Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira

Author:Steve Bogira [Bogira, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307814197
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-27T21:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Fixes

“HAVE ANY OF YOU seen a cold-blooded killer before? Let’s take a look over here,” prosecutor James McKay is telling a jury in 302 one July morning. McKay steps behind the defense table and brushes Dino Titone’s shoulder lightly with one hand. “This man, sitting over here with the suit and the glasses on, is a cold-blooded killer. What the evidence is going to show you, ladies and gentlemen, is that Dino Titone is an executioner.”

Titone, who’s sharply dressed in a gray suit that his mother had tailored for him for this trial, is repelled by McKay’s touch. But he knows the prosecutor would love to have him fume in front of the jury, so he remains stone-faced, doesn’t flinch.

It used to be easier to provoke him, Titone says later. As a youth, “I was always one to fight. But I’m more laid-back now. Over the course of time you learn that fighting’s not the way you solve things, and that you can do more with kindness than with anger.”

Titone is solidly built, just under six feet tall but over two hundred pounds. He has a broad face, a small mouth, and a full head of wavy black hair that’s graying at the temples. There was no gray when he was arrested in 1982 for the double murder for which he’s now on trial for a second time. But he was twenty-two then; now he’s thirty-eight, and much has happened in the interim. The judge at his first trial is in prison for taking bribes, and the lawyer who represented him is on parole for giving them.

ON THE MORNING of December 12, 1982, a forest preserve ranger was patrolling a secluded tract of land near the Des Plaines River for illegal duck hunting. This was in unincorporated Lemont Township, fifteen miles southwest of Chicago and barely within Cook County. Around nine-fifteen A.M. the ranger came upon a powder-blue Oldsmobile on the river’s south bank. He parked his patrol car and walked toward the Olds, planning to look through its windows for hunting gear. As he approached, he heard banging from inside the trunk and a voice: I’m running out of air! Get me out of here!

The ranger radioed for help. A Lemont police car arrived, then an ambulance. The ranger and a police officer used a tool from the ambulance to pop open the trunk. Inside were two blood-spattered men, one writhing and moaning, the other pale and still. Their hands were tied behind their backs. A .38 revolver lay in the trunk. Police later found another gun, a small semiautomatic, on the ground not far from the car.

The motionless man, thirty-nine-year-old Aldo Fratto, had been shot in the head, chest, back, abdomen, and shoulder. He was dead. The other man, Fratto’s nephew, twenty-six-year-old Tullio Infelise, had four bullet wounds in his chest and abdomen. The two men had been shot about six hours earlier. As paramedics worked on Infelise in the ambulance, the police officer asked him who had done this to him.

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