Jane Doe No More (33 page)

I felt the lump. I tried to rationalize it. It was small, located at six o’clock on my left breast. My breasts have always been dense and cystic, so I thought,
Maybe it’s just a cyst.
I tried to shrug it off, but it nagged at me. I told John, who was reassuring, but I knew he was concerned. I decided to call my doctor in the morning and scheduled an appointment for the following Monday morning when we returned from our trip. I kept telling myself not to worry about it until I knew if I had something to be concerned about, but it didn’t relieve any of my fear. Our friends owned a Winnebago (RV), and we all piled in later that day to head to Cape Hatteras. We ended up climbing the lighthouse. It was a good distraction. I didn’t say anything to anyone else about the lump. Then we went to the Wright Brothers National Memorial and Museum. I remember taking a picture of John and Johnny by the monument. I remember thinking,
How blessed I am to have such a great family and friends.

When Donna got home, she immediately went to see her OB/GYN.

The exam was nerve-racking. Donna’s OB/GYN sent her for an ultrasound and advised her to go to a breast doctor. If you believed that your luck hadn’t been the best lately, a lump could mean only one thing. How easy it was to think the worst. Donna was strong, yes; but when things are not going your way, the mind tends to favor tragedy over triumph.

“Listen,” the doctor said after looking at the preliminary test results. “I’m sure this is a fibroadenoma. Nothing to worry about.”

Fibroadenoma is a noncancerous (benign) tumor, a word that might not be a helpful or encouraging way to describe this condition, which is fairly common among females. It’s generally fibrous and glandular tissue that is balled up to form a small knob.

Scary, the doctor told Donna, but nothing to be concerned about.

“How sure are you?” Donna asked. She didn’t need this now. If it was cancer, she’d be fighting two monstrosities at the same time.

“I am as certain of this as I am of anything in my entire life,” the doctor assured Donna.

She walked out of the doctor’s office still a little on edge, but relieved about the diagnosis of the lump. She could put it behind her as a cancer scare. Many women have gone through the same thing. It was something to keep an eye on, but nothing to consider alarming.

As Donna’s trial date grew closer, word came from the mayor’s office that the city wanted to make an offer to avoid an ugly discourse and legal action in open court. Apparently City Hall wanted to settle. The city was willing to negotiate a deal. But Donna was skeptical of the city’s desire to enter into a dialogue about settling. Something didn’t seem right.

Sure enough, her instincts were spot-on. She’d had a meeting set for July 31, 2000, right before she left for vacation. Then the mayor’s office called only hours before to say that “the mayor went out of town suddenly and the meeting would have to be rescheduled.” So they agreed on Tuesday, September 12, at 11:00 a.m. The night before that meeting, the mayor’s representative called to say there was a scheduling conflict and they would have to, once again, reschedule. They asked if Donna was available on September 18 at two o’clock in the afternoon.

Donna “reluctantly agreed,” according to her notes of these conversations.

Then the office called that morning to ask if she could come in later that afternoon, at four o’clock.

“No,” Donna said. “I cannot do it.”

That day, Mayor Giordano called Maureen Norris himself. “Please, I apologize for this . . . but can your client come in at four?”

“I’ll ask her.”

It had been more than a year since mediation hearings had begun back in August 1999. To say that Donna was frustrated and running out of patience would not put into perspective how low her confidence level was with the mayor’s office, and her trust that the city would listen to her concerns and act on them. The mayor seemed to be running backward, unwilling to commit to anything. Donna wanted changes inside the police department—new policies and procedures. Screw the money—it was about the city doing the right thing. She was not backing down from that fight.

Donna decided that she should take the mayor up on his offer to meet that afternoon. Who knew when she would ever get another chance to sit down and hear what he had to say.

“Let’s do it,” Donna told Maureen.

By now, surrounding Mayor Giordano and his close staff were rumors of widespread corruption throughout his administration. There was talk that the mayor was involved in organized crime on an undetermined level. It was so common in Connecticut politics during the 1980s and 1990s for certain politicians to receive kickbacks from construction companies in place of city contracts that it was almost expected in some jurisdictions. Giordano was running to unseat Senator Joseph I. Lieberman for a chair in the senate that fall (a long-shot bid he would ultimately lose). What’s more, Waterbury was “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy,” according to the
New York Times,
even as the mayor considered paying off Donna to avoid yet another pockmark on the face of city officials that a civil trial was sure to create. Things were out of control enough already. And it wasn’t the first time a mayor of Waterbury had run into potentially severe legal trouble within the preceding twenty years. Joseph J. Santopietro, elected in 1985, had been convicted the year before Donna’s attack (1992) on charges related to a bribery and kickback scheme. There was a common feeling among city (and some state) residents that Waterbury was experiencing the corrupt municipal leadership of the 1950s and 1960s all over again. The seat Giordano occupied while staring at Donna, Maureen Norris, Elena Ricci Palermo, and Cheryl Hricko, the two corporate lawyers representing the city, at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, September 18, 2000, was indeed dirty and well worn.

“Sit down, please, Mrs. Palomba,” the mayor said, showing Donna and Maureen in. “I apologize for the delays.” He seemed wired and shaky. There were other things on his mind.

The rumors of a corrupt mayoral office didn’t really matter much to Donna, of course. The mayor was considered innocent until proven guilty in her eyes. Donna knew better than most how it felt to have the brass pointing a finger in your face, or a growing populace calling you a liar. What mattered to Donna and Maureen was the city’s terms of a potential settlement. Nothing more. Did city officials want to play ball? Donna was less concerned about a monetary settlement, but would the city agree to the changes Donna wanted implemented within the police department? Those changes were absolutely nonnegotiable.

As the mayor gave Donna his guarded attention, Donna laid out the background of her case before focusing on her policy and procedure recommendations.

“We’d like for you to get back to us by Friday,” Maureen said.

The mayor listened intently—as did, unbeknownst to anyone in the room, several law enforcement officers who were eavesdropping on the conversation. The feds had bugged the mayor’s office and were also listening to his phone calls. FBI agents were actively investigating Giordano and his office for municipal corruption. Yet that was only half of it. Through the pipeline of that kickback investigation, the feds were about to uncover an unforgivable set of crimes the mayor had been perpetrating, which would bring a new level of hypocrisy, insult, brutality, and inhumanity to that tattered mayor’s chair. While Donna sat across from the mayor of Waterbury, describing her attack in graphic detail, Philip Giordano was embroiled in a sexual assault case of his own, only the mayor was the actual perpetrator and children as young as eight years old his victims. In investigating Giordano on suspicion of corruption, listening to his every move and the phone calls he made, the feds had been introduced to a prostitute the mayor was using to get at two children in her life. The mayor might have been giving favors to area mobsters and taking kickbacks, but those crimes paled in comparison to the fact that he was also continually and repeatedly raping two young girls, eight and ten years old, to whom he was given access by that prostitute, who was mother to one and aunt to another.

The special agent in charge of the Giordano investigation, Michael J. Wolf, later put the mayor’s crimes into perspective, saying, “The public expects and deserves utmost honesty, integrity, and strong moral fiber from those who serve on their behalf,” before adding that the mayor’s conduct was “disgraceful.”

This was the same man Donna Palomba was negotiating with—a rapist himself (of children, no less).

As Donna met with the mayor, the FBI had yet to uncover that Giordano was involved with the prostitute and her daughter and niece. This would become an issue later, when it was first implied that the FBI had allowed some of the abuse to continue so it could build a case against him.

“When we first determined and believed that Mr. Giordano may have been having inappropriate sex,” Agent Wolf told the
New York Times,
“all of the appropriate agencies were notified and performed admirably, first ensuring the safety of the children and then developing the probable cause to charge him . . .”

The evidence was astonishing when later presented in court during Giordano’s trial, a case handled by none other than John Connelly, the SA in charge of facilitating the investigation into Donna’s sexual assault. Giordano was ultimately charged with six counts each of sexual assault, risk of injury to a minor, and conspiracy to commit sexual assault, all devastating charges that could have put the mayor in prison for life. Giordano came out swinging, calling the prostitute a liar and criminal. But to corroborate her story of supplying her eight-year-old daughter and ten-year-old niece to Giordano for his sexual gratification, the feds provided more than four hours (126 calls total) of taped telephone conversations between Giordano and the prostitute, many of the calls made directly from the mayor’s office. The tapes were incredible in their graphic sexual detail, almost unlistenable.

“Who are you going to be with?” Giordano asked the prostitute during one conversation (made just weeks after he met with Donna and Maureen). It was obvious he had known the prostitute for some time and had engaged in this type of behavior with the children already on several occasions.

The prostitute gave the mayor the nickname for her daughter, the child she and the mayor had decided on earlier, an indication that she was bringing the young girl for the mayor’s sexual pleasure, to which the mayor replied, “Yup,” agreeing that she was the right girl for what he had in mind on that particular day.

But then the mayor, after thinking about it, gave the prostitute a warning: “Make sure! Because if it’s the other one, I’ll
leave!
”

Apparently, the younger the better for the mayor of Waterbury.

“I did anything he asked me,” the prostitute later testified in federal court. She admitted how she had first met the mayor when she was a streetwalker working to support a drug habit. He was a client who simply pulled up and asked her if she was available. Stunning the courtroom as she testified, the prostitute said she had actually “lost count of how many times she had taken the girls to the mayor for sex,” adding that his sexual encounters with the children took place inside the mayor’s city-issued car, his government office, his old law office, a friend’s house, and his own home. He paid the prostitute forty to sixty dollars per visit. The child sexual assaults took place generally between 5:15 and 5:30 p.m., which was after Mayor Giordano’s coworkers and staff went home for the night. Sometimes, the woman testified, the mayor would request the children earlier, on school holidays and snow days, when the children were available.

“He wanted
young
girls . . .” she said.

It was four days after that first taped call when the mayor was heard “berating the prostitute for putting both girls in his car [at the same time] before one of their meetings.”

“It’s awkward for me,” the mayor explained, telling the prostitute how he wanted only one child at a time.

Sometime later the mayor can be heard on a call asking the prostitute, “Who’s coming with you?”

She named the child.

He didn’t approve. The girl she had in mind on that day was, actually, too old.

He said, “I want one of the
little
girls, I told you.”

So this was the man—a public official, the mayor of the city, a pedophile and rapist—that Donna and Maureen sat down with to negotiate Donna’s case. Donna and Maureen both left the mayor’s office that day, September 18, with little confidence that the mayor would be able to facilitate Donna’s recommendations of policy and procedure changes.