Prosecutor: Former chief hit black suspect to teach him a ‘lesson’
CAMDEN >> Frank Nucera “wanted to teach those n ***** s, those unruly f***ing n ***** s a lesson,” a federal prosecutor told a jury Wednesday during summations in the former Bordentown Township Police chief’s hate-crime trial.
Assistant U.S. attorney Joseph Gribko said the former police chief’s “hateful, racist words,” secretly recorded by Sgt. Nathan Roohr within hours of township police’s response to the Ramada Inn, showed his former boss’ racially motivated intent.
Police were called Sept. 1, 2016 after a hotel manager claimed Stroye and his 16-year-old girlfriend were swimming in the pool but hadn’t paid for their room.
Stroye and his girlfriend got into it with police officers Shawn Mount and Salvatore Guido. Things got out of hand with the “teenagers being teenagers,” the federal prosecutor said, but the situation was under control, with the teens subdued and handcuffed, by the time Nucera got to the second floor of the hotel.
Stroye had scuffled with Mount, who described it as the fight of his life. Mount pepper-sprayed the Trenton teen during the fight before other officers arrived and got him under control.
“It’s over. But that’s not enough. He wanted to teach ‘those n ***** s, those unruly f***ing n ***** s’ a lesson. The defendant wanted these people to know ‘stay the f**k out of Bordentown,’” Gribko said, playing the clip of the chief’s own words.
As Stroye was being led out in handcuffs, no longer posing a threat to officers, he stopped near the doorway and cursed at officers saying he was going to sue them. That’s when, Roohr testified, Nucera lunged at him and slammed his head. Nucera was later caught on tape calling Stroye the Nword.
“Those aren’t just words. They’re elements of the crime charged here. … The defendant is not being charged for his words. He’s being held accountable for his actions,” Gribko said.
The jury retired to the deliberation room around 2:30 p.m. to pour over the evidence presented at the three-week trial before U.S. District Court Judge Robert Kugler. After the jury left the courtroom, Kugler thanked attorneys for their efforts in the “hard-fought case” and shook each of their hands and Nucera’s wishing him “good luck” as the jury decides his fate.
The jury left for the day without reaching a verdict and will resume deliberations Thursday morning.
Nucera, charged with hate-crime assault, deprivation of civil rights and lying to the FBI, is accused of slamming the handcuffed black teenager’s head “like a basketball,” as Roohr testified, into a metal door jamb.
Nucera faces up to 20 years in the slammer and the loss of his six-figure pension, frozen since March as part of an agreement with New Jersey pension officials, if jurors believe beyond a reasonable doubt Nucera is guilty of the crimes.
The former police chief, who retired in January 2017 amid the FBI probe, denied going “hands on” with Stroye during a surreptitious video recording Dec. 22 with FBI special agents. The FBI alleged the police chief lied during the interview. The defense said Nucera appeared “genuinely surprised” when Roohr accused him of striking the teen during a taped conversation in December that was part of an FBI-concocted “ruse” to get the chief to incriminate himself.
A dueling portrait of the 62-year-old Nucera, who decided against taking the stand in his own defense, emerged with prosecutors suggesting Nucera was a micro-manager with a short fuse whose “deep racial animus” toward African Americans was evident in 81 secret recordings made by his colleague.
On the tapes, played on an almost endless loop for jurors during the threeweek trial, Nucera was heard causally and repeatedly using the N-word, comparing blacks to the terrorist organization ISIS and suggesting he could be on a firing squad and mow them down.
Prosecutors suggested on rebuttal Nucera was more of a Machiavellian slickster than he has let on at trial, telling Roohr in that conversation he thought the police dog handler admitted hitting the teen in a game of criminal dodgeball.
Looking to soften jurors’ view of the alleged stonecold racist man in blue, defense attorney Rocco Cipparone Jr. said his client was a former military man who served the country “honorably” and later became a “law-abiding law enforcement official” for the township police for 34 years ago.
Nucera rose through the ranks, becoming police chief in 2006, and cared so deeply about Bordentown that he took up the mantle of sharing responsibilities as township administrator.
A perfectionist who liked things done to a certain standard, Nucera rankled the rank-and-file with his “union-busting” antics and stingy management of overtime assignment, Cipparone said.
And so those cops looked for a way to oust him as police chief, so they could benefit, he said, pouncing on the alleged “material lies under oath” of star witness Sgt. Roohr and Detective Sgt. Guido, the only other cop who testified seeing the chief strike Stroye.
“Numerous versions. Material inconsistencies. Material lies under oath. That’s called perjury. There’s more than ample reasonable doubt,” Cipparone said, drawing a distinction he made in openings between social justice and criminal justice.
The defense attorney said it was “maybe justified” that the police chief is “vilified in the media, vilified in his neighborhood.” But he shouldn’t be found guilty in a case that doesn’t have “true corroboration.”
“I’m not telling you to ignore” the words, Cipparone said. “They’re ugly and embarrassing . ... There’s not a single audio or video recording that proves he ever put his hands on Timothy Stroye.”
Prosecutors didn’t call Stroye to the stand, so their case against Nucera boils down to the testimony of two cops. They must convince jurors that Nucera not only struck Stroye, but that he did so because he’s black.
Gribko told the jurors that police dog handler Roohr’s testimony that he saw his police chief grab Stroye’s head and slam it so violently against the door jamb that it made loud “thud” was “all the proof you need” to convict Nucera.
Cipparone dismissed the government’s “one and a half witnesses” as repeated liars who tried to deflect blame from their own possible criminal actions and who benefited from the chief’s departure.
The defense lawyer told jurors, “There’s nothing to support Roohr’s story but Roohr’s story.”
Roohr, a police dog handler who pierced the socalled blue wall of silence, confidently testified about his involvement in the case. He made entries in what the defense called a “bad Frank diary,” along with dozens of recordings that captured the police chief spewing racial slurs about Stroye and his girlfriend’s “nipple-hanging” aunt. Roohr admitted deleting recordings that didn’t capture Nucera or he deemed irrelevant, and the FBI was delayed in serving him with a subpoena.
Cipparone likened that to the “fox guarding the hen house.”
Roohr testified that the handcuffed Stroye no lon
ger posed a risk to officers when the chief hit him.
Assistant U.S. attorney Molly Lorber on rebuttal said Roohr, trailing right behind Stroye, had a “great view” of the police chief’s actions.
Saying he wasn’t a “noble police officer stepping up” to out his bad boss, the defense pointed out Roohr’s salary increased by $20,000, from $113,000 to $133,000, the year Nucera retired.
“Money’s a big motivator . ... Maybe there is motivation is to deflect the blame from themselves,” Cipparone said.
Roohr and then-Capt. Brian Pesce, who succeeded Nucera as chief, worked together to compile a 12-page misconduct complaint that Pesce planned to hand over to prosecutors and the township committee.
“This guy has been building a dossier for over a year. That’s not a guy with a motive, a bias or a prejudice?” Cipparone said.
He suggested Pesce may have intentionally left out the alleged assault on Stroye in the complaint because he “wasn’t willing to hang his hat on Roohr’s account.”
Gribko dismissed the defense’s conspiracy of Nucera as the aggrieved and betrayed boss. The cop witnesses “had nothing to gain and everything to lose” in testifying against them old boss, he said. They “did what they had to do.”
“[Roohr] could have just gone to the township committee and pressed play,” the federal prosecutor said. “He didn’t need to make a federal case of it.”
Cipparone then sacked Guido, saying the FBI thought he was “full of crap.”
Guido was locked arm in arm escorting Stroye to a police cruiser. In softpedalled testimony, he described the alleged assault differently than Roohr, as more of a push to the back of Stroye’s neck that sent the teen and Guido tumbling into the door jamb.
Guido said he saw the sleeve of the chief’s peach shirt out of the corner of his eye. Guido didn’t initially tell the FBI what he saw during an interview at his home Dec. 22.
He went to work and watched dash-cam videos that showed he wrongly told special agents he walked out Stroye’s girlfriend. Guido met with agents later that night, outside Mastoris Diner, to correct his statement, and that’s when he came clean.
Guido, who said on the stand he feared what would happen to him if he crossed the chief, admitted on cross examination he didn’t remember the events until watching the videos, something Cipparone revisited in his closing. He also made a bizarre comment that the “a**holes” from the FBI shouldn’t get the tapes.
“He can’t even see it in his own mind,” the defense attorney said. “He’s trying to put two and two together.”
The defense attorney said jurors should take note of Guido’s testimony that he gave Stroye a “hard shove” in the back to get him moving, about the same time as Nucera, saying they couldn’t assign “good motive” to one and “bad” to the other.
Then, he suggested Guido may have been angry after he “got beat up by a girl” and may have struck the teen.
Cipparone made a big deal about Stroye, who complained in police lockup of a potential concussion, not taking the stand. Stroye could not identify who hit him, and came with plenty of baggage, with a multistate felony rap sheet the defense planned to impeach him on.
“Where’s Timothy Stroye?” he said. “The fact that they didn’t call Timothy Stroye should loom in your minds.”
Furthering the thirdparty guilt theory, Cipparone pointed to his cross examination of FBI special agent Vernon Addison.
Addison received information from an unnamed witness on scene that Stroye struck his head on the first floor of the hotel and as he was entering the police cruiser. The person who was responsible for that blow was said to be someone with a beard and military-style haircut, which the defense said doesn’t match his mustachioed client.
Lorber dismissed the “mystery witness,” saying the FBI did its due diligence and got it right.