Joe Lally fends off lawyers
As 4 p.m. neared, U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf looked at Sal DiMasi’s lawyer, Billy Cintolo, and then looked at the clock.
“Mr. Cintolo, how much longer do you anticipate?” Wolf asked.
“I’m tired, judge,” Billy sighed, “it’s been a long day.”
Billy was the last of three defense lawyers to take on the feds’ unflappable star witness, ex-Cognos software salesman Joe Lally, in a kind of marathon sumo wrestling match.
And none of these skilled lawyers pinned Lally yesterday.
“This guy could sell ice to the Eskimos,” one courtroom observer said. And judging from his two days on the witness stand, it’s clear Joe Lally could hustle the Eskimos on a deal for ice.
Yesterday was spent dredging up the huge flaws of this Willy Loman on steroids — a beefy guy with outsized appetites for gambling, the high life and … multi-million-dollar software deals with state agencies across the country.
Lally made a ton of money doing it. And he lost a ton of money to the Mashantucket Pequot tribe at Foxwoods, along with various bookies who took his sports bets and cashed Joe’s huge checks in offshore banks.
The highlight of yesterday’s theater came when Tom Drechsler, defending Lally’s former pal and uber lobbyist, Richard “Dickie” McDonough, kept lashing out about all those checks to the bookies.
Photo: Josh Reynolds for the BOSTON GLOBE
In the middle of Drechsler’s tirade, Lally pointed out that he was introduced to one of those bookmakers by his client, Dickie McDonough.
The courtroom erupted in laughter and Drechsler, ever the spitfire, replied: “Oh, and I suppose you’re going to tell us that Dick McDonough told you what kind of car to drive.”
“Actually,” Lally said, “he did.”
That was probably the $75,000 Mercedes that Lally said he had to forfeit back to Herb Chambers.
For all of his intensity, Tommy Drechsler did not challenge Lally about the veracity of the incredible scene he described on Wednesday. The Cognos deal had collapsed and a paranoid Dickie McDonough insisted on a mutual frisk for hidden microphones in the basement of Lally’s home.
Drechsler left that alone.
At the end of yesterday’s lunch break, Drechsler looked just like Billy Cintolo. “I’m tired,” he said in the outside corridor.
The lawyers for Sal DiMasi, his accountant, Richard Vitale, and Dickie McDonough all tried to pick apart the terms of the deal Lally made with the feds.
But they couldn’t erase the fact that before this flawed huckster became a “cooperating witness” against them, he had invited Sal and Dickie to his second wedding.
And they came. The feds have the wedding video.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1339282
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