All eyes this week will be on the second Abner Louima trial,when the defense starts presenting its case — with confessed sex-torturer Justin Volpe as the likely leadoff witness.
It will be the first time Volpe, the former 70th Precinct cop who’s serving a 30-year sentence after pleading guilty last year to sodomizing Louima, will be forced to testify about exactly what he did in the station-house bathroom — and whether he had any help.
Putting Volpe on the stand is a risky move for Ronald Fischetti, the defense lawyer representing convicted sodomy cop Charles Schwarz in the conspiracy trial in Brooklyn federal court.
But Fischetti is banking on his testimony to prove Schwarz didn’t hold Louima down during the bathroom barbarism in the early morning hours of Aug. 9, 1997.
Schwarz was convicted at the end of the first trial last year. Now, he and Officers Thomas Wiese and Thomas Bruder are charged with concocting a story to protect Schwarz from investigators.
Volpe is expected to repeat what he told Judge Eugene Nickerson in his sentencing last year — that Schwarz wasn’t in the bathroom, and Wiese was.
While most of the last week’s testimony came out at the first trial, there have been a few bombshells.
First, Louima testified for the first time that someone opened the bathroom door just before the sodomy.
Days later, prosecutors claimed they have a witness who heard Volpe tell Schwarz’s former lawyer, Stephen Worth, that he wouldn’t “say nothin'” about the second cop’s role in the attack days before his guilty plea.
The 12 jurors will either see Volpe as a monster and a liar who denied the attack for almost two years before coming clean, or as a man who has nothing to lose by telling the truth.
“Calling him is like playing with a hand grenade,” said Manhattan criminal defense lawyer Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor who helped win a conviction in the Francis Livoti police brutality case.
Pomerantz said Fischetti will likely ask Volpe limited questions, focused “on the guts” of what happened in the bathroom.
Prosecutors are then likely to take “pretty free rein” asking a host of questions that could damage Volpe’s credibility, he said.
Arthur Aidala, a Brooklyn criminal defense lawyer, said prosecutors will also try to give the jury “every emotional motivation to come back with a conviction” by bringing out the terror Louima suffered at Volpe’s hands.
He said Fischetti will need to hone in on the fact that Louima has never been able to identify Schwarz as the second attacker.
“The goal is not just for him to say he wasn’t there, but to show that Louima could not be sure who was there,” he said.
Pomerantz said Fischetti, who’s also likely to put Schwarz on the stand, is probably counting on Volpe to bolster his client’s testimony that he’s not guilty.
“The positives are that he was there. [Jurors] already heard from Louima, and he’s got his own [credibility] problems,” Pomerantz said.
“There’s only a couple of people in the world who know what happened,” he said. “Volpe’s one of them.”