File Photo - Amy Fisher Newsday Photos by Karen Wiles - Stabile - 4) Dante Ciaffa 5) Herbert Cantor 6) Joel Rifkin 7) Fred Paparcuri 8)

Newsday File Photo by Dick Yarwood - Colin Ferguson 9) Newsday Photo by Karen Wiles Stabile - Tony Astore 10) Newsday File Photo by Dick Yarwood - Robert Golub. 11) Newday Photo by Karen Wiles Stabile - From left, Paparcuri, Cantor, Astore, attorney

Frederick Brewington and Ciaffa. 12) Newsday Cover Photo by Karen Wiles Stabile - Tony Astore, Fred Paparcuri, Herbert Cantor and Dante Ciaffa.

KEYWORDS: COURT.COVER.LAWYER.LONG ISLAND.QUOTE.TRIAL.

Copyright 2000, Newsday Inc.

By Katie Thomas. STAFF WRITER, Courtroom Characters / Trial buffs can tell prosecutors and defense lawyers a thing or two about how to run a trail...and they often do, 02-13-2000, pp G12.

EDITION: NASSAU AND SUFFOLK

SECTION: LILife

Newsday, January 24, 1997

By Cara S. Trager. Cara S. Trager is a free-lance writer

DEIRDRE and Kevin O'Regan were renting an apartment in Copiague last

year when they decided it was time to buy a house. They limited their

search to just one community : Levittown.

"I grew up in Levittown, and I loved it here," said Deirdre O'Regan,

30, an elementary school gym teacher. "The community had a homey feeling

to it. You knew your neighbors, people were friendly, and there were

numerous activities for children - Girl Scouts, soccer, baseball,

football and swimming lessons at the pool," she said. "When I have

children, I want them to grow up in the same community environment I

did."

The O'Regans paid $133,000 for their home, a Cape Cod-style house

with four bedrooms, one bath and a detached garage.

Fifty years after housing visionary William Levitt turned potato

fields into homesteads for returning World War II veterans, Levittown -

the community that bears his indelible signature - continues to offer

young families the quintessential American Dream: affordable home

ownership. In all, Levitt built 17,447 homes from 1947 to 1951.

In much the way that Levittown's first tract houses were widely

affordable then, they are still considered a good deal by Long Island

standards. What sold then for between $6,900 and $9,900 - a house

that has probably seen one or more additions since its conception -

is selling now for anywhere from $120,000 to $180,000 and more. Skeptics

say you pay more than you should for a Levittown house, that the same

structure would cost less elsewhere, but for the O`Regans and others,

Levittown is also a community that offers everything they want in

suburban living.

"It's still probably one of the most affordable places to live in

Nassau County for first-time home buyers," said Sal Albanese, sales

manager at Manheim Equities Inc., a commercial and residential real

estate agency in Levittown.

Although the recession in the late 1980s and the early 1990s saw

real estate values drop 20 percent, prices today are 5 percent to 10

percent above 1991 levels. For $120,000 today you can get a

three-bedroom Cape Cod with no garage, something akin to the original

Levitt home, although the kitchen has likely been modernized and

expanded. For $200,000, additions are likely to include one or more

dormers and, of course, a garage. There are three to four bedrooms, an

extended dining room and new bath, according to Theodore Dallow,

chairman of Century 21 Dallow Realty in Levittown, the community's

biggest and oldest real estate agency.

In the third quarter of last year, the average selling price of a

house was $147,100 in Levittown compared with $227,900 in Nassau County

and $176,300 in Suffolk, according to the Multiple Listing Service of

Long Island.

"In Levittown, you are paying a decent price for a decent house,

while in other towns you are paying a high price for a house that just

doesn't justify it," said Tom Ciano, a 26-year-old hospital emergency

room technician who is closing on his first home, in Levittown, next

month. The house costs about $140,000.

Because of Levittown's affordability, its real estate market

remains brisk. "We could always use more listings," said Dallow, whose

firm sells more than 100 houses a year there, "because there's more

demand than there are houses."

Barbara Kelly, the curator of the Long Island Studies Institute at

Hofstra University in Uniondale and author of the book "Expanding the

American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown" (SUNY Press, 1993),

said Levittown's residential real estate market seems to typify the

selling pattern of post-World War II housing on Long Island.

"One of the problems with houses built at the same time is that

owners tend to be the same age and move through life cycles at the same

time, and houses come on the market in bursts," said Kelly. "Every 10

years, there's a glut of houses on the market, and homeowners suffer.

But those who can afford to wait it out and sell after the burst will

get a better price."

Kelly said fewer houses in Levittown are on the market now because

"the World War II generation has retired and moved on, but the next

generation has not yet begun to sell and move on."

Still, Levittown has its downside. For some potential buyers, the

very mention of Levittown conjures up images of look-alike tract homes

that have no basements.

"There is a slight stigma attached, probably because when any

community is as well publicized, there's no mystery left to it," Kelly

said. "When you say you live in Levittown, everyone thinks they know

what you live in. But if you say you live in Sands Point, you could be

living in a shack, but people can dream differently about you."

Clearly, preconceptions about Levittown usually prove to be

misconceptions.

As Lynne Matarrese, the historian of the Levittown Historical

Society, tells it, Levittown was criticized for "cookie-cutter houses,

but you can hardly find any home that looks the same."

Indeed, over the years, Levittown's houses have undergone such

major interior and exterior renovations and expansions that they bear

little resemblance to the structures that first greeted former GIs and

their families.

"As families grew, they finished the upstairs, and now you would be

hard-pressed to find an original," said Richard Krug, manager of

Coldwell Banker Sammis in East Meadow. "There are so many ways people

have updated, expanded and modernized them - with extended family

rooms, fireplaces, dormers in the rear and front, new kitchens, baths

and doors."

Daphne Ruf, a Levittown resident since 1959 and secretary of the

Levittown Property Owners Association, estimated that nine of 10 homes

have been expanded. "Levitt gave us a 60-foot lot, so you could build an

attached garage," she said. "None of the houses had garages, but

practically every house has one now."

pioneers who never moved out. When they bought a new ranch in 1951,

"everybody was the same age, and we had children the same age who went

from nursery school to high school," said Mildred Cantor. "Our children

had friendships that lasted throughout their school years."

Over the years, Cantor said she has seen many people leave the

community for larger homes. But after raising three children there, she

remained in Levittown because it was convenient to her husband's auto

parts business in Valley Stream. As a trustee of the Levittown Public

Library, she had ties to the community. What's more, she said, "The

house suited us."

They have expanded it three times - in 1957, 1968 and 1970. The

Cantors built a one-car garage and a room behind it, put a dormer on the

attic in front and back to create three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs

and enlarged the kitchen. Mildred Cantor said the renovation costs

totaled about $15,000.

"I have an imminently flexible house," she said.

Some of today's buyers also rank the Levitt houses' potential for

customization as a major plus. "One of the reasons we bought our home

was that we could make the changes we want," said Deirdre O'Regan.

The O'Regans plan to add dormers and put in two to three

bedrooms and a bathroom on the secondlevel.

Ciano said he and his wife also were attracted to the room for

improvement Levitt homes offer. Long-term, he wants to add a master

bedroom with a cathedral ceiling to the second level.

"You can do a lot more with a Levitt house than with other types of

houses," said Ciano.

Copyright 1997, Newsday Inc.

Cara S. Trager, Levittown Still An Opportunity For First-Time Home Buyers, 01-24-1997, pp

D02.