Hard work is this judge’s chief conviction

Listen to this article

U.S. District Judge Charles Siragusa rises each day no later than 4:30 a.m., and works for several hours before going to the office.
This routine is invariable except on weekends when he gets up early to work, but does not go to the office, says Siragusa’s wife, Lisa. He then waits until the evening to resume work.
Siragusa always has risen this early. But he used to go right to the office. He would stay until long past sunset. Siragusa, 55, married late in life. He has changed his habits to accommodate a relatively new role as a husband and father. Family is important to him. He works hard at it.
“He is a very, very good husband, and the best father I’ve ever seen,” Lisa Siragusa says.
For the Siragusas, vacations and evenings out are almost always family affairs. Siragusa does not like to be separated from his family, his wife says.
Siragusa’s docket currently includes the Amico real estate fraud case. He also is presiding over an eight-defendant drug trial. Sandwiched between are the typical lesser criminal matters, prisoner complaints and other minutiae that take up a federal judge’s time.
A few weeks ago, he heard arguments in a trademark dispute between Mars Inc. and a South American candy maker whose discount-store brand might or might not infringe on Mars’ M&Ms trademark. He is trying to negotiate an out-of-court settlement.
Siragusa worked as a prosecutor before becoming a judge, spending 15 years in the Monroe County district attorney’s office. He joined the office after graduating from Union University’s Albany Law School in 1976. For a decade, Siragusa was first assistant district attorney.
Siragusa often worked from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m., says Howard Relin, Monroe County district attorney. In the late 1980s, when new security procedures kept the Hall of Justice locked until 6 a.m., Siragusa arranged for space at the adjacent Rochester city police headquarters. He would work there until the Hall of Justice opened.
Siragusa has been married twice. His first marriage-to a former prosecutor-was childless and brief. It ended in divorce in 1983, the year Siragusa was promoted to first assistant. Siragusa declines to speak about his first marriage. Relin does not see any way that Siragusa’s nearly obsessive devotion to his job did not figure in the breakup.
When Siragusa was a bachelor, he lived in a place on Blossom Road that Lisa Siragusa says generously could be described as sparsely furnished. Her husband is not interested in material possessions.

‘Brilliant trial attorney’

Siragusa was Relin’s first assistant until he became a judge in 1993. Besides being a bulldog for work, Siragusa was a brilliant trial attorney, Relin says. When Siragusa was running a murder trial, prosecutors from other counties would come just to watch him work. Over a 10-year span, Siragusa won 51 murder convictions, still a record. He never lost a murder case.
“(Siragusa) had a folksy way of connecting with a jury, and I mean that literally,” recalls Robert King. “He would just say, ‘Folks, here’s what happened,’ and then lay out his case in terms a layman could understand.”
A former Monroe County prosecutor, King-now SUNY chancellor-headed the district attorney’s violent-felony squad in the 1970s. King was the first chief of the newly created squad. Siragusa was a team member.
“I don’t mean any disrespect to anybody else on the team-it was a pretty outstanding bunch-but Chuck was clearly the star,” King says.
Siragusa encourages people to call him Chuck. He does not make an issue out of it, but outside of the courtroom he subtly heads off any honorific one might think of using.
“Hi,” Siragusa says, returning a phone call. “It’s Chuck Siragusa.”
“I try to remind myself that it’s not me that’s significant, it’s the position,” he explains.
The violent-felony group was a dedicated tight-knit group, says former team member Glenn Pezzulo of Culley, Marks, Tannenbaum & Pezzulo. Felony squad members worked hard and hung out together. Siragusa was a star player on the district attorney’s baseball and basketball teams.

Sports fan

Siragusa loves sports. He has copies of Sports Illustrated and Sporting News going back to the 1970s, and can rattle off player and team statistics as easily as legal precedents. He no longer plays sports; after three knee operations, he has no cartilage in his left knee. He works out at least three days a week in a home gym.
Pezzulo, who had spent a year working as a civil litigator before becoming a prosecutor, found the felony squad’s relentless diet of rapes and assaults draining. After a few years, he transferred into white-collar crime. He returned in 1980 to civil practice.
In the violent-felony squad, police and prosecutors worked together closely, King says. It resembles the TV show “Law and Order.” Back in the 1970s it was a new concept. King remembers one hard-bitten, veteran detective asking him why he was bothering to get a warrant to do a search. It would the first time he had bothered to do so, the detective said.
Siragusa seemed to like working with the police, Pezzulo says.
A number of violent-felony team members went on to greater prominence.
Before he became SUNY chancellor, King was elected Monroe County executive in 1991, and later was tapped for several high positions in Gov. George Pataki’s administration. Patricia Marks and Thomas Van Strydonck are now state Supreme Court justices. Donald Wisner and David Boehm are judges in the state’s Fourth Department Appellate Division.
Siragusa twice ran for state Supreme Court, winning in 1992. He was appointed to the federal bench in 1997 on the recommendation of then Sen. Daniel Moynihan, D-Manhattan.
His confirmation hearing had to be delayed. The Senate called to inform him of the date one day before the hearing. The Siragusas were in Aruba on their honeymoon; he did not consider cutting the trip short.
Siragusa knows the number of homicide scenes he surveyed as a prosecutor: 308. He often is asked how this affected him. He used to say it had not, that he had not known the victims in life, and that, to him, they just seemed to be sleeping. He no longer says this.
The Robert Reilly case, for one, sticks in his mind. Reilly bludgeoned his wife to death. That the crime occurred “in the marital bed” was bad enough, Siragusa says. But then Reilly took his three children to the Red Barn restaurant for hamburgers. When they got home, Reilly took his children upstairs one at a time, drowned them in the bathtub and laid them next to his wife.

Shawcross case

But Siragusa probably is best-known as a prosecutor for the Arthur Shawcross case.
Shawcross was a 45-year-old parolee who in 1988 and 1989 killed 11 women. His methods were brutal. Some he bludgeoned, others he strangled; some he mutilated.
Shawcross’ parole came 15 years into a 25-year sentence on a murder conviction for killing a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl in 1972 in Watertown.
Siragusa has saved a photograph of himself and some cops standing at a Shawcross murder scene. Shawcross had gutted the victim like a fish, and claimed to have eaten some of her organs.
The Shawcross conviction earned Siragusa worldwide fame. Afterward, he was invited to speak to a national convention of Australian prosecutors. And some three weeks ago, he and Relin were interviewed in Siragusa’s chambers for an upcoming HBO documentary on cannibal killers, featuring Shawcross and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Siragusa accepted the Australian prosecutors’ invitation. He made the 18-hour flight to Australia, gave the speech and caught the first flight he could back to Rochester. He did no sightseeing. Relin thinks Siragusa did not want to miss any more work than necessary.
In the 98-0 Senate vote to confirm Siragusa’s District Court nomination, Moynihan mentioned the Shawcross case as a point in Siragusa’s favor. No one spoke against the nomination.
Siragusa thinks his many encounters with such murders, committed with what prosecutors call depraved indifference, have been beneficial to his judicial temperament. He feels clear on what is right and what is wrong.
Attorneys for Reilly and Shawcross both presented insanity defenses. Siragusa overcame them. Anyone who would commit such crimes clearly is not sane, Siragusa says. But people have choices. Those who choose evil should pay the price.
“I have confronted the dark side of human nature,” he says. “I came to realize that people like Shawcross and Reilly know exactly what they are doing. This has made me mindful that anybody can do any sort of injury to anyone.
“But despite all I’ve seen, I understand that most people are good. I have a greater appreciation for the fact that most people are good. I think this has made me a better judge.”

The civil side

Lawyers, particularly civil attorneys, give Siragusa rave reviews.
“I was curious as to how he would do when he was elected to Supreme Court,” says commercial litigator Kenneth Payment of Harter, Secrest & Emery LLP. “It’s not that I didn’t think he would do well. I only knew him in passing, and I had no reason to think he’d do other than well.
“It was a question of how long it would take him to get up to speed. Civil law isn’t harder than criminal law, but it’s very different, and it’s pretty complicated.”
In a short time, Payment says, Siragusa was beyond up to speed-he was outstanding, handing down finely tuned decisions in contract and marital law in a matter of months. When Siragusa went to the federal bench, Payment says, his grasp of antitrust law was equally quick, and his rulings as impressive.
In employment and discrimination law, Siragusa also shines, says Nelson Thomas of Dolin, Thomas and Solomon. Thomas, recently before Siragusa on a sex-discrimination case in which his client did not prevail, says he cannot fault Siragusa’s legal reasoning.
“I still think my client should have won,” Thomas says. “I wouldn’t have taken the case if I didn’t think she was right. When it came down to it, though, Judge Siragusa didn’t believe her story. I can’t really argue with that.”
The transition from attorney to judge was simple enough on the criminal side, but civil law was intimidating, Siragusa concedes.
“It’s not like criminal law, where issues repeat themselves. The rules of evidence are the same, and I knew the rules of evidence. As far as the substantive law, you get into it. I did it through hard work,” he says.
Siragusa is unfailingly polite to attorneys in court, seldom showing annoyance and never giving in to the temptation to which judges occasionally fall prey to make a lawyer feel small.
His method is Socratic, Pezzulo says. He probes each attorney’s argument, searching out the weaknesses. He has read whatever needs to be read in their papers and in the precedents. He rules with confidence that he has made the right decision.
The only break in Siragusa’s gentlemanly courtroom demeanor comes when a lawyer is not prepared. He has no patience for this. He asks attorneys he finds to be unprepared to step up to the bench, and lets them know in no uncertain terms that he thinks they are wasting his time.

Work ethic

Siragusa’s grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was an agent for Prudential Insurance Co. for 43 years. Siragusa’s father worked for Prudential for 37 years. Siragusa says his work ethic came from them. Their insurance licenses hang in his chambers.
Siragusa loved his parents, but only now that they are both gone has he come to truly appreciate what they did for him, he says.
A hit-and-run driver killed his father two years ago. Siragusa’s sister, who teaches communications at Siena College, lives near Albany. So, Siragusa became primary care-giver to his mother, who had diabetes. Before his father’s death, Siragusa would stop to see his parents every day on his way to work.
Until his father was killed, Siragusa says, he had not realized how much his father had done to take care of his mother.
Shortly after his father’s death, Siragusa’s mother had to go into a nursing home. Siragusa visited her every day, sometimes twice. He would see her in the morning on his way to work. If he visited in the afternoon, he would skip lunch. Siragusa’s mother liked to pass out treats to nurses and aides, to give them something as a thank you for caring for her. Siragusa kept his mother supplied with candy bars. She died three weeks ago.

Irondequoit upbringing

Siragusa grew up in Irondequoit; he attended Catholic elementary schools and graduated from the Aquinas Institute. His bachelor of arts degree is from LeMoyne College, a Jesuit school in Syracuse. Siragusa graduated from LeMoyne in 1969, majoring in sociology.
After college, Siragusa became a teacher at a Catholic elementary school in Irondequoit. Some of the nuns there were the same ones who had taught him. He taught for six years and coached the basketball team. Siragusa loved teaching, and says he learned lessons as a teacher that are useful to him now.
“I learned that kids see right through you if you’re not sincere,” Siragusa says.
As a teacher, Siragusa made $6,000 a year. He lived with his parents. He was happy.
“When I look back on it now,” Siragusa says, “I wonder why I ever left home.”
Still, Siragusa began to think that “I needed to make a decision. Law had always been at the back of mind, so I applied to law school.”
Siragusa applied to law schools in Syracuse, Buffalo and Albany. He did not want to be any farther from his family. All three schools put him on a waiting list. So, Siragusa applied to the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H. He was accepted.
After a year there, Siragusa transferred to the Albany Law School.
“I can’t tell you I liked law school, because I didn’t,” Siragusa says. “I got good grades.”
Siragusa worked under three district attorneys: Lawrence Kurlander, Donald Chesworth and Howard Relin. He started in Rochester City Court, assigned to a series of judges in four-month rotations. He prosecuted misdemeanors and did felony arraignments.
After two or three rotations, Siragusa moved to grand jury, and then was assigned to an office in Irondequoit, where he was responsible for prosecuting shoplifting, traffic and DWI cases in Irondequoit, Penfield and Henrietta. n 1979, Chesworth formed the violent-felony squad and brought Siragusa in to work on it. When King left, Chesworth put Siragusa in charge of the squad. Chesworth left to become superintendent of the state police in 1983. Relin made Siragusa his first assistant.
Relin says Richard Keenan, who followed Siragusa as first assistant, came to him with a concern. It was just after Keenan’s appointment, and Keenan told him he did not see any way he could be another Chuck Siragusa.
“I told Rick not to worry,” Relin says. “I told him that he should just do the best he could, which I was sure would be more than good enough. I told him that nobody could be another Chuck Siragusa.”
([email protected] / 585-546-8303)

10/25/02 (C) Rochester Business Journal