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I hand the evidence bag to Chief Laggos and ask him, “When did you first set eyes on this bullet?”
“When Chief Calabrese of the East Hampton force drove it over to us the other night after Mr. Cunniff was shot.”
“And what did you then do with the bullet?”
“I handed it over to our forensics specialist and had him look at it first thing this morning,” Laggos says. “You always want to know if it’s a possible match for other bullets in our system.”
“And how do you determine if there is a match?” I ask.
“When a bullet is fired from a firearm, and goes through the barrel, the barrel leaves markings on the bullet that are unique to a specific firearm.”
“So what you’re doing, if I understand you, is cross-checking that a particular bullet might have been fired by a gun used in a previous crime. Isn’t that right?” I ask. “Whether you have the weapon in your possession or not.”
“Yes, that’s exactly right.”
I walk back to the table next to ours where one of the clerks is seated, and the clerk hands me another envelope, introduced into evidence during that first week of the trial by Kevin Ahearn. This one contains the three bullets collected by Laggos’s cops from the Gateses’ home after the murders, even though the gun that fired them was never found. I hold the envelope up for the jury and tell them what’s inside.
Now I ask Laggos to come down from the stand, as I remove those three bullets and carefully place them on the table next to the bullet Dr. Raymond Williams removed from Jimmy Cunniff.
“Now, Chief, would you care to inspect the grooves and what are known as the lands on these bullets?”
“I don’t have to,” he says. “I already have because you asked me to before we came into the courtroom this morning.”
“So I did. But would you please tell thejuryyour expert conclusion regarding the three bullets found at the Gateses’ home after the tragic murder of that family and the bullet fired into my associate Jimmy Cunniff last night.”
“They were all fired from the same gun,” he says.
“Your Honor!” Kevin Ahearn bellows. “With all due respect, Chief Laggos isn’t a forensics expert.”
“With all due respect, I’m just telling the court what the forensics expert you already called reiterated to me before I came over here today,” Mort Laggos says.
Ahearn sits back down. He’s got nowhere to go in the moment, and he knows it. This is, after all, a cop from Suffolk County. They’re on the same team.
Gotcha.
“So just to be clear, Chief, you are saying that the bullet the doctor removed from Mr. Cunniff was fired by the same gun used to kill Mitch and Kathy and Laurel Gates.”
Mort Laggos nods. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
The murder weapon had never turned up, as all the cops who worked the case know, and I know, and so does Kevin Ahearn. When the cops first questioned Rob Jacobson, they asked if he owned a gun. He said he did. They asked what kind. He said a .22 that he kept in a lockbox and had never fired—his wife felt safer having one in the house. They asked if they could see the lockbox. When he opened it, there was no gun inside. He acted shocked and said somebody must have taken it. Or stolen it. The cops wanted to know who that might have been. “Maybe somebody trying to make me look guilty,” Jacobson said. At the time, the cops knew the missing gun didn’t rise to the level of probable cause, even if the Gateses had been shot dead with a .22. But what they call “articulable suspicion” was just one more brick in the wall they finally built around my client.
Laggos, a big, wide-body guy, walks back to the witness stand and sits himself down. I walk back over to him. But I’m not really talking to him now.
I’m addressing the jury.
“We’re all here because the state says that my client shot and killed all three members of the Gates family.”
I pause now.
“So let me ask you one last question, Chief: how is it that somebody else managed to use our murder weapon to shoot Jimmy Cunniff?”
“Objection,” Ahearn says. “Calling for a conclusion.”
“Sustained,” the judge says.
“Withdrawn,” I say. But then as I pass the jury, “Unless it was the real killer doing the shooting at my partner.”
Ninety
