« MA: School Zone Charges Pressed | Main | Where Have All the Black Men Gone? »
May 15, 2005
Cover Story--Newsday- Marie La Pinta--soon to be free
http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/
Cover photo and headlines
http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/
Cover photo and headlines
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lipint15,0,2078978.story?pag
e=4&coll=ny-homepage-bigpix2005
A life, career forged from family tragedy
BY ROBIN TOPPING
STAFF WRITER
There's a part of Anthony La Pinta who will always be that 16-year-old boy who came home one night to a dark house with an unlocked back door and something sticky on the kitchen floor.
As he reached into the refrigerator to get something to drink on that rainy March 27, 1983, La Pinta was unaware that he was stepping in his father's drying blood. He was just a teenager coming home from a movie, trying to beat his 11 p.m. curfew and unaware of the violence that had just taken place in his small, well-kept West Islip home.
Years later, when he was a man, and a lawyer, long after his mother was locked up for taking part in the murder of his father, La Pinta impassively studied the events of that night, regarding them as the "facts of the case."
It was the case that he studied endlessly, nights and weekends, searching for a legal opening through which he could release his mother, Marie, 69, from prison, and free himself and his older brother Lenny from their emotional prison.
Through this case, he came to grips with the difficult memory of his father, Michael La Pinta, a man who beat his mother but loved his sons. And they loved him back, even as they couldn't fathom the demons behind his anger.
"My brother and I were as much victims as anyone," La Pinta said. "My father was killed and that left a tremendous hole in my heart. I think about him every day and I believe he tried to do the best he could."
But back then, the teenage Anthony didn't know he was living through the hours that would reshape his life.
"I remember my mother showed up about an hour later, soaked, and I asked if she was OK, and she said, 'Go to bed, my son, I had a little problem with the car,'" recalled La Pinta, now 38.
The next day he was supposed to travel to Florida with his father, who was moving his belongings out of the house after he and Marie La Pinta had agreed to end their troubled marriage.
But no one came for Anthony that day.
At 5 o'clock, he got a call from his mother's workplace, a Babylon dress shop where she was employed as the head seamstress. They were looking for her. She was usually so reliable.
La Pinta's growing fears were confirmed when he went into the kitchen and saw a bullet hole through the window.
"I panicked," he said. "I grabbed my dog and ran out into the street. The homicide detectives pulled up and they said they had a search warrant for the house and they had found a body last night. They thought it was my father."
At first, he thought it was a practical joke, one of many his friends played on him. But when he went to stay with a neighbor that evening, his mother called him, hysterical, telling him she did not kill his father. A detective came on the line saying she would be in court the next morning.
"I didn't know what was going on. I did not grasp that she was a suspect," La Pinta remembered.
Marie La Pinta and her brother, Leonard Crociata, were convicted in 1984 of the murder of her husband of 27 years, Michael. Crociata had come over to the house at his sister's request and the two men had gotten into a struggle over a gun that Michael La Pinta was holding. The gun went off and he was killed. The defense contended the shooting was unplanned and accidental. The prosecution said it was an intentional crime.
Marie La Pinta and her brother dumped the body at the Babylon landfill, where an off-duty police officer saw them and later traced the license plate, leading to their arrest. Their jury apparently did not believe the defense lawyers who argued the shooting was unplanned and accidental.
Their mother had been able to get out on bail for a few months, during which her sons remained optimistic. When she was convicted, the three were stunned.
arie La Pinta and her brother were sentenced to 25 years to life for intentional murder. And suddenly, Anthony La Pinta, and his brother Lenny, then 20, who was about to finish college in upstate Potsdam, were alone.
"I thought my mother was going to be acquitted," Anthony La Pinta said. "I was blown away by the conviction and she was devastated. I didn't know what I was going to do. I was scared to death."
Twenty-two years later, Anthony La Pinta, propelled by the fear, pain and shame that had infused his childhood, used his skills as a criminal defense attorney and found the key to his mother's freedom.
In a motion to set aside the 1984 verdict, he argued to State Supreme Court Justice Robert W. Doyle that his mother's rights had been violated because her lawyer and her brother's lawyer had been from the same law firm. The defense was the same for both, so Marie La Pinta's story was never told. The jury never heard the whole truth about Michael La Pinta and what he did to his wife, year after year, night after night.
Behind closed doors, Marie La Pinta was a battered woman, the victim of her husband's violent temper. He threw things at her and punched her in the head. She lived with a fear that warped her existence and set the stage for their final confrontation.
"Mrs. La Pinta ... was tried in a vacuum, with no understanding of any of the participants of the human context in which these events unfolded," Anthony La Pinta argued in legal papers that convinced Judge Doyle to reverse his mother's conviction.
La Pinta's legal arguments were filled with the poignancy that only a son could bring to the tale. "I wanted it to be that way," he said, explaining why he didn't hire another attorney to do the work.
"The basis of my knowledge is my personal knowledge of the facts and circumstances of this matter," La Pinta wrote in his legal papers.
He not only wrote about the abuse, he lived through it and knew the victim and abuser as Mom and Dad. On that night when he returned to the empty house, he lost not only a mother who adored her children but a father who loved his sons.
"My dad was kind of an aloof, distant guy," La Pinta said. "He was pretty difficult to deal with. He had a short fuse. He was not a warm and tender guy. But he loved his kids and I loved him. He was my dad.
"He wasn't a child beater. However, he was a wife beater and he was very harsh to my mother. It was something we grew up with. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized this was a big problem. Before that, I thought this just happens in families."
nthony's brother, Lenny, who was 41/2 years older, saw the abuse too, but got away from it by going to music school at the State University of New York at Potsdam.
"I saw things deteriorate as I came home from college more and more," Lenny La Pinta said. "I noticed my father became more reclusive and would be verbally disparaging of my mother in letters to me."
Like Anthony, Lenny was aware of the physical abuse his mother endured.
"We had witnessed some of it, but most of it was kept from us," he said. "It was done after we had gone to bed behind their closed bedroom doors. And as my mother tried to get out of the relationship, he became more free with his hands as time passed."
Marie La Pinta understood physical abuse. She had lived with it as the daughter of a tyrannical father in Sicily who rarely let her out of the house. Her marriage to Michael La Pinta had been arranged and she brought with her the lessons of that upbringing: Don't complain, suffer in silence, don't talk about the pain.
"She would reiterate to us, 'He's your father, you have to love and respect him.'" Anthony La Pinta said. "She would never say, 'Your father is abusing me.' She was not the type of woman to complain about the problems in her life."
Both Anthony and Lenny La Pinta recall their mother as loving and doting. Although they grew up poor -- their mother was a seamstress and their father a mason -- they always had good meals on the table.
"My mother wasn't happy with her life. But she was happy with us," Anthony La Pinta said. "We made life bearable for her."
Shortly before the shooting, the couple's marriage had fallen apart and they planned to separate. Their arguments escalated and Michael La Pinta forbade his wife to have any of her relatives over at the house. When her brother heard about the ban, he came over to the home to plead with Michael, but the discussion ended in a fistfight. That led to a feud, which erupted again the night Michael La Pinta was shot.
As teenagers and as adults, Anthony and his brother always believed that their mother never meant for her husband to die. "There has never been a single second since this happened that we didn't absolutely believe my mother," Anthony La Pinta said.
But after the conviction, Anthony and his brother could only look on helplessly as their mother's appeals were turned down year after year. And in their own way, they went on with their lives.
nthony reluctantly went to the State University of New York at Oswego in upstate New York. His brother, Lenny, who was just starting his career as a music teacher at the West Islip schools, pushed him to get away from what had happened.
"I remember driving him up to Oswego and it was tough," Lenny La Pinta said. "It was the first time we really felt the loneliness. I got back in the car and drove on and that's when it hit me that the three of us would be in three different places leading separate lives."
At Oswego, Anthony surprised himself by excelling both academically and in student activities. He was elected student body president.
"Something magical happened up there," he said. "I had incredible success and I can't tell you how or why. It was really a grace of God."
He put himself through school with grants and loans and worked several jobs. His brother was able to stay in the house with the help of a tenant who rented an apartment their mother had helped them add while she was out on bail.
But Anthony La Pinta rarely came home. He mostly stayed in school during vacations and kept the tragedy to himself.
Both sons stayed in touch with their mother, visiting on holidays and speaking by phone.
Anthony helped to do research for some of his mother's unsuccessful appeals and began to think about the law as a career, fueled by anger over his mother's conviction.
"I felt this was just a tremendous injustice," he said. "I just said, this can't be the way things are and it provided an incredible inspiration."
At Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia, Anthony set his sights on criminal law. After his graduation in 1988, he became an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia until he returned to New York in 1993. He became a criminal defense lawyer in East Islip. After his divorce from his wife, with whom he has a daughter, he moved back into the West Islip house where his journey began.
He has carried his mother's case with him always.
"I would be reminded of it ... but especially in certain circumstances, like when I would see a family situation where the young child is affected by their parents' arrest," he said.
As before, Anthony La Pinta rarely spoke of the terrible events that formed his young adulthood. Yet, as time went by, and his mother's appeals were exhausted, she became eligible for clemency because she had no other legal recourse. So the brothers went public.
"It's not something he ever spoke about, but it does get around because he was looking for clemency," said defense lawyer Ray Perini of Hauppauge, one of La Pinta's friends. "It was one of the things I respected about him. He did everything he could but kept it as private as he could."
he brothers worked on the clemency campaign together, applying several times. They employed the help of politicians, made a 20-minute video explaining her life and the situation, created a Web site -- www.mercyformom.org -- and garnered more than 19,000 signatures for an online petition. They also convinced relatives of Michael La Pinta to write letters asking for clemency, along with jurors and the off-duty police officer who first reported the murder.
Lenny La Pinta said going public with the story enabled him and his brother to talk about what they had hidden for so many years.
"It was like finally being cleansed of the hurt and the humiliation," Lenny La Pinta said. "People would say it's impossible ... to be that bad because she has two sons who never turned their back on her and look what they are doing."
But the clemency bids were all turned down.
Then, last year, Anthony began working on a motion to set aside the verdict. He worked on it for months, anguishing over each word, occasionally asking other lawyers for advice.
"This whole experience has shaped the man, the person that he is, the lawyer that he is," said Paul Gianelli, who earlier this year welcomed La Pinta into his Hauppauge law firm. "It is altogether fitting that he was able, through his legal skills, to bring about this new chance for his mother to win her freedom."
After listening to La Pinta's story, Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota joined him in his request to overturn his mother's conviction. Negotiations on the exact plea that will someday bring his mother home are still not complete.
Spota said at the time that he "absolutely expects to reach a plea deal ... that will aid in her freedom."
When Doyle reversed the conviction, La Pinta said, "It was like a 1,000-pound weight had been taken off my shoulders."
Through the years, he has struggled to reconcile the father he loved as a boy with the abusive man he vilified in his legal case.
"The evidence revealed that Mr. La Pinta was a violent man who kept guns and bullets in his car, in the basement and in the marital bedroom, and who expressed his anger by screaming, using knives, destroying the children's toys, throwing glasses against the wall and breaking glasses in the kitchen sink," La Pinta wrote about his father in court papers.
The lawyer's composure crumbles when he speaks about his father as the man who raised him, rather than the man who beat his mother.
"If he could look down on us right now and see what has happened and how we have suffered, I don't think he would have resented any of this," La Pinta said. "I think he would have wanted us to be happy."
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
Posted by lois at May 15, 2005 07:59 PM