The death penalty trial of convicted mob boss Vincent Basciano, aka Vinnie Gorgeous, who was already serving a life sentence, resulted in no death. But it did result in a steady paycheck for Basciano's court-appointed lawyers, and the flushing of millions of taxpayer dollars down the can. Which is exactly what Judge Nicholas Garaufis warned prosecutors before the trial started. Now Times columnist Jim Dwyer does some back-of-the-envelope calculations and guesstimates that the whole trial cost "more than $10 million in public money." Hey, that's show biz! Think those bologna sandwiches don't pay for themselves?
After more than five weeks of testimony, it took the jury less than three hours to decide to spare Basciano's life. Could it be that because Basciano was only one of four people involved in the murder of the rival gangster, the jury didn't feel right about singling him out for death? "The jurors were able to see this in two and a half hours,” Richard Jasper, one of Basciano’s lawyers, tells the Times. "Some of the informants had murdered a whole football team of people. Why was Basciano death-penalty-worthy and these other characters weren’t? Because he didn’t cooperate?" Jasper, by the way, was paid $187 an hour, and was just one of four lawyers appointed to represent Basciano. The defense team hasn't submitted a final bill yet, but as of April they'd racked up over $4 million in fees.
Still, the daughter of the murdered mobster, Connie Pizzolo, is glad the feds tried to get Basciano executed, though she's unhappy with the results. "To me, it degrades the value of life," Pizzolo told the Daily News. "It's a bit insulting. A death sentence, to me, would be the only answer." Instead, some $10 million later, Basciano is doing what he would have been doing anyway before the show trial: serving a life sentence under extremely restrictive conditions in one of the nation’s most secure prisons, the "supermax" federal prison in Colorado.
