Three wrongfully convicted Queens men freed after ‘egregious’ violations by trial prosecutors
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From left, George Bell, Gary Johnson and Rohan Bolt had their wrongful convictions overturned Friday. Photo via GoFundMe
By David Brand
A cop was shot and killed in a botched robbery at an East Elmhurst check cashing place. So too was the shop owner. The pressure was on to find the murderers.
It was 1996, four days before Christmas, and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani ordered the police to catch the killers before the holiday.
And so, after thousands of stops and interrogations, Queens cops from the 115th Precinct settled on a handful of suspects. Their arrests were based on flimsy eyewitness accounts and stories told by supposed informants in trouble for their own minor misdeeds; their convictions grounded in coerced confessions and exculpatory evidence hidden by prosecutors.
In the end, three men — Rohan Bolt, George Bell and Gary Johnson — would spend the next 24 years behind bars after being convicted and sentenced to virtual life sentences. In Bell’s case, then Queens District Attorney Richard Brown sought the death penalty.
But nearly a quarter-century later, all three men walked free from prison Friday when a Queens judge vacated their wrongful convictions. Their release relied on the dogged work of a team of defense lawyers and investigators, a case review by the current Queens DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit and corroborated claims of persistent misconduct by trial prosecutors.
Queens DA Melinda Katz joined defense attorneys in the motion to overturn the convictions based on the violations uncovered by her CIU.
Queens Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas apologized to Bell, Bolt and Johnson during a hearing on the motion Friday.
“I do believe it is important that I say how sorry the court is for the miscarriage of justice and the egregious violations of your constitutional rights that occurred in this courthouse, my courthouse, 20 years ago,” Zayas said.
He then turned his attention to the actions of prosecutors in a case that could have resulted in the death penalty.
“The stakes could not have been higher and the duty of care by the prosecution should have been correspondingly heightened,” Zayas said. “The opposite occurred in this case … the District Attorney’s office deliberately withheld from the defense credible information about third-party guilt that is evidence that others may have committed these crimes.”
Attorneys for the three men say the facts of the case highlight the intense pressure to catch the killers, the corners cut and lies told by a team of detectives accused of fabricating confessions, and the extreme misconduct by Queens prosecutors, including Brad Leventhal, the current head of the Queens DA’s Homicide Bureau.
Leventhal and his boss at the time, Assistant District Attorney Charles Testagrossa, withheld evidence from defense attorneys that pointed to other suspects in the case and suppressed deals and mental health records of key witnesses, according to records uncovered by the CIU.
Leventhal and Testagrossa also denied that members of a notorious crew known as the “Speedstick” gang had been implicated in the killings, though they possessed an NYPD officer’s written interview with a Speedstick member who fingered his counterparts in the killing at the check cashing store.
Queens prosecutors used that same document, known as a DD5, to investigate and charge another Speedstick member in a separate case. But they buried the document and hid it from defense attorneys when prosecuting Bell, Bolt and Johnson, the CIU found.
That document only turned up in unredacted form in response to a Freedom of Information Law request from another attorney working on a separate wrongful conviction case related to a Speedstick robbery.
The lawyer, Tom Hoffman, turned it over to the team representing Bell, Bolt and Johnson, a crucial break in the case to overturn the wrongful convictions.
The reversals brought the total number of convictions overturned with the backing of Katz’s CIU to seven. She made the formation of the unit a core promise of her campaign for DA and said last month that investigators are reviewing about 80 cases overall.
Katz, however, denied that prosecutors, including Leventhal, had deliberately hidden evidence.
During the hearing Friday, Katz said she agreed to vacate the convictions because of “the inadvertent failure” of the trial prosecutors to disclose police reports and information about a key witness who suffered hallucinations.
Those facts, she said, “established a constitutional violation that we simply cannot defend.”
Trial prosecutors Brad Leventhal (pictured) and Charles Testagrossa “deliberately” suppressed evidence favorable to three men wrongfully convicted of murder, a Queens judge said Friday. Eagle file photo by Paul Frangipane
CIU Director Bryce Benjet also said there was no evidence that prosecutors intentionally withheld evidence from defense attorneys.
But Marc Wolinsky, an attorney from the firm Wachtell Lipton who represented Bell pro bono, countered that characterization.
Queens prosecutors “did not act in good faith, they acted in bad faith,” he said. “This was not inadvertent.”
“The injustice in this case transcends any that I believe has been introduced in this court,” Wolinsky added.
Throughout their 123-page motion to vacate the convictions, Wolinsky and fellow attorneys Scott Stevenson, Rita Dave and Legal Aid lawyers David Crow and Kenneth Finkelman, also suggest that Leventhal, Testagrossa and their colleagues intentionally withheld evidence favorable to the three defendants.
“It is hard to believe that the failure to turn over this large volume of exculpatory evidence in a death penalty case was the result of inexcusable sloppiness,” they wrote.
‘It was all false’
Ira “Mike” Epstein arrived at the Astoria Boulevard check cashing business he owned just after 7 a.m. on Dec. 21, 1996. It was frigid that Saturday morning, just over 22 degrees, when Epstein pulled up at roughly the same time as Charles Davis, an off-duty police officer guarding the shop to earn some extra money.
Moments after Epstein lifted the check cashing store’s roll down gate, two men approached and forced Epstein and Davis into the store. A witness peering from her window said she heard gunshots and saw two men flee.
A neighbor called 911 and police flooded the scene. Inside, they found Epstein dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. Davis, shot multiple times, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Immediately, police coated East Elmhurst with wanted posters to catch the cop killers.
The three men described in the posters bore no resemblance to Bell, Johnson or Bolt other than that they were Black. The NYPD also issued an all points bulletin looking for men from another crew — the Speedstick gang — suspected of committing an earlier armed robbery in the area.
Over the next few days, police stopped 6,000 vehicles and questioned 1,000 New Yorkers in the days after the murders, said then-Police Commissioner Howard Safir at the time.
Detectives from the 115th Precinct eventually nabbed a 20-year-old man named John Mark Bigweh, initially identified as John Marks. Bigweh was arrested for selling nickel bags of weed to an undercover officer a few blocks from the checking cash store.
At the stationhouse, Detective Maryann Bubelnik questioned Bigweh about the killing. She said he copped to seeing two men in a bodega shortly before the shooting and told her they flashed a gun and said they wanted “to get paid.” He identified the men as Bell and Johnson.
Bigweh was taken to Queens Central Booking and again questioned, this time by officers Frank Bovino and Michael Falciano who extracted a confession. By their account, Bigweh admitted to acting as a lookout for the killers after riding to the store in a van with men named “Roti” and “Jason.”
Bigweh said he did not know Roti’s name or where he lived, but he directed cops to the homes of Bell and Johnson. They were arrested on Christmas Eve 1996.
Both gave a tacit confession to detectives, but later maintained the confessions were coerced. According to court papers, Bell said he was harassed and assaulted by officers who fed him the information. “I did good?” he asks the detective at one point during the videotaped confession.
At a press conference, Giuliani celebrated the arrests. “If you shoot and kill a New York City police officer the Police Department is going to catch you,” he said.
Safir praised the broken windows policing that cracked the case: A petty weed bust led to a break in a major murder investigation.
''This case was solved based on a minor arrest, which we constantly talk about,'' Safir said. “Paying attention to small crimes and you solve big crimes. This is a perfect example of it.''
Safir urged Queens District Attorney Richard Brown to seek the newly reinstated death penalty for the killers.
The other two suspects, “Roti” and “Jason,” were still missing, however.
A neighborhood informant — identified by police as a “crack lady,” according to case documents — led police to Bolt, the 35-year-old owner of a West Indian restaurant near the check cashing spot. Cops grabbed Bolt outside a grocery store, informing him that he was under arrest for double murder and that he was the suspect nicknamed “Roti” or, as officers wrote in their report, “Roadie.”
Bolt said he had never heard that nickname. He went by “Jabba.” Plus, the short and stocky father of four didn’t match a description made by Bell, who said the killer was 19 or 20 and tall.
And he certainly didn’t match the build of the Speedstick members suspected of committing other unsolved armed robberies in the area.
Bolt maintained his innocence from day one, telling the families of Davis and Epstein at sentencing that he was sorry for their tragic losses, but that he did not commit the murders.
With Bell, Johnson and Bolt charged with the killing, that left “Jason” on the loose.
On May 30, 1997, Bubelnick and Bovino arrested a man named Jason Ligon, whose mother lived across the street from the check cashing store.
For reasons still unclear, the detectives had shown a photo of Ligon to another man with an undetermined connection to the crime, according to the motion to vacate the conviction. That man identified Ligon and police made the arrest.
After a five-hour interrogation, they secured a confession from Ligon that matched confessions made by Bell, Johnson and Bigweh.
Ligon copped to driving the getaway car, which he said was a “maroon” van. Witnesses, however, recalled seeing a blue or green van. A stripped blue van was found near the crime scene and later evidence showed the Speedstick crew used a van in their heists,
Ligon detailed the crime in his account. Johnson, he said, rode shotgun, Bolt was the mastermind and Bell shot Davis and Epstein.
But another factor complicated Ligon’s “confession.” He was not even in New York City at the time of the murders. He was staying in a hotel in Washington D.C., records show.
Nevertheless, he remained on Rikers Island for three years until Queens prosecutors consented to his release a month after the other three were sentenced, telling the court his confession was false.
As for that confession, Ligon told the Village Voice in 2007 that the cops “made it up.”
Attorneys cited the Voice article in their motion to vacate the convictions. Ligon’s account embodied the entire foundation of the case, they said.
“It was all false,” they wrote.
A prosecution that ‘shocks the conscience’
In May 1997, shortly before Ligon’s arrest, members of the Speedstick crew were arrested for a crime similar to the check cashing store murders.
A crew ambushed an armored truck and shot the two former cops guarding the cash inside. Police arrested a man named Aaron Boone and his brother-in-law Robert Majors, as well as a third man named Bernard Johnson, and charged them with attempted murder and armed robbery. Boone’s twin brother Ammon Boone was also considered a suspect, the Daily News reported at the time.
The same Daily News report said the men were considered suspects in the ambush that left Davis and Epstein dead in the check cashing store.
The report prompted attorneys for Bell, Bolt and Johnson to seek material about the investigation into alternate suspects in the double murder case.
But the Queens DA’s Office “repeatedly and specifically denied to the court and to the defense lawyers that the Speedstick gang had any connection to the Astoria Boulevard murders,” attorneys wrote in their motion to clear the convictions.
Newly discovered materials proved otherwise, however.
Queens prosecutors suppressed a police report known as a DD5 in which a member of the Speedstick crew told NYPD Detective Richard Heider that another member, Jamal Clark, had confessed to the Astoria Boulevard check cashing ambush. Clark’s nickname was “Jason” and he said the heist was organized by the Boones.
The unidentified informant who spoke to police also said that Clark feared he would be killed by the Boones. Clark was indeed murdered and Aaron Boone indicted for the killing two years later.
That same document, DD5 288, served as the basis of another prosecution by the Queens DA, confirming that prosecutors were aware of the contents of the document and considered it credible, the new team of attorneys wrote in court documents.
Testagrossa even discussed the contents of the report with Heider, according to handwritten notes found in the case file.
Benjet, the CIU director, said withholding that information was a crucial error that denied the defendants their right to a fair trial.
“That should have been disclosed. The prosecutors trying this case denied its existence,” he said during the hearing Friday.
But, Benjet added, “based on my investigation today I cannot say it was intentional, but it certainly happened and everyone in our office wishes it did not.”
Police recovered a blue van near the crime scene Dec. 21, 1996 that matched the description of a van seen by witnesses. Defendants identified the vehicle as a maroon or burgundy van in confessions they later said were coerced. Photo via court documents
A flood of additional documents uncovered by Benjet and the CIU corroborated the connection between Speedstick and the check cashing ambush, thus demonstrating that Bell, Bolt and Johnson were clearly not the lone suspects.
One unidentified witness interviewed by officers also said Clark confessed to his role in the murders and a second said Bigweh, the man who identified Bell and Johnson, said he had no role in the attack.
In another DD5, an informant said they saw three men casing the check cashing place prior to the ambush. One of the men had a long scar on his face that matched the description of Clark, the reports show.
Leventhal and Testagrossa never turned over any of that evidence to defense attorneys, an obvious violation of Brady law, mandating that the prosecution share materials with defense attorneys even if that information is favorable to the defendant.
Instead, they pursued the murder charges against Bell, Bolt and Johnson and continued to seek the death penalty against Bell.
“The prosecution of George, Rohan and Gary shocks the conscience,” said Wolinsky, the attorney who represented Bell pro bono.
“Our client, George, was just 19 years old when he was coerced into confessing to a crime he did not commit. Even more disturbing is the fact that the prosecutors sought the death penalty against George at the same time they were withholding evidence showing that he was innocent,” Wolinsky added.
The suppression of the DD5s was not the only example of misconduct by prosecutors, Katz’s CIU found.
Testagrossa and Leventhal never disclosed that they had arranged a cooperation agreement with Bigweh, their star witness, in January 1997, or that Bigweh had attempted suicide a month after the Davis-Epstein killings. They also never shared information about his history of auditory hallucinations, despite defense attorneys’ request for psychiatric records.
Prosecutors offered Bigweh a five-year sentence for attempted robbery rather than up to 50 years for his alleged role in the double murder.
Yet, on the witness stand, Leventhal only asked Bigweh about an agreement dated a few months prior.
The Queens DA’s Office did not respond to specific questions about Leventhal’s misconduct or his future as head of the Homicide Bureau.
The Office’s Chief Executive Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Naiburg told The New York Times Friday that Leventhal had handled “roughly 85 cases” and only been sanctioned once, in 2006.
His recent high-profile cases include the prosecution of Chanel Lewis, a man convicted at retrial of killing Howard Beach resident Karina Vetrano in 2016.
‘More intent on winning the case’
To attorneys and investigators working to reverse wrongful convictions in Queens, the actions by prosecutors in the Bell-Bolt-Johnson case illustrate a perceived culture of misconduct that persisted in the Queens DA’s Office before Katz took office.
“What happened in this case was a pattern that existed at that time of suppressing exculpatory evidence,” said Tom Hoffman, the wrongful conviction attorney who obtained the suppressed police report implicating the Speedstick gang to the murders of Davis and Epstein.
Hoffman represented a client named Robert Majors, whose conviction was overturned last year after a judge determined prosecutors withheld key evidence implicating another suspect. Majors was connected to the Speedstick killers through his brother-in-law, Aaron Boone.
“It’s like once they make the arrest, they couldn’t go back. Rather than decide to do what’s right, they decided to suppress the evidence,” Hoffman said. “As Judge Zayas said, they were more intent on winning the case than seeking the truth.”
In late 2019 and into early 2020, top officials in the DA’s office — including some still serving — sat for depositions as part of a series of lawsuits filed by three men who were wrongfully convicted in Queens Supreme Court.
One of the complaints accused the DA’s Office of upholding an “office policy that was indifferent to misconduct and rewarded prosecutors for ‘winning’ cases.” The lawsuits cited nearly 120 cases where Queens prosecutors were admonished by appellate judges for misconduct.
At the hearing Friday, Zayas condemned the decades-long evidence suppression that left three men behind bars. “And because of that constitutional violation, three men have been wrongfully convicted for nearly a quarter century,” Zayas said.
Katz now has 90 days to decide whether she will bring new charges against Bell, Bolt and Johnson.
Though their saga continues, each of the three men expressed optimism Friday. They thanked their attorneys for their tireless work on the case and said they looked forward to walking out of Greenhaven Correctional Facility and into the next phase of their lives.
“I have spent more than half of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit, and I am no longer the young man with a bright future I once was,” Johnson said. “But this is the first step in making things right.”
