Convicted Fair Haven Arsonist: I Was Framed

A Fair Haven developer — who restored worn-down buildings on Grand Avenue before being jailed for torching the neighborhood — will make the case that cops arrested the wrong guy as he seeks to win a new trial next month.

That developer, Angelo Reyes, has submitted a petition for a new trial for an old arson case. His lawyer, Norm Pattis, argues that an out-of-state drug dealer was actually responsible for ordering the burning of a vacant home in 2008 and a luxury car in 2009. Prosecutors are already calling it a ​“conspiracy theory.”

During the aughts, fire burned throughout Fair Haven in what seemed to be a pattern of arsons. Conflagrations lit up on Lombard, Lloyd, Downing, Wolcott, James and Poplar Streets. Law enforcement blamed Reyes, a businessman with a criminal record, for many of the blazes. He initially beat federal charges but state charges stuck.

Now, in a proceeding set to take place next month, Reyes will argue that he was framed, taking the fall for a heroin dealer in Puerto Rico.

In 2012, Reyes was put on trial for arson, conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and burglary, all for allegedly paying two of his employees to firebomb a Downing Street home in October 2008 and a BMW in May 2009.

The prosecutor said that Reyes wanted to torch the house to intimidate Robert Lopez, who he’d sold the property to in 2002, who’d never done anything with it and who refused to sell it back to him, even after law enforcement agents seized a cache of weapons from his house.

The prosecutor also said that Reyes had wanted to torch the BMW to get back at Madeline Vargas, who worked at substance abuse counseling agency and planned to start an outreach program in an empty parking lot near one of Reyes’s businesses.

The state’s case relied on two co-conspirators who turned on Reyes. A father-and-son pair who worked for Reyes and lived rent-free in one of his buildings — both named Osvaldo Segui, Senior and Junior — said they’d been paid to set the fires to settle personal scores for Reyes. No other physical evidence linked Reyes to the arsons, and no other witnesses backed up the Seguis’ testimony.

But the six-person jury said Reyes was guilty on all five counts.

After hearing that Reyes had endangered the lives of 40 firemen who doused the blazing BMW while also benefiting his neighbors by organizing Grand Avenue merchants into an improvement association and holding events throughout Fair Haven, a judge sentenced Reyes to 15 years behind bars, which he’s still serving.

The judge pointed out that Reyes was convicted of drug and weapons offenses in 1983, 1986, 1987 and 1992. In prison, he learned about the mortgage industry; after being released, he built a real-estate empire, buying one abandoned house at a time. Eventually, he became a respected community leader with deep ties to John DeStefano’s administration, until 2002, when he was convicted again for absentee-ballot fraud.

Though Reyes offered apologies during his sentencing, saying with tears in his eyes, that he lived with a ​“constant battle within me of shame, regret and sorrow,” he maintained his innocence and asked for time to ​“exhaust all my remedies.”

His new attorney, Norm Pattis, has pursued multiple appeals to clear him. Right after the sentencing, Reyes had argued that the trial judge didn’t let him present evidence that the Seguis had previously made false allegations against him.

In another trial in federal court, the Seguis testified that Reyes had ordered them to commit other arsons, including of his Lombard Street laundromat to clear the way for redevelopment. But there a 12-person jury acquitted him.

Pattis took a set of procedural arguments, including that prosecutors misled jurors about the meaning of ​“reasonable doubt,” all the way to the Connecticut Supreme Court, where five justices who heard the appeal unanimously struck it down and thendenied a motion to reargue it before the full court.

Now Pattis is saying new evidence arrived in his office, in the form of an unsolicited letter that could finally exonerate Reyes by pointing to another culprit.

In 2015, an individual in Puerto Rico said that he’d overheard a conversation about a New Haven resident with a BMW who owed a narcotics-related debt to one of his family members, Saul Valentine.

The writer said that Valentine had sent his uncle and cousin ​“to take care of it,” and that Valentine feared returning to New Haven to face questioning about the crimes they might have committed for him.

The uncle went by the street name ​“Baldo,” which matched Osvaldo Segui, Sr.

In 2017, in a motion for a new trial, Pattis linked Valentine with the Seguis, the co-conspirators who’d turned on Reyes at trial (in exchange for only serving time for the federal arson case without an additional state sentence), arguing that they’d all been ​“associated in a criminal enterprise.”

Pattis said that Valentin used Segui Senior to retaliate against Yeiskol Leon, a dealer who wouldn’t take responsibility for heroin that cops seized, by burning two cars of Leon’s in the Fair Haven Heights and Dwight neighborhoods in December 2008.

Pattis said that local cops knew multiple people would back up that story; in fact, they had all the evidence on tape, in statements that a former New Haven homicide detective recorded.

According to what Pattis found, Valentin told Leon multiple times that he had the Seguis set the fires for him; Segui Senior told two bystanders, on separate occasions, that Valentin had pressured him to blame Reyes for the arsons and that he and his son would have received ​“a life sentence” if he hadn’t; and Valentin told another inmate in federal lockup that he was worried ​“Baldo” would testify against him.

Pattis argued that state and federal law enforcement knew about the link before Reyes went on trial, but they never turned the information over to prosecutors, who in turn would’ve had to give it to the defense as possible proof of what’s called ​“third-party culpability,” essentially that another person might be the real culprit.

Of all the ​“new trial petitions or post-conviction relief” Pattis had handled, he called it ​“the most compelling case I’ve seen” in the last 25 years. ​“There really is legitimate third-party culpability on this,” he said at a hearing that year. ​“Whether that would make a difference in a new trial, I don’t know.”

In response, the state denied all the substantive allegations and left Pattis to prove his case. At the same hearing, John Doyle, the senior assistant state’s attorney in New Haven, dismissed the arguments as ​“the continued machinations, the continued conspiracy theories of Mr. Reyes.”

The arguments about whether to grant a new trial are scheduled to begin on Aug. 28.