Razzle Dazzle: A Tough Guy Gets Undressed

Razzle Dazzle:
A Tough Guy Gets Undressed


Joseph Guzman had just begun describing the shooting that left Sean Bell dead and himself seriously wounded when Queens Assistant District Attorney Charles Testagrossa asked him April 1 where he was struck by a bullet fired by Det. Gescard Isnora.

"Upper right shoulder," replied Mr. Guzman, who is big enough to play nose tackle for the Jets, and he took off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt to display the scar from the wound.

It would be nearly two hours later before he remembered to button up again. By then, Mr. Guzman was under heavy cross-examination by lawyers for the three Detectives on trial in the shooting of Mr. Bell, himself and Trent Benefield outside a Queens nightclub on Nov. 25, 2006. It was cold enough in Queens Supreme Court Justice Arthur Cooperman's courtroom that many in the audience were wearing their coats, but he was perspiring on the witness stand, frequently mopping his brow and close-shaved head with a blue handkerchief.

Provoking With a Purpose

The defense lawyers spent more than two hours during the morning session figuratively trying to get Mr. Guzman out of his suit and tie so his Inner Thug could be seen.

The Chief-Leader/Michael O'Kane BRINGING STREET INTO COURT: Joseph Guzman, who was shot 16 times in the police barrage that killed Sean Bell, proved Mike Tyson's line that 'everybody's got plans until they get hit' when he turned from a cool, self-assured witness into an angry, combative one under provocative cross-examination by lawyers for the three Detectives charged in the shooting.

First James Culleton, the attorney for Det. Michael Oliver, poked and prodded, needled and badgered, and Mr. Guzman turned from a relaxed, street-savvy prosecution witness into someone who could be as combative as he was confident on the stand. Then Anthony Ricco, Detective Isnora's Harlem lawyer with the Italian name, grabbed the baton and turned up the heat, their exchanges evolving into a noisy street dispute that brought reactions from Mr. Bell's supporters on the right side of the courtroom each time they thought Mr. Guzman got the best of their verbal flurries.

Then Mr. Ricco asked whether Mr. Guzman had told Fabio Coicou, the man in black with his hand in his pocket who quarreled with several members of Mr. Bell's bachelor party as they exited Kalua Cabaret, that he was going to get his gun to settle their dispute.

"Where you from?" Mr. Guzman demanded. "Where you from?" He insisted he had no gun to retrieve and so, "Where I'm from, that's not a good bluff."

He didn't appear to realize it, but Mr. Ricco had him on the ropes and was methodically jabbing his credibility to pieces. In short order Mr. Guzman said he had no qualms about Mr. Bell getting behind the wheel of the car that was supposed to take them from Jamaica back to their homes in Far Rockaway, even though his friend's blood-alcohol level would later turn out to be nearly twice the standard for being considered legally drunk.

The Chief-Leader/Michael O'Kane HE DID HIS HOMEWORK: Anthony Ricco, left, the attorney for Det. Gescard Isnora in the Sean Bell shooting trial, got the best of his spirited cross-examination of Joseph Guzman by provoking the man who was in the passenger seat next to Mr. Bell into becoming belligerent, raising questions about his claim that he defused an earlier dispute that Mr. Isnora believed could escalate into gunplay. Accompanying Mr. Ricco is Detectives Endowment Association special counsel Philip Karasyk.

And where Mr. Guzman several times previously offered testimony that had deviated from statements he'd made to prosecutors or the grand jury, this time he reiterated what he'd told grand jurors about his brief conversation when a uniformed cop approached him after the shooting early that morning on a desolate street. "Officer, you just killed us for nothing," Mr. Guzman recounted to the courtroom. "There's no gun in this car."

In making those statements, he seemed to undercut his claims that he hadn't known that those who had confronted him, Mr. Bell and Mr. Benefield were cops, or why they did so.

A Question of Justification

The case against the three Detectives hinges on whether they lacked justification for opening fire on the three men. Their attorneys have asserted that based on the dispute between Mr. Coicou and those in Mr. Bell's party - including Mr. Guzman's alleged remark about getting his gun - Detective Isnora had reason to believe they might be planning a drive-by shooting and sought to head them off. After he was struck by the car driven by Mr. Bell, which also collided with a minivan in which his backups were approaching, and Mr. Bell drove forward again, Mr. Isnora began firing his weapon, a decision that could be justified by either his belief that Mr. Guzman was reaching for a gun or that Mr. Bell was trying to do him serious harm using the car as a deadly weapon.

Five cops wound up firing 50 shots - 11 by Mr. Isnora, 31 by Mr. Oliver, four by Det. Marc Cooper, and four by two other officers who weren't indicted. No gun was found on the three occupants of Mr. Bell's car, or in its vicinity. But the criminal case against the officers hinges on whether they had reason to fear for their lives unless they used deadly force.

Many of the witnesses called by the Queens DA's Office - which concluded its case the morning after Mr. Guzman testified - were friends of Mr. Bell's who had been with him inside Kalua. Some of them told different stories in court than they had related to prosecutors or grand jurors before the indictments were brought, and lawyers for the Detectives tried to make the case in their cross-examinations that the changes were concocted either out of loyalty to Mr. Bell or to improve the chances of the $50-million civil suit brought by Mr. Bell's family, Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman.

Justice Cooperman, who at the Detectives' request is deciding the case without a jury, will have to wade through the inconsistencies, not least among them Mr. Coicou's statement to the Queens DA's Office in January 2007 that someone in the Bell party said, "We'll get the gat," something that on the witness stand last month he denied having heard.

Believed He Had Gun

Two of Mr. Bell's friends, Larenzo Kinred and Hugh Jensen, both said in court that they believed Mr. Coicou had been armed on that fateful night, based on the fact that he had just one hand in a coat pocket. And Mr. Guzman last week said he too thought that was possible, describing Mr. Coicou as "a short black male with a black leather coat" standing by a black Ford Expedition SUV with chrome wheels outside Kalua, where he was waiting for his girlfriend, one of the club's dancers.

"He was saying, 'I'll fight you,''' Mr. Guzman testified, adding that one member of their party, James Kollore, responded, "I'll take your gun."

Other witnesses who were with Mr. Bell have said that he also threatened to take the gun that Mr. Coicou had not in fact produced, even though Mr. Bell was supposed to get married later that day to his longtime girlfriend, Nicole Paultre. Among those who urged him to reconsider were Johnell Hankerson, a longtime friend and next-door neighbor of Mr. Guzman's who was married to the sister of the bride-to-be.

Another witness who said Mr. Bell argued with Mr. Coicou, Jean Nelson, testified that Mr. Coicou had threatened, "I'll shoot y'all." Mr. Nelson, who had been with Mr. Bell, also said that Detective Isnora had approached Mr. Bell and his two friends in their Altima and said, "I wanna holler at you" before Mr. Bell drove into him, a claim Mr. Guzman would later contradict on the witness stand when he said he never saw the cop approach them and first became aware of him when he began shooting.

The attorneys for the cops implied that Mr. Guzman invented details on the witness stand to aid his civil suit and create greater sympathy for himself and for Mr. Bell.

Benefield Flounders

The day before Mr. Guzman's court appearance, Mr. Benefield was on the stand, and like several previous witnesses appeared a bigger help to the defense case than to the prosecutors for whom he testified.

He denied hearing any conversation between Mr. Coicou and Mr. Guzman outside of their discovering that they both came from Far Rockaway, but he also said he believed Mr. Coicou might have been holding a gun inside his coat.

Mr. Benefield disputed what Detectives said he had told them after the fatal shooting about having drank a Long Island iced tea and five Hennessy cognacs at Kalua, claiming in court that he actually drank three Long Island iced teas and no cognac. He also denied having told doctors at Mary Immaculate Hospital, where he was taken to have his wounds treated, that he drank at least four beers every day - telling the courtroom he did not drink beer - and had smoked marijuana every day for six years. His blood alcohol level when he was tested after the shooting indicated that he was drunk at the time.

Rugged Grilling

When the lawyers for the Detectives weren't hammering Benefield over his consumption of drugs and alcohol, Mr. Ricco was prodding him to admit that he had revised earlier statements he'd made to cops about the confrontation between Mr. Bell and Mr. Coicou to improve the chances of winning his civil suit on the grounds that the cops had no reason to suspect violence might be imminent when they approached Mr. Bell's Altima.

Mr. Guzman, who at 32 is eight years older than Mr. Benefield (Mr. Bell was 23 when he died), was a considerably more self-assured witness when he limped to the witness stand shortly after 9 a.m. last Tuesday, walking with a cane as a result of some of his wounds, which damaged his intestines as well as his legs. Mr. Testagrossa, seeking to inoculate him against the cross-examination to come, early on had Mr. Guzman acknowledge that he had done two "bits" in prison for felonies, in 1995 for an armed robbery that eventually was reduced to a lesser charge and in 2002 for the sale of crack cocaine to an undercover cop within 1,000 feet of a school.

Mr. Guzman delivered the first, wrenching irony of his testimony when he told the court that originally Mr. Bell's friends had planned to hold his bachelor party in Mount Vernon, "but nobody wanted to drive."

He himself had confined his drinking to a single cocktail, explaining, "I'm diabetic, so I really don't drink."

Claims He Cooled Beef

And he claimed to have sought to defuse the confrontation with Mr. Coicou, testifying, "I said, 'Listen, player, we're not gonna get into this.'''

He said as he and Mr. Bell walked to the Altima, Mr. Coicou drove past them slowly, and crossed into their path while making a turn onto Liverpool St. "I told him, 'G'head,''' Mr. Guzman said. "He told me, 'G'head.'''

They got into their car, he testified, and Mr. Benefield came running up and jumped into the backseat on the driver's side.

Mr. Guzman made no mention of Detective Isnora approaching; rather, he said, Mr. Bell started to drive and "a green minivan comes along and we hit it in the front."

The next thing he noticed, Mr. Guzman testified, was a "black male, silver gun ... on the passenger side of the vehicle." He said the man was shouting but did not remember what he said; just that right after that, "He shot."

After displaying the wound, Mr. Guzman said, "When he shot me, everything to me slowed down ... I'm looking at him. He kept shooting."

He said he told Mr. Bell, "Let's do it, let's do it! This is not a robbery; they're trying to kill us!"

Asked by Mr. Testagrossa to identify the man who had shot him, Mr. Guzman responded, "This kid right here, what's his name."

'Don't Got to Respect Him'

It would be the first of several times that he referred to Detective Isnora, who is 29, as a "kid." When Mr. Ricco asked him on cross-examination why he would not acknowledge him as an adult, Mr. Guzman retorted, "I don't got to respect nobody on that side and call him no man."

He said he never saw Detective Oliver fire his gun, explaining that after he was initially hit he tried to move away from the gunfire from Detective Isnora by climbing toward the window on the driver's side of the car.

There were clearly some mistaken details in his account. Detectives Endowment Association President Mike Palladino would note later that day that Mr. Isnora carried a black Glock, not the silver gun Mr. Guzman remembered, and he claimed to have been trying to crawl to safety while the car was still moving, a dubious proposition since it would have been virtually impossible for Mr. Bell to shift from "reverse" to "drive" in an attempt to get away while a man of Mr. Guzman's size was climbing over him.

'Shooting Didn't Stop'

Some of what he said rang true even in the areas where it was exaggerated. Mr. Guzman, asked whether there had been any pause during the shooting, testified that the gunfire "was continuous. It didn't stop. It seemed to me like it was going on for an hour."

And when it ended, he said of Mr. Bell, "There wasn't much left of him."

He testified that he told his friend, "S, I love you," and that Mr. Bell had replied, "I love you, too," although that didn't square with a doctor's testimony a week earlier that one of the bullets had pierced Mr. Bell's vocal cords and made him incapable of saying anything.

Assistant DA Testagrossa elicited from Mr. Guzman that he had not heard anyone say, "Police, don't move." Referring to a uniformed officer of higher rank who approached the car after the shooting ended, Mr. Guzman said, "The only time I knew he was police was when he came out of the car and said, 'Let me see your f - - -' hands."

He spent 18 days at Mary Immaculate Hospital, and then another six weeks at Jamaica Hospital. Mr. Guzman has "a dropped foot and nerve damage," a metal rod in one leg, "numerous holes in my intestines," and four bullets that remain in his body from the 16 that struck him.

The defense lawyers showed him no sympathy when they began cross-examination, and Mr. Guzman tried to match them. It would soon become clear that the attorneys were hoping to rile him, to bring the blustery street-tough side of him to the surface and transform him from victim to a not-altogether-unwitting accomplice in the events that cost Mr. Bell his life.

Troubled Past Excavated

Mr. Culleton began by asking him about his relationship to Mr. Hankerson, who the defense attorneys believe may have had the gun - in the Mercedes that he had driven to Kalua - that Detective Isnora allegedly heard Mr. Guzman referring to.

After Mr. Guzman replied that he had lived next door to Mr. Hankerson his entire life, Mr. Culleton asked whether his 1995 criminal conviction had involved holding up someone at gunpoint.

"I never possessed a gun," Mr. Guzman responded. "Was someone you were with armed with a handgun?"

"That's what they were trying to say," he replied, his temper beginning to creep past the preparation he had received from the Queens DA's Office for what he would testify to and what he could anticipate on cross-examination.

Mr. Culleton moved on to the November 2002 bust for selling crack on 147th St. just off Rockaway Blvd. Mr. Guzman bristled when the attorney asked where he got the crack, saying, "What difference does that make? It's in the neighborhood. It's all over the neighborhood."

Sentenced to 2-4 years in that case, he was released, Mr. Guzman testified, "almost exactly" a year before the shooting outside Kalua. While he had been employed as a mason by a construction firm "after my first bit," his return to Queens following his second imprisonment left him scrambling for work, going to a corner every day where a kind of shape-up was held by contractors looking for day-laborers.

Getting Under His Skin

Mr. Culleton brusquely pressed him on whether he had driven to Kalua in Johnell Hankerson's Mercedes, whether he had told friends that night to "take me to my bitch's house," and whether he had tried to pick up a female bartender in the club that night.

When Mr. Culleton asked him whether he was contradicting his grand jury testimony about when Mr. Benefield left the club that night to square it with Mr. Benefield's statements the day before, Mr. Guzman said with rising irritation, "I ain't tryin' to hide nothing, man. I ain't learned nothing from yesterday, and I been livin' this for 16 months."

He began responding to questions even before Mr. Culleton finished them, prompting Justice Cooperman to admonish him.

When Mr. Culleton, pursuing the defense's theory that Mr. Guzman on his way to the car might have called Mr. Hankerson about retrieving his gun, asked whether he had used his cell phone, the witness exclaimed angrily, "It's four o'clock in the morning, who am I talking to on the phone?"

To which Mr. Culleton sternly replied, "You tell me - I ask the questions." After an hour of doing so, he ceased his cross-examination, but Mr. Ricco took the same confrontational approach and added to it his penchant for addressing witnesses in the street language they employ.

Banter Gets Heated

At first, Mr. Guzman seemed to enjoy the give-and-take, telling Mr. Ricco after one question about his criminal past, "You did your homework."

But when he insisted that he didn't have a gun during the 1995 robbery, Mr. Ricco retorted that he made the same claim regarding the night at Kalua.

"Did you find a gun?" a no-longer amused Mr. Guzman replied. "Did they find a gun?"

Mr. Ricco then shifted the focus to the 2002 arrest that he referred to as "your crack situation."

"Who bagged the crack?" he asked.

"What difference does that make?" an exasperated Mr. Guzman replied. " ... I bagged the crack."

"Who took care of your money?" "That's obvious." "Who took care of the protection?" Mr. Guzman looked at him disdainfully and asked, "I look like I need protection?"

But the bluster was starting to wear on him, as he disputed statements by Detective Isnora's lawyer that a cooler witness would have ignored. He scoffed at Mr. Ricco's characterizing the bust as the culmination of a long-term probe, saying, "Two to four, it couldn't have been that long-term."

'Didn't Do Homework'

He corrected Mr. Ricco about the school near where he made the cocaine sale - "you didn't do your homework."

But when the attorney noted it took place in "the community where you spent your whole life," Mr. Guzman momentarily turned rueful.

"You make bad choices," he said.

Mr. Ricco asked whether he had spoken to any other witnesses to make sure their accounts conformed, and Mr. Guzman replied, "Nobody wants to talk about this, man."

Contrasting him with Mr. Bell, who was legally blind in one eye, Mr. Ricco expressed incredulity that he claimed not to have seen Detective Isnora as he approached their car, saying, "You don't have an eye problem and you wasn't drunk."

"I just told you I didn't see him," Mr. Guzman retorted.

Referring to his urging to Mr. Bell, Mr. Ricco asked, "Does 'let's do it' mean 'run him over'?"

"No," Mr. Guzman said. "Let's do it means, we gotta go. They're shootin' at the car, they're shootin' like crazy, they're killin' this kid. That's what y'all did."

'Doing What You Wanted'

A few minutes later, after another exchange in which Mr. Guzman angrily challenged the lawyer, Mr. Ricco diverged from Mr. Culleton's tactic of citing court protocol to establish that he was the one who was in charge in this setting. Instead, he stated, "I bet you were kind of tough out there at Club Kalua that night. I bet you weren't paying 'that kid' no mind when he said, 'Show your hands.' You was doing what you wanted to do, which is what you're doing right now."

With that flourish, which lacked only a question to justify it, he was framing for the judge and those in the courtroom what he saw as the essence of Mr. Guzman's demeanor: that he wouldn't defer to a lawyer in a courtroom any more than he was likely to have just brushed off Mr. Coicou's posturing with a mere, "Listen, player, we're not gonna get into this."

If there were any doubts on this matter, Mr. Guzman dispelled them moments later with his, "Where you from? Where you from?" outburst.

That was the most dramatic moment in their battle, but Mr. Ricco may have sealed the case against trusting this witness when he then asked, "Were you concerned in any way, Mr. Guzman, that Sean Bell wasn't in the best condition to drive?"

"If I felt like he couldn't drive, I would've drove," Mr. Guzman replied.

A Matter of Judgment

In saying so, he further damaged his credibility by raising questions about his own judgment that night. One of the hazards of driving drunk is that being intoxicated slows a person's reflexes, but that is not the primary consideration - if it were, it's likely that we would license 14-year-olds to drive more readily than 60-year-olds given their superior reaction time. The greatest danger of getting behind the wheel while under the influence is that a person's judgment is impaired.

Mr. Bell had already proved he was operating at less than peak efficiency in that department by getting so drunk on the morning of his wedding, then becoming embroiled in an argument with a stranger at a time of day when the odds of it having unforeseen consequences were especially high, and finally looking to drive despite his inebriation. He certainly didn't deserve to die for those mistakes, but they were all contributing factors in what followed.

The Queens DA has argued that in the heat of the moment, the cops on the scene panicked and fired 50 bullets without having established that they were in real danger. It seems at least as possible, however, that it was Mr. Bell who panicked; that if he didn't realize immediately that Detective Isnora was a cop, then the collision with the green minivan would have filled in the blanks, and that he responded as he did not out of fear for his life but because he realized he might wind up spending his wedding day behind bars. At a time when he was inhibited from thinking clearly, that might indeed have seemed like a fate worse than risking death by driving at Mr. Isnora to try to escape the circumstances that macho bluster outside a nightclub had created.

'He Knew They Were Cops'

After court adjourned that afternoon, Mr. Palladino remarked, "Isnora [got] hit by the car and there's scientific evidence that proves that. [Mr. Guzman] knew damn well that they were the police, right from the start. I think we got a good look at the type of individual Joseph Guzman was by his demeanor on the stand. He's probably used to that type of behavior on the street."

At the start of the trial, the DEA leader said, the defense lawyers all believed it would be imperative to put the Detectives on the stand, placing their credibility up against that of the witnesses against them. But with the three cops' grand jury testimony having already been read into evidence by the prosecution and the DA's witnesses being so problematic on issues of consistency and believability, Mr. Palladino said, "The big dilemma now is whether you even put the three guys on the witness stand."

One feature of the defense case that began April 3 is likely to be the lawyers' belief that Johnell Hankerson had the gun Mr. Guzman allegedly referred to stashed in his Mercedes. Mr. Palladino claimed that he fled the scene on foot and did not return for his car until hours later.

Part of Later Shootout?

Less than five months after the Bell shooting, Mr. Hankerson was shot while eating a slice of pizza on Rockaway Blvd. Detectives eventually recovered a gun near the scene that a witness claimed Mr. Hankerson had dropped during a shootout, but Mr. Palladino said Assistant DA Testagrossa opted not to bring charges against him. During his own appearance on the witness stand, Mr. Hankerson denied that he had won an assurance that he wouldn't be prosecuted in return for giving testimony for the DA's Office.

It's only a theory, one that has some interesting circumstantial evidence to support it but nothing to prove it's valid. But then, the attorneys for the three Detectives don't have to make that case; they just need to establish reasonable doubt on behalf of their clients.

And that, with the help of the performances on the witness stand of the two men who were in the car with Mr. Bell, they seemed well on their way to doing.
 

Editor's "Razzle Dazzle" Column RSS feed