The family of Mark Fisher also came to doubt the veracity of the case presented by the Brooklyn district attorney. Fisher’s mother, Nancy, was particularly vocal. A devout Catholic from Colombia who immigrated to the United States, Nancy publicly charged that D.A. Hynes had shied away from going after all the parties who played a role in her son’s slaying. In their book on the case, authors Mladinich and Benson write that Nancy believed that “some of those responsible for her son’s death were not prosecuted because they had political connections and were able to pull strings.” In October 2006, on the third anniversary of their son’s death, the Fishers filed a civil lawsuit against Giuca and Russo, and reportedly claimed that Hynes had held back crucial information from the couple in the course of investigating Mark’s murder. “I won’t go away until I get answers,” Nancy told the New York Post. “I know that, and Hynes knows that.” At the time, District Attorney’s Office spokesman Jerry Schmetterer said, “It is totally inaccurate to say that there’s any information that they’ve asked for that we haven’t shared. The D.A. and the prosecutor have both said that if any information developed that would indicate that there were more suspects in this murder, we would move very aggressively.” (The lawsuit is ongoing.)

The New York Post ran a banner headline: “GRIDDER SLAIN TO BOOST GANG’S REP.”

Watching Nancy in the courtroom during the trial, Doreen had thought about what her own mother had gone through when Doreen’s brother Brian was murdered, in Park Slope in 1980. Brian was standing on a corner outside a bar at four a.m. when someone jumped him and stabbed him. He made it home, only to collapse in the hallway of the house. He died at the hospital an hour later. “My mother was never the same,” says Doreen. “When I remember that pain in my mother, I thought, If my John killed someone’s son, he should be in jail forever.”

Doreen started having a recurring nightmare. “I’ve had this dream maybe 50 times,” she says. “[There’s] the dreaded knock on the door. I’m told my son is dead, and I feel my stomach collapse and the blood drain from my body.” In the dream, Mark Fisher transforms into her son Matthew, and Matthew transforms into her brother Brian, and Brian becomes her son John. She wakes up and remembers it’s not her son who is gone, but Nancy Fisher’s. “And when I wake like this I feel selfish for being grateful my sons are still here,” she says. “I sit up in the bed and I wake Frank and he rolls over and puts his arms around me and asks if it was that dream again. I say, ‘Yes,’ and he asks what can he do, and I say, ‘Nothing.’ I know Nancy Fisher’s pain so well, and there is nothing I can do, nothing.”

When John Giuca was hauled away to serve his sentence, he asked his mother, “Mom, what are they doing to me?” Doreen’s life went into a tailspin. She smashed up her bedroom. Frank thought she was having a nervous breakdown. The day of Giuca’s conviction, his half-brother, Matthew, disappeared for three days, sleeping on park benches. Frank held the family together, going to work every day. Doreen cried herself to sleep, sometimes burrowing in her bed until dark, when she’d emerge to make dinner for Frank. Every other weekend, she would travel eight hours by bus to see her son at the Upstate Correctional Facility, near the Canadian border.

Giuca went in thin, 135 pounds, weak and tired and scared. The food was “unrecognizable slop, inedible,” he now says. “They fed you through a slot in the cell.” The drinking water came out rust-brown, sometimes viscous. The showers were freezing. Only three hours a day of recreation were allowed. He double-bunked with a coke-addict burglar, who was doing 12 to life. “A good guy,” Giuca recalls. “I was lucky.” Another friend was stabbed, but survived the attack. Though Giuca’s jailhouse world was racially polarized and tense, he managed to stay out of trouble, landing a job in the prison library, working 30 hours a week and making $7 every two weeks, which was considered generous. He missed his mother’s cooking. She tried to compensate, bringing him canned tuna, green tea, grape juice, and as much fruit as the guards would allow, though he claims a good amount was pilfered along the way. (He has since been moved to a less severe environment at Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Dutchess County, New York.)

The Sting

It went like this for a long time, Doreen in a daze, doing what needed to be done and feeling hopeless. Then, one day in early 2006, Doreen awoke from her stupor. The jurors, she told herself. Find something on the jurors. It was a desperate thought. She’d watched television cop shows: if you prove a juror engaged in misconduct, it could overturn the case. She obtained the jury sheet, which listed the names and neighborhoods of the jurors. She got her hands on a transcript of the voir dire, the pre-trial review of potential jurors’ fitness to serve on a case. She even managed, through a contact, to come up with a list of some of the jurors’ addresses. And so it began. She called her mission “the Sting.”