FEDS WRAPPING UP INVESTIGATION OF CORRUPTION UNDER ANELLO'S REGIME
ANALYSIS By Mike Hudson
Federal law enforcement officials are putting the finishing touches on the case that may not only result in the indictment of former Niagara Falls mayor Vincenzo V. Anello, but others both in and outside of his administration, sources close to the case confirmed this week.
Niagara County Board of Elections officials have until Wednesday of this week to deliver all of Anello's financial records on file with the board going back to 2002, two years before he was sworn in as mayor here.
Elections Commissioner Scott Kiedrowski said that copies of the records had been supplied to the FBI previously, but now the lawmen are seeking the original, signed documents.
Sources told the Reporter this weekend that, in federal criminal cases, photocopied records might or might not be permitted as evidence.
"It's always preferable to have the originals if you're going before a jury," the source said. "That would be one of the details you'd want to get wrapped up."
On Thursday, FBI agents arrived unannounced at the elections board offices in Lockport, making sure that Kiedrowski and Elections Commissioner Nancy Smith had received the subpoena and were prepared to comply with the order. The agents also asked for the correct spellings of their names, Kiedrowski said.
"We would just testify that they're the original records and we were the custodians," he added.
The subpoenas came on the heels of an FBI raid at City Hall in which computers used by Anello and his former city administrator Dan Bristol were seized.
Technicians at the FBI's computer forensics lab in Quantico, Va., spend most of their time retrieving documents from computer drives thought to have been scrubbed by the people who used them.
Using sophisticated technology and proprietary retrieval programs unavailable on the commercial market, the FBI has been highly successful in recreating e-mails, letters and other documents that have led to convictions in countless criminal cases over the years.
The FBI investigation dates back to May 2005, when the Niagara Falls Reporter came into possession of documents showing a series of payments made to Anello by downtown developer Joe Anderson and totaling $40,000. Anderson and his partners -- attorneys Paul Grenga and Brian Meilleur, a Canadian citizen -- bought the former Wintergarden building from the city for $1 million in 2003, which Anello engineered while serving on City Council here, and after being elected mayor Anello oversaw the sale of long-term development rights along the city's East Mall to Anderson.
Grenga was very active in Anello's campaign and had longstanding ties with Bristol, who was named city administrator on the day Anello took office. Also involved in the sleazy deals was convicted felon, ex-convict, former Niagara Falls city councilman and disbarred attorney Michael Gawel.
Gawel and Grenga have both been interviewed by the FBI during the course of the investigation, as have city employees from the law department, the city clerk's office, the controller's office and the city's NFC Development Corp., which provided a series of grants and low-interest loans to other Anderson businesses here.
Immediately upon receiving the documents, the Reporter contacted the FBI. The paper was also able to provide the lawmen with the name of a confidential witness, who had been privy to the details of all the money secretly funneled to Anello through one of Anderson's companies, and who wanted to talk.
For his part, Anello took to doing interviews with newspapers, magazines and television news reporters. At first he denied he'd taken any money at all, but later changed his story and said that the $40,000 he received from Anderson during the election season of 2003 constituted an interest-free private loan, and that there was no repayment schedule attached to it.
The FBI's confidential witness has denied this, saying that the understanding was that the money was never to be paid back.
In any event, the former mayor has stuck to his absurd story through thick and thin for the past three years, and has repeatedly threatened legal action against this paper for publishing the revelations in the first place. The stories were "totally unfounded, false and defamatory," he said.
Several of Anello's department heads went so far as to pronounce the Reporter guilty of libel, irresponsible journalism and being part of an organized conspiracy to defame the operations of municipal government in this city in a series of guest editorials gleefully printed by the Niagara Gazette.
But the U.S. Department of Justice apparently agreed that something about the whole deal just didn't seem right. Less than a month after the Reporter published the first story on the Anderson-Anello payoffs, a federal grand jury was seated in Buffalo to look into official corruption at Niagara Falls City Hall.
Reports that sealed indictments have already been handed down by that grand jury, and that the U.S. Attorney's office is simply waiting to secure every single bit of evidence that may be used in upcoming criminal trials, could not be confirmed by the Reporter as of press time Monday afternoon.
Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com June 17 2008
