RIVERHEAD, N.Y., Nov. 4 - The murder case against Daniel Pelosi, the Long Island electrician accused of murdering the multimillionaire R. Theodore Ammon, was already plenty bizarre, with tales of $300,000 hotel bills, secret surveillance systems and stolen human ashes.
But on Thursday, it entered the realm of the occult.
Mr. Pelosi's lawyer, Gerald Shargel, argued in court that members of Mr. Pelosi's family had turned on the suspect, testifying against him because they believed they had been cursed. They accused Mr. Ammon's estranged wife, Generosa, of being a witch, Mr. Shargel said. Ms. Ammon married Mr. Pelosi three months after her husband was fatally beaten in his East Hampton home in October 2001.
"The whole witchcraft story explains in exquisite detail that we're dealing with some unusual people," Mr. Shargel said outside State Supreme Court here.
The Ammons had been mired in a bitter divorce when Mr. Pelosi entered the picture, hired as a contractor to help renovate an Upper East Side town house where Ms. Ammon had planned to live with her two children. Mr. Pelosi and Ms. Ammon began an affair.
Many in Mr. Pelosi's family did not like Ms. Ammon and suspected that the marriage was one of Mr. Pelosi's "get-rich" schemes, family members have testified. But after Mr. Pelosi's older brother, James, a New York City police officer, died suddenly in March 2002, the family began to blame Ms. Ammon for the death, Mr. Shargel said.
Certain signs pointed to witchcraft, he said.
Some family members saw the face of a demon appear in a photo of Mr. Pelosi's dead brother, deep in the folds of an American flag in the backdrop, he said. And one of Mr. Pelosi's sisters saw a pair of Ms. Ammon's shoes beside a tree in a family member's backyard, he said, and took their presence to be a sign of witchcraft.
"The spell stuff starts as soon as the brother dies," Mr. Shargel said outside court. "The devil enters when she sees the shoes."
Mr. Shargel brought up the talk of witchcraft as Mr. Pelosi's sister Barbara Lukert testified that she had seen her brother at her home in Center Moriches hours before Mr. Ammon was thought to have been killed. When Mr. Shargel questioned Ms. Lukert about the demonic shoes, the prosecutor, Janet Albertson, cut in.
Ms. Albertson argued that Ms. Lukert could not testify about other family members' suspicions about Ms. Ammon having supernatural powers because of rules preventing hearsay testimony.
Mr. Shargel said that the stories show that Mr. Pelosi's family members, many of whom are prosecution witnesses, are biased against Mr. Pelosi.
A decision on whether the testimony would be allowed was expected on Monday.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/nyregion/05pelosi.html
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