Prosecutor gets leadership role
NXIVM trial vet Lesko named temporary head of U.S. attorney’s office
A veteran federal prosecutor who was on the trial team that convicted NXIVM leader Keith Raniere has been appointed to temporarily lead the Brooklynbased U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York.
Mark J. Lesko, formerly a three-time elected town of Brookhaven supervisor on Long Island and the first assistant to the past two U.S. attorneys in his office, was sworn into the new role by Eastern District Chief Judge Margo Brodie.
The role appears to be temporarily. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that President Joe Biden was planning to nominate Breon Peace, who worked under former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to lead the Eastern District that includes Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens in New York City and both Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island.
The office has handled cases in the Capital Region. The Times Union has reported that federal prosecutors in the Eastern District are investigating Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for his administration’s nursing home policies.
Lesko, a prosecutor in the Eastern District from 2002 to 2009, returned in 2018, serving under U.S. Attorneys Richard Donoghue and Seth Ducharme. Lesko had previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. from 1999 to 2002.
In a statement, Lesko said: “After having spent many years on the line prosecuting federal crimes, as well as significant time overseeing prosecutions and civil cases in a wide range of supervisory positions, I look forward to leading the office and working with our law enforcement and agency partners to protect and serve the Eastern District’s more than eight million residents.”
Lesko — along with federal prosecutors Moira Kim Penza and Tanya Hajjar — was on the team that convicted Raniere on all charges at a nearly twomonth trial in 2019.
It was Lesko who delivered the government’s rebuttal after Raniere’s attorney, Marc Agnifilo, gave his closing argument to the jury. Lesko shredded the defense attorney’s argument that Raniere’s “master/slave” club, Dominus Obsequious Sororium, known as DOS and “The Vow,’ was about women trusting one another and not sex.
Lesko reminded jurors about Raniere’s plan to order a “jail cell” and “dungeon,” among other bondage gear, from a California company that was to be placed inside a home on Milltowne Drive in Halfmoon, where DOS members often met. He questioned how that could be intended for spiritual reasons.
“If (DOS) is not created for sex, then what was going to happen in the dungeon? ... Were they going to knit sweaters in the dungeon?” Lesko asked the jury. “Of course it was about sex.”
And Lesko reminded jurors that women in DOS — “slaves” who answered to “masters” in a pyramid-like structure — were coerced into handing over embarrassing “collateral” in the form of naked photos and other compromising information.
“What courtroom was (Agnifilo) in in the last six weeks?” Lesko asked jurors.
Lesko suggested in his rebuttal that Raniere created DOS as his longtime lover, Pamela Cafritz, who recruited sex partners for him, was dying of cancer. Lesko told jurors that after Cafritz died in 2016, Raniere leveraged his “mind control” in DOS to get women for sex and to keep them through lies, coercion and collateral.
Lesko handled the questioning of some key prosecution witnesses, including high-ranking NXIVM defector Mark Vicente, a one-time member of Raniere’s inner circle who was the second witness to testify against Raniere in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.
“It’s a fraud. It’s a lie,” Vicente said of NXIVM under questioning by Lesko. “It’s this wellintended veneer that covers horrible, incredible evil.”
Lesko’s witnesses included a Los Angeles woman who belonged to DOS and “The Vow.” The woman, a model and actress identified at trial as “Jay,” testified that Raniere convinced her to move to the Capital Region to start a T-shirt company that never got off the ground.
The woman told Lesko that television actress Allison Mack, a high-ranking member of NXIVM and DOS whom she described as emotionally abusive and vindictive, assigned her to seduce Raniere. Women in DOS, known as slaves,” were ordered to obey all commands by their “masters,” all of whom answered ultimately to Raniere, whose presence in DOS was kept secret.
“It was basically my worst nightmare come to life,” Jay testified. “The worst thing is it would be a cult and someone would want to sleep with me — and that’s what it was.”
Jay told Lesko: “Pardon my French, but I needed to get the f__ out of there. … I decided first and foremost that I needed to get out of Albany.”