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If he were executed like he was supposed to have been, we wouldn't have this problem today. How could somebody on death row be paroled? Only in liberal NJ. This guy actually had conjugal visits with his girlfriend.

http://lawlibrary.rutgers.edu/courts/appellate/a6486-98.opn.html

http://www.nationalcops.org/parolehearings.htm

http://www.greatlinks.com/jersey/ledger/d54991.html

So what are they up to now? Parole by seniority?

Who is responsible for the impending release of Cop Killer Thomas Trentino?? The N.J. Supreme Court?

It's an absolute outrage that he hasn't been executed years ago!

Try teling that to the bleeding hearts , here, who are againts capital punishment.

Try telling that to the bleeding hearts , here, who are against capital punishment.

Amadou Diallo, 22, seen in this undated photo, was gunned down by four New York policemen in front of his home on Feb. 4, 1999. (AP File) Overview In February 1999, four New York City policemen searching for a rape suspect knocked on Amadou Diallo's door to question him. When he came to the door he reached inside his jacket, at which point the officers shot at him 41 times, hitting him with 19 bullets. The object Diallo was reaching for turned out to be his wallet. Story

Here is why Trantino was convicted.

Thomas Trantino

In 1963 Thomas Trantino brutally tortured and slaughtered Lodi Police Officers Peter Voto and Gary Tedesco. One of the officers was 20 years old and was on the job only one day. This case appears before the Supreme Court on September 25, 2000. You can write a letter to the parole board letting them know your feelings of the release of a cop killer. Send letters to:

Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz
c/o Justice Stephen Townsend, Superior Court Clerk
Hughes Justice Complex
25 West Market Street
P.O. Box 970
Trenton, NJ 08625-0970

BTTT!

Lodi Police Dept. Memorial to Sgt. Peter Voto and P.O. Gary Tedesco

I woke up this morning and saw in the paper and heard on the news that one of our officers was stabbed at a domestic last night and his partner shot and killed the stabber.

I don't know the condition of the officer, or who he is yet (we all know each other since we're only a 110 man dept.) but we won't have to worry about parole.

NJ Cop Killer is Now a Free Man

Longest serving N.J. inmate, convicted of killing two officers, released from halfway house

The Associated Press

2/11/02 3:51 PM

CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) -- A man convicted of killing two police officers in 1963 has been released from a halfway house and is on parole after more than 38 years in custody.

Thomas Trantino, who turned 64 Monday, had been the state's longest serving inmate, having spent most of his adult life in prison.

Trantino was rejected for parole nine times. But a year ago, the state Supreme Court said the parole board lacked proof that he posed a threat to society and sent him to a halfway house for a year.

The Department of Corrections confirmed Monday that he had been released late Sunday or early Monday. "A couple of hours one way or the other don't matter," said Jerry Voto Sr., the son of Peter Voto, one of the Trantino's victims. "The point is, he's out." Trantino's lawyer, Roger A. Lowenstein, said Trantino had a job lined up and would most likely move to another halfway house in Camden.

"It's really a non-event," Lowenstein said of the release. "He's probably going to move from one halfway house to another."

Trantino was sentenced to death for fatally shooting the officers in Lodi, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the state's death penalty law was deemed unconstitutional.

The two officers -- Voto, 40, and Gary Tedesco, 22 -- were shot to death after they responded to a disturbance call at a bar where the men had been drinking. Voto was beaten and shot in the head. Tedesco, who had been forced to strip to his underwear, was shot in the stomach.

Trantino surrendered the same night; his accomplice was shot to death two days later by police trying to arrest him.

They should have executed this slime instead of sending him up. Now he gets a second chance at life. The officers didn't. My deceased husband was a police officer and I've attended too many funerals for officers slain in the line of duty. When I see this piece of work walk, knowing two LEO's died, it makes me sick. There is a brotherhood of LEO's that reaches around the world. There are no borders. When you kill an officer, a piece of every cop dies with him. They will be watching this one. If he makes a mistake, they will nail him.

If he were executed like he was supposed to have been, we wouldn't have this problem today. How could somebody on death row be paroled? Only in liberal NJ. This guy actually had conjugal visits with his girlfriend.

Once again, I am disgusted with my state's judicial system. Can;t beleive I am actually rasing children here. I am not familiar with the political make up of our Supreme Court, anyone? Where is Judge Napolietano when you need him?

Who cares? Murder Schmurder. The important thing is that we lock up old guys with weak bladders on an airplane for 20 years. Late video renters and teenagers who subscribe to guns&ammo are also arrest priorities.

Don't you realize that there are real criminals afoot?

Once again America embraces evil in its midst after a temporary parting.

ping

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/852419/posts?page=1#1

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
http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyJmZnYmVsN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2NDIyMjcz

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

Woman Recants Trantino Beating Story
Nov 7, 2003 6:11 pm US/Eastern

(1010 WINS) (CAMDEN, N.J.) To his neighbors, he's Mr. Tom, the man who bought kids fruit or candy at the nearby store and helped people pay for home repairs.

To authorities, he's Thomas Trantino, the man who would have been put to death for killing two police Lodi officers 40 years ago were it not for the state's temporary suspension of the death penalty.

Now, he's behind bars again after being accused of beating the woman police describe as his live-in girlfriend in a series of attacks over the last two weeks.

In a twist Friday afternoon, though, the alleged victim told reporters the attacks did not happen and that she was forced by authorities to say they did.

"None of it happened," according to Carmen Gonzalez, who said she was recently released after spending six years in prison. "Tommy is one of the most gentlest human beings I've ever known."

Spokesmen for the state parole board and the Camden County Prosecutor's office said Gonzalez had not told them she was changing her story as of Friday afternoon and say the recanting in the media does not change their positions.

If Trantino is convicted of even one of the charges he faces, it is likely he will spend the rest of his life in prison for violating the terms of his parole.

Trantino, 65, was charged Thursday with criminal restraint and five counts of aggravated assault following his arrest at the Camden building where he ran Friends Transition Support Services. The nonprofit organization was started a year and a half ago by the Haddonfield Friends Meeting to help paroled prisoners return to society.

Authorities said the 33-year-old victim was someone he had been counseling.

Neighbors of the couple in the Fairview section of Camden say the woman was a drug addict who took Trantino out of the peaceful life he'd been living.

Police were called Thursday afternoon to Trantino's office on the second floor of a row house across from the federal courthouse when the people working in the law office below heard a commotion and rushed up the stairs to see Trantino with the woman in a headlock, Camden County Prosecutor Vincent P. Sarubbi said Friday.

She told police she had been trying to leave the building and Trantino was holding her back. Trantino told police he had been trying to restrain her from going to the roof, where she intended to commit suicide.

Police and emergency medical workers realized she had been abused, Sarubbi said, and Trantino was taken into custody. The woman later told police she had been hit, kicked and choked by Trantino on at least five occasions between Oct. 27 and Thursday.

It was not until police had Trantino in custody that they realized who he was, said Camden City Deputy Police Chief Joe Wysocki.

Trantino -- the longest serving inmate in New Jersey history -- was freed last year after serving 38 years for killing two Lodi police officers in August 1963. The officers were shot execution-style by Trantino and Frank Falco, who was killed two days later when police tried to arrest him in New York City.

Trantino later surrendered and was sentenced to death, but that was changed to life in prison in 1972 when New Jersey abolished the death penalty. In New Jersey, inmates serving life sentences are eligible for parole after serving 30 years.

He was denied parole nine times before the state Supreme Court ordered that he be moved to a halfway house in 2001, saying the parole board lacked proof that Trantino would be a threat to society.

Trantino is being held without bail, and Sarubbi said he is applying to have him remain in custody without bail until the new charges against him are resolved.

A hearing before a parole board employee is expected within the next two weeks to determine whether Trantino can be held without bail on a parole violation until the other charges are resolved in court.

He is also scheduled to appear in family court next Thursday for a hearing in which a judge will decide whether to make permanent a temporary restraining order keeping him away from Gonzalez.

"I think that much was made when he was released from prison that he was a model prisoner, that he had reversed his life and that he would be the vehicle and savior for other prisoners across the country," Sarubbi said. The new charges undermine the idea that people who commit a crime as heinous as Trantino's can be rehabilitated, he said.

Neighbors of Trantino's at his office and home, though, say the man they knew was rehabilitated, and they suspect that the alleged victim may not have been telling the truth.

The man who lives above Trantino and the woman who owns the building where he works have said they wanted to pull the ex-con aside and tell him the woman he was involved with was bad for him.

"I can't imagine that someone would spend that much time and work so hard ... and then throw it away," said building owner Liz Ashley.

"This man here is a very nice man," said neighbor Barbara Garrett. "He does things for the community and I'm always going to back him up."

Garrett said she was so upset Friday morning when she heard about Trantino's arrest that she confronted Gonzalez. "She said, 'You don't know what goes on behind closed doors,"' Garrett said.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-nj--trantino-arrest1107nov07,0,4442913.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
http://1010wins.com/topstories/winstopstories_story_311130311.html