 Antonio Mallet (Photo: BuzzFeed News)
He died several hours later at Jacobi Medical Center. A detective with the New York Police Department spoke with the emergency-room doctor, who said he had observed two bullet holes in Ledeatte’s head.
A man named Michael Walker had called 911 from a nearby payphone to report the shooting, and he remained at the scene as officers arrived. The police took Walker in for questioning just before 3 a.m. He would remain in police custody for nearly 20 hours.
In his first two statements, made at 3 a.m. and 5:35 a.m. to detectives in the Bronx Homicide Task Force, Walker said he had spent time with Ledeatte on September 23 and had arranged to meet him at the supermarket around 10:30 p.m. Walker said Ledeatte didn’t show up, and when Walker returned later, he found Ledeatte shot in the head.
Later that morning, the task force detectives handed over the case to officers in the 49th Precinct, and detectives Joseph Nieves, Donald Gannon and Kevin Tracy took over the investigation, with Nieves taking the lead role. Walker then gave a statement—which lacked a timestamp—that largely tracked his first two statements but added detail about his and Ledeatte’s activities prior to the shooting.
At 8:30 p.m., Walker signed two statements, signed also by Nieves and Gannon. In the first statement, which included a waiver of his Miranda rights, Walker said that he had worked with Ledeatte at least five times when Ledeatte was delivering a stolen car. Walker said his job was to “back up” Ledeatte by driving right behind him to prevent a police officer from identifying the stolen vehicle.
In the second statement, Walker said that he and Ledeatte had gone to a used-car seller named Alpine Motor on September 19, and Ledeatte met with a man he called “Cee-Lo.” Walker wrote: “Mike came back over … and told me that [Cee-Lo] needed a [Lexus] GS 300 which he was going to get for him that night.” Walker said Ledeatte told him the next day that he had gotten the car.
A few days later, on September 23, according to Walker, Ledeatte said Cee-Lo’s friend might take the car and that Ledeatte wanted Walker to help him make the delivery. Walker said that Ledeatte told him that Cee-Lo used the stolen cars to help repair and resell cars he bought from a crash lot.
In his final statement, made at 10:30 p.m., Walker said that Cee-Lo hired Ledeatte to steal a Lexus and made plans to take delivery behind the supermarket. He said they arrived in the loading area in their separate cars. Walker, who was about 150 feet behind Ledeatte’s vehicle, said he noticed a white car at the corner of the store. He said Cee-Lo got out of the car and approached the Lexus on the passenger side. Another man got out of the white car and also walked to the passenger side. Cee-Lo then walked around to the driver’s side.
Walker said Cee-Lo “bent inside the car to see what Mike had been doing,” and then “slowly … took a gun out and shot Mike twice in the head.” Walker said he could see what was happening because the dome light of the Lexus was on. He said Cee-Lo and the other man ran to their car and drove off.
The detectives went to Alpine Motor the next day and learned that Cee-Lo was the nickname for 26-year-old Antonio Mallet. By then, Mallet was in Virginia, but he learned that the police were looking for him and came back and turned himself in on September 26. Walker later identified Mallet from a photo array and in a lineup.
Mallet gave a statement to the police. He said that on the night of September 23, he and his girlfriend hung out at her sister’s house and then came home and went to sleep. He said he slept in, then went to Alpine Motor and another auto dealer, then to Queens and Manhattan, and finally picked up his girlfriend for dinner.
Walker identified Mallet from a photo array and later from a lineup. Mallet was charged with second-degree murder.
There was no physical or forensic evidence connecting him with the crime. Police recovered a deformed bullet from the Lexus, which may have fallen out of Ledeatte as EMT workers removed him from the car. Police technicians pulled fingerprints from the Lexus, but they were determined to be of “no value.” They also found a beeper next to Ledeatte.
After giving his statement, Walker moved to Connecticut and could not be located. As a result, Mallet’s trial was delayed for more than two years and began in March 1999. By then, Gannon and Nieves had both left the department, leaving Tracy as the only detective to testify about Walker’s statements against Mallet.
At a hearing to suppress Walker’s statement on March 8, 1999, Tracy testified that Walker’s interview process took so long, in part, because he believed that Walker “knew more than what he was telling us and he was withholding information.”
Asked about contradictions in Walker’s statements, Tracy said: I spent some amount of time with Mr. Walker conducting an interview with him in order to get to the truth of the matter here … originally yes, he made statements to me and then again it just took a matter of time speaking with him to gain his trust and gain his confidence and at that point in time he made the [10:30 p.m.] statement to me.”
Justice Lawrence Tonetti of Bronx County Supreme Court denied the motion to suppress. The trial began on March 11.
Walker testified about Ledeatte arranging the car sale and Walker’s role in assisting him. Walker said it took “no time” to recognize Mallet at the meetup, because he’d “seen him before.”
Walker described the second man as “slim” and “dark,” about 5’9” and wearing a black leather jacket and black pants. He said he never gave the police a description of this person because “they never asked.”
Walker testified that Mallet shot Ledeatte only one time. This was consistent with an earlier statement but not his final statement, where he said Mallet had shot Ledeatte twice. He said he had changed his statement because a detective told him that Ledeatte was shot twice. (Although the emergency room doctor had written in his report that Ledeatte had two bullet holes, a medical examiner testified at trial that he had only received one shot, but the bullet left both entrance and exit wounds.)
There were other inconsistencies in Walker’s testimony. He testified at trial that he didn’t see a gun but testified before the grand jury that he saw Mallet put a gun to Ledeatte’s head.
Crime Scene Unit Detective John McAndrews testified about his diagram and photos of the crime scene. McAndrews said it was “light enough to see,” but also said that there were no lights above the Lexus, which was parked in the loading dock area. McAndrews also said that he used a flash to take his photographs.
Tracy testified that he interviewed Walker off and on for about two hours between 1 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. He said it took that long to “get to the fact[s] and to get to the truth.” Tracy also testified that he did not tell Walker that Ledeatte had been shot twice and that he did not hear any other detective telling Walker that. In addition, Tracy said that although he knew Nieves and Gannon had interviewed Walker, he did not know the substance of those interviews.
Mallet did not testify or present any witnesses. His attorney said in his closing argument that the case against Mallet was thin, based on a single witness on a dark night who was half a football field away from the shooting and had been sweated by the police for nearly a day until he named Mallet as the shooter. The attorney noted that police had found a beeper next to Ledeatte, but it had never been examined to see what numbers were stored on the device.
The prosecutor said: “All the witnesses were brought here for a reason because in their own way, everybody’s testimony, scientific testimony, photographic evidence here is meant to show you that everything supports the version of the story given by Gregory Walker. He had no reason to lie about who did the shooting. He had every reason to come back here and tell you who did.”
The jury convicted Mallet of second-degree murder on March 18, 1999.
At sentencing, Justice Tonetti said that although the verdict was “well warranted,” he had doubts about Mallet’s guilt. “That is the tragic aspect. I don’t know if he is guilty, having done this too long I just don’t know. I think the verdict [was] substantially warranted by the evidence that was adduced in this case. Otherwise I would set it aside.” He sentenced Mallet to 20 years to life in prison.
Mallet began a series of appeals through the state and federal courts. His fifth state motion for a new trial, filed on February 27, 2014, was based on a partial recantation by Walker. In an unsworn audio recording made to Mallet’s investigator, Walker said Ledeatte’s assailants wore hoodies and he was not “100 percent sure” of his identification. He also said the police had roughed him up. Again, the trial court, in April 2015, and the appellate court, in January 2019, affirmed the conviction.
Mallett was released from prison on January 16, 2019. On October 15, 2019, he filed his sixth motion for a new trial. Mallet was now represented by David Shanies, who was later joined by Ronald Kuby.
The heart of the motion was a sworn affidavit from Walker made on July 6, 2019. Walker said that he was too far away to see the faces of the assailants and that the police coerced him with physical and verbal threats to name Mallet as the shooter once Walker said he had seen Mallet—whom he knew only as Cee-Lo—in the days prior to the shooting.
“Over and over again, I told the detectives that I could not see who shot Mike,” Walker said in the affidavit. “One detective got angry and at one point he got violent. The detective grabbed me and pulled me out of the chair I was sitting in. He slammed me up against the wall, which was painful and scared me. The detectives said I was going to tell them who did the shooting or I was going to jail.”
Walker said the detectives made him change his statement to say there were two shots and lied to him by telling him there was a lot of other evidence against Mallet. They also falsely told him that Mallet was a dangerous, violent criminal who might try to hurt him or his family.
Walker said that after the trial, he moved to Florida and straightened out his life and became deeply involved in his church. “I want the court to know that I am coming forward only because I want to do what is right and set an example for other people who were put in a position of being forced to wrongfully accuse some other person of a crime,” he said.
The motion also included an affidavit from Kevin Rosado, an employee at Alpine Motor, who said that Nieves had yelled at him and tried to intimidate him to say that he had seen Ledeatte and Mallet arguing at the business. “I told Detective Nieves that I never saw Mallet with Ledeatte at Alpine, which was the truth,” Rosado said.
Separately, the motion included a report from Dr. Geoffrey Loftus, an expert on memory and perception, who said that based on the lighting conditions and distance between Walker’s and Ledeatte’s cars, Walker would not have been able to make an identification.
After the filing, Justice Ralph Fabrizio of Bronx County Supreme Court ordered a limited hearing to determine whether Mallet had exercised due diligence in obtaining Walker’s affidavit.
Prior to the hearing, Mallet’s attorneys moved to disqualify Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark from involvement in the case. (Prior to her election as district attorney, Clark had been an appellate judge in the Bronx and had affirmed three lower-court rulings denying Mallet’s request for a new trial.)
Clark’s office consented to the motion in early 2021, and the case was assigned to the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, under the condition that its Conviction Review Unit (CRU) first investigate Mallet’s claims of a wrongful conviction. Mallet agreed to that proposal and placed his motion for a new trial on hold while the CRU and his attorneys conducted a joint investigation.
The CRU interviewed Walker and Rosado, whose accounts largely tracked their 2019 affidavits. Walker’s statements shed more light on what he had seen at the dealership prior to the shooting. He said that although Ledeatte had pointed out Mallet and talked about delivering a Lexus that evening, Ledeatte never said the Lexus was for Mallet. (Mallet would tell the CRU that he did not know Ledeatte.)
The CRU also interviewed Nieves, who had retired a year before the case went to trial.
Nieves said he did not think Walker had anything to do with the murder, but he said he and the other detectives put “pressure” on Walker, telling him, “if it wasn’t someone else, it might be you.”
The CRU also obtained the disciplinary records of Tracy and Nieves. Both officers faced allegations of misconduct that bore on their credibility as witnesses.
On April 4, 1991, Nieves had been arrested for selling bootleg video cassettes from a store he co-owned in the Bronx. His partner had previously complained to the Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) that Nieves had locked him out and “stole[n] everything.” Nieves was suspended for about two weeks.
The IAB records contained other complaints against Nieves, most involving his alleged misdeeds as a businessman and landlord.
Tracy’s IAB file contained 23 entries. In 1991 and 1995, he was put on modified assignment for getting into fights. In the second fight, he lost his service weapon and failed to notify command about what happened. Tracy was also arrested in 1996 for harassing his girlfriend. He received a suspension. The CRU could not interview Tracy. He died in 2017. The other detective, Donald Gannon, was also dead.
On September 16, 2024, Mallet’s attorneys filed a new motion to vacate, asserting again that the conviction had been based on perjured testimony and police misconduct. Also that day, Anastasia Heeger, an assistant district attorney in Westchester County and the head of the CRU, filed an affirmation in support of the motion.
She wrote: “This is a single-eyewitness identification case. The sole eyewitness has credibly recanted and any other evidence that Mallet was present at the time of the crime is lacking. Further, two of the detectives involved in this case—lead detective Joseph Nieves, and testifying detective Kevin Tracy—have been credibly accused of bad acts occurring prior to Mallet’s trial, which undermines their credibility and the reliability and thoroughness of their investigation. Nieves’ credibility and reliability is so undermined that he would not be called in any further prosecution of this matter.”
On September 26, 2024, Justice Alvin Yearwood of Bronx County Supreme Court vacated Mallet’s conviction and then dismissed the charge.
Westchester County District Attorney Miriam Rocah said in a statement: “The credible witness recantation and the new evidence uncovered by the CRU’s more than two-year investigation provided a strong case that the integrity of the conviction was compromised. Though this is not proof of actual innocence, we believe the defendant did not receive a fair trial, which is why we supported vacating this conviction.”
After his exoneration, Mallet said, “I’m not stopping here. I’m definitely going to get me some accountability. You understand. I don’t care if I’ve got to go to the halls of justice, all the way to Washington D.C. I hope and pray that they don’t get away with this injustice.”
– Ken Otterbourg
|