Cop Killer Paroled!!

There are no bars on the windows of the four-story house in a residential section near Newark's downtown. The front door isn't locked.

But the wiring on the windows, which is connected to an alarm system, is a reminder to the 90 men who live in this building and several adjoining brownstones that they are not yet entirely free.

They are state prisoners living in a halfway house. And before they can shed the role of inmate, they must complete an intense, rule-oriented, therapeutic six- to 12-month program designed to serve as a bridge between prison and life on the outside.

It is in this kind of environment that cop killer Thomas Trantino will have to live before he can become free.

Ten days ago the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered Trantino, the state's longest-serving prisoner now in custody, released after 37 years of incarceration. But the court set a condition for the man who murdered two Lodi policemen in 1963 -- a successful one-year stay in a halfway house.

State officials, who have until mid-February to transfer the 62-year-old Trantino from his cell in South Woods Prison in Bridgeton, will not say to which halfway house Trantino is headed, although the Supreme Court had said it must be in the Camden area.

But whatever halfway house he goes to, there will be many similarities to Newark's PORT program, short for Prison Offenders Receiving Treatment.

The PORT program, which is owned and operated by a non-profit substance-abuse treatment organization called Integrity House, allowed The Record to visit Friday.

Like other halfway houses, the PORT program, under contract with the state, serves as a bridge between the tightly regulated world of prison life and freedom. But there are some special aspects to its role. For instance, the program is tailored for inmates with a history of substance abuse, a common problem among the prison population.

"We help the prisoner with the transition," said David Kerr, Integrity House's director and president. The program is varied from teaching life skills -- opening a checking account or meeting new friends -- to teaching offenders how to deal with anger or sadness.

Everything is done in a highly structured environment. Indeed, aspects of life inside PORT are just like prison.

Daily self-help and therapy groups are mandated, and offenders are expected to discuss the issues that landed them in prison and learn coping skills to help them deal better with life.

"You learn to deal with your feelings and take responsibility for yourself," said an inmate who has been at PORT for several months. The 33-year-old, who asked not to be identified, said he believes the program is helping him put his life on track after serving two years in prison for selling heroin near a public school.

PORT's clinical director, Ed Lyons, said the intensive group therapy phase goes on for 90 days. It's only then that offenders are allowed to get out into the community, either working at a job or beginning a job-training program.

The program aims to put offenders in jobs with a future -- computer services, for example, rather than flipping hamburgers.

The PORT program stresses accountability, Lyons said. Prisoners must be on time for and attend scheduled groups. When a prisoner goes to work, he must return to the halfway house by a certain time. Offenders who are more than two hours late returning from work under state corrections rules must be sent back to prison, Lyons said.

It's an environment in which many inmates can't perform adequately. Kerr says only 30 percent of prisoners complete the PORT program, and the others are sent back to prison.

It's the reason the alarms are on the windows of the small, bunk-filled bedrooms of the PORT program. An occasional inmate has escaped that way, said PORT social worker Joseph Sweeney. Some inmates will try to elude staff attention and escape without notice to get a head start on the police, Sweeney said.

"We can't keep inmates here if they want to leave," he said. But Sweeney said the authorities are always called and the inmates are sent back to prison when they are found.

Walkaways and other disciplinary problems are not unique to the PORT program. Each year 2,500 to 3,000 state prisoners are sent to about two dozen privately run halfway houses throughout New Jersey, state corrections officials say.

But 26 percent of all state prisoners sent to halfway houses are cited for infractions of halfway house rules, and a high majority of them end up back in prison, said Diana Zompa, director of the office of community and drug programs for the state Department of Corrections.

Zompa said some infractions -- being a few minutes late coming back from work, for instance -- can be handled internally by halfway house staff. But more serious infractions -- including all walkaways -- result in an automatic return to prison.

Zompa said offenders who committed violent crimes are monitored more closely than those with non-violent histories. They are allowed to leave the house unsupervised only for work, family visits, or religious services. She said they are not allowed overnight family visits.

Most inmates do not end up in halfway houses. Zompa said Corrections officials try to send the best candidates to halfway houses. Only those prisoners in minimum-custody units are eligible. Inmates who have completed their full sentences can simply walk out the prison door, even if there have been discipline problems.

State law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they were uncertain what would happen if Trantino broke the halfway house rules. There is no precedent for the situation, because the Supreme Court, not the Parole Board, ordered his release.

The potential problem is further complicated because Trantino has served his maximum sentence. On the other hand, they say, the court has made it clear that Trantino's release is dependent on his successfully completing a year in a halfway house.

"We might have to ask court guidance," conceded a senior state law enforcement official when asked about remedies available to authorities should Trantino not abide by the rules. "We're not sure what we would do."

But Trantino's lawyer, Roger Lowenstein, says he is confident that his client will do well in a halfway house, citing the inmate's infraction-free record through his last three decades in prison.

Supreme Court officials cited that record in ordering Trantino's release, saying state officials had buckled to public pressure to keep him behind bars, even though they could not show a substantial likelihood that he would commit a crime. Formerly on death row, Trantino had concluded the punishment phase of his prison term in 1979.

The state Parole Board had denied Trantino parole nine times, each time after angry protests by relatives of the two police officers, law-enforcement officials, and politicians.

Trantino's original death sentence was set aside when the state's former capital-punishment law was overturned by the courts in 1972. Trantino's sentence was further reduced under a state law that allowed prisoners with life terms to be released in as few as 15 years.

During his 37 years behind bars, Trantino has had several community furloughs. He was also allowed to leave prison for a brief time in 1998 when he was sent to a North Jersey center that serves as an evaluation point for halfway-house candidates who need further assessment.

That center, Talbot Hall, is similar to a halfway house and offers various self-help and therapy groups. But the center is a locked institution. Trantino's stay there was brief, and he was moved back to prison after protests by Governor Whitman that he never should have been let out.

Law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said one problem might be finding a halfway house that would be willing to take Trantino.Given the high publicity about his case, some houses might be reluctant, they said.

Halfway houses, which are paid about $57 a day for each state prisoner they accept, are privately run and have limited rights to deny admission to certain prisoners.

Trantino's adjustment to life in a halfway house might not be a complete shock. An acknowledged drug abuser, he has been participating in a drug-treatment program called Nu Way at South Woods State Prison. There inmates attend self-help and therapy groups that are similar to halfway house programs.

The 33-year-old inmate at the PORT Program, who had also been at South Woods, said Trantino is the volunteer president of Nu Way's reentry program at the South Jersey prison.

The inmate said Trantino helped lead groups that teach prisoners how to deal with the stresses of life outside the wall.

"He tells people to take it one day at a time," the inmate said. "He's very positive. He's always encouraging people."

Might want to check the facts about rehab in prisons and when they started. AA was in the prisons as early as 1943. Furthermore, why couldn't he had gone to AA/NA mtgs in prison and when they actually got around to implementing a formal rehab program attended then?

There's a difference between drug "rehab" programs as we know them, and AA. The term "rehab" didn't even enter the lexicon until the 70s or so, way after this guy was imprisoned. And anyway, it stretches credulity to believe that this guy wasn't doing drugs while in prison.

The guy should still be locked up as far as I am concerned, but don't knock people stopping using dope. There are the ones who do anything to look good for parole, privilleges etc, but I do know some who actually stop and stay quit because it is a problem rather than because it makes them look good. I do volunteer work in the local prisons dealing with substance abuse and job skills and the subject tends to grab my attention.

That's good that you're doing that volunteer work, thanks for your service. The point that I've been making from the beginning was that, contrary to what his apologists say, this guy was NOT "infraction free" in prison. He was/is in drug rehab, which means, given the time that he was in prison, that he was doing drugs then. It's one thing for defenders of this cop killer to say that this guy turned his life around during his incarceration. But it's dishonest for them to say that his time was "infraction free," unless you consider that consuming illegal drugs is neither a crime, nor a violation of prison rules.

Trantino lecturing ex-convicts

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Photo by: BETH BALBIERZ

Thomas Trantino in a photo shortly after his release in February 2002.

CAMDEN -When Thomas Trantino gives lectures to groups of former convicts about adjusting to life on the outside, they tend to sit up and listen.

After all, Trantino knows of what he speaks.

Imprisoned for 38 years in the shooting deaths of two police officers, Trantino was released on parole last year. Like many paroled felons, he found a society unwilling to have anything to do with him, much less give him a chance at a fresh start.

The 65-year-old Trantino, who murdered two Lodi police officers in 1963, decided to use his experiences in a constructive way. With help and funding from the Haddonfield Quakers, Trantino now runs a program that provides support and counseling to former prisoners and other at-risk individuals.

"Beyond Prison Walls: Friends Transition Support Services" operates out of a renovated brownstone on Cooper Street in Camden. The program is augmented by attorneys, family therapists, teachers, psychologists, and criminologists who volunteer their time.

Among Trantino's duties are giving one or two talks a week.

"I've done almost everything, including change," he told the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill. "A lot of them say, 'If this guy can do it, so can I.' I'm the worst of the worst."

Trantino was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but that sentence was commuted in 1972.

He was denied parole nine times before the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered him moved to a halfway house last year.

The challenges of re-entering society are many, according to experts. Housing, work, family dynamics, addictions, and the difficulty of reconnecting to the world can be overwhelming.

According to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, almost two-thirds of inmates released from state prisons are rearrested within three years of their release.

"We tend to look at ex-offenders as only a negative influence on our communities," said Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the institute and a former New York City deputy police commissioner. "In fact, some of them can be a very positive force to support others like them as they struggle to readjust after prison."

Trantino sees his program as a crucial part of that equation.

"You want people to know that they have the power to change," he said. "We're just helping them to do what they know they can do."

40 years after killing, Tedescos sue Trantino
Friday, September 5, 2003

By AMY KLEIN STAFF WRITER

HACKENSACK - Forty years after Thomas Trantino and another man gunned down two police officers in a Lodi bar, the family of rookie cop Gary Tedesco is seeking justice.

Not the kind that comes from a criminal trial. The Tedescos already got that and - in their eyes - lost it when trantino was paroled from prison last year.

Now they want money.

In a wrongful death suit filed Thursday in Superior Court, Tedesco's mother and sister said Trantino owes them for the support, guidance, comfort, and advice they lost when the young officer was killed in 1963.

"He cared a lot for me. He wanted to do so much for me," said 88-year-old Sadie Tedesco, who still clutches the photo of her son taken three months before his death. "I haven't lived life since and I don't care."

Gary Tedesco was a 22-year-old probationary patrolman in August 1963 when he and Sgt. Peter Voto responded to a disturbance call at the now-defunct Angel Lounge on Route 46. The two were killed execution-style by Tedesco and his partner Frank Falco in what became one of New Jersey's most notorious homicide cases.

Falco was killed two days later when police tried to arrest him in New York City. Trantino surrendered and was sentenced to death by a Bergen County jury the following year. The sentence was commuted to life in prison after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972.

Trantino, now 65, was denied parole nine times before he was released in February 2002.

Attorney Mike Lubin, who is representing Sadie Tedesco and her daughter, Elaine Harvey, said family members pursued a lawsuit after the state in 2000 lifted the two-year statute of limitations families had to file wrongful death lawsuits in cases of murder or manslaughter.

"Although some may say he paid his debt to society, he has not paid his debt to the Tedesco family," Lubin said.

Harvey said her parents were too grief-stricken during the two years following Tedesco's death to file suit.

The suit doesn't specify a dollar amount. Lubin said he didn't know what financial assets, if any, Trantino has.

Harvey, who has been crusading against her brother's killer since she was 20, said Trantino may have money from a book he wrote while he was in prison, or could be on the verge of a potential windfall if a rumored movie about his life is made.

"I'm glad we finally had it done," Harvey said, after the suit was filed. "We are still heartbroken over the release of this killer."

A similar suit was filed last year by Voto's son, Jerry, who said his intention is to prevent Trantino from cashing in on his notoriety.

Trantino, who lived in a homeless shelter for a month after his release, has an apartment and a job, said his lawyer, Jeffrey Fogel.

"There's a long way before this case is over," Fogel said Thursday. "I feel bad for the family, and I feel bad that they can't put this behind them and that they're whole lives are devoted to this. I don't know what good it does."

E-mail: kleina@northjersey.com
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A close look at Trantino case 40 years later
Monday, September 15, 2003

By JANON FISHER HERALD NEWS

Thomas Trantino should have died in the electric chair 40 years ago. If he had been put to death, his crime would have been forgotten. The families of the Lodi police officers that he killed might have felt some closure. It would have been a tidy and, some would say just, solution.

But he didn't die and he's still alive here in New Jersey. That's where things got messy.

David Stout's gritty and complex book, "Night of the Devil: The Untold Story of Thomas Trantino and the Angel Lounge Killings," explodes the myths of the case and then draws out a balanced, but never dispassionate, tale about a 1963 double homicide that is still making headlines four decades later.

In the first, and most readable, part of the book, Stout goes back over court transcripts and newspaper articles to understand the facts of the case. He interviews family members and participants to draw out the real story.

The myth behind the murder, which Stout traces back to the aging newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, is that the two cops were forced to strip naked and perform sexual acts on each other, after which they were pistol whipped and shot dead.

The origin of the story may have come from Winchell, but Stout lays the perpetuation of the myth on The Record.

"I know how it happens," said Stout in a telephone interview. Stout is a New York Times reporter who worked for The Record in the early 1980s. "You get out the clips like a good reporter and do your research," he said. That's how the misconceptions of the past get perpetuated, he said.

True, the officers had been commanded to strip, Officer Gary Tedesco down to his underwear, officer in training Peter Voto was found in his undershirt and pants. But Stout points to the fact that the Bergen County Prosecutor at the time, Guy Calissi, never mentioned sex acts.

"Unless we assume that Guy Calissi held back some of the most horrifying elements of the case even while seeking a murder conviction and the death penalty, we can only conclude that there was no sexual harassment," writes Stout. None of the witnesses who took the stand mentioned it in their testimony.

Trantino's partner, Frank Falco, the who had one murder to his name already, was an enforcer for a mob loan shark. He had a history of forcing guys to strip when they couldn't come up with the money.

Stout also refutes the theory of Trantino as the trigger man of both murders.

After the shootings at the Angel Lounge, Trantino and Falco fled to New York City. Trantino ran to his parents' house in Brooklyn, but Falco hid out in a Manhattan hotel under an assumed name.

When police found out where he was hiding, he never made it out of the room alive, so Trantino got pinned with both murders.

Based on the number of guns at the bar (four) and the number of guns found (three) Stout surmises that Falco shot Tedesco and Trantino killed Voto.

According to the book, there was little nuance in the prosecutor's argument, and the defense attorney was preoccupied trying to keep his client off death row - unsuccessfully.

Trantino was found guilty with no leniency and sentenced to die. But fate intervened.

A series of appeals delayed Trantino's appointment with the electric chair long enough for the U.S. Supreme Court to step in. In 1972, the court found the death penalty unconstitutional and commuted all death row prisoners to life in prison.

Stout makes no bones about whose side he's on in this story. His sympathies are quite clearly with the families of the slain officers. Violence entered his own life when his aunt was killed by an ex-boyfriend.

"It would have been better if (Trantino) had gone to the electric chair," said Stout.

Still, in the second and third parts of the book he is able to take a step back and see the dilemma that was created by the high court's decision.

Without a death sentence, Trantino became eligible for parole in 1979. Had the prosecutor gotten a separate conviction for each murder, Trantino would not have seen parole for another 15 years. After all these years, the families of the victims and the law enforcement community were not ready to see this convicted murderer back on the street.

Here begins a 20-year struggle between the concept of rehabilitation and proper punishment. New Jersey law allows an inmate with a history of good conduct the eligibility of parole when a portion of his time is served.

Twenty years of parole board hearings and court appeals are hardly the staples of true crime books, but Stout is able to maintain a lot of the momentum established in the first part of the book.

He's also careful to keep the human element in the story.

He spends several chapters on the effect the murders had on the families and the police, who were traumatized by the killings, and shows the evolution of Thomas Trantino from a drug-addicted, violent criminal to a remorseless, self-absorbed inmate.

True, Trantino was a model prisoner; he counseled prisoners and was trusted by staff. But he never apologized or even admitted to his crime until recently.

In the early 1980s, the parole board voted to grant Trantino release, but the strong opposition and outrage from the law enforcement community pressured state officials not to grant parole. Politicians bent on election used the case to bolster their get-tough-on-crime images. It wasn't until 1997 that an appellate court judge's dissent created an opportunity for the inmate.

"I do not believe that defendant can be kept incarcerated indefinitely only because people outside the correctional system insist that he remain there," the judge wrote. "After all, the entire parole process is predicated on the belief in the potential for rehabilitation and redeemability of all people. Even Thomas Trantino."

Despite still strong protests and the emotional anguish of the victims' families, Trantino was eventually released.

The rule of law triumphed over politics - but is it justice?

Stout never answers that question.

"I don't know what the right answer is. He went in as a young man and came out a middle-age man, approaching old age," said Stout. "Was he punished enough? That question is impossible to answer."

Reach Janon Fisher |at (973) 569-7163 or fisher@northjersey.com

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