While Seymour Tankleff lay in a coma in the hospital a week after having been stabbed and bludgeoned, Jerry Steuerman faked his own death, changed his appearance, took on an alias and fled to California. Two weeks later, Suffolk County Det. James McCready, Det. Sgt. Robert Doyle [no relation to Judge Doyle] and Edward Jablonski, the chief of the district attorney's homicide bureau, tracked down Steuerman and went out to California, spent the night at Steuerman's Redondo Beach, Calif., motel, then escorted Steuerman back to testify against Marty. "He's not wanted for any crime. He's just a missing person," Doyle said of Steuerman to Newsday.
The Suffolk County police chronicled the episode in a missing persons report:
"Jerry Steuerman is a friend and business associate of Seymour Tankleff, who is soon expected to expire from his injuries. Tankleff and Steuerman own a race horse and Tankleff has helped Steuerman finance numerous bagel stores. Tankleff and Steuerman and a few others were playing cards on the night of the assault. Steuerman has been thoroughly questioned and Homicide does not believe he was involved. Steuerman is described as an aggressive businessman by family and friends."
While the police don't explain why they were so sure Steuerman wasn't involved in anything nefarious, they were confident enough not to be troubled by this entry of 9/22/88:
"Anonymous male caller advises Steuerman finances his son Todd, aka Toad, in major cocaine dealings. Caller states he saw Steuerman and Todd in a room together with several kilos of cocaine. Also states last business venture he heard them working on was a whorehouse on the East End."
To read Steuerman's Missing Persons Report, click here (pdf).
Well, when you start to link McCready's close business relationship with Steuerman before the homicides and at a time when Steuerman's son Todd was possibly running a massive cocaine distribution ring in the bagel stores, you begin to understand why Tom Spota would employ every means possible to keep Marty in prison and prevent the true facts of Marty's case from the public eye. I guess Spota would have been much better off if NYS had the death penalty at the time of Marty's wrongful conviction. Dead men tell no tales.
Posted by: Robert L. Olson | January 23, 2008 at 01:49 PM
book is fiction
Posted by: lo | January 02, 2009 at 11:10 PM