The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York), August 20, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 Post-Standard
All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York)

August 20, 2006 Sunday
FINAL EDITION

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A1

HEADLINE: THE TRIALS OF SAL PIEMONTE;
LAWYER IS A MAN OF MANY TITLES: PROSECUTOR, DEFENSE ATTORNEY, JUDGE, CRIMINAL DEFENDANT, INMATE, AND NOW, HE SAYS, A NEW MAN.

BYLINE: By John O'Brien Staff writer

BODY:
Sal Piemonte tells people his worst day was Oct. 5, 2001.
It's not the day he went to prison. It's the day he got out - the day he discovered his home on a hill in Solvay in a shambles, along with his life. Trash all over. Mold growing on dirty dishes. An overgrown lawn. And, most surprising: no wife, daughter and stepdaughter.
That was the worst day. In the best days, the early days, Piemonte was a brash, headline-grabbing lawyer with a clientele of drug suspects so devoted they scribbled his name on jail walls and chanted his nickname: Abogado de droga. The drug lawyer. In those days, Syracuse police officers tweaked their antagonist by making a T-shirt with those words and Piemonte's face.
Piemonte, 51, seemed as much performer as practitioner then. A judge once jailed him when he wouldn't shut up in court. Another time, he made news by demanding the district attorney resign and by calling police and prosecutors "Nazis."
He was caustic with authorities, but by most accounts a charmer outside the job. He was out on the town three or four nights a week. He could afford a boat and a $200,000 addition to his house.
But the image eventually fell apart. The drug lawyer was using drugs and drinking too much. He was a part-time village justice who committed crimes - separate cases of witness tampering and helping drug dealers hide their profits. Finally, the guy who fought to keep people out of prison landed in one himself.
All of it led him to his worst day. He was free, but to do what? His family, his profession and his audience were gone. He was bankrupt, and he'd lost the will to step outside.
Piemonte, always a loud and ferocious battler for his clients, had to figure out how to stand up for himself.
"That sounds like me'
He got his start in 1980 as an assistant Onondaga County district attorney, he said. There he became friends with another prosecutor and fun-loving guy, J. Kevin Mulroy. Over the next two decades, they would remain friends, through careers with a similar rise and fall.
Piemonte was engaged to Jill Russell until they broke it off in 1985. In 1998, she was murdered in her hospital room by her estranged husband, Jeff Cahill, who was sentenced to death until New York's death penalty law was ruled unconstitutional. Piemonte declined to talk about the relationship. But after Jill's murder, he told a reporter that she had recently revealed to him that her husband was dangerous.
In 1983, while still a prosecutor, Piemonte began using cocaine. He rationalized that it was OK because he was handling mostly sex cases, not drug crimes. He used cocaine occasionally but stopped when he got away from that crowd around 1985.
Piemonte's cocaine use started again in 1993 or 1994, he said. This time, he got the drug from friends, some of whom he had represented in non-drug cases, he said. He said he never paid for the drugs, that friends provided them for free.
Six years ago, Syracuse police and federal agents investigated the rumor that Piemonte was accepting drugs as payment for legal services. They found no proof of it, said Chris Wiegand, a former Syracuse cop who worked the case. But even Piemonte's friends suspected his clients were his drug connection.
"He became personal friends with some of those people, and that's always a bad idea," said Jim McGraw, a lawyer who shared office space with Piemonte.
He wasn't using cocaine every day, sometimes not even once a month. Other times, he'd use it three days in a row, he said. He liked the jolt of confidence and energy, but it dulled his senses. Christina Piemonte, who divorced him four years ago, said he kept it a secret from her.
"I didn't know until he was in rehab," she said. She declined to talk about her life with her ex-husband.
Piemonte built a reputation as a good trial lawyer who chased the dollar and the spotlight. He was willing to take on the police and the establishment, yet was polite and gregarious. Those attributes helped him win election as Solvay village justice in 1997.
He won acquittals of the top charge in dozens of trials, including at least two homicide trials. He won a $67,000 settlement for a pregnant woman who was strip-searched by Syracuse police in a public hallway. He made himself indispensable to Latinos accused of dealing drugs: He said he was one of three defense lawyers who spoke Spanish.
As his caseload grew, so did his problems. Dave Evans, a friend of Piemonte's who worked as his court clerk in Solvay, suspected Piemonte was using drugs while on the bench in 1998. Piemonte was fidgety, his speech racing.
"I'd go to court and notice there was alcohol on his breath," Evans said. "I made sure things ran smoothly."
Piemonte would recognize something in the drunks and drug users who appeared before him.
"I was reading a report and going through it and thinking, "That sounds like me. That sounds like me. That sounds like me. Holy - - . It's me,"' he said.
"It started to affect my conscience," he testified later before judges of the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court. He was appealing to them to get back his law license. "I started feeling that ... I'm directing people to get treatment when I felt that I should get treatment myself."
Piemonte checked himself into Tully Hill Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center in 1998.
But his troubles were just beginning. The next year, Piemonte tried to help a businessman in a DWI case. He asked a Solvay police officer not to show up for a hearing. In exchange for pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of witness tampering, Piemonte agreed to resign as Solvay justice.
Even before he finished his six-month suspension from practicing law for that crime, Piemonte knew the feds were on his tail. In 2001, they accused him of helping a client, cocaine dealer Michael Prevo, hide $11,000 in illegal profits by filing a false financial report with the Internal Revenue Service.
The storyteller
Piemonte was sentenced to three months at the U.S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., where he says he learned five ways to light a cigarette without a match. He learned you don't get up from a meal without knocking on the table. And he learned not to take someone else's turn on the phone. He says he got punched out for that.
These are the stories Piemonte tells and, you have to remember, he likes a story.
"The story is not good enough, even when it's a good story," Evans said. "I've been there, experienced the same event. Then he tells it to someone else and you think, "Wait a second. That's not exactly what happened."' A bumpy plane ride from New Jersey became, in the retelling, a near-crash.
It's part of his charm, Evans said. Besides, he said, Piemonte backs up the bravado in the courtroom.
Piemonte tells a story of being locked in solitary confinement in prison on a technicality for at least two weeks. The cell was all steel, no windows. A single light bulb burned day and night. It wasn't air-conditioned, and it was July. At least 100 degrees. The inmate next to him screamed and banged his head on the wall all day. Piemonte got through by reading and re-reading a novel that a guard slid under the door. The cover was ripped off, so he didn't know the title. And the last few chapters were missing, so he doesn't know the ending.
But many novels usually have their titles printed on every other page, don't they? Piemonte says he was under too much stress to remember the title. When pressed, he said it was a detective novel, possibly by Steve Martini.
A life in hiding
Piemonte was at rock bottom after finding his home a mess when he got out of prison.
In prison, thoughts of his daughter Tori, then 7, kept him going, he said. When he got out, his family was the one thing he still had left. Then, that was gone, too.
A month later, on Nov. 8, 2001, Piemonte called his therapist, Robin Kasowitz. "I can't guarantee anything," he told her, and hung up. Fearing the worst, she called Solvay police. When officers arrived, no one answered the doorbell.
When they got in, they found two spilled bottles of pills on the kitchen counter, according to a police report: an allergy medicine and an anti-depressant. The officers, including Solvay police Chief Richard Cox, found Piemonte upstairs in bed.
He was in the fetal position, but conscious and coherent. Piemonte told them he'd taken pills and gin.
At University Hospital, he was so belligerent with the hospital workers that two police officers were called for "an emotionally disturbed person" and they put him in handcuffs. Then they called Syracuse Officer Joe Reilly, who'd known Piemonte for years and often testified against Piemonte's clients. When Reilly walked in, Piemonte was shouting at the officers.
"I don't need to be here. I don't have a problem," Reilly remembers him saying. Reilly took off the cuffs and talked to him for four hours, then drove him home.
Mulroy and Evans were two of a handful of friends who stood by Piemonte. They mowed his lawn and visited him when he was a recluse.
Mulroy and Piemonte grew closer partly because Mulroy had gone through similar turmoil. He was the son of the former county executive and a high-profile, outspoken judge in his own right. He, too, was publicly disgraced when he was removed from the Onondaga County Court bench in 2000 for his remarks about a black victim.
When they would visit, Mulroy and Evans regularly found Piemonte in his pajamas.
"He was like a barn cat," Evans said. "You knew he was inside, but you caught a glimpse of him only once in a while."
Piemonte had a long way to go. He'd go to therapy sessions with Kasowitz and become "almost catatonic," she said. Only one subject could snap him out of it.
"He'd be sitting in the office and having trouble just figuring out why to breathe," said Kasowitz, who spoke with Piemonte's approval. "And we started talking about law. He'd become impassioned and just start talking."
The road back
Without a law license, he worked three jobs: mowing lawns and tending bar at a restaurant and a country club. McGraw went to one of the bars and listened to Piemonte "moaning and groaning about his life."
"Instead of having thousands of dollars in his pocket all the time," McGraw said, "he was happy to get a tip."
Piemonte says he no longer drinks or uses drugs, that he stays sober one day at a time. He says he doesn't know when he had his last drink.
Ronald Dougherty, medical director of Conifer Park rehab center, said it would be highly unusual for a recovering alcoholic not to remember his last drink. "The date, the time and where they were - most recovering alcoholics can tell you," said Dougherty, who was not commenting on Piemonte specifically. It's also uncommon for someone to use cocaine as long as Piemonte did and never pay for it, Dougherty said.
Piemonte got back his law license a second time two years ago, after the Appellate Division granted him leniency because of his cocaine and alcohol addictions.
But it wasn't until a few months ago that he started believing he was back. He was in court arguing a case and Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick was sitting in the back. Afterward, Fitzpatrick went up to him, shook his hand and said, "It's good to have you back, Sal."
Fitzpatrick was the one who helped convict Piemonte in the witness-tampering case and who required him to resign as village justice. After that moment in the courtroom, Piemonte went to his car and got choked up, he said, because he took it as a sign that he'd redeemed himself.
"No one has ever questioned Sal's intellect or his legal ability," Fitzpatrick said. "He's a tenacious fighter in the courtroom. I hope the guy makes a strong comeback."
Piemonte said he's the only person in New York state history who has been a defense lawyer, prosecutor, judge and prisoner. He said he researched it. It's even wryly implied in his Yellow Pages ad: "Experience like no other."
"Sal's a fighter'
Gone is the plush law office. He works alone out of his home; lawyers don't want to associate their practices with his reputation. Piemonte often answers his own phone, which rarely rings. He has half as many clients as before and makes far less money.
Piemonte lives in a $300,000 home in Camillus. His place is immaculate, refined. He is handling his first homicide case since his return. He's won acquittals on the top charge in all four of the cases he has taken to trial. He's picking up clients who hear about him at the jail.
At the jail, inmates called out to him. They didn't care about his record.
"I know Sal's a fighter," said Davon Hunter, who was awaiting sentencing. "I can read people. This guy is hungry." Piemonte said he was especially determined to defend Hunter because the case was handed to him by Mulroy. Mulroy became ill and died last year from an unknown affliction.
"I didn't want to let Kevin down," Piemonte said. A jury acquitted Hunter of attempted murder and assault in June, but convicted him of an illegal weapons charge, in the shooting of a teenager. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Hunter and other inmates said Piemonte is one of the few lawyers who gives them the straight story. He takes their collect calls from the jail, even at 3 a.m.
A second chance
Friends have noticed a new Sal.
"Sal's a little more humble than he used to be," said private investigator Joe Spadafore, who has worked for Piemonte and is a friend. "His honesty is a little more than what it was."
Piemonte acknowledged what was at the core of his troubles: his arrogance. "I needed to be knocked down," he said.
The realization came after hours of staring out the back window of his home, into the woods, contemplating his life, he said. He'd swing from being angry with those who put him away, to angry with himself, to angry with God for knocking him down.
"I kind of felt like God was engaging in a little overkill," Piemonte said.
It's easier to step outside lately, but he said he still suffers "the humiliation of just having to walk down the street."
But the performer lives. He walked with a boldness, even a swagger, when he visited clients in jail a few months ago and held court with other accused criminals. He was dressed casually: khaki pants, loafers, sport coat and no tie. Coat wide open, hands on hips and legs splayed, he chatted up a deputy. Piemonte presented a confidence developed through years of jailhouse meetings. And three months as a prisoner.
He's always had that flair, said his older brother Vito.
The two were opposites growing up in Rome, N.Y. While Vito worked with his father doing carpentry, Sal was off playing sports or running for class president.
"He never lacked confidence," Vito Piemonte said. "He set his mind to something and he'd do it. He'd say, "I'm going to win,' and he did."
The old Sal never used to phone his brother. Since Sal's downfall, the calls come often, Vito said.
Part of getting back up was getting to know his 12-year-old daughter, Tori, much of whose childhood Piemonte missed. He blames himself for being too caught up in work and his lifestyle. Tori didn't know until recently about her father's troubles.
Soon after he bought his new home, he hired an artist to paint a jungle scene on her bedroom walls. Hidden in the scene are words and numbers she chose, such as her soccer jersey number and her pet rabbit's name. And one more detail that Piemonte added: "Daddy loves you."
The message was written in the leopard's spots - changing what the proverb argues cannot change.

Sal Piemonte: key dates
1977: Graduates from Cornell University with a degree in industrial labor relations.
December 1979: Graduates with a law degree from Syracuse University.
1980 to 1985: Assistant Onondaga County district attorney.
1985 to 1993: Associate, then partner in the Martin & Martin law firm.
1993 to present: Solo practitioner.
1997: Elected village justice in Solvay.
June 1999: Pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge of witness tampering. Sentenced to perform community service and resigns as village justice.
January 2000: Law license is suspended because of the criminal conviction.
September 2000: License is reinstated.
January 2001: Pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false report with the Internal Revenue Service. He's sentenced to three months in federal prison.
November 2001: Law license suspended for three years.
2003: Files for bankruptcy.
July 2004: Law license is reinstated.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO Dennis Nett/Staff Photographer ATTORNEY Sal Piemonte meets with Bobby Robertson at the Onondaga County Justice Center in June. In his glory days, the lawyer earned the reputation of being willing to take on the police and the establishment. Drug suspects called him abrogado de droga, the drug lawyer. FROM THE TOP OF THE WORLD... File photo/Stephen D. Cannerelli, 1997 SAL PIEMONTE celebrates winning election as Solvay village justice March 18, 1997 at the Solvay Town Hall. TO THE BOTTOM OF IT.... File photo/David Lassman, 2001 SAL PIEMONTE arrives at the Federal Building in Syracuse Dec. 26, 2001, where he pleaded guilty to helping a client hide $11,000 in illegal profits. Dennis Nett/Staff photographer SAL PIEMONTE calls a client from his Camillus home, from where he conducts his law practice these days. He acknowledges now that his arrogance was at the bottom of his troubles. "I needed to be knocked down," he said. File photo/Stephen D. Cannerelli, 1997 IN MAY 1997, Sal Piemonte prepares to hear his first case of the day as Solvay village justice. Two years later, he would agree to resign in exchange for pleading guilty to a charge of witness tampering. Dennis Nett/Staff photographer WORKING ALONE from his office in the basement of his Camillus home, Sal Piemonte is trying to piece back together his practice and his life.