PIRRO TOLD TO ZIP IT! Chattering Outside Church Has Officers Fuming At Her

Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro was seen giggling and chatting outside a Bronx church after the funeral Mass for slain Police Officer Danny Enchautegui - spurring outrage from cops.

One officer brusquely told her to "shut up," prompting Pirro to zip her lips and snap to attention just after the flag-draped coffin holding Enchautegui was placed into a nearby hearse.

While grim-faced Finest stood ramrod-straight, Pirro drew glares from the hero cop's fellow officers when they spotted her giggling and chatting with state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno (R-Rensselaer).

"She should have kept her mouth shut and showed some respect," said one disgusted high-ranking member of the NYPD.

Fumed another officer: "It was bad timing. Everyone is waiting for the family to leave. The family is trying to be strong. We're all still in formation. It was out of line."

A Pirro campaign spokesman denied last night that any cop told her to keep quiet outside the church.

Joining Bruno and Pirro in the church were Gov. Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Missing, though, was Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Albany), who is facing new accusations from GOP lawmakers of blocking a package of bills mandating prison terms for certain illegal gun traffickers.

Silver aides refused to say precisely where the speaker was during the funeral. Silver attended Enchautegui's wake Tuesday.

The aides noted that Silver had phone talks with Bruno and Pataki yesterday in a bid to reach a compromise after the Daily News turned up the heat on Albany's big three to stop the bickering and pass new laws protecting cops.

The key to ending the snarl is Silver, said state Sen. Jeff Klein (D-Bronx), who attended the funeral and represents the neighborhood where Enchautegui was slain.

"He's portraying to everyone that Democrats are not tough on crime - and that's not true," said Klein, who said a Pataki gun crackdown package "would pass overwhelmingly" if Silver simply allowed an Assembly vote.

Meanwhile, Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco (R-Schenectady) urged Silver to hold an immediate special session to deal with the gun measures and laws called for under The News' Stop Crimes Against Cops Campaign.

"The problem is he's got a base in his Democratic conference who don't believe in tougher penalties, and that base seems to have his ear right now," said a frustrated Tedisco.

But Silver is keeping the current schedule of having Assembly members return to the Capitol after New Year's Day.

"We are trying to put together something we can pass by early next year," Silver spokesman Skip Carrier said.

Originally published on December 15, 2005

The Journal News.

Pirro's second act

By BRUCE GOLDING, NOREEN O'DONNELL AND GLENN BLAIN
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: October 9, 2005)
http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051009/NEWS10/510090341

ELMIRA

The back steps to 351 Spaulding Ave. are shabby and weather-beaten, a perch for the cats that prowl this blue-collar neighborhood. But in the mid-1960s, when the house was neat and trim, it was where Jeanine Pirro sat after school, immersed in her books, postponing parties and boyfriends, in a hurry to begin the career that would make her a political star.

She raced through high school in three years and left this fading city on the Che-mung River for college, law school, marriage and a job as an assistant district attorney in Westchester County. There, she caught the attention of powerful Republicans like Anthony J. Colavita, then the county's party chairman.

"She was always extremely bright, very ambitious," recalled Colavita, an Eastchester lawyer who also headed the state GOP. "I always thought she had a bright political future."

At 35, a decade after graduating from law school, she was at New York City's fabled Waldorf-Astoria Hotel announcing her bid for lieutenant governor.

But that was as far as she got. Two days after entering the race, allegations that her husband was tied to organized crime forced her to quit rather than reveal his list of clients.

It has taken Pirro 20 years to re-emerge on a statewide stage. In August, she was back at the Waldorf for another political announcement, this time for a chance to slay the Democratic giant, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"As I go around New York state, there are a tremendous number of issues that aren't being addressed, that ordinary New Yorkers are concerned about," she said in a recent interview. "I decided that the United States Senate is the place where I think I can be most effective."

Yet, she remains dogged by her husband's misdeeds. In recent years, the public has learned that he had affairs and fathered a child outside their marriage, drank too much and used cocaine, and cheated enough on their taxes to go to federal prison. Just as she was deciding to run for the Senate, he was again accused of mob links and vigorously denied them.

Meanwhile, Pirro has earned her own criticism that she abused her office and showboated to gain celebrity and fame. And she faces competition for the GOP line from fellow Republicans — former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, lawyer and Nixon son-in-law Edward Cox and upstate tax attorney William Brenner — who say she is too liberal to offer a real alternative to Clinton, who holds a commanding lead in recent polls.

Whether she can overcome these hurdles is key to her hopes of a long-delayed second act.

The younger of two girls born to a Lebanese-American couple — Nasser "Leo" and Esther Ferris — Pirro was brought up in a close-knit family that spent much time together, according to former neighbors and friends. It was Pirro's mother who seemed to play the biggest role in inspiring her younger daughter to achieve.

"Esther raised the girls pretty strict," said Marguerite Shaw, 75, who still lives across the street from the Spaulding Street home where the Ferrises lived. "They had friends, but no loud parties, no running in and out, no boom boxes. They were a nice family."

Pirro calls her father her hero, her mother her backbone. In her book, "To Punish and Protect: One DA's Fight Against a System That Coddles Criminals," Pirro described her mother as a beautiful, strong-willed woman, despite an upbringing "designed to crush her independent spirit."

Esther Ferris grew up in Lebanon, where she was sent at age 5 after her father divorced her mother because she had borne him only girls. The four sisters lived with their father's wealthy brother at his home in Beirut.

"In that environment, her subservient position was reinforced each and every day," Pirro wrote.

Esther Ferris returned to the United States after she married a man her father befriended while they both served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ferris' father had by then remarried and was raising two sons.

"When my grandfather told Ferris that he had a beautiful daughter living in Lebanon, the young sailor was interested," Pirro wrote in her book. "After the war ended he traveled to Lebanon, fell in love with my mother, Esther, and they eloped. He brought her home with him to America as his wife."

The couple settled in Scranton, Pa., where he ran a restaurant and was part-owner of a hotel. About five years later, they moved to Elmira, where Esther's father was living and where Leo Ferris worked for a time with his father-in-law selling mobile homes; he also owned and managed rental properties and served as director of the Chemung County Transit System.

Their first daughter, Mary Louise, who now lives in Tarrytown, was born in 1948; Jeanine was born three years later.

"Jeanine was quite the bookworm," said Shaw, the former neighbor. "You'd always see her on the back steps reading."

She took extra classes and completed Notre Dame High School after her junior year. She already knew she wanted to become a lawyer, a career choice she would later credit to the TV show "Perry Mason."

"I was in a rush," Pirro said. "I had a job to do, OK. I had a mission. I've been focused my whole life."

That focus is evident in her personal interactions — she looks people straight in the eye when talking to them and never appears distracted. Several years ago, she greeted a young visitor to her office by squatting down to the child's height and telling how she never let anything get in the way of her aspirations.

"You're a beautiful girl, and you can do anything you want in life," Pirro told the child.

But Pirro also has a temper that can flare in an instant, and she has lashed into reporters and stalked out of news conferences when the questions turned against her. Off the record, she can scold like a schoolmarm and swear like a longshoreman.

Mary Nelan Tucker, a high school classmate and now a teacher at Elmira's Southside High School, remembered Pirro as a "very hard worker, very bright." When asked if Pirro had any boyfriends, she said: "We were in a Catholic high school in the 1960s, boyfriends and girlfriends were not a top priority."

Leo Ferris died of cancer in July 1978, at age 54. Esther Ferris, who has recently been battling cancer, remained in Elmira, in a small, ranch-style house that she and her husband bought after the Che-mung River flooded in 1972 and damaged their original home.

After high school, Pirro attended Corning Community College, then left Elmira for the University of Buffalo and Albany Law School.

It was at law school that she met fellow student Albert Pirro Jr. of Mount Vernon while he was working at the school bookstore. The couple began dating, and in 1975 they married and moved to Harrison. She was hired as a Westchester assistant district attorney; he began working as a lawyer specializing in real estate and municipal matters.

Over time, the Pirros would become partners not only in raising a family, but also in establishing themselves as a political force in Westchester. Albert Pirro became an influential figure in Republican circles, tapping into his ever-growing list of clients to provide funds for GOP causes and candidates, including his wife.

In 1978, she was chosen by District Attorney Carl Vergari, a Republican, to lead a fledgling unit dedicated to prosecuting domestic violence and child abuse, at a time when such crimes were rarely handled in criminal court. The job made Pirro a favorite of women's advocates and marked the first turning point of her career.

"She was an incredible partner," said Charlotte Watson, a Democrat who ran the shelter called My Sisters' Place from 1986 until 1999 and who is now the state refugee coordinator.

"I think Jeanine is, as my grandmother would say, a 'right-is-right and a wrong-is-wrong type of person,' " Watson said. "If you do somebody wrong, if you harm somebody, you should have to pay a price."

Pirro began grabbing headlines prosecuting heart-wrenching cases of cruelty toward women and children. She soon became a darling of local reporters, who could always count on a story from her on an otherwise slow news day.

One of her biggest victories came with the 1988 murder conviction of Michael Linton, who hunted down his wife after she fled his beatings, broke into her apartment, shot her 13 times and stuffed her body in the oven. The case netted her national attention in Rolling Stone magazine, where she was described as "a snappy dresser with a great pair of legs, a lush mop of curly black hair, scarlet nails painted to match her bee-stung lips and a penchant for ankle bracelets — a real looker. ... Pirro's appearance flouts expectations on such a grand scale, it's hard to believe her flamboyance isn't, at least in part, a deliberate message: Just because a woman is a hot tamale, buster, doesn't give you any rights to mess with her."

But the media's adoration wasn't shared by all her colleagues in the District Attorney's Office.

Former Westchester prosecutor Bruce Bendish, who was chief of the Homicide Division when Pirro headed the domestic violence bureau and is now a criminal-defense lawyer, said Pirro was known around the office for assigning herself the easier, high-profile cases while pawning off the tougher ones on her subordinates.

"Any idea that Jeanine is a team player is far, far from accurate," Bendish said. "It was always the impression in the D.A.'s Office that she wanted everybody else to do the work, and then when everything was tied up in a little package, she'd all of a sudden appear and be there for the end result."

When she told The New Yorker magazine in 1997 that Vergari established the domestic violence bureau after she persuaded him to bid for the funds and let her run the bureau when he got them, the normally taciturn Vergari fired back with an angry letter that accused Pirro of spreading "falsehoods made for the purpose of self-aggrandizement."

The retired district attorney did not return calls seeking comment, though at the time he said he'd long been irked that Pirro described herself as "founder" of the unit, and kept quiet only to avoid causing political damage to a fellow Republican.

Her former second-in-command, Clement Patti Jr., defended her leadership and professionalism.

"She is a workaholic," he said. "As a result, if you liked to work and you were a workaholic, it was a fun place to be. If you didn't like to work, it was not the place to be."

Pirro's job satisfaction hasn't always been complemented by a happy home life. The first five years of her marriage were "lonely" ones because her husband "was very driven to become successful and spent much time out of the home," according to medical records compiled after he spent two months in a psychiatric hospital in 1986, a little more than a year after the birth of the couple's first child, Cristine. Their son, Alexander, was born in 1989.

Al Pirro, whom his wife described as "quiet, moody and irritable," "took no pleasure in her fame," according to the records. In 1983, he had two extramarital affairs, one with a woman working at his law firm and another with a woman who later claimed he fathered her child. That allegation led to years of litigation in which Al Pirro denied paternity but eventually was proven the father through DNA testing.

During an angry confrontation over his cheating, Pirro slapped her husband and threw him out of their home. He lived out of a suitcase for several days before she took him back; about two weeks later, he was admitted to Fair Oaks Hospital in Fair Oaks, N.J., for treatment of depression with thoughts of suicide and death.

"She reflected, however, that she may have had a role in the affairs, citing (Al's) seeming discomfort with her fame and also the financial pressure she believed that she has put on him," the records said. "She also described her manner as quite domineering, reflecting that this may have alienated (Al) at times."

The records — which were given to a federal judge so Al Pirro could get alcohol-abuse treatment and shave a year off his prison term for tax fraud — also revealed that Al Pirro occasionally used cocaine during the early 1980s, while his wife was a prosecutor. At the time the records became public, Jeanine Pirro said she had been unaware of her husband's illegal drug use.

"I am proud of my family," she told The Journal News last month. "I have tried extremely hard to keep my family together. And family has been at the core of my career."

Upon his release from Fair Oaks, Al Pirro returned to work with a vengeance, and soon became one of the county's most influential real estate lawyers, with the ability to secure government approval for major projects across Westchester on behalf of developers who included Donald Trump.

In her book, Jeanine Pirro described being ambivalent when asked to run for a seat on the Westchester County Court, but said she agreed after various advocacy groups urged her to do so. She won a landslide victory in 1990, and soon became known throughout the courthouse for dramatic and scathing remarks from the bench, as when she told a convicted murderer: "If there would be a death penalty in New York state, I would be more than happy to impose it in this case."

Colavita, who was county Republican chairman at the time, remembers Pirro's judicial quest differently. He wondered if her run was intended to help fade the controversy that doomed her short-lived bid for lieutenant governor.

"I think someone advised her that if she ever wanted to run for D.A. or anything else, she had better cleanse herself by running for a judgeship," Colavita said. "Judicial races in a county like Westchester just did not require that kind of scrutiny. Nobody in that campaign made an issue of her husband's client list."

In 1993, after three years on the bench, Pirro's name floated quickly when Vergari announced he would not seek re-election as district attorney. In a foreshadowing of controversies to come, she used a public-access cable TV show to admit that her family had failed to pay Social Security taxes for its household help, a problem that had just torpedoed Zoe Baird's nomination by President Clinton for U.S. attorney general.

Pirro survived that scandal and was easily elected the county's first female district attorney, but the honeymoon was short-lived. A consensus developed among some Westchester police chiefs that she was not much of a team player. She wanted her office to have its own "major case squad" to investigate serious crimes for local police; her press conferences on big arrests left some wondering if police were involved at all.

And when a deranged gunman killed Eastchester Police Officer Michael Frey in 1996, Pirro infuriated many law-enforcement officials by declaring on live television that the case would be eligible for the death penalty — before anyone knew that the killer had taken his own life inside the house where he was barricaded.

Gradually, she made more of an effort to share the spotlight, inviting police officials to speak at her news conferences and crediting the work their officers did.

"She was never the one to step out of the spotlight, but she wasn't pushing anyone out of the way anymore to get into it," said Greenburgh Police Chief John Kapica.

When the O.J. Simpson murder case placed a premium on telegenic talking heads a decade ago, Pirro quickly joined their ranks, sometimes making three appearances a day. As she rubbed shoulders with celebrities, their celebrity rubbed off on her: In 1997 she made People magazine's list of "50 Most Beautiful People."

She was also among the first prosecutors to recognize the potential abuse of the Internet as a tool for sex offenders to target underage victims, and she initiated a high-profile sting operation that to date has snared more than 100 suspects, including a priest, a high school wrestling coach, a Yonkers city official and the headmaster of an exclusive prep school.

But in 1999, years of behind-the-scene troubles emerged when Al Pirro and his younger brother, accountant Anthony Pirro, were indicted in a million-dollar federal tax scheme to illegally deduct lavish personal spending by Al and Jeanine Pirro as expenses of Al Pirro's various businesses.

Months of pretrial motions and weeks of trial testimony pulled back the curtain on the couple's extravagant lifestyle, including lavish furnishings for their home, designer clothing and a custom pen for their pet pigs.

The case ended in convictions, and although Jeanine Pirro was not charged, questions emerged over what she knew about her husband's crimes, and her political future appeared more in doubt than ever. With her husband serving his 29-month sentence in a Florida prison camp, Pirro mounted her second re-election bid against an unknown former Bronx prosecutor, Tony Castro, who hammered her over what he called her ethical lapses tied to her husband's conviction. Even after receiving only token support from county Democrats, Castro came within six points of Pirro on Election Day. It was her weakest showing at the polls.

If any doubts remained that Pirro's political armor was dented, they dissolved with the 2002 death of a popular high school athlete after an underage beer bash at a home in her Harrison neighborhood. Dozens of teens had tried to cover up their partying instead of seeking help for Robert Viscome when he was knocked into a coma during a drunken confrontation.

When a grand jury voted not to file charges, allegations flew that Pirro was covering up for the homeowners, who were friends and political supporters. Even after a second grand jury charged Patrick Rukaj, the son of a Lotto millionaire imprisoned for murder, protesters hounded Pirro at book signings after publication of her memoir later that year.

Although Pirro survived her first election after Al Pirro's conviction, conventional wisdom held that district attorney was all she could hope for.

Jeanine Pirro did not agree.

"She never thought that that incident wrecked her," said Republican strategist and family friend Michael Edelman. "She truly believes that spouses stand on their own, whether it involves males or females."

As Al Pirro's name receded from the headlines, Jeanine Pirro pressed on with her work as district attorney. She began to rebuild her celebrity persona. She returned to the cable news programs and wrote her book, depicting herself as a tireless advocate for victims.

Throughout, she remained active politically, appearing at Republican gatherings across the state and lobbying in Albany for new crime bills, and the talk was that Pirro would run for state attorney general in 2006. But Stephen Minarik, the newly elected state GOP chairman, had a different idea. Minarik wanted Pirro to challenge Clinton, whose campaign has consistently declined to discuss Pirro's candidacy.

"When I became state chairman, one of the things people talked to me about was to make sure that we got on board early with our candidates," he said. "We started looking around, talking with contributors, and I said 'Hey, I kind of like Jeanine Pirro.' "

She had enough name recognition to take on Clinton, he said, plus a strong law-enforcement background and moderate views on issues like abortion and gun control that could attract support from independents and crossover Democrats.

Minarik said he considered Al Pirro's history when reviewing Jeanine Pirro's potential.

"Of course, I thought about that," Minarik said. "But I kind of treat people for what they do on their own."

Pirro said the campaign was about her and her 30-year record.

"A record that I'm proud of, an outstanding record for the people of New York," she said. "My husband paid the price for what he did, and he continues to do so every day, but my name is on this ballot, no one else."

When asked about her relationship with her husband now, Pirro angrily refused to answer, calling the question "out of line."

According to a Quinnipiac poll last month, about 4 of 5 voters said neither Pirro's relationship with her husband, nor Clinton's with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, would affect their votes.

But as in earlier years, Al Pirro's shadow hangs over Jeanine Pirro's plans for 2006. As the buzz of a Pirro-for-Senate campaign began spreading this spring, new allegations surfaced of connections between Al Pirro and the mob. FBI recordings caught a reputed capo in the Gambino crime family, Gregory DePalma of Scarsdale, bragging that another mob associate told him the prosecutor's husband revealed information about a pending investigation. Al Pirro denied it, calling DePalma a "buffoon."

"It's just the rantings of an old mobster," Jeanine Pirro said during her interview.

And her campaign has been marred by early missteps, including a widely ridiculed 32-second pause during her kickoff speech.

Her decision to challenge Clinton also has confounded some people close to Pirro, who think the contest is all but unwinnable. They think she is better suited for a law-enforcement post like attorney general.

"It was a perfect match, and it was the race she had been talking about for years," Edelman said. "And it was the race other people had been talking about for years."

But Pirro said the promise of improving lives across the state by working in Washington would motivate her just as much as fighting for victims in the courtroom.

"Jobs, jobs! The people of upstate New York, they're trying to make a living, they're trying to make ends meet," she said. "People are trying to get food or medication, and they're eating cat food. I can get passionate. I am passionate about it."

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