 John Chinnici (Photo: ACLU Foundation of Vermont)
At the time, there had been a series of armed robberies in Bennington, rattling the small town. Police Chief Paul Doucette would later say, “People are cranked, and we’re trying to put our community at ease.”
In his first statement to police, Falace said the robber with the silver gun looked like a “Mexican” and “may have been Italian or Puerto Rican and spoke with a New York accent.” He described this man as about 5’10” and 185-190 pounds. He also said he believed this person might have just gotten out of jail or been on furlough. He said the second robber, who didn’t show a weapon, was about 6’ and 150 pounds.
Galusha described the robber with the gun as about 5’8” and 170-180 pounds. Detective Lawrence Cole asked him, “Sound like he was from around here?” Galusha answered, “No, not really.” Galusha said the second robber was about the same height, but thinner.
Several hours later, at 4 a.m., the police interviewed Falace a second time. He said he recognized the voice of the robber with a gun, maybe from a store customer or someone he had talked with at the Vermont Department of Corrections’s Probation and Parole Office in Bennington. “I never knew any of their names,” he said. “I just did a mental picture.” He again said the robber had a New York or Brooklyn accent.
At some point during the interview, Falace viewed Facebook photos of 30-year-old John Chinnici, a Bennington resident who had been released from federal prison in July 2015 after serving seven years on a weapons charge. The federal government’s probation office had notified the Bennington Police about Chinnici’s release and said that he was affiliated with a street gang.
Falace said he recognized Chinnici as an occasional customer at the convenience store, but he did not identify him as one of the robbers. Chinnici’s Facebook photo showed a small star tattoo near his eye, and Falace then told the police that the person he might have seen at the store had a similar feature.
On January 12, 2016, the police received information about Anthony Mayhew and his girlfriend, Vanessa Garcia, connecting them to a 2015 robbery at a Subway restaurant. Garcia and John Chinnici were cousins, and Mayhew’s sister dated Galusha. Garcia had been a suspect in a November 2015 burglary at Martin’s, after $200 in change was stolen.
Mayhew had also reported to the Bennington Police that he had been assaulted a week earlier after a drug deal went bad.
Mayhew and Garcia lived in an apartment next door to the Hemmings Motor News store and coffee shop, which had surveillance cameras both inside and out.
Cole reviewed the footage. He would later say on a search-warrant application for Mayhew’s apartment, related to the assault and not the robbery, that the footage captured a “significant amount of activity” in Mayhew’s parking lot. Footage from inside Hemmings showed Chinnici and Mayhew meeting at around 9 a.m. the morning after the robbery.
The police executed the search warrant on the morning of January 14 but did not find anything related to the robbery. They brought Garcia and Mayhew in for questioning and seized their cellphones. Garcia invoked her Miranda rights, but the police continued to question her about footage showing her car leaving and returning around the time of the robbery.
Mayhew denied any involvement in the robbery. Cole asked him about Chinnici, and Mayhew said that he, Garcia, and Chinnici had gone to the town of West Dover to get pizza on January 10.
Later during the interview, Mayhew said he was done talking, but the police continued to ask him questions about the robbery and about Garcia’s relationship with her cousin.
The police then interviewed Chinnici. He said the police had recently hassled him over wearing a hood. Cole told him it had nothing to do with the hood, that he was in their “radar sights.”
At first, Chinnici denied being with Garcia and Mayhew. Later, he admitted getting pizza with them but said he had spent the night at the home of Robert Farkas in West Dover and taken the early bus in the morning from Wilmington to Bennington.
During the interview, the police described the suspects. At the time, Chinnici was 5’9” tall and weighed about 240 pounds. Although he was born in New York, he had moved to Vermont when he was 2 years old and did not have a New York accent. He said, “I believe I’m pretty identifiable and it definitely wasn’t me.”
The police returned to the station and re-interviewed Mayhew, who had by then spoken informally with Chief Doucette. That interview was unrecorded, but Doucette said Mayhew named Chinnici as his accomplice. During the formal interview, Mayhew admitted to taking part in the robbery but would not name his accomplice. “All I said was I was there, I wasn’t the one with the gun, that’s all,” Mayhew said.
Mayhew was arrested on robbery charges and quickly arraigned. While at the state courthouse in Bennington, he ran into members of the Chinnici family, who were attending a family-court hearing for John’s brother, Michael. An officer said the encounter “freaked” Mayhew out, and the police arrested John Chinnici on January 14. Later that day, Mayhew gave a statement naming Chinnici as his accomplice.
As part of the investigation, police received a search warrant and seized Chinnici’s cellphone, extracting locational information and other data. In the application, Cole said that he had “limited information about the [gunman’s] height and weight.”
Although initially charged in Bennington County Superior Court, Chinnici was indicted on July 10, 2017, on a federal robbery charge in U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont in 2017. The state charges were dismissed.
Chinnici’s trial began on July 24, 2018. Prior to trial, Judge Christina Reiss held a hearing to discuss two potential conflicts of interest. Chinnici’s attorney, Ernest Allen, had previously represented Galusha on a federal bank robbery charge in 1993. In addition, a federal public defender who had represented Chinnici in his gun case was now representing Amy Stone, a potential government witness who planned to testify that she sold a gun to a man named “John,” who was “Vanessa’s cousin,” in early 2016.
Chinnici waived the conflict regarding his attorney, and Judge Reiss ruled there was no conflict regarding the public defender.
At trial, neither Galusha nor Falace identified Chinnici as one of the robbers. Galusha acknowledged during cross-examination that he was dating Mayhew’s sister. He also testified that he hadn’t spoken with Mayhew the morning after the robbery.
Falace testified that the Bennington police used Facebook to pull up photos of Chinnici prior to Falace mentioning his name.
Mayhew testified under an immunity grant that he, Garcia, and Chinnici had dinner in West Dover and returned to Bennington.
Mayhew said that Chinnici told him he would forgive Mayhew’s $450 drug debt if Mayhew helped him with a robbery. He said they changed into dark clothes, left the apartment, and walked down Main Street in search of a business to rob. Mayhew said they entered Martin’s, but then left and decided to rob the employees when they made the night deposit.
During cross-examination, Mayhew was asked how Chinnici—who had about 100 pounds on Mayhew—was able to find dark clothes that fit him at Mayhew’s apartment. Mayhew first said Chinnici must have borrowed some of his clothes, then said he couldn’t remember.
Cole testified about the investigation. He said that the police reviewed video footage from the bus that Chinnici claimed to have taken from Wilmington to Bennington and could not find evidence that Chinnici was on board. Cole also said that Chinnici suggested in an interview that Galusha might have committed the crime with Mayhew.
Frank Thornton, an expert in digital forensics, testified about the information extracted from Chinnici’s cellphone. He said that data showed Chinnici’s cellphone traveled from Bennington to West Dover on the night of January 10 and returned to Bennington that evening. This undermined Chinnici’s account that he spent the night in West Dover.
Trisha Farkas, Robert Farkas’s wife, testified that Chinnici spent the night on January 7, but not January 10.
During the search of Chinnici’s cellphone, the police also found several text messages between Chinnici and his then-girlfriend, Stephanie Dockery. He texted her at 9:20 p.m. on January 10 and told her he was returning to Bennington. He texted her at 11:58, saying he was meeting a friend at midnight, then at 12:44 a.m. that he was “back safe and sound.” Later, Chinnici told Dockery he was going to send her some money, and he sent her $960 in two installments on January 11 and January 13.
Significantly, at the time of the trial, the police could not find the cellphones of Chinnici, Garcia, or Mayhew.
During closing arguments, Allen intimated that the robbery was an inside job, “an armed robbery that had some planning to it, knew where the night deposit was, knew what time they closed up, knew where they’d be going, off a little inside information.”
The jury convicted Chinnici on July 27, 2018. Prior to sentencing, Allen moved to withdraw as counsel, because Chinnici planned to pursue a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. Judge Reiss granted the motion, and David Williams was appointed to represent Chinnici.
On December 21, 2018, Williams filed a motion for a new trial that said Allen had provided ineffective assistance. The motion said that Allen had failed to:
- Object or move to exclude the cellphone evidence after the state couldn’t produce the items.
- Request a mistrial after Falace testified about how the police showed him Facebook photos of Chinnici.
- Introduce evidence contradicting Mayhew’s account of the crime. Video footage from the parking lot showed Garcia’s car leaving and returning but did now show Mayhew and Chinnici traveling on foot.
- Highlight the discrepancies between the witness descriptions and Chinnici’s size and accent.
- Develop evidence suggesting that Chinnici’s uncle, Frank Chinnici, was a viable suspect.
The motion noted that Frank Chinnici, who was less than two years older than his nephew, more closely fit the witness descriptions. He was darker-skinned and smaller than John Chinnici, spoke with a New York accent, and had posted a picture of a silver gun on his Facebook page two months before the robbery.
In January 2019, the Bennington Police Department located Garcia’s and Mayhew’s cellphones and provided the court with a lengthy explanation of how they had gone missing. (Chinnici’s phone was never found.)
Chinnici filed a supplementary motion for a new trial on June 19, 2019. The filing said that Mayhew’s phone records showed he received several calls from a number associated with Galusha on the morning of January 11, 2016. Galusha had testified that he didn’t speak with Mayhew.
“The AT&T call records would have also provided the missing link confirming the widespread suspicion that the robbery was an inside job and completely undermined Mayhew’s claim that the robbery was John Chinnici’s idea,” the motion said.
Both motions also claimed that the police had targeted Chinnici and tainted the investigation by showing his Facebook photo to Falace. After the trial, Cole said at a hearing that Falace must have found Chinnici’s photo on his own. The motions said that assertion didn’t hold water because Falace didn’t know Chinnici’s name, limiting his ability to execute a proper search on the site.
In response to a court-ordered discovery request, the government would later say that Cole acknowledged downloading and printing Chinnici’s Facebook photo, writing the word “John” on the printout.
The motions said that Falace did not mention any tattoo in his initial description of the gunman. It was only after he saw Chinnici’s photo that he mentioned a star tattoo on the person he saw at the probation office.
Judge Reiss held an evidentiary hearing on October 15, 2019.
At the hearing, Mayhew testified that he had committed the November 2015 burglary at Martin’s. But he said he had not used inside information but had watched the employees. (The owner of the store testified that a burglar would have needed inside information and that he didn’t trust Galusha.)
Mayhew also testified that the calls he received on the morning of January 11 were from his father, who lived in the same building as Galusha. In addition, Mayhew testified that he and Chinnici skirted the Hemmings video cameras when they left the apartment in order to avoid detection.
Cynthia Chinnici, John Chinnici’s mother, testified that she had told Allen about Frank Chinnici prior to the trial and that she had also provided him with the name of a woman whom her son was messaging at the time of the robbery. The woman testified about those messages but said they had been deleted from her phone.
John Chinnici testified that he would not have waived the conflict of interest if he had understood how Allen intended to cross-examine Galusha. He said it was his belief that Galusha was involved. He testified that when he and Mayhew met for coffee on January 11, he overheard Mayhew tell Galusha that he was holding onto Galusha’s share of the money from “something” the two men had done together.
On December 19, 2019, Judge Reiss vacated Chinnici’s conviction. Her ruling rejected all of Chinnici’s claims of ineffective representation, except for Allen’s failure to resolve the conflict of interest.
“At the …. hearing, Attorney Allen discounted an ‘inside job’ defense theory but ultimately pursued one, at least in part, in his closing argument,” Judge Reiss wrote. “To support this theory at trial, he had an obligation to vigorously expose Mr. Galusha as a participant in the alleged crime, including seeking to introduce evidence of Mr. Galusha’s alleged participation in the November 2015 Martin’s burglary as proof of the same modus operandi that was used in the January 2016 Martin's robbery. This vigorous defense would have required Attorney Allen to expose Mr. Galusha’s bias and motive to testify falsely.”
Although Chinnici had waived the conflict, Judge Reiss said the waiver was not made knowingly or intelligently. She said Chinnici didn’t understand that Galusha was an adverse witness, and that she had granted the waiver based on Allen’s representation that he did not plan to pursue an “inside job” defense.
After the ruling, Chinnici, who had never been sentenced, remained in custody.
On January 17, 2020, Chinnici pled guilty in U.S. District Court to an unrelated drug charge. The robbery charge was dismissed, and he was released from prison on time served.
In 2023, Chinnici, represented by attorneys with the ACLU Foundation of Vermont, filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the Town of Bennington, Cole, Doucette, and another officer, seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction.
– Ken Otterbourg
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