Gabriel Rom

grom@lohud.com

The paper trail in the federal criminal trial of Ramapo Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence is deep. More than 205,000 documents deep.

Over the next 90 days defense attorneys for St. Lawrence and Aaron Troodler, the former executive director of the Ramapo Local Development Corporation, will scour over troves of documents from the prosecution — about two terabytes of data — as part of a pre-trial fact-finding process.

How the lawyers will avoid getting lost in that mountain of data, which has an actual page count much higher than 205,000, was the focus of a short but substantive hearing Thursday at White Plains Federal Court.

The bulk of the hearing was spent hammering out the details of an electronic database for both counsels. Troodler's lawyer, Susan Wolf, also had around half a terabyte of data to give to the prosecution.

"That sounds like a lot," Judge Cathy Seibel said.

St. Lawrence's lawyer, Patrick Burke, requested that Judge Seibel give the counsels close to 120 days to go through the material, but the judge denied the request and set the next trial date for Thursday, July 21 at 4:30 p.m., where she said any motions relating to the documents could be addressed.

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Both St. Lawrence and Troodler pleaded not guilty last Friday to 22 charges of federal securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges for allegedly selling $150 million in municipal bonds based on fabricated town financial documents.

Federal prosecutors are also in possession of ten boxes of documents and hard drives seized in May 2013 from Ramapo Town Hall offices by FBI agents and Rockland District Attorney's Office detectives. Records from the finance department and the offices of the supervisor, town attorney and tax departments were seized.

St. Lawrence and Troodler refused to comment after the hearing.

Twitter: @GabrielRom1