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Onondaga county District Attorney William Fitzpatrick in 2013, talking about the state Moreland Commission on Public Corruption, for which he served as a co-chair.

(Gary Walts | gwalts@syracuse.com)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick's staff deleted videos from a camera they seized from a man who'd filmed Fitzpatrick's speech at an office Christmas party, according to the man.

A DA's investigator then took the camera to the county crime lab and made sure all the videos were gone, a lab report says.

Mark Angiolillo, who was hired by the DA's office to play piano at the private party on Dec. 15, 2011, said he started filming Fitzpatrick's speech because he thought it was funny.

Three or four members of the DA's office approached Angiolillo and one of them told him to hand over his video camera, he said.

Angiolillo said then-Assistant District Attorney Clifton Carden told him, "If you don't give it up, we could have you thrown out the window."



"I said, 'Are you serious?'" Angiolillo said.

"Yeah -- you got to give it up. It's got to be confiscated," Angiolillo says Carden told him.

The seizure of Angiolillo's camera prompted an investigation by Syracuse police. A deputy police chief tried unsuccessfully for two years to persuade federal and state prosecutors to file criminal charges against employees of the DA's office.

Fitzpatrick acknowledges deletions

Contacted by Syracuse.com, Fitzpatrick didn't answer whether his staff seized Angiolillo's phone and camera, but acknowledged he's aware videos were deleted from the camera.

Fitzpatrick offered no explanation for why his staff seized the camera. He defended the deletions by saying they were inappropriate videos of Angiolillo and others that were "criminal offenses."

The DA wouldn't explain why his staff would bring the evidence of a crime to the lab and delete the evidence.

Angiolillo wasn't charged with any crimes.

The private party was in an upstairs area of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Between 60 and 70 people were there, Angiolillo said.

When Carden told Angiolillo to turn over the camera, Carden was accompanied by First Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Trunfio, Assistant District Attorney Jeremy Cali and DA's Investigator Tim McCarthy, according to a police report.

Angiolillo said the DA's employees took his camera and phone into another room. They came back five minutes later and handed him his phone. But they said they were taking the video camera - a Sony Bloggie touch camera -- with them and keeping it overnight, he said.

McCarthy took the camera to the Onondaga County crime lab the day after the party, according to a report written by a crime lab employee.

"Tim McCarthy showed up asking if I could help him make sure all files (pictures/movies) were deleted from a Sony Bloggie camera," said the report, which Syracuse.com obtained under the state's Freedom of Information Law.

The employee who wrote the report said he plugged the camera into a device to see if all videos had been deleted, even from the internal memory, which they had.

'He's going through my life'

When Angiolillo went to the DA's office the day after the party, McCarthy interrogated him for 45 minutes, Angiolillo said.

McCarthy asked him if someone had put him up to taking the video, Angiolillo said. Angiolillo said no.

During the interrogation, McCarthy mentioned a domestic dispute case between Angiolillo and his ex-wife 18 years earlier, Angiolillo said.

"I'm thinking, what's that got to do with what I just did?" Angiolillo asked. "He's going through my life."

McCarthy questioned him about videos he'd found on the camera of young women walking down the street, and of a dog outside a home in Oswego, Angiolillo said.

When McCarthy handed him the video camera, it had been wiped clean of all the videos Angilillo had taken over the previous six weeks, Angiolillo said.

"He said something about a felony charge, but the man's willing to forget about it," Angiolillo said.

"Felony charge?" Angiolillo asked.

McCarthy advised him to let it drop, Angiolillo said.

DA bashes police

Two weeks after the party, a "confidential and reliable source" reported the incident to Syracuse Police Deputy Chief Shawn Broton, according to a police report.

The source was at the time an assistant district attorney, according to a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The unidentified assistant DA told Broton in 2011 that Trunfio had informed Fitzpatrick the day after the party about confiscating Angiolillo's phone and having it "scrubbed" of all videos, according to a police report.

Fitzpatrick ripped Broton for wasting money investigating the incident.

Broton wrote five reports about his efforts to investigate the camera seizure in the two years following the party.

Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler, shown in a Jan. 7, 2014 file photo, defends his department's investigation of Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick's staff over its seizure of a man's video camera and the deletion of a video of Fitzpatrick giving a speech at a Christmas party.

Fitzpatrick criticized him for "this idiotic, three-and-a-half-year, totally wasted effort to investigate nothing, at unknown expense to the taxpayers..."

Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler said the investigation is open. Someone could've been charged with official misconduct, fourth-degree grand larceny for stealing Angiolillo's camera, or even robbery, Fowler said.

"He was left to believe that he had no choice but to give up his camera and that if he didn't there were some express consequences -- which was to subject him to bodily harm by throwing him out a window," Fowler said.

Police seek a prosecutor

He said he decided an outside agency was needed to decide whether to charge someone because of the ongoing rift between his department and the DA's office.

At the time of the party, the DA's office and the Syracuse Police Department were in a public feud over an investigation of child-molesting allegations against former Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine. The hostility between the two agencies has been broiling ever since.

In January 2012, Broton and Fowler asked the U.S. Attorney's Office to launch a criminal investigation into the seized camera, but the federal prosecutors referred them to the FBI, according to police reports.

Between February and May 2012, an FBI agent met with the assistant DA who'd contacted Syracuse police, the reports said. But the agency determined that no federal laws were broken, the reports said.

In the summer of 2012, Broton took the case to the state police, state Attorney General's Office and the state Inspector General's Office, the police reports said. None of the agencies chose to investigate, the reports said.

No one from the FBI or any state agencies interviewed Angiolillo, Angiolillo said.

Two Syracuse police detectives asked not to do the investigation because they had to work with the DA's office, the police reports said.

"The fact that in (Broton's) quixotic quest to embarrass the DA's Office, 5 different agencies and 2 of his own detectives flatly rejected any investigation into this matter is the real story here," Fitzpatrick said in his email to Syracuse.com.

He wrote in the email that Broton's police reports in the case were "replete with lies, inaccuracies and mistakes." The allegations were "all based upon hearsay and allegations from a fired disgruntled employee," Fitzpatrick wrote.

Fitzpatrick did not respond when asked to be more specific about the alleged lies in Broton's reports.

"Not that I should have to explain, but in making private remarks to members of my office at a Christmas party, an audience consisting of men, women and youngsters, I thanked them for their service to the people of Onondaga County," Fitzpatrick wrote. "At no time were the remarks remotely 'off color.'"

He did not answer questions about whether his staff took Angiolillo's camera to the crime lab.

County Executive Joanie Mahoney's office is reviewing the crime lab's role in deleting Angiolillo's videos, her spokesman said.

McCarthy would not comment. Trunfio, Cali and Carden did not respond to requests for an interview.

Broton declined to comment.

Police chief cites warrantless search

Syracuse civil rights lawyer Terrance Hoffmann, speaking hypothetically, said someone in Angiolillo's position might have had a claim that his civil rights were violated when the DA's office seized his phone. But the incident happened too long ago for him to sue -- beyond the three-year statute of limitations, Hoffmann said.

If what was reported to Hoffmann were true, the actions of the DA's office employees could amount to robbery because they took Angiolillo's camera under threat of force, Hoffmann said.

Under the reported circumstances, they appeared to have used their status as law enforcement officers for a purpose unrelated to law enforcement, which could constitute another violation of the law, Hoffmann said.

Fowler said a prosecutor should present the case to a grand jury.

"The man was subjected to the taking of his property, a warrantless search of that property, an interrogation, and a procedure conducted on his property at the crime lab," Fowler said. "It's an abuse of power the way this man was accosted, and beyond that."

Angiolillo said he believes the DA's office abused its authority.

"Definitely," he said. "They took it from me. That's theft."

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