” Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”

–Honore de Balzac

Jimmy Burke, former Suffolk County Police Commissioner, A.D.A. prosecutor Thalia Stavrides, Deputy District Attorney Emily Constant, and about 15 Suffolk County police as well as NYPD escorts invaded our home in February of 2009. They closed off the Holland Tunnel entry street and alerted my landlord, criminals who were operating a sex-trafficking operation (which I had reported to the Chair of Community Board #2) under the nose of the NYPD so they could witness the spectacle along with reporters from major newspapers. Including John Sutter from The Villager which has since been sold to the Schnepps empire. Sutter, of course, had just done a deal with the Russian mob to sell air rights for the new SoHo Hotel and was ecstatic that my publication, The SoHo Journal, was being destroyed. The DA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to turn me and my legitimate, but risky property investments — which were sabotaged by the Town of Southampton during the implosion of the greed and criminality of the banks during the Great Recession — into crimes, by perverting the laws that interpret what constitutes Grand Larceny. For a nefarious reason. The Town of Southampton helped along my Civil Death by telling my mostly poor tenants not to pay rent utilizing the Code Enforcement Police to handle the operation. If Affordable Housing was going to be provided, the Town of Southampton was going to provide it — or not. As long as the beneficiaries were white civil servant’s families.

Complaints were piling up on Southampton Town Supervisor Patrick Heaney’s desk from voters and retirees mainly from the Village of Hampton Bays where migrants were being forced to live in the woods due to neglect and the inhumanity of local politicians. The people renting my property through a local broker were getting new housing in this, the largest voting block in the Town. Somehow my plan, as a social worker and human being, to solve the Affordable Housing crisis was anathema to the Southampton politicians as well as the liberal elite hypocrites. It made them look bad. So they brought the problem being exacerbated by someone exposing the Town’s greed and racism — to the DA, Thomas Spota. He, too, was being exposed by my articles about corruption. I wrote about the Sentosa Nursing Home scandal, the Marty Tankleff prosecution championed by The Innocence Project and the pay-to-play judge stacking operation run by Spota and Frank McKay of the Independece Party. Feathers were being ruffled.

As this was occurring It was beginning to dawn on those in law enforcement in the Town of Southampton and in DA Spota’s office that something was going on with the proliferation of sex worker killings. Someone, or someones, were up to no good and the well-known misogyny was getting out of control. Perhaps, it was a cop. Maybe even someone Spota knew. He’d surrounded himself throughout his career with law enforcement and even his home existed among an enclave of police and sycophants. That the rampant misogyny was among one or maybe several actors — maybe even among law enforcement — seemed possible, especially since no progress was being made regarding the missing sex workers. Maybe this possibility was spilling over into serial murders. Was Gilgo becoming a known dumping ground for prostitutes?

Thus far there are two documentaries describing the absence of Spota’s investigating of these murders: Gone Girls and The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets — in addition to others about the girls themselves.

At that time, as an investigative journalist, social worker, and real estate investor in SoHo and the Hamptons, I’d written several articles, published a magazine, and had two blogs describing corruption and criminality in the Town of Southampton and in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office. I wrote several articles about Thomas Spota, the DA, his assistants, the Supervisor of the Town of Southampton, Patrick Heaney, its Code Enforcement apparatus, the Town Attorneys and Town Investigator David Betts, who, after being dropped by East Hampton due to a scandal, was offered the Southampton Republican Party Chairmanship. The current DA is also a member where my application to review the entire, fraudulent prosecution, was ignored until I simply withdrew it out of disgust over the continuing corruption.

Among my attorneys were Tom McVann, George Guldi and Ethan Ellner. Guldi was a legislator who knew where a lot of political bodies were already buried, including those from the Town of Southampton and the DAs office and who had made a run for DA himself. Naturally he’s now in Federal prison. Ellner, who already was a criminal unbeknownst to me at the time became a Rat for D.A. Spota and brought down Steve Levy, his friend and Suffolk County Executive, in order to buy a free pass out of prison. Although Ellner was already a criminal that never bothered Spota, like the Burke appointment which was shoved down Steve Bellone’s throat. Spota was always cozy with wiseguys and criminals in Suffolk County politics. Guldi is now in prison and Ellner disappeared once his mentors Thomas Spota and Detective Joseph Micelli extorted fake affidavits for the boss against me and went into hiding after extorting false confessions. McVann had been an A.D.A. under Harry O’Brien so he got nothing — zero — for being the Mastermind — which is what everyone should have gotten for not stealing but accepting money from from the criminal banks that destroyed the economy in 2009, like JPMorgan Chase.

But then, the Red Herring would not have distracted everyone. That was the point.

Among those whom I interviewed beginning in early in 2000 were local activists and politicians. I met with D.A. Robert Mortgenthau, Cy Vance and Eric Schneiderman and In the Hamptons I contacted political aspirants and interviewed law enforcement luminaries including Sheriff Vince DeMarco. Supervisor Heaney and Investigator Betts would not respond to my requests. The same was true of political operative Frank McKay, an associate of DA Thomas Spota, who together operated a pay-to-play judge picking scheme to solidify their power.

Stories began to seep out about a series of deaths involving sex workers while Spota was police counsel and began with the discovery of remains in the North Sea area of Southampton, a location where hunters unearthed the body of Sandra Costilla, 28, and where Town investigator Betts lives and has his private investigator business Columbo & Holmes. In 1996 partial remains of Karen Vergata, 34, a sex worker, were found on Fire Island but were not identified until 2022. Then, in 1997, partial remains of the unidentified woman they police called “Peaches” were discovered in West Hampstead and later identified as Tanya Jackson. Following this, in 2000, the skeletal remains of Valerie Mack, 24, were discovered in a wooded area in Manorville in the Hamptons. Jessica Taylor, 20, an escort, was also discovered there in 2003. Then, on July 9th in 2007 Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, a sex worker from Connecticut was discovered. On July 10, 2009, a few months after Spota began his Red Herring ploy against me, Melissa Barthelemy, a 24 year old sex worker, went missing on Long Island — and on December 11, 2010 her remains were discovered along Ocean Parkway.

On December 13, 2010 the remains of Costello, Brainard-Barnes and Waterman were discovered along Ocean Parkway as well. On May 1, 2010 Shannon Gilbert went missing in Oak Beach — Burke and Spota’s neighborhood — after making a 911 call that someone was after her and she ran off into the night. On June 6, 2010 Megan Waterman, a 22 year old sex worker, disappeared from her motel in Hauppauge — where the DA and Detectives have an office — after traveling from Maine. Amber Lynn Costello, 27, was last seen leaving her home in West Babylon for a sex work meeting on September 2, 2010.

It wasn’t until December 14, 2010 that SCPD Commissioner Richard Dormer announced that a serial killer was at work.

Brilliant work! So timely.

On January 2022 a new task force was announced by trhe D.A.s office to find the killer. D.A. Spota had dragged his feet for the entire time he was in office — including the time in the 1990’s when he was the lawyer for the Suffolk Country Police Department and later elected District Attorney and had James Burke placed as Police Commissioner.

Meanwhile, Guldi had made his opinion known that he suspected Spota had done nothing about the reported deaths and the apparent fact that a serial killer — using a favorite location for a few sexual predators — was at work. Among the possible predators the name of Jimmy Burke surfaced numerous times before, during, and after he was appointed the Police Commissioner, and was later picked up for having kiddy porn in his car and prosecuted for torturing suspect Christopher Loeb who had broken into Burke’s car and stolen the assorted debris. After 3 years in Federal prison and released Burke was again arrested for a sex crime in a Long Island park. You see a pattern here?

Given the fact that I and my family was prosecuted for attempting to solve the affordable housing problem in Southampton — where the politicians currently sit on more than $2 billion dollars basically extorted from NY City property buyers — via transfer taxes — (called the Preservation Fund) and exposing corruption, its no surprise that Spota needed to deflect attention away from Gilgo Beach and Burke and perhaps killers whom he knew personally.

The brazen criminal search of my apartment was only trumped by his invasion of my SoHo Journal publishing office a mile away, to which no one came to my aid that was both disappointing and illustrative of the fact that money buys justice. The Marion County Record in Kansas, for example, recently experienced a similar violation of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press and the Sheriff of that attack was prosecuted. Spota was prosecuted too and imprisoned but got nothing for my family’s gross violation and inconvenience supported by his prosector Stavrides, police and Town of Southampton politicians and Town Attorneys.

And as my wife described it, during the three hour search as she followed one Detective around and into our bedroom, past our sick children — he asked her “Are you afraid I’ll find something — she said, ‘No, I’m afraid you’ll steal something.”

Spota needed a distraction: A Red Herring.

So Spota decided to go after people who knew something, prosecute them, search for interviews and writings, deflect interest away from himself, his cronies, his assistants, his pals and deflect everyone from his incompetence and criminality after Brainard-Barnes was found but before Barthelemy was unearthed — because he knew what was coming down the road. He did nothing about the killings but made a 3 year splash prosecuting me and my family and spent a fortune keeping it in the so-called media. The Southampton Press not only printed anything Spota’s Goebbels-doppelganger Robert Clifford wrote, and provided every address of property I owned published along with a statement from Town Attorneys Joseph Lombardo who stated absurdly that “we’re not trying to put him (MacPherson) out iof business.”

Which, of course, was exactly what they were doing.

So Spota sent Detective Miceli and his goons to search my apartment and my publishing office, took my computers, records, interviews, and created a smokescreen in February of 2009. Then, Spota used his corrupt assistants and judges to extort a plea — before being sent to prison himself. I’d interviewed witnesses, judges, tenants, voters, informants, activists, criminals, and politicians — in and out of office. Spota needed my sources but never returned my political diaries or writing.

He had created a media event out of my legal real estate business which had been destroyed by the criminality of the banks and subsequent cover-up until the National Mortgage Settlement occurred — a $50 billion dollar deal which no one can now tell you about — or find the money. And Chase alone stole tens of thousands of dollars alone from me at the DAs direction. While I was doing time in prison for accepting CDO-generated money for collaterized mortgage, all of which were foreclosed upon thanks to the Town of Southampton seeking to get rid of poor tenants, Jamie Dimon was collecting $13 million dollar bonuses. The DA never found any of that $82 million dollars I supposedly stole because I had used it — to pay mortgages. Spota’s criminality went far beyond the mini-prosecution and the totally fictitious $50 million and then $82 million dollars. The Grand Larceny that never happened cost me nearly five years in prison.

This is how they get journalists.

But, now at least, one of the serial killers has been apprehended. And, the distraction is over. For now.

But not for my Civil Death. Even the Conviction Integrity Unit, operated by prosecutor Thalia Stavrides and current DA Gene Tierney continues the smell of fraud that started with Spota til this day with a cover-up. The DAs office refused to review a conviction that is pure criminality by that office. Spota now works in a law office after doing two years of a 5 year sentence, collects a $9000 a month pension, Social Security, and has $17 million in tbe bank according to Newsday.

If you’d like to know more about Burke and Spota read Jimmy the King.

Justice in the Town of Southampton and the DAs office is a continuing fraud.

Copyright: A Civil Death in the Hamptons. Soon to be published