After a second grueling day of deliberation resulted in a hung jury Tuesday, federal District Court Judge Curtis Gomez declared a mistrial in the high-profile case of two VIPD officers accused of extorting $5,000 from a known criminal in 2008.
Gomez said that if prosecutors don’t drop charges, the case will be retried as early as Jan. 4.
Capt. Enrique Saldana, a 22-year police veteran who had been chief of all VIPD detectives before he was arrested in August, faces six federal and four local charges ranging from extortion to obstructing justice, as do his alleged accomplices, VIPD Sgt. George Greene and St. Croix resident Louis Roldan.
As he left the courtroom Tuesday, Saldana seemed frustrated and tired but calm. “It’s some relief, for now,” Saldana said, soft-spoken and straight-faced as he exited with his wife.
“But I think about my family a lot,” he said in a near whisper. “This has been hard on them.”
During testimony last week, federal prosecutors erected a wall of evidence against the three, including video footage showing Greene and Roldan accepting a $5,000 payoff from 51-year-old Richard Motta. Prosecutors say it was a bribe paid in exchange for them returning evidence they failed to report and for promising not to turn fake drugs Motta had possessed over to federal agents that might have led to federal drug charges.
The jury asked to see that tape one last time Tuesday, sending the court into another long recess around noon as they replayed the scene.
All day, families and friends of the defendants milled around outside the courtroom on one end, while federal agents hung out on the other. The standoff only highlighted the long-standing and deepening feud between federal and local law enforcement officers that provided the strong undercurrent of the entire trial.
Prosecutors, who say Saldana, Greene and Roldan extorted the $5,000 from an easy target —– a long-time and well-known criminal from St. Croix —- will now have only a few weeks over the holidays to figure out why their case was not a slam dunk. The biggest challenge, some federal agents have said, is making evidence rank higher to a jury than local loyalties and personal feelings about “the feds.”
Confronted with the evidence, the three defense attorneys largely chalked up the officers’ failure to log evidence (including cash and possible drugs) and the failure to log the required reports during a drug investigation to low standards at the VIPD. They say Saldana, Greene and Roldan were merely playing bad cop while conducting an investigation that they say implicated Motta in a murder-for-hire scheme. That plot was never really spelled out in court as the defense’s attempts were frustrated by legal rules on hearsay evidence. They also failed to explain why the trio never turned in the $5,000 bribe as evidence or why they never turned in the kilo of fake cocaine that started the snowballing chain of events in December 2008.
The new trial in January “is going to be the same, just a different jury,” said attorney Joseph DiRuzzo, assistant to Saldana’s defense attorney, Darren John-Baptiste.
As the jury was dismissed at around 5 p.m. Tuesday, jurors remained vigilantly tight-lipped about the case.
When asked what hung them up, one of the three male jurors said, “I don’t think we should address that. This trial is still going.”
“This was not an easy case for the government,” said Roldan’s attorney, George Hodge, who pointed to the weakness of the prosecution’s main witness, Motta —- a self-described gangster and convict.
“Now they have to prepare all over again,” he said. “And they have to find Motta,” he said, chuckling to himself.
The defendants all left the courtroom looking frustrated Tuesday. Their families looked confused. “It’s not done,” Greene said as he walked away with his family.
“We’ll just have to wait till January and start all over again,” Saldana said, calming his wife as she berated a Source reporter for earlier talking with federal agents.
“We hoped it would all be over today,” he said.
