New Haven Independent

The middleman is Orange native and Yale School of Management grad John Lucarelli (pictured above with attorney Dominic Amerosa outside the Church Street courthouse during his trial last July). Lucarelli returned to Judge Janet B. Arterton’s courtroom Thursday morning as his lawyer argued to have the judge acquit Lucarelli or at least grant him a new trial.

Click here and here to read the memo’s Lucarelli’s team submitted to the court in support of the request.

Click here to read the government’s response.

A jury found him guilty on two fraud charges related to the scam that found out-of-town moneybags investors using local depositors to buy millions of dollars of preferred stock when New Haven Savings Bank went public and became NewAlliance.

But while the jury found Lucarelli guilty, it also answered “no” to two key special questions Judge Arterton posed to them — answers, that Lucarelli claims, undermine their guilty verdict. That’s the basis of his request to Arterton.

Lucarelli helped New York investors line up local accomplices to muscle their way illegally into the purchase of stock when New Haven Savings Bank went public in 2004 and became NewAlliance Bank. In what was believed to be the first federal case of its kind in the country, the government charged several investors with crimes.

The mastermind of the scheme, Robert Ross, who hired Lucarelli and made far more money off the scheme, pleaded guilty and cooperated with the prosecution. He testified against Lucarelli at trial. As a result, he faces far less time in prison.

Lucarelli’s Gambit

Lucarelli was originally supposed to be sentenced on Halloween. Now whether he’ll be sentenced at all hinges on the outcome of the arguments heard Thursday morning, which lasted just over an hour in Courtroom B.

In interrogatories posed to the jury, Judge Arterton asked whether they believed that Lucarelli had specifically defrauded a) the bank; or b) the depositors in the scam.

Even though they had convicted Lucarelli of fraud and conspriacy to commit fraud, the jurors answered “no” to both questions.

“To convict him,” argued Bob Fiske, the Lucarelli attorney (out of four present) who spoke at Thursday’s hearing, “they had to prove he had a specific intent to defraud either the bank or the depositor.”

Fiske argued that the jury clearly signalled that Lucarelli hadn’t intended to hurt either victim — so he therefore couldn’t under the law be found guilty.

Not so, countered Assisant U.S. Attorney Michael S. McGarry. He acknowledged (and Judge Arteron agreed) that the jury’s finding sent a mixed message. But he argued that the jury may have misunderstood the judge’s questions — confusing, for instance, unnnamed “depositors” who were hurt by the bank scam with the few specific depositors who knowingly went in on the scam with Lucarelli and Ross.

McGarry made an analogy to the driver a getaway car in a bank robbery. The driver knows he’s helping to rob a bank. He intends to be part of that conspiracy. But he may know not which bank is being robbed — or even, if he’s parked outside a shopping mall, whether a bank or a store is being hit. He’s still guilty, McGarry argued.

Arterton said the central question indeed rests on whether the jury needed as part of its guilty verdicts to find Lucarelli guilty of intended specifically to hurt either depositors or the bank. Both sides presented court opinoins backing their position. She praised both sides for the extensive research they presented on this interesting legal question — and adjourned the hearing to chart the future of both an interesting legal question and of a scam middleman hoping to stay out of jail.

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