His sister wept. His lawyer yelled, “Innocent!”
But all Leroy-jama Wig fall, 19, could do was to flash a goofy grin as wide as his face as he was formally charged with being part of a posse that terrorized Times Square on Easter Sunday — a “wilding” attack straight out of the 1980s crime book that left three people with bullet wounds, the streets on high alert. And a city traumatized.
And why not? This just may be his lucky day.
Also headed to his own trial, though not charged with a crime, was brand-new Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. — a man described as terminally “soft” by his own underlings behind his back. He watched the arraignments of dozens of youths, one more “innocent” than the other, from a back row of the courtroom, posing and preening. Just like Wigfall.
Vance, who swept into office on a platform heavy on hugs for miscreants, appears, finally, to have listened to me and manned up. Vance said there would be no plea deals offered to the dozens of men accused of rampaging in an annual event that reminds New Yorkers that crime may have been asleep. But it’s not dead.
“New York cannot take one step backward in our fight to keep our streets safe,” he intoned.
But a veteran prosecutor said that, in Vance’s race to be a born-again tough guy, he made his first big rookie mistake.
“Saying, ‘I’m not going to take any pleas’ sounds nice. But the truth is, you can’t say anything until you see what these cases look like. What’s the evidence? Are there witnesses? I’m not sure an expert DA would say those kinds of things,” the source told me.
“His perspective is different. He was a defense attorney for nearly 20 years.” Ouch. “His inner circle isn’t made up of experienced state court prosecutors.” Vance’s chief assistant, Dan Alonso, worked fraud and white-collar cases as a federal prosecutor and assistant district attorney.
Vance himself left New York before crack hit, fleeing city streets for the latte bars of Seattle, where he plied his trade as a defense attorney. So even as Vance claimed it was coincidence that he happened to be watching the alleged thugs’ court dates, the rare sight of a DA in a low-level courtroom fooled no one.
“It’s symbolic,” said a prosecution source. “The Manhattan DA’s Office is always going to be judged by how it handles the wilding cases, or the Central Park jogger. It’s Manhattan. Whatever happens here reverberates around the country.”
The on-the-job training puts pressure on Vance, whose heart was long with the bad guy. He was in good company as Wigfall was arraigned, along with dozens of lesser lights, on a felony charge of assaulting a cop. His defense lawyer protested that his client was merely “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“He was just hanging out with a whole bunch of his friends!” cried Wigfall’s sister, Trina, 32, tears falling. She admitted that her young brother had been in trouble with the law before.
“He was trying to get on the right track. Now he can’t,” she said, as if he were the victim here.
At the same time as the drama unfolded, Iasia Manson, also 19, lay moaning in bed, injured by a gunshot someone put in her elbow as she walked on 34th Street Sunday night.
“I’m hurt,” she told me groggily. “My medicine puts me to sleep.”
The attack on Times Square was a wake-up call. A reminder that we must be vigilant. The bad times can roll again.
Don’t let it happen.
The hotel that has no shame
New York’s hotshots in the field of violence against women — ex-sex-crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein and lawyer Michael Dowd, who defends ladies who kill abusive spouses — are set to trek to the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Conn., on May 12, for a luncheon thrown by the Domestic Violence Crisis Center. And this infuriates the family of a woman raped in the hotel garage at gunpoint.
“My wife was buckling my 3-year-old son into his car seat in the Marriott garage when she felt a gun in her back. She was ordered to submit to his sexual assault or he would kill my children . . . He told my daughter she would be next,” the victim’s husband wrote me about the 2006 attack, for which Gary Fricker was sentenced to 20 years.
It gets worse.
Marriott last summer blamed the victim for her own attack. She “failed to exercise due care for her own safety and the safety of her children,” hotel lawyers wrote in court papers filed in a civil suit that’s set for trial around the same time as the violence conference.
After weeks of a threatened national boycott, the offensive claim was removed from the defense. Now, the hotel is cynically trying to burnish its image as a lover of women and kids, claims the “traumatized” victim.
“The hotel very much appreciates the DVCC’s business and supports the mission of that organization,” said Marriott lawyer Marc Kurzman.
The Domestic Violence Crisis Center did not respond to queries. Dowd, while decrying the blame-the-victim legal tactic, said he intends to speak at the conference. No word from Fairstein.
Marriott “is more than happy to trample victims of sexual violence like my family when it is convenient,” the husband wrote. The entire corporation should be ashamed.
Hero dad was a fool first
I am thrilled to tears that adorable 2-year-old Bridget Anderson was rescued after a fall into the chilly East River. But while “hero” dad David Anderson does a victory lap around the TV dial, I can’t help but wonder why a father perched his baby on a river wall — then took his eyes off the toddler long enough for her nearly to drown.
“Five seconds.” That’s how long Anderson says he looked away from the baby in order to adjust his camera.
He mentioned that he put his trust in a rail and fence, conjuring the possibility of a maddening lawsuit.
Even five seconds is too long to look away, Dad. You have no one else to blame.
Soda-bred kids
If you believe the state wants to keep your kids slim with its threatened beverage tax, think again. That tax may wind up causing prepubescent love handles if you’re not careful.
Most folks don’t realize that Welch’s and Tropicana can pack as many pounds on kids as Sprite and Pepsi. The answer here is moderation. So don’t stress if your kid likes to sneak a soft drink. Just turn off the TV and video games and kick him out into the sunshine. You won’t raise a porker.
He’s a real ‘Sex’tuagenerian
Sex addiction. It’s not just for horny celebs anymore.
A 73-year-old dirty old paralegal is retiring from the city Law Department after he was caught repeatedly e-mailing pictures of nudes, and printing lewd material on an office printer. But a shrink declared Aban Cooper a “sex addict,” and now the guy’s on his way to a cushy fall. That’s what I call equal opportunity for the twisted.