public corruption, and organized crime, including successful prosecutions of over 100 members and associates of the mafia. Honig now is a CNN Legal Analyst, hosts podcasts and writes for Cafe, is a Rutgers University scholar, and is Special Counsel to the law firm Lowenstein Sandler.
Honig applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It, and reported the following:
From page 99:Follow Elie Honig on Twitter.Seven years later, armed with Arillotta’s information, we sent an FBI excavation team to the Agawam murder site. We had gotten permission from a judge for the FBI to take Arillotta out of prison for a day, on a macabre field trip of sorts, so he could show them precisely where to dig. FBI agents quickly found a series of .22-caliber shells on the ground, right where Arillotta had indicated—powerful corroboration in its own right, but merely a warm-up act for what happened next. The FBI team then used a front loader to skim thin layers of dirt, an inch or two at a time, from the spot where Arillotta claimed that Westerman’s body would be found. The FBI sifted carefully through each bucketload of dirt, first by hand and then by using a straining device that looked like a massive colander. After the first few scoops yielded nothing, the FBI’s front loader hit something hard—the soles of a pair of Nikes. It was Westerman’s body, head down, feet up, just as Arillotta had told us. The team spent the next several days, aided by an archaeologist, carefully excavating the site. They ultimately recovered Westerman’s decomposed remains—still with a ski mask over his head and a Taser in his jacket pocket, just as Arillotta had described. And inside the grave the team found the .38-caliber shell from that final close-range gunshot that Fred Geas put in Westerman’s head.We caught a good one with this Page 99 Test: a story about a New York City mafia case that I prosecuted where we dug up a dead body of a guy the mob had killed and buried in the woods seven years prior. This sounds like it’s out of a movie, but it’s all true; I was an organized crime prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, and I use real-life stories from my own cases to illustrate broader points about how powerful people get away with it.
There has never been better corroboration than this. Here’s what I said to the jury during my closing argument at trial: “There’s an expression that people use in regular everyday life: ‘does he know where the bodies are buried?’ It means, does this guy know what he’s talking about? Is this guy for real? Well, here, you see that expression literally applied. Anthony Arillotta knew exactly where the body was buried.”
And, believe it or not, Arillotta had yet another murder plot to confess. (This was a truly prodigious crew.)
This particular anecdote appears in a section of the book about how powerful people insulate themselves from law enforcement by surrounding themselves with other criminals, lower down in the power hierarchy. Savvy powerhouses – political bosses, corporate CEOs, drug kingpins, actual mob bosses – understand that you always want to stay away from a crime scene, you want to say as little as possible to as few people as possible, and you want to have others do the dirty work. And, if somebody does happen to flip – like Anthony Arillotta, the gangster discussed in this excerpt – the boss can brand that person as a murderer, a criminal, a liar whose testimony for the prosecution should not be trusted by a jury.
But prosecutors (sometimes) have a counter-move: corroboration, independent evidence that backs up the cooperator’s testimony. “It’s not about whether you like the cooperator,” we’d often tell juries, “it’s about whether you believe him.” And we’d urge the jury, in making that determination, to consider the testimony against other hard evidence. Sometimes, prosecutors gather substantial corroboration, and other times we wind up with little to nothing in terms of support. This story focuses on one case where we got especially lucky. The cooperator, Arillotta, was backed up by the ultimate form of corroboration: he led us directly to a dead body that had been missing for seven years.
The Page 99 Test: Hatchet Man.
--Marshal Zeringue
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