A Criminal Injustice! A True Crime, a False Confession, and the Fight to Free Marty Tankleff

By Edgar-Award winning former Newsday reporter Richard Firstman and private investigator and former NYPD homicide detective Jay Salpeter

On December 28, 2007 Marty Tankleff was freed from prison, ending his 17-year imprisonment for the murders of his parents, a case that has become famous as one of the nation’s most disturbing wrongful convictions. In A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE: A True Crime, a False Confession, and the Fight to Free Marty Tankleff (A Ballantine Books Hardcover; On-Sale: December 30, 2008), award-winning journalist Richard Firstman teams with Jay Salpeter, the private detective who unearthed the new evidence that freed Tankleff, to finally tell the complete inside story. What they reveal is a searing indictment of the criminal justice system in a quintessential American suburb – and of justice in America itself.

When he went to bed on the night of September 6, 1988, seventeen-year-old Marty Tankleff was a typical Long Island kid. The next day Marty woke to find his parents brutally bludgeoned, their throats slashed. His mother, Arlene, was dead. His father, Seymour, was barely alive. With remarkable self-possession, Marty called 911 to summon help. And when homicide detective James McCready arrived on the scene an hour later, Marty told him he believed he knew who was responsible: Jerry Steuerman, his father’s business partner. Steuerman owed Seymour more than half a million dollars, had recently threatened him, and had been the last to leave a high-stakes poker game at the Tankleffs’ home the night before. However, McCready inexplicably dismissed Steuerman as a suspect, and focused on the teenage Marty. The detective told Marty that his father had woken up and identified him as the killer, though it wasn't true, and Marty wondered if he could have committed the murders while blacked out. Seizing on this, McCready drafted a confession, which was unsigned and immediately recanted by Marty.

A week later, Steuerman faked his own death and fled to California under an alias and Seymour Tankleff succumbed to his injuries, never having woken up. Yet the police and prosecutors remained fixated on Marty – and two years later, he was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to fifty years in prison.

But that unbelievable odyssey was just beginning. With the support of his family, he set out to prove his innocence and gain his freedom. For ten years, disappointment followed disappointment as appeals to state and federal courts were denied. Still, Marty never gave up. In 2001, after 11 years in prison, he persuaded Jay Salpeter, a retired NYPD detective turned private eye, to look into his case. At first it was just another job for Salpeter. As he dug into the case, he soon discovered new and shocking evidence that established other more likely suspects than Marty Tankleff (Please see attached pages for more details.). Based on this new evidence, Marty's lawyers argued for a new trial. During the resulting hearings, twenty-some witnesses presented evidence of Marty's innocence and others' guilt.

After a few of Salpeter’s discoveries brought national media attention to the case, Marty’s conviction was finally vacated on December 21, 2007, a year ago this week. But A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE alleges that the truth has continued to be ignored by state authorities, who have publicly exonerated the Suffolk County police and prosecutors of any wrongdoing – and declined to pursue the men alleged to be the true killers.

As gripping as a Grisham novel, A Criminal Injustice is the story of an innocent man’s tenacious fight for freedom and an investigator’s dogged search for the truth – the untold story behind one of America's most disturbing wrongful conviction cases.

About the Authors

RICHARD FIRSTMAN is an award-winning author and journalist whose books include The Death of Innocents, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Edgar Award winner. He has written for numerous publications, and his work as a producer has appeared on 60 Minutes. He was previously a reporter at large and an editor at Newsday.

JAY SALPETER, a highly decorated former New York City police detective and hostage negotiator, is one of the country’s top private investigators. His work has led to frequent appearances on Dateline, 48 Hours, MSNBC, Fox News, and Court TV (now truTV). In 2008, he co-founded the Fortress Innocence Group, the nation’s first private investigations firm devoted to overturning wrongful convictions.

*****************************************

What you may not know about Marty Tankleff’s case as found in A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE

Last week, the New York State Investigation Commission released a report exonerating Suffolk County authorities of any wrongdoing in the 20-year Tankleff case. The police and prosecutors conducted a “comprehensive, methodical investigation from beginning to end,” it said, and “nothing was uncovered by the Commission’s investigation to indicate that the Suffolk County Police Department should have done something other then [sic] what they did.”

A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE comes to a far different conclusion.

- A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE reveals that in 2006 James McCready, the lead detective in the Tankleff case, unwittingly admitted during a taping of the Dr. Phil Show that he knew that a hit man, Joey “Guns” Creedon, was paid $50,000 for the murders of Arlene and Seymour Tankleff. This admission was never aired or revealed until now. The authors have a copy of the tape. (Pages 540-542)

- The alleged drug connections between key figures in the Tankleff case as outlined by the authors in A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE. (Pages 109, 118, 128, 138, 221-225, 371, 373-374, 415-416, 452-453, 470-473, 483)

- Firstman and Salpeter dig into the past to reveal how McCready manipulated Tankleff into a false confession, feeding him details based on his observations of the crime scene. Despite Tankleff’s repudiation of the document and refusal to sign it, the “confession” was then used to convince the media and the jury of Marty’s supposed guilt. With no recording of the interrogation, prosecutors relied on the accounts of McCready and his partner, Norman Rein, to cast Marty as a spoiled rich kid who went into a homicidal temper tantrum.

- The authors use police documents to show that the investigation of the Tankleff murders was anything but comprehensive and methodical, as the SIC claims in its defense of Suffolk County. The authorities dismissed the obvious motive and opportunity of the more likely suspect, Jerry Steuerman (Seymour Tankleff’s business partner), without analysis or meaningful investigation. The documents reveal that McCready and Rein didn’t even speak to Steuerman until three days after they arrested Tankleff. Even then, they did not question him about the several hundred thousand dollars he was under intense pressure to repay to Seymour Tankleff or about allegations that Steuerman had threatened Tankleff. (Pages 126-130) In fact, Steuerman remained a non-suspect even after he faked his own death and fled to California under an assumed name a week after the homicide. Documents and interviews reveal new details about Steuerman’s notorious escapade. (Pages 132-143)

- The Tankleff case came soon after Newsday found that the Suffolk County homicide squad had a confession rate of 94 percent, dwarfing the rates of jurisdictions across the country and suggesting that many alleged confessions were suspect. It also came amidst the state commission’s first investigation of Suffolk County, which found that the homicide squad had a history of misconduct, including instances of perjury and a reputation for coercing confessions. One of those accused of testifying falsely in a prior homicide case was Detective McCready, but he was never disciplined. Thus, the authors write, when McCready was permitted to lead the Tankleff investigation, and he fixated on a naïve teenager in shock over discovering his parents brutally assaulted, it set up a perfect storm for a tragic miscarriage of justice.

- The authors reveal new details of the alleged relationship between McCready and Steuerman that came to light during the hearing of new evidence in 2004 and 2005, providing further evidence that McCready’s testimony at Marty’s trial – when he said he had never met Steuerman prior to the murders – had not been truthful. The recent SIC report questioned the reliability of two witnesses who placed the men together in both a personal and business relationship. The book also reveals, for the first time, that another person came forward to say she saw McCready go into the office of Steuerman’s bagel store, and that after McCready brought Steuerman back from California, his son Todd laughed and told her, “They sent my father’s friend to go get him.” The woman gave a statement to Salpeter but was too afraid to testify. (Pages 64-81)

- A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE shows that the jury that convicted Marty Tankleff misinterpreted evidence, misunderstanding or even disregarding the principles of “burden of proof” and “reasonable doubt.” Drawing in part on a recorded interview that a defense investigator had with one of the jurors two months after the trial, the authors conclude that Tankleff was convicted largely on speculation, ignorance, and poor reasoning. Additionally, the jury ignored undisputed forensic evidence that demonstrated that the supposed confession was untrue.

- Tankleff’s half-sister, Shari Mistretta, the only family member who did not support him, turned her back on Marty after she learned that he was to receive the bulk of their father’s $3.2-million estate and failed to persuade him to change the will. Marty’s conviction made her the beneficiary of the estate and—contrary to the SIC’s recent report—she acknowledged later using some of the inheritance to set up her husband in business—with Detective McCready. They opened a pub near the courthouse. (Pages 166-172; 303-305; 367-368)

- Tankleff’s first appeal, in 1994, led to an extraordinary 2-2 split by the four-judge panel. The two judges in favor of reversing the verdict made clear that not only should the trial judge have suppressed Marty’s statements to the police on constitutional grounds, but that there was no other evidence against him sufficient to sustain an indictment, much less a conviction. This was a verdict that cried out for reversal. Why it was not, in fact, reversed is one of the issues examined by A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE. (Pages 363-367)

- A CRIMINAL INJUSTICE alleges that the office of the current district attorney of Suffolk County, Thomas Spota—who was the county detectives’ association attorney and McCready’s personal lawyer prior to becoming DA—intimidated witnesses favorable to Marty while protecting the men that Salpeter’s investigation identified as the true killers. Among the DA’s actions: Helping one of the alleged killers, Peter Kent, construct a false alibi (Pages 448; 546-549) and pressuring a witness who was prepared to give testimony favorable to Tankleff to recant, under threat of a long prison sentence for a pending armed robbery charge. After he changed his story, the witness, Brian Scott Glass, showed up in court with a prominent lawyer; a few months later, the armed robbery charge (a third felony that could have sent him to prison for 25 years) was dismissed. (Pages 511-516).

- The authors examine in depth Suffolk County Judge Stephen Braslow’s stunning denial of a new trial in 2006, after hearing testimony by more than two dozen witnesses – a decision so politically expedient, and so little supported by the evidence, that it earned judge Braslow both reversal and an extraordinary rebuke from the appellate court in late 2007.