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By Elie Honig

Dear Reader,

I wonder whether Joel Greenberg will be just too much. Too much for a jury to take, too much for a jury to bear, too much for a jury to accept.  

I can still remember the moment it happened to one of my cooperating witnesses: John Alite.  

Alite had spent the better part of two decades as a lethal enforcer for the Gambino organized crime family, and he was our star witness in the case against John Gotti, Jr. Alite had punched out and baseball-batted (he used this phrase as a verb: baseball-batted) and shot so many people that it took us months to work it all out. In the end, he couldn’t even recall exactly how many people he had shot, so we estimated it at mid-thirties (most of them non-lethal; Alite developed a trademark of shooting his victims in the legs and butt to send a “message” — though he also did kill or arrange the killings of three victims). So, yeah: bad guy. 

None of that is what pushed the jury over the edge, however. It was the story of the contractor who Alite had hired to do work on his house while Alite was away on vacation. A neighbor later reported to Alite that, one night, he looked through a window, into Alite’s home, and saw the contractor having sex with a woman on Alite’s bed. Alite — well, he didn’t appreciate that.  

So, Alite testified to the jury, he tied up his trained attack dog on a leash in his garage. He then lured the contractor into the garage and, at gunpoint, zip-tied him to a chair that was just inches beyond the leashed dog’s reach. Alite left the contractor there, within breathing distance of the frenzied dog, for hours. We’re talking inventive, sadistic torture here (for the contractor and for the dog, really). It got worse. Alite then untied the contractor and marched him, still at gunpoint, to a small pond behind the house. Alite made the contractor walk into the frigid, waist-deep water, and fired shots as the contractor flailed and splashed for his life. Alite didn’t hit the contractor with any shots — he never meant to — but again: inventive, sadistic torture.  

If your stomach is turning — so too, was the jury’s. It was just too much. The jury had listened carefully to Alite throughout his testimony leading up to that point. I’m not saying they loved him, but they seemed attentive. But as he told this sordid tale of the dog and the pond, I could feel the jury turn off. I saw at least one juror simply stop taking notes. They likely didn’t disbelieve Alite — why would he make up such horrible stories about himself? — but it just got to a point where it was more than they could bear.

This is rare, even for cooperators — all of whom are, by definition, confessed criminals. I’ve called plenty of cooperators who have committed murders, robberies, extortions, virtually every crime in the book, and juries generally accept their testimony in the end. But sometimes, it’s just too much.

Which brings us to Greenberg. If I’m the prosecutor handling the Greenberg case, and whatever other cases may come out of his cooperation — and, rest assured, there will be others — this is my biggest concern: that his conduct might be just too outrageous for a jury to bear.    

I’ve seen some wild rap sheets — remember, I used to prosecute professional criminals who spent their entire careers, such as they were, in the mob — but I’ve never seen an array of crimes quite as grotesque, varied, and pathological as Greenberg’s. The most serious charge to which Greenberg has now pled guilty is sex trafficking of a minor. That’s about as heinous a starting point as one can imagine. Greenberg has now admitted that he paid to transport a minor across state lines for sex, and he introduced “other men” who engaged in “commercial sex acts” with the minor. I’ve put murderers on the stand, but this feels like an even tougher sell, in a sense. I could always tell a jury, “Yes, he’s a killer.  He has admitted that. And he killed with, and for, the mob, for this defendant.” In a sense, that’s more palatable than sexual abuse of a minor, particularly if Greenberg himself was the primary driver of the operation.  

And that’s just one of many crimes that Greenberg has now admitted. He also engineered a scheme to steal drivers’ licenses and adopt false identities; a fraud involving complex cryptocurrency transactions; and a coordinated theft from a Covid relief fund. You have to hand it to Greenberg: the Covid fund was barely up and running before he found a way to rip it off.  

If that’s not enough to call into question Greenberg’s credibility, he also pled guilty to a federal stalking violation — which, when you dig into the facts, is even worse than it sounds. A Florida teacher filed paperwork to challenge Greenberg in an election (somehow, Greenberg had gotten himself elected as a local tax assessor, a position he promptly abused by committing the aforementioned crimes). Greenberg then engaged in a wild campaign to falsely accuse the teacher of being a pedophile. The irony and projectionism here are off the charts. So, too, are the possibilities for cross-examination: Greenberg falsely accused a person of being a pedophile for his own personal gain once before, so why wouldn’t he do it again?

How, then, does a prosecutor build a case based around Greenberg as a star witness? The answer, in a word: corroboration. Prosecutors are rightly obsessed with corroboration, with building independent evidentiary support for as much of a cooperator’s testimony as possible. Sometimes corroboration can be minor, incidental, but significant. If, for example, a prosecutor says he spoke on the phone frequently with the defendant, phone records can confirm that there were in fact a certain number of calls between the two during a certain time period. Other times, it can go to the heart of the issue in dispute. For example if a cooperator says that, in one of those calls, they discussed the very criminal scheme at issue, a wiretap recording of that call (if prosecutors are lucky enough to have one) could confirm exactly that.

Prosecutors do seem to understand that the need for corroboration of Greenberg is particularly acute. They conspicuously larded Greenberg’s plea papers with specific references to financial records, travel documents, phone records, texts, and other evidence that supports his testimony, almost as if to say, “We know he’s especially bad, but we’ve got the goods to back him up.”

Risk at trial should be, and logically is, a zero-sum game. One side “wins,” one side “loses,” and as one of those probabilities goes up, the other goes down. But here, it somehow seems the risks for both sides are elevated. Prosecutors face a chance that, even if they corroborate Greenberg’s every utterance, a jury — or, perhaps, a single juror — will simply turn on him. And any person who might be charged based on Greenberg’s testimony risks that a jury will put aside its visceral disgust, focus dispassionately on the evidence, and conclude that Greenberg, vile as he is, has come clean and is amply backed up.

Ultimately, then, the question about Greenberg might not be whether he tells the truth — it might be simply whether a jury can stomach the cold reality.

Stay Informed,

Elie

Elie Honig is the author of the forthcoming book, “Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department,” now available for pre-order.