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Susan G. Kellman, a longtime defense lawyer in New York, says she got into the Pizza Connection trial about ten months late. She didn't know the background of the case particularly well, but she had heard it was already breaking records in the Manhattan federal courthouse, and, simultaneously, driving everyone involved nuts. When Kellman signed on to represent Salvatore Salamone (his pizzeria was in Pennsylvania), who was charged with racketeering and drug conspiracy, she said Judge Leval gave her the summer to read over the trial's 120-page indictment. "I remember reading the indictment in a hammock out in the Hamptons, and seeing that my client had only been charged with one racketeering act," she told me in an interview. "Anyone who knew how RICO laws worked knows that you need at least two acts to be charged with this. I thought, 'Huh, that's odd.'" Kellman is referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—part of legislation passed by Congress in 1970 that is partially credited with the Mafia's fall from grace. It gave federal prosecutors the legal latitude to charge organized crime family heads with ordering foot soldiers to conduct crimes, and foot soldiers for merely participating in said crimes. If you ever read or hear about a mob case, there is a very good chance a RICO charge is somewhere in the indictment. (It's also mentioned frequently on The Sopranos.) According to Kellman, the lack of sufficient acts for a RICO charge against Salamone was the first of many peculiarities she noticed over the course of the trial. When she arrived in the courthouse that fall, it only got more bizarre. The day-to-day scene she described was chaotic, but not because it was unruly—it just didn't make much sense. "On some days, the courtroom would be empty," she told me recently. "And the cafeteria would be filled with trial lawyers, on the phone, trying to salvage their firms. There would be days, weeks, and months without my client's name ever being mentioned. I think he was mentioned maybe one or two days out of the whole time I was there." The defendants, she said, were in and out. It was the same with the infuriated translators. It was almost an assembly line: The jurors—the same 12 people who had to bravely endure seventeen months of duty—just sat and watched as individual after individual was brought in, reprimanded, and then escorted back out. To expect them to make a reasonable conclusion after so many hours of testimony, she continued, was ludicrous. "It didn't look like an American court of justice," she explained. "Just the size of it made it impossible to connect with the defendants. The fact that you were dealing with humans was totally lost. People lose perspective." She wasn't alone in her sympathy for the defense. Journalist Shana Alexander, whose book, The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Money, Drugs, Mafia, dove into the trial's inner-workings, concluded that, in the end, "the trial was too big, too complex and contradictory, and too long to serve the interests of justice and the efficiency of the legal system." After the trial, 13 of the defendants appealed their decision to higher courts, raising these issues of length and complexity as violations of their due process rights. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the appeal, but a lower federal appeals court expressed some sympathy for the defendants: Although their convictions should be upheld, they had a point about how much of a shit show the whole thing was. "To me, it was everything that's wrong with our criminal justice system," Kellman continued. "Sure, there may have been reasonable convictions, but you can't cast the net that large. If you throw it over 30 people, there's a very good chance that several people shouldn't be in it. Innocent people will have their lives ruined." (Like Vito Badalamenti, the only defendant to be acquitted of all charges but still somehow spent over four years behind bars.) According to Kellman—who obviously had a dog in this fight—her client was caught in the net. Sure, he was tied up with the wrong people, she said, but he was not a drug smuggler involved in an international heroin ring. The RICO and drug conspiracy charges against him would later be dropped, and although Salamone was eventually convicted on a lesser act of currency manipulation through falsifying statements, and had to subsequently serve five years in prison, Kellman argues that the government heavily charged him just so it could say it did. "Whoever you can go after to get whatever headline you can get," she said. Kellman say the prosecution was typical for the US Attorney who was in charge of the Southern District of New York then: Rudolph Giuliani. The future New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate was slowly constructing a name for himself, she said, with an image of being tough in a terrified city. This would later materialize in his grueling use of the "broken windows" policing model. And at the time, the mob was his Public Enemy No. 1. With that in mind, Giuliani craved the spotlight, Kellman argued, calling him the "Donald Trump of prosecutors." (Giuliani was contacted for this article, but was unable to comment.) "Whatever ails the system," she continued, "was just exacerbated in the Giuliani years. I just kept thinking to myself, 'This shouldn't happen in an American court.'" Of course, the biggest irony of the Pizza Connection trial is that, even with its flashy FBI raids and super-sized trial, it didn't really achieve much on the street. After it was all over, the mob still sold dope—the defendants were merely replaced with new slacks, according to Amoruso, and the stream continued. "The trial impacted the mob in that it shut down a very lucrative operation that was running smoothly and brought in a lot of steady income for American and Sicilian mobsters," he explained. "In the long run, however, it was business as usual. Heroin continued to flow into New York and other American cities." Follow John Surico on Twitter.