Charles V. Bagli

But this was not a query about lunch, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday in state Supreme Court. The papers described a wide-ranging scheme involving three companies to steal at least $15 million from Bloomberg L.P., the giant financial information and media company, through bribes, kickbacks and bid rigging.

Among the conspirators, “sandwich” was code for bribes or kickbacks, prosecutors said. The contractor wanted to know if the executive, Vito Nigro of Turner Construction, was satisfied with the thick envelope stuffed with cash that had been delivered to his office the prior day, according to the indictment.

Nigro and the contractor were among the 14 people charged with grand larceny, bribetaking, bid rigging, money laundering and falsifying business records relating to work at Bloomberg offices at 120 Park Ave. and 919 Third Ave. The defendants all pleaded not guilty in state Supreme Court in Manhattan and were released on bail. Three companies were also charged in the scheme and pleaded not guilty.

The indictments Tuesday came after a two-year investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the State Police.

Prosecutors said contractors coveted work for Bloomberg because the company “pays extremely well and it pays on time.”

Executives at Bloomberg and Turner Construction routinely steered contracts to favored electrical contractors, vendors and others in exchange for cash, favors, or work on their homes, the indictments said. The executives and contractors in turn inflated the cost of their work for Bloomberg by millions of dollars.

The executives were fired in October 2017 as investigators seized records and computers at their offices.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, described it as a “brazen” scheme that was nonetheless successful over the course of a decade. His office has repeatedly prosecuted companies for similar schemes, which he contends contribute to “New York’s sky-high construction costs.”

“This is a major cost for businesses and taxpayers,” Vance said in an interview. “Hopefully, this will spur corporations to invest in prevention strategies, auditing.”

Prosecutors said that more than a dozen individuals and companies had already entered guilty pleas in connection with the conspiracy and paid about $5.5 million in restitution. Some of those contractors are cooperating with investigators and providing evidence against the people arrested Tuesday.

At the arraignment, Assistant District Attorney Christopher Beard described Anthony Guzzone, Bloomberg L.P.'s former global head of construction, as the “capstone on this pyramid of corruption.”

Guzzone reaped not only millions of dollars in cash kickbacks, prosecutors said, but contractors also did work to convert his New Jersey home to a “palace,” installing iron gates and a custom-designed outdoor barbecue, among other things.

Alex Spiro, Guzzone’s lawyer, challenged the prosecutors’ case, suggesting the “bare bones” indictment was light on evidence of Guzzone’s alleged wrongdoing, aside from references to lunch meetings and a custom bar.

From almost the day Bloomberg recruited Guzzone more than 15 years ago, prosecutors said, he was looking to enrich himself by stealing from the company. At first, Guzzone was responsible for maintenance contracts at Bloomberg offices, including its headquarters, and he demanded kickbacks in exchange for steering work to vendors, prosecutors said.

But when he was promoted to global head of construction, prosecutors said, Guzzone expanded the fraud, colluding with Ronald Olson and Nigro, executives at Turner Construction, as well as contractors and vendors.

The scheme went undetected for years, prosecutors said, because the people with oversight responsibility to guard against criminal activity — Guzzone at Bloomberg and Olson and Nigro at Turner — were in on it.

Prosecutors said that Guzzone even came up with the idea in 2008 of creating an electrical contractor, Litespeed Electric, to obtain some of the work. Guzzone was a silent partner in Litespeed, which was formed with executives from Bloomberg’s former electrical contractor, including Robert Fleming, who was indicted Tuesday along with his wife, Donna Fleming, and three colleagues.

According to the indictment, Litespeed padded its bills. By 2017, when the scheme collapsed, Litespeed had gotten roughly $250 million in contracts for Bloomberg offices.

At the same time, Guzzone and Robert Fleming named Donna Fleming as a no-show company president so Litespeed could compete for contracts as a woman-owned company.

The company’s lawyer, Mark Agnifilo, said, “Litespeed categorically denies that it stole a dime from Bloomberg.”

Investigators say the investigation is continuing.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/nyregion/bloomberg-construction-fraud-kickback-charges.html" id="d37ce213-84a6-35e9-af74-64a739dcd737">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — A contractor working at Bloomberg company offices in Manhattan sent a text to an executive who helped oversee the work, asking a seemingly innocuous question: “How was the sandwich?”

Cash 'Sandwiches': 'Brazen' Fraud by Bloomberg Executives Is Detailed in Charges

As investigators peeled back the complex layers of contracts, contacts and under-the-table favors between electrical contractors, vendors and corporate executives they made a startling discovery: It was an inside job.

On Tuesday, the District Attorney’s Office and the state police are expected to arrest more than a dozen executives, including practically the entire staff of Bloomberg’s global construction and facilities department, on fraud, theft and bribery charges, according to one executive briefed on the investigation and defense attorneys.

The pay-to-play scheme, investigators say, operated undetected at Bloomberg and was centered around interior construction work at the company’s offices, including its headquarters at 731 Lexington Ave. Subcontractors and vendors are accused of paying bribes and kickbacks in various forms over nearly four years to executives at Bloomberg and to two executives at Turner Construction, a general contractor that oversaw work at Bloomberg.

The executives at Bloomberg and Turner and the vendors would then pad the bills for the work, raising the cost by millions of dollars for Bloomberg.

There is no evidence Michael Bloomberg was aware of the alleged fraud happening in his company, people briefed on the investigation said.

Spokesmen for Bloomberg and Turner said the companies were victims of a long-running scheme by rogue employees. “We thank the Manhattan district attorney’s office for uncovering this scheme,” Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg LP, said.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment Monday on the investigation.

Anthony Guzzone, the former global head of construction at Bloomberg, sits at the center of the investigation. Guzzone was fired last October, as state police and investigators seized computers and company records at Bloomberg headquarters.

“Mr. Guzzone has had an unblemished life and a distinguished career,” said his lawyer, Alex Spiro, who expects his client to be indicted Tuesday morning. “We will fight any allegation against him.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/nyregion/bloomberg-construction-fraud-kickback.html" id="918c29fe-ffba-35b9-a472-3da297466ed4">The New York Times</a>.

Bloomberg Executives to Be Charged in Construction Fraud Scheme

NEW YORK — More than 18 months ago, the Manhattan district attorney’s office opened yet another investigation into fraud in the city’s $62 billion construction industry, this one involving Bloomberg LP, the financial information and media company owned by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is considering running for president in 2020.

On Tuesday, the District Attorney’s Office and the state police are expected to arrest more than a dozen executives, including senior executives in New York of Bloomberg’s global construction and facilities department, on fraud, theft and bribery charges, according to one executive briefed on the investigation and defense attorneys.

There is no evidence Bloomberg was aware of the alleged fraud happening in his company, people briefed on the investigation said. He has been sending signals he might run for president, making a recent visit to Iowa to talk about climate change. A central part of his appeal to voters, along with his three terms as New York’s mayor, is his success as a businessman and self-made billionaire.

Anthony Guzzone, the former global head of construction at Bloomberg, sits at the center of the investigation. Guzzone, who was recruited by Bloomberg from a construction company more than 15 years ago, was fired last October, as state police and investigators seized computers and company records at Bloomberg headquarters.

Guzzone had a particularly close relationship with the owners of Litespeed Electric, a contractor based in New Jersey, who are also scheduled to surrender to authorities Tuesday.

Mark Agnifilo, a lawyer for Robert Fleming at Litespeed, insisted that there was no evidence that Fleming paid “cash kickbacks” to Guzzone or anyone else, or that Bloomberg paid more than they should have for electrical services. Agnifilo said that many of the things that Fleming was being accused of are common practices in the industry.

“The New York City construction industry is obviously highly competitive,” Agnifilo said. “Honest companies go to great lengths to keep getting lucrative contracts. I don’t think Litespeed is any different.”

Investigators also seized records at Turner Construction offices downtown. The company has insisted that two of its top executives in the interior construction division — Ronald Olson and Vito Negro — had gone “rogue,” deliberately evading the company’s internal compliance program. Those two men were fired by Turner last October.

Tom Curran, a lawyer for Turner Construction, said his company and Bloomberg aided the DA’s investigation from the start. Neither company is being charged with anything or fined, he said.

For months, the close-knit industry has been rife with rumors about a pending indictment involving as many as 40 executives and millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. In recent months, more than 14 people have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

Corruption scandals in the interior construction industry, a specialized subset of construction work, have been like desert flowers that bloom once every five years, without fail. The highly profitable work covers the guts of a building, everything from dry wall, electrical and plumbing to lighting and carpeting.

In 2015, the District Attorney Office successfully prosecuted John Cassisi, former director of global construction for Citibank’s Citi Realty Services, for operating a scheme in which he received $500,000 in cash and gifts from contractors seeking work.

Plaza Construction, Tishman Construction, Granite Construction and Hunter Roberts Construction Group paid a combined $92 million in restitution and penalties for overbilling connected with fraud charges brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

And Bloomberg has been burned before.

Structure Tone, once the largest interior construction firm in New York and nationally, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2014 brought by the Manhattan district attorney and agreed to forfeit $55 million for defrauding its clients, including Bank of America and Bloomberg.

Bloomberg replaced Structure Tone with Turner.

In response to questions from a reporter earlier this year about the latest investigation, Bloomberg said it had overpaid for construction work by about $1 million. But investigators say that the participants in the scheme enriched themselves and overcharged Bloomberg by tens of millions of dollars.

Javier Paulino, a former Bloomberg manager, pleaded guilty in July to taking bribes and stealing more than $1 million by overcharging for work done at Bloomberg offices, or charging the company for work that was never done.

He has been cooperating with authorities, as has Frank Zustovich, 42, who worked at Jonathan Metal &amp; Glass, a vendor for Bloomberg, a defense lawyer said. Zustovich pleaded guilty to stealing more than $50,000 from Bloomberg and agreeing to provide unnamed executives at both Bloomberg and Turner with special benefits.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

The latest investigation apparently began when the district attorney’s office got a tip in 2017 about wrongdoing by some managers at Jonathan Metal &amp; Glass, a relatively modest Queens company that fabricates and installs architectural walls and glass for office interiors.

An investigation was launched by Christopher Beard, who heads the district attorney’s rackets squad, and members of the Special Investigations Unit of the state police.

Jonathan Glass fired Zustovich and two other employees in October 2017, according to a note it sent to clients. By then, however, investigators had seized business records and computers used by executives at both Turner and Bloomberg who were suspected of participating in the scheme. State police also raided the homes of some of the suspects.

Former Bloomberg Executives to Be Charged in Construction Fraud Scheme

There is no evidence Michael Bloomberg was aware of the alleged fraud happening in his company, people briefed on the investigation said. He has been sending signals he might run for president, making a recent visit to Iowa to talk about climate change. A central part of his appeal to voters, along with his three terms as New York’s mayor, is his success as a businessman and self-made billionaire.

For months, the close-knit industry has been rife with rumors about a pending indictment involving as many as 40 executives and tens of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. In recent months, more than 14 people have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

Javier Paulino, a former Bloomberg manager, pleaded guilty in July to bribetaking and stealing more than $1 million by overcharging for work done at Bloomberg offices, or charging the company for work that was never done.

There is no evidence Bloomberg was aware of the alleged fraud happening in his company, people briefed on the investigation said.

<h1>In 2015, Roberto Buscetta had been hiding for decades under assumed names and 11 of his closest relatives had been slaughtered by Mafia assassins when two filmmakers tracked him down in Florida, looking to chat.</h1>

His father, Tommaso Buscetta, had been a soldier in the Sicilian Mafia, the first high-ranking Mafioso to break the code of silence in the 1980s at a time when the Sicilians took omerta far more seriously than their American brethren. His father’s testimony at trials in Italy and New York had figured in the convictions of more than 400 members of the mob.

Now the filmmakers wanted Roberto Buscetta to appear on camera and talk about his father.

“Killing Tommaso Buscetta’s son would be a perfect trophy,” Roberto said, explaining his reluctance.

But he did it and so did his mother, Cristina, at the urging of the filmmakers, Mark Franchetti and Andrew Meier, whose documentary, “Our Godfather: The Man the Mafia Could Not Kill,” began streaming on iTunes on June 10. It will be featured on Netflix in September.

“Going after the seemingly impossible — finding her and the family and getting them to talk — was always the tantalizing prize,” Franchetti said.

Finding the Buscettas was indeed a challenge. It took nearly two years. The immediate family had been living under adopted names in a string of different locations for more than three decades. Roberto’s stepsister Lisa, who also appears in the documentary, says she uttered the Buscetta name for the first time in her life in the film.

Meier said he contacted prosecutors, FBI agents and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which oversaw Buscetta’s security and safe house. The DEA was wary. Several agents who had protected Buscetta had died. Some were uninterested. Two agents who had guarded Buscetta, John Huber and Tony Petrucci, were helpful. Still, they had not been in touch with Cristina for a decade.

Meier finally sent a note in 2015 to an old email address that he was told members of the Buscetta family had used in the past. Weeks passed with no response.

Finally on April 10, 2015, Cristina responded. “I must say,’’ she wrote “that your email woke up my curiosity.”

Cristina was Tommaso Buscetta’s third wife. They met in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. He returned there in the early 1980s after a serving a prison term for drug trafficking. By his own account, he wanted no part of the bloody war being waged in Sicily at the time among factions of the Mafia, or the Cosa Nostra.

Buscetta, who grew up in Palermo, the youngest of 17 children, was the only sibling to join the Mafia. He became an influential figure who commanded respect that went beyond his rank as a soldier. Mob bosses sought his advice. He was intelligent and worldly, having lived in Brazil and Brooklyn, where he worked with the Gambino crime family.

But in 1982, Mafia hit men killed two of his sons, a son-in-law, his closest brother and a nephew in separate incidents in Palermo. The following year, after being arrested in Brazil, he agreed to cooperate with Italian and U.S. law enforcement and signed what became a 3,000-page confession.

“For him, breaking omerta was really the hardest decision of his life because he had this sensation that he broke something that was sacred,” Cristina says in “Our Godfather.”

He testified in Palermo during the “Maxi Trial,” the largest anti-mob prosecution in history, which culminated in 1987 with the conviction of 342 Mafiosi.

Since Italy did not have a witness protection program, U.S. authorities hid him in a safe house in New Jersey and shuttled him back and forth across the Atlantic.

“It has to be understood that during that period Buscetta was the most important, the most wanted and most endangered witness in American criminal history,” Huber, the DEA agent, said in an interview.

In New York, Buscetta testified in 1985 at the “pizza connection case,” brought by Rudy Giuliani, who was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan at the time. Seventeen people were convicted for their roles in an international drug ring.

“There was no other witness in the case who was able to describe the enterprise, identify the hierarchy and describe the goals of the organization,” said Louis Freeh, the lead prosecutor who went on to become director of the FBI.

Ivan S. Fisher, who represented the Mafia boss Salvatore Catalano at the trial, said Buscetta “just oozed intelligence.”

“He played the courtroom like fiddle,” he said.

Fourteen years later, still in hiding, Buscetta died of cancer at the age of 71. He was buried under an alias in North Miami, Florida. But his story, his place in history as the Mafia’s first high-ranking informer, and the ravages he brought to the mob, and his own family, still resonated years later with Franchetti, a foreign correspondent in Moscow for the Sunday Times of London, and Meier, a journalist and nonfiction author.

Franchetti had been the producer of a 2013 documentary, “The Condemned,” about a remote Russian prison exclusively for murderers.

Now he and Meier wanted to provide a compelling, but straightforward account of Buscetta’s life, stripped of romance and populated with interviews with family members who had not spoken publicly since they disappeared in 1986.

Cristina and her son Roberto agreed to meet the filmmakers in Florida in May 2015. Roberto asked Petrucci, the DEA agent who had once protected the family, to join them. Hours before they were supposed to meet, Cristina changed the meeting spot to the Ritz-Carlton, overlooking the beach in Fort Lauderdale.

“At the first meeting, Mark and Andrew gave us all kinds of assurances,” Roberto said. “When you’ve been in this business for a long time, there are certain words you want to hear. The guys came across as incredibly sincere. They were willing to bargain about everything, including whether to show our faces on camera.”

The filmmakers told Cristina and Roberto that it was difficult to make a film about a dead man with only a handful of photographs available. Might they have any family photographs, home movies, diaries

Cristina said she had a trunk full of photos, while Roberto said he had lots of video. At a subsequent meeting, he handed them 13 DVDs, including one that showed Buscetta in a Santa Claus hat dishing out Christmas presents to the family.

“That’s when we realized we definitely had a film, a unique and intimate insight into a Mafia don and his family,” Franchetti said.

Still it took time for Cristina and Roberto to agree to go on camera. Not even their neighbors knew their real names. “There is still a risk,” Cristina Buscetta told the filmmakers. “The Mafia does not forget.”

“Security for them and us was the main issue,” Meier said. “Cristina said, ‘This is my last son.’”

The logistics were key. Meetings with family members had to be discreet and at carefully chosen locations. Filming was done at spots where the backgrounds were visually interesting, but nondescript, without identifying landmarks that would reveal the Buscettas’ location.

Still many relatives rebuffed the filmmakers. Others agreed to help but would not appear on camera.

Even Roberto, who in the film describes serving combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan under his assumed name, asked for precautions. He would not allow that name to be used in the film. He asked that his face never appear in full view.

Cristina, however, looked straight into the camera, ready to remember the man she had loved.

“We found her at the right time in her life,” Meier said. “She felt she hadn’t told the story. As she said in the film, ‘It was now or never.’”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/arts/television/tommaso-buscetta-our-godfather.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

They hid from the mob for decades, now they will surface in a film

Now the filmmakers wanted Roberto Buscetta to appear on camera and talk about his father.

On the last of six episodes, the producers of “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” presented Durst with an envelope he had addressed. The handwriting looked identical to that on the anonymous note that had alerted authorities to the presence of Berman’s body in her Beverly Hills home. On both, the word “Beverly” was misspelled “Beverley.”

Then, the episode ended with Durst muttering to himself, perhaps confessing, as he marched off to the bathroom, still wearing his microphone from the interview.

“What the hell did I do?”

“Killed them all, of course.”

Viewers were left stunned. The documentary went on to win huge ratings, a Peabody and two Emmys.

But it turns out Durst’s remarks were significantly edited; rather than being consecutive, the two sentences had been plucked from among the 20 in his rambling remarks and presented out of order.

Durst’s lawyers are now preparing to cite those edits — they’ll call them manipulations — in an effort to cripple his prosecution as they get ready for a trial set to begin in a few months in California. They are planning to call the documentary filmmakers as witnesses and to suggest that they cooperated so closely with the police that they became, in effect, “agents for law enforcement.”

So even though it’s Durst who is facing a possible prison term, the documentarians — Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier — will also be scrutinized as their decision-making is challenged by the defense at trial.

The filmmakers defend their edits as being entirely representative of what Durst said. But other documentarians — like Mark Harris, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and professor at the University of Southern California, who once taught Smerling — have questioned it.

“The editing is problematic,” Harris said. “They put those lines together in a way that’s very damning. But it is definitely more ambiguous in the transcript.”

True crime documentaries like “Thin Blue Line” (1988) have a long history of working to free the unjustly accused. Much rarer have been those that, like “The Jinx,” were at least partially responsible for putting people in jail. In the Durst case, the investigators in Los Angeles did not so much work off leads suggested by the documentary as build their case atop the evidence unearthed by the series itself. (Lifetime’s recent documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” also presented a compelling argument for that singer’s prosecution and was followed by his arrest.)

Susan Murray, an associate professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, credits “The Jinx” with triggering a recent burst of true crime documentaries. “The Jinx,” she said, “has all the elements of documentaries, but it also has the sensational aspect of reality TV unfolding before you.”

And seldom has there been a more compelling subject than Durst who, at 76 and with a net worth of $100 million, has spent the past few years in a Los Angeles jail cell. Long alienated from his family, which built a real estate empire in New York City, Durst has also long been suspected of having killed his wife, Kathie, who vanished in 1982, although he was never charged. Berman, one of Durst’s best friends, was at his side through most of it, often acting as his spokeswoman.

In 2000, when Berman turned up dead, shot in the back of the head, Durst was also suspected, but he was not initially charged. He was living in Texas at the time. He had moved there from New York, taking up residence in Galveston and posing as a mute woman after authorities in Westchester County reopened the investigation into his wife’s disappearance. Investigators now contend that during this period, Durst stole away to California and killed Berman because he was concerned his old friend would incriminate him in his wife’s death.

Ten months later, he was back in the spotlight when parts of his Texas neighbor’s body turned up in Galveston Bay. Durst was charged with murdering Morris Black and gave a gruesome account at trial of carving up the body. But he said his gun had gone off accidentally as he grappled with Black in self-defense. The jury acquitted him in 2003.

These tawdry details, and the psychological complexities that surround them, are the core of “The Jinx,” which was 10 years in the making. Working from a Madison Avenue office, Jarecki and Smerling built a library of documents, court records, interviews and newspaper articles, all of it cross-indexed and annotated. The material became the subject of a 2010 feature film by the duo, a somewhat fictionalized version of Durst’s life, “All Good Things,” that starred Kirsten Dunst as Kathie and Ryan Gosling as Durst.

Just before the premiere, out of the blue, Durst contacted Jarecki. They discussed the possibility of a lengthy interview and Jarecki arranged for Durst to have a private screening of “All Good Things.” Durst was impressed, even though the film implicated him in three killings. He liked that it portrayed him as someone who had been buffeted by an aggressive father. “The movie, I did think,” he said in a 2010 interview with me, “is as reasonably accurate as anything out there.”

Soon — over the objections of his lawyer — he had agreed to be interviewed by the filmmakers and sat for three days of filming. He admitted, for the first time, that he had lied to the police investigating his wife’s disappearance. He described the fractured state of their marriage before she vanished.

“By 1981,” he told the filmmakers, “our life was half arguments, fighting, slapping, pushing, wrestling.”

“It deteriorated from there on.”

But he did not acknowledge a role in any crimes.

It took the producers another 16 months to coax Durst into sitting down for a second, final interview in April 2012 in a hotel room. By this time they had discovered the envelope with the similar handwriting and misspelling. They confronted Durst with the envelope and the note that alerted authorities to Berman’s body. He looked nervous but denied he had written the so-called “cadaver note.”

When the interview was over, Durst asked to use the restroom, where for seven or so minutes he talked to himself. As aired, his soliloquy ended with, “Killed them all, of course,” although that’s not the order in which Durst actually spoke the words.

The final episode aired March 15, 2015. Durst had been arrested just the night before.

As a reporter who had long covered the case, I was invited by Jarecki to join a group of about 30 people at his Upper East Side home to watch the show. The group included Jeanine Pirro, the former Westchester County district attorney who had reopened the investigation into Kathie Durst’s disappearance; Rosie O’Donnell; Diane Sawyer and members of Kathie’s family.

The living room went silent after Durst’s chilling words aired. Then some of Kathie’s family began quietly weeping. An indignant O’Donnell quickly demanded, “How could they possibly withhold this information for so long?”

That question would reverberate in the days to follow, as journalists and other documentary filmmakers debated it in the press. By law, the filmmakers had not been bound to turn over their material to the authorities. But didn’t they have a moral responsibility to see justice done?

The filmmakers said that, for two years, they had not been aware that Durst had been recorded in the bathroom. The audio was not attached to video that they reviewed in creating the documentary.

Durst’s defense team has argued that the filmmakers and the investigators coordinated their timing, arresting Durst as the final episode aired as part of a publicity stunt to boost HBO viewership.

“We’re here today,” Durst’s lawyer, Dick De Guerin, said in a recent interview, “because the purpose of the producers of the ‘The Jinx’ was to win an Emmy, not to actually document Bob’s story. This is show business. It’s not a documentary.”

But the investigators, who arrested Durst in New Orleans, where he was traveling under an alias, said the timing was purely a coincidence. They had been tracking him and watching him stockpile cash, and feared he was getting ready to flee the country.

The filmmakers have been wary about discussing “The Jinx” because they expect to be called as witnesses, according to their lawyer, Victor Kovner. But in past interviews with me in 2014 and 2015 they have discussed how they tried to balance their role as independent journalists with their obligation as citizens to come forward with the evidence.

They initially met with the lead prosecutor on the Berman case, John Lewin, in 2013, a year after they finished interviewing Durst, they said. They ultimately provided investigators with the raw footage of the Durst interviews and the envelope from Durst where his handwriting resembles that on the so-called “cadaver note.” Lewin, who specializes in cold cases, then bolstered his investigation with additional evidence, including dozens of his own interviews with Durst and others.

The filmmakers say it was not until 2014 that they discovered Durst’s bathroom remarks and then alerted Lewin to the additional audio material. Durst’s defense team is seeking to have all of the evidence compiled by the filmmakers thrown out.

In bringing his case, Lewin was careful to use a transcript of the actual raw audio from Durst, not the edited version that was used in the documentary. Several defense lawyers said they thought the raw audio was likely to be admissible as evidence. But they predicted the defense would be careful to screen jurors to eliminate any who just couldn’t shake what they had heard on TV.

“How many jurors saw ‘The Jinx’ and remember the final lines?” said Ben Brafman, a criminal defense lawyer in New York. “It’s very prejudicial.”

Beyond the courtroom, the discussion among documentarians is likely to focus on the question of just what is allowed in such editing. Every filmmaker, or reporter for that matter, edits interviews for clarity and brevity.

“It’s not deceptive as long as it doesn’t misrepresent what the person says,” said Rick Goldsmith, co-director of the 2009 documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.’’ “It’s effective storytelling.”

Documentarians, including Goldsmith, generally admired the work done on “The Jinx.” But he said the editing of the final sequence left him queasy. “I was uncomfortable with that one part of the edit,” he said.

Durst began his bathroom soliloquy with perhaps his most damning statement: “There it is, you’re caught.” The filmmakers say they never intended for the last two lines they aired to be read as a question followed by an answer.

“We put the line ‘killed them all’ at the very end of the last episode to end the series on a dramatic note, not to link it to any other line,” said Stuart-Pontier. “It didn’t occur to us that other journalists would connect it with ‘What the hell did I do?’ There are actually 10 seconds between the two lines, and I think the experiences of reading it and hearing it are very different.”

Marcia Rock, director of news and documentaries at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute, said: “We all edit; we all take things out.”

“The test is,” she continued, “is it still the truth, or are you manipulating the truth?”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f004765d-9959-3dc4-ab77-6425a4ca387f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/arts/television/robert-durst-the-jinx.html">The New York Times</a>.

To understand why Robert Durst, the peculiar real estate scion long suspected in several homicides, is now charged with killing his close friend Susan Berman 19 years ago, look no further than the 2015 HBO documentary about his life.

HBO film faces own trial in Durst case

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Charles V. Bagli

Articles written by the author

Cash 'Sandwiches': 'Brazen' Fraud by Bloomberg Executives Is Detailed in Charges

Bloomberg Executives to Be Charged in Construction Fraud Scheme

Former Bloomberg Executives to Be Charged in Construction Fraud Scheme

Bloomberg Executives to Be Charged in Construction Fraud Scheme

Former Bloomberg Executives to Be Charged in Construction Fraud Scheme

They hid from the mob for decades, now they will surface in a film

HBO film faces own trial in Durst case