Cases: Anzalone: To Catch a Liar

To Catch a Liar

By Ric Kahn, The Boston Phoenix, 9/24/85, p8.

There was George Collatos, fiddling with the jade pinky ring he'd picked up in Singapore, one of his two favorite cities, the other being Kuala Lumpur, not Boston. He was absolutely the best-dressed criminal in the courthouse. Deep tan, dark blue three-piece suit, blue shirt, maroon tie. The artificial lights glistened off his painted fingernails which had not been specially prepared for the occasion. "I always get a manicure," George Collatos was saying.

Here he was on trial again, this time for lying as a government witness during the September 1984 prosecution — some say persecution — of Ted Anzalone, who had been tried for extortion and acquitted. Indeed, the 64-year-old Collatos has risen before the federal bench so many times that besides his well-documented medically weak heart, he probably also has stress fractures in his legs. But now, earlier this month, he was sitting in the front row of courtroom number 12 of US District Court wearing a dumb smile as his attorney, while arguing motions before the judge but no jury, uttered what may become George Collatos's epitaph. "He is, has been, and will be — forever — a liar," William Brown asserted in Collatos's defense. "And they knew about it." "They," of course, are the prosecutors in US Attorney William Weld's office. "He was a convicted perjurer, a convicted extortionist, and," Brown added, "they gave him a polygraph test, which he flunked. He has been a liar — he's got a certificate from this court to prove it."

Three days later, on Friday, September 13, after deliberating for 45 minutes, a jury found George Collatos guilty of perjury. But beyond providing the former Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) administrative aide with another diploma of deceit to hang on his prison wall (he faces a maximum $10,000 fine, five years in prison, or both), the conviction shows the transparency of the US Attorney's exploitation of Collatos as a tool in its reverse-domino plan to collar Anzalone and then squeeze Anzalone to collar his onetime boss, former mayor Kevin White. In fact, revelations at Collatos's latest trial raise serious questions about whether the government deliberately withheld evidence and intimidated witnesses during the Anzalone prosecution in its still-unfilled quest to catch the great White.

Civil libertarians see Collatos's conviction as the ultimate vindication of the concerns they've been raising about the potential of coerced witnesses to abuse the rights of defendants when prosecutors are overly zealous. In the hands of the zealots of Bill Weld, a man without principle became a witness without scruples.

At 1:55 p.m. on the first day of his perjury trial, George Collatos stood at a pay phone and sighed, "So far so good." His optimism was based on the fact that no witnesses had yet been called — the jury had only just been selected. Later a guy spotted Collatos sitting alone in the courtroom. "George," he said, to have to sit there and listen to your lawyer call you a liar — that must be humiliating, no?" "No," Collatos told him. "I've heard Nixon called a liar."

The first witness in the government's case against the dishonorable George N. Collatos was Daniel Small, an assistant US Attorney in Weld's Public Corruption Unit. Prosecutor Stephanie Duncan-Peters asked Small if he knew Collatos.

Small: Yes. He was a witness.

Duncan-Peters: Who was he a witness for?

Small: The government.

The exchange was not as pedestrian as it sounds. The last time Small and Collatos hooked up, Small was trying to convict Anzalone by convincing a jury that Collatos was telling the truth. Now he was witness for the prosecutors trying to convince a jury that at the Anzalone trial Collatos had not been telling the truth. The prosecutors were from the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section, based in Washington, DC. This is not to be confused with the Department of Justice's US Attorney's Office, based in Boston. The Department of Justice's Washington people were now telling a jury that last year's star witness for the Department of Justice's Boston people had lied, but only about some things. The lies came to light as a result of a sting masterminded by Harvey Silverglate. Silverglate was and is a counsel for Anzalone (he's also a Phoenix contributor). Because of his successful sting, Silverglate was able to puncture Collatos's credibility and help exonerate Anzalone. The government was outraged at the tactic. But lo and behold, a year later it was using the fruits of the operation to indict Collatos for perjury, and Silverglate the civil libertarian had been subpoenaed as a government witness. Also waiting in the wings to testify was Anzalone. Outside the courtroom Anzalone noted that this time Collatos was the defendant and he was the prosecution witness. "And," he added, "Mark Wolf is down the hall." Wolf used to be chief of the Public Corruption Unit, which put together the case against Anzalone. Now he's a federal judge. At the time of the Collatos trial, he was presiding in the courtroom next door. George Collatos, who was being prosecuted by Wolf's former employer, the Justice Department, told a courtroom neighbor that if he'd known Wolf was in the next room, he'd have gone and visited him. Of course, last year, when Collatos was cooperating with the Justice Department, he had said during a recess from the Anzalone trial, "The government sucks. They lie. I used to think that they told the truth, but the FBI lies." And now, as Small was testifying in courtroom 12, George Collatos, in the grandest spirit of "It takes one to know one," leaned over to a spectator and said of his former advocate, "He's lying."

George N. Collatos, who cannot tell fact from fiction, has always been a contradictory witness for the government.

In February 1982 George Collatos pleaded guilty to attempted extortion. He didn't have much choice. In August 1981 William Clark, president of Lawrence Ready Mix Concrete Corporation, had complained to the FBI that Collatos, then a BRA aide, had tried to shake him down. Collatos had promised to pave the way for the company to build a cement-batching plant in Dorchester. Clark agreed to be wired by the Feds. On October 21, 1981, monitored by the electronic eyes and ears of the US government, Collatos accepted $12,500 in marked money from Clark in the parking lot of the Dedham Holiday Inn. Collatos pocketed the envelope and drove away. At least two cars with FBI agents followed him. In Westwood, where he lived, Collatos noticed a guy in an unmarked car waving his arms. Collatos thought he was trying to run him off the road. Collatos hit the gas, then slammed on the brakes. He threw the money out the window. The two G-cars slammed into one another. When the dust settled, the G-men recovered the $12,500 in a ditch 10 feet from Collatos's car. Collatos was taken into custody for extortion. The next day he was suspended from the BRA. In March 1982, Collatos, a single father of two daughters, was sentenced to three years at the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut.

Three months later Collatos was granted immunity from prosecution and compelled to testify before a federal grand jury that was looking for evidence of political corruption in the administration of then-mayor Kevin White. Collatos testified before the grand jury for three days in August 1982. In his testimony he exhibited the trait that would characterize his sting as a professional witness: he lied. In September 1982 he was indicted for perjury. The government charged that he'd lied when he denied soliciting and receiving financial contributions for White's 1979 re-election campaign, lied about organizing two fundraisers for the mayor in the same campaign, lied when he denied having approached any member of the governor's Executive Council to influence a court decision in favor of the Lawrence Ready Mix Concrete Corporation. He'd even lied, it charged, about the number of safe-deposit boxes he had.

None of this made the folks in Bill Weld's office very happy. In January 1983 Collatos pleaded guilty to four counts of perjury. The US Attorney's Office recommended a stiff six-year sentence to be served in addition to his extortion time. In a February 1983 sentencing memorandum, Assistant US Attorney Robert Cordy wrote: "Mr. Collatos's refusal to co-operate, particularly after being immunized and compelled to testify, demonstrates his need for rehabilitation.... Mr. Collatos must be personally deterred from continuing his criminal conduct. After being sentenced, he will again be compelled to testify under oath before the grand jury. It is vital that he receive a sufficiently severe sentence to dissuade him from continuing to commit perjury, notwithstanding whatever motivated him to lie previously."

At a sentencing hearing that month before Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr., Collatos's attorney, James Reardon, argued, "I object to and strenuously ask the court not to allow them to use George Collatos as a whipping boy for their ill-gotten failure to produce that which they might have produced, should have produced, or wanted to produce." In other words, the government had failed to snag Kevin White. He continued, "I ask you to consider the fact that the US Attorney's Office had the witnesses; they knew what Collatos was saying was false; they knew it well in advance." Reardon then predicted the rise of another colossal Collatos case: "The US Government makes no doubt about the fact that we are going to see Mr. Collatos again before a grand jury. Without even attempting to be facetious, it is like one of those old reruns on television. We may well have Son of Collatos before we are done here with this, if they keep pursuing this particular matter."

Judge Garrity sentenced Collatos to two years but left open the possibility of reducing the term if Collatos cooperated with investigators in the City Hall corruption case.

"I saw the handwriting on the wall: they were going to keep squeezing me until I talked," Collatos wrote in a March 1984 article for the now-defunct Boston Observer. "Assistant US Attorney Mark Wolf wrote the parole commission that I should be denied parole because I was suppressing evidence.... The mayor had abandoned me; I had no money left for lawyers; my family needed me.... So I decided to take Garrity up on his order."

On March 3, 1983, from Danbury prison, Collatos drafted a motion to have his sentence reduced to two years' probation. He also offered Weld's office his cooperation in exchange for immunity and the US Attorney's support of his sentence reduction. "The defendant, since being incarcerated, has adopted a different attitude," Collatos wrote about himself in his motion. "An attitude which demonstrates a start of rehabilitation by the defendant." Collatos said in the Observer article: "Wolf and an assistant drive through a snowstorm the next day to interview me about what kind of information I could supply. I began telling them everything I knew and could remember." A week later Collatos was granted immunity. At a June 10, 1983, hearing before Judge Garrity, Mark Wolf supported Collatos's sentence reduction, saying, "In our view he is now cooperating, testifying, we believe, truthfully, and to the extent that the sentence we requested and the sentence the court imposed was aimed at correcting his attitude, it is our perception that that purpose has been served and an additional prison sentence to serve that purpose is no longer required."

Seven days later George Collatos flunked a polygraph test requested by the FBI.

At the Collatos perjury trial, defense counsel William Brown said to Assistant US Attorney Daniel Small, wasn't it a fact that he knew Collatos had flunked a polygraph test on June 16 and 17 of 1983? Small took umbrage at the word flunked, responding, "That's not correct, and you know it."

Apparently, the feds prefer the term "deception indicated." Of the eight questions Collatos was asked on the test, one was not evaluated, four were deemed "inconclusive," and three were labeled "deception indicated." The examiner classified the overall results of the test as "deception indicated." The "deceptive" three:

Q: Have you knowingly withheld any information regarding illegal payments you have received since 1975?

A: No.

Q: Did you intentionally withhold any information about payments you have received since 1975?

A: No.

Q: Since 1975 have you intentionally withheld information regarding payments you have received?

A: No.

Weld and his minions may try to defuse the impact of the lie-detector-test results by employing the George Collatos line of reasoning: "We don't remember. We forgot about it." But in two motions submitted to the court on April 9, 1984, Ted Anzalone's attorneys specifically requested from prosecutors the results of any polygraph tests appropriate to the case. Silverglate says that in response the government released a 1982 polygraph exam — done at the behest of Collatos's attorney at the time — that Collatos had passed. But, he says, the government deliberately withheld from them the lie-detector test Collatos had flunked. "That shows," Silverglate charges, "an intentional and knowing cover-up." Silverglate wonders whether prosecutors in the Justice Department in Washington were also not told about the second test. If they had known Collatos had flunked it, Silverglate maintains, Anzalone would not have been indicted in the first place.

Meanwhile, six months after he began cooperating with the feds, George Collatos was released on parole. He had served 14 months for extortion and four for perjury, and he was determined to keep his butt out of the can.

* * *
In March 1984 a grand jury, before which Collatos had testified, indicted Anzalone on charges of extortion and conspiracy to extort. The government charged that Anzalone, who had served as assessing commissioner, manager of the Hynes Auditorium, and fundraising honcho for former mayor Kevin White, had extorted $8000 from John Slocum, a Rhode Island contractor. The indictment alleged that Anzalone had conspired with others to threaten Slocum with the loss of city work if he didn't pay up. The government's unindicted coconspirator and star witness was none other than the unbelievable George Collatos. But in part because Collatos's testimony was not credible, Anzalone was acquitted (though testimony presented at the trial seemed to implicate Anzalone in a potential conspiracy to violate the state campaign- finance laws). By the time Collatos had become the star witness at the Anzalone trial, he had all the luster and credibility of a wooden nickel. He had become, in fact, a testifying autmaton.

At the Son of Collatos perjury trial, Dan Small described how he changed at the Anzalone trial when he was confronted about a meeting he'd had with Anzalone at LaBella's coffee shop, in the North End, a meeting at which Collatos threatened to tell incriminating lies unless he got money and help from Anzalone and White.

"His demeanor changed rather noticeably," Small said. "The answers that he gave became much more subdued, automatic: ‘I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember.' He was much more nervous."

And no wonder. Collatos didn't want to anger his new prosecutor patrons. He knew that if he admitted to the LaBella's business, the government's case would go down the tubes. And the feds might take it out on him. So he took a route he was comfortable with: he lied. He never figured that two guys had been hiding in the basement of LaBella's recording on yellow legal pads his conversations with Anzalone.

Anzalone had told Silverglate that on at least two occasions after his indictment but before he went to trial Collatos had tried to extort $200,000 from him and White, saying he would lie in court unless he was paid. According to Anzalone, Collatos had even suggested that White could hide the money by passing it off as payment for one of Collatos's thoroughbreds. Silverglate decided to set up a sting operation to catch Collatos in his very believable threats to lie.

As the site of the sting, Silverglate chose LaBella's, where Collatos had previously sought out his longtime friend Anzalone. The drawing of LaBella's the government introduced at the Son of Collatos perjury trial made the spot look like a quaint Cambridge coffee house. A number of people at the trial, however, indicated that LaBella's decor is more in line with northern Italian shmutz. At the Collatos trial, Silverglate acknowledged this about LaBella's: "You wanted to wash [not only] your hands after you left but also your feet." Witness John Wall said, "The interior was very ancient — and that's no exaggeration. There was an antique coffee urn, old books, papers, and furniture that recalled — at least to me — a scene from a Dickens novel." Collatos's attorney, William Brown, said, "LaBella's resembles a Building 19. It's a pretty raunchy place." Even owner Emilio Cucchiella, better known as Bobby LaBella, admitted when asked if he recognized his coffee shop from the artist's rendering, "It looks a lot better than what it actually is." But Brown's calling LaBella's an after-hours joint was going too far. After LaBella got off the stand, he walked over to Collatos and glared. LaBella had known Anzalone for 35 years. He'd given him a key to the joint.

In fact, LaBella had been there for Teddy in the 70's when his wife-to-be, Joanne Prevost, a city official at the time, needed to camouflage her purchase of a North End town house. LaBella's half-sister, Claire Cicchetti stepped forward to be Prevost's straw. "You _______ _______," LaBella said to Collatos, "that's what you are." And then to Brown: "You gotta be a real _______ piece of ____ to pull something like that. Just like your client."

"My friend called me a piece of ____, eh?" Collatos later said to his courtroom neighbor. "He helped set me up, helped instigate it [the sting], didn't he?"

At about seven on the evening of April 27, 1984, Silverglate gathered his troops at LaBella's. Because in this case it would have been illegal to tape record conversations without the consent of both parties, Silverglate summoned a trio of transcribers: John Wall, a former Justice Department prosecutor now in private practice; Tom Viles, currently a second-year law student at New York University who'd worked in Silverglate's office; and a court stenographer who was there in lieu of her boss, who'd evidently neglected to tell her the true nature of her assignment — she'd come to LaBella's dressed for a cocktail party. Anzalone and Silverglate were also present. After a practice run, Silverglate left and the trio repaired to the cellar via a trap door. The stenographer took one look at the basement and began to get nervous. The downstairs made the upstairs look like a Quincy Market fern bar. After a few minutes in the heat and dust of the cellar, the stenographer hit her head on a beam. She decided she'd had enough. She shot up the stairs so fast, she left her steno machine behind. John Wall followed her up and gave it to her.

At about 8 p.m. George Collatos arrived for his prearranged meeting with Anzalone. Listening for about an hour and 10 minutes through the trap door, which was held ajar by an aluminum step ladder, Viles and Wall furiously tried to capture on paper the conversations between Collatos and Anzalone.

On September 19, 1984, at the extortion trial of Ted Anzalone, Nancy Gertner, one of Anzalone's attorneys, confronted a shocked George Collatos — and a shocked US Attorney's Office, which had not been apprised of the sting — with the "earwitness" accounts. Gertner's cross-examination of Collatos formed the basis of the Justice Department's perjury indictment of George Collatos.

Gertner: Directing your attention now to a meeting — to April 27, 1984, between eight and nine p.m. — do you remember being in LaBella's Coffee Shop on that evening?

Collatos: No, I do not.

Gertner: Do you remember saying to Ted Anzalone, "I am in your corner, but I need some help"? Do you remember anything like that?

Collatos: No, I do not.

Gertner: Directing your attention back to April 27, 1984, do you remember saying that you are going with a lawyer other than the public defender and that you cannot believe the mayor would let you jeopardize Anzalone?

Collatos: I would never say such — I do not remember.

Gertner: You would not say such a thing like that?

Collatos: I do not remember anything like that.

Gertner: Do you remember saying to Ted Anzalone on that occasion, "Tell the mayor to work fast. I don't know what else I can tell you." Anything like that?

Collatos: I never said anything like that to Mr. Anzalone.

Gertner: Do you remember Anzalone saying to you, "If you tell the truth, George, I'll be fine," or words to that effect?

Collatos: I've told the truth.

Gertner: Do you remember Ted Anzalone saying to you, "George, if you tell the truth, I'll be fine"?

Collatos: I don't recall that conversation at all.

Gertner: Do you remember telling Ted Anzalone on April 27th that you know that Anzalone did not threaten or promise Slocum anything? Do you remember that?

Collatos: I don't recall that conversation at all.

Gertner: Do you remember saying to Anzalone that "I am not going to hang for that, I'm not going to do it. On my daughters, I'd go to jail for them, but no one else. I want money." Do you remember saying that?

Collatos: That's not even my way of talking. No, I never said that.

Gertner: It's not your way of talking?

Collatos: I never said anything like that.

Gertner: Do you remember saying — I'll clean up the language a bit — "I'll lie. I don't give a f___ about him, the mayor"? Do you remember saying that?

Collatos: No, I don't.

Gertner: Do you remember saying, "I'm going to tell the truth, but if I have to answer a certain way I'm going to tell them what they want to hear"? Do you remember that?

Collatos: No, I don't.

Gertner: Do you recall saying, "You better make that man understand that if you have to punch him in the nose — tell him to go to jail one night — he'll understand"? Do you remember saying that?

Collatos: No, I don't ever remember saying anything like that.

Gertner: Do you remember saying, "____ the mayor. Let him burn"? Any words like that?

Collatos: Sorry, I don't recall anything like that.

Gertner: We are talking about an April 27th meeting at LaBella's Coffee Shop between 8 and 9 p.m.

The court: Do you have any memory at all of that specific meeting between 8 and 9 p.m. on the 27th of April?

Collatos: No, I don't.

On September 20 Silverglate told the prosecutors that he was later going to call Tom Viles and John Wall as defense witnesses. Stung by the whole affair and trying to save their case, the feds sent out two G-men to track down Viles and Wall that afternoon. The FBI and IRS agents found Wall in his law office. They located Viles at his girlfriend's house in Cambridge. According to Viles, when he refused to talk to them about the LaBella's incident, the FBI agent informed him that what he'd witnessed could possibly involve five federal crimes: perjury, extortion, bribery, obstruction of justice, and misprision of a felony. Viles understood misprision of a felony to mean having knowledge about a federal crime and failing to report it as soon as possible to a law enforcement agent. Viles caught the G-men's drift. He felt he'd become the subject of an investigation into misprision of a felony/obstruction of justice. At the Collatos trial, Viles testified that he was "concerned about being harassed." Silverglate, who was even more overtly threatened by the feds with prosecution of misprision of a felony and obstruction of justice, says the government wanted Viles to think he was being investigated so he would plead the Fifth Amendment and not testify in Anzalone's defense. Because the cloud of potentially being prosecuted for obstruction of justice as a result of the LaBella's affair remains over Anzalone's head, he refused to testify as a government witness in the Collatos trial, invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

After the guilty verdict came down, however, Anzalone had plenty to say. At a press conference he issued a prepared statement. Claiming his constitutional right to a fair trial had been violated by the suppression of Collatos's flunked lie-detector test, Anzalone said, "Had I been convicted, we would have immediately moved to reopen the case on grounds of serious prosecutorial misconduct. Since I was acquitted notwithstanding the government's unseemly tactics, my attorneys and I are calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the matter and to conduct an intensive investigation in order to find out who in the United States Attorney's Office was and remains responsible for this suppression of exculpatory evidence, and who made the decision to use a known and indeed convicted perjurer who had flunked a polygraph exam as an important government witness without making known the dark side of that witness to the defendant and his lawyers."

Despite his acquittal, Anzalone says the feds are still on his case. A lawyer by trade who estimates he made $100,000 in 1982 after leaving City Hall, Anzalone says he now has no clients. "The government has called any client I had before the grand jury," he says.

The man Kevin White once referred to as "a minor saint," now makes his living as a maintenance man. Anzalone says he makes about $200 a week taking care of 10 buildings. He fixes broken windows and flushes out clogged toilets. But despite being betrayed by Collatos, Anzalone does not wish to see him sent to jail. "I consider him a sick person," Anzalone says. "He cannot tell the truth. The government knew this and should not have indicted him for lying. He's not a person I ever want to see again. But I am sorry he has to go back to jail for this.... It's the government that should have been put on trial, not George Collatos." The charge, says Silverglate: subornation of perjury.

In trying its star witness, George Collatos, for perjury, the government was admitting its culpability in his becoming a man forever false. George Collatos was ultimately convicted of testifying too well for his onetime prosecutorial patrons. In his closing argument, Collatos's attorney, William Brown, asked the Justice Department, "What is he, the cat you're going to kick because you screwed up?" And then to the jury, "I submit to you it's kick the cat — they lost the Anzalone case. Please give my client some peace."

But the cat's already been kicked so often he can't tell fact from fiction. At the start of this perjury trial, George Collatos's attorney turned to him and asked, "Do you have any last- minute instructions?"

"No," Collatos replied with a smile. "I'm innocent."

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