THIS TAKES THE CAKE: “Cannibal cop” Gilberto Valle, with a police car cake at his wedding, wept yesterday as jurors began deliberations. (
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Accused “cannibal cop” Gilberto Valle broke down in tears yesterday as the defense told jurors that his perverted taste for “awful” and “disturbing porn” had wrecked his life — but shouldn’t send him to prison.
Prosecutors countered by portraying the troubled NYPD officer as a depraved predator with a badge and a gun, saying that only his stunning arrest last year had kept him from acting on monstrous urges to kill, cook and eat at least six women, including his wife.
Jurors deliberated for about 80 minutes after hearing both sides’ closing arguments, and ended the day by asking for “a whiteboard or flip chart to help organize our facts” when they return to Manhattan federal court this morning.
Valle, 28, lost his composure for the third time during his two-week trial, weeping and wiping his eyes after public defender Julia Gatto described how the cop’s “pretty wife,” Kathleen Mangan-Valle, had fled with their “adorable” baby girl last year after discovering his online chats about abducting, cooking and eating her and other women he knew.
“His foolishness on the Internet, his insensitive, ugly thoughts, have cost him everything,” she said.
Gatto maintained that everything Valle did on the Web involved “fantasy role play” and “masturbatory materials,” and she began her impassioned summation by reading from a chat in which he said: “I just have a world in my mind and in that world I am kidnapping women and selling them to people interested in buying them.”
Gatto also mentioned a phone conversation the night before in which her dad likened the case to Orson Welles’ famous “War of the Worlds” radio show that set off a panic in 1938. She insisted Valle’s chats were no more real than the “alien invasion” of the broadcast.
Earlier, prosecutor Hadassa Waxman argued that Valle “left the world of fantasy and entered the world of reality” when he agreed to kidnap an Upper East Side teacher and sell her for $5,000 to a New Jersey man to allegedly be raped and murdered.
“This was no joke,” Waxman said. “This was not just sick entertainment.”
And in a dramatic rebuttal summation, prosecutor Randall Jackson derided Gatto’s arguments as “absurd” and “ridiculous,” repeatedly calling Valle a “sexually sadistic individual” who enjoyed looking at images of women being tortured or who were already dead.
”This is not a masturbatory sexual fantasy,” he said. “This is a man who has a deep-seated desire to harm women, and the evidence shows he was taking actual steps to realize it.”
Jackson banged a podium as he argued that Valle illegally accessed law-enforcement databases to target his intended victims, calling it “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that his plans were real.
He also compared Valle’s arrest to airline passengers getting busted for talking about blowing up a plane, which prompted a failed defense bid for a mistrial on grounds that Jackson was trying to “elicit fear” from the jury.