Though some defendants pressed for an early trial, Addonizio repeatedly moved for postponement - at least until after the mayoral runoff, June 16. In the election's first heat, Addonizio had trailed Kenneth Gibson, a black engineer, by nearly 20,000 votes. But Gibson's total fell short of a majority, and most supporters of the five eliminated candidates were expected to shift to Addonizio.

Surprisingly, the mayor - under indictment for extortion and depicted in the DeCarlo tapes as a pawn of organized crime - was running on a "law-and-order" platform, attacking "crime in the streets." As election day neared, the campaign focused increasingly on the racial issue and Newark's whites' fear of black violence. Although blacks and Spanish-speaking people comprised more than 60 percent of Newark's 381,930 population, whites remained a majority of the registered voters. Airing the evidence in court was bound to erode Addonizio's support among this white electoral majority.

Judge Barlow set June 2 as the trial date. Hellring objected vigorously on behalf of the mayor, pleading for a two-week delay. Stern opposed it. He said "the public had a right to know whether the charges were true or false before these men stood up for office." He had another reason, which he divulged to the judge only in camera: The government intended to call Irving Kantor as a witness; another two weeks and he might be dead or too far gone to testify. The date remained June 2.

Addonizio charged that the government was obstructing his reelection campaign in other ways. The terms of his bond forbade him to leave the state without the U.S. attorney's permission. Since Newark is covered by New York television stations, it meant that he could appear on live newscasts or taped interview shows only by Lacey's consent - and Lacey refused to give it unless Addonizio agreed not to discuss the pending case, a condition Addonizio understandably would not meet. Once the jury was chosen and sequestered, the restriction was lifted. Addonizio appeared on TV, calling the trial "a political prosecution."

The mayor wanted the trial held in his native Newark, but other defendants moved for a change of venue. Some of those standing for office even claimed they couldn't get a fair trial from the same citizens whose votes they sought. Boiardo's attorney, Thomas Wadden of Washington, a former partner of Edward Bennett Williams, urged that the trial be shifted out of New Jersey to some other district in the Third Circuit; he suggested the Virgin Islands. (The Third Circuit is composed of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the Virgin Islands.)

"You're talking to me as a golfer rather than as a judge," Judge Barlow quipped.

He ordered the trial held in Trenton, where jurors were less likely than those in Newark to be prejudiced by pretrial publicity.

So, on Monday, June 1, a major portion of the U.S. attorney's office checked into Trenton's Holiday Inn for what turned out to be a two-month stay-Stern, Bissell, Brown and Merkelbach, plus a rotating retinue of secretaries, FBI agents and IRS accountants. Lacey commuted by car. As they had in the DeCarlo case, Lacey and Stern divided the prosecution chores-Lacey addressing the jury, Stern presenting the evidence. "Batman and Robin," one defense lawyer called them.

By trial time the defendants' ranks had been thinned. In addition to Gallo, Judge Guiliano had died since indictment-of natural causes at age 71. Turner, Schiff and Khrush were too ill to stand trial. Judge Barlow also severed West, Bernstein and Frank Addonizio because their lawyer, Raymond Brown, was tied up on a protracted trial in Jersey City.

The defense lawyers were a diverse crew. Addonizio's counsel, Bernard Hellring, was a roly-poly white-haired corporation lawyer. His strategy was to keep both himself and his client as far as possible from the other defendants and their lawyers -especially the mobsters. Addonizio himself commuted to court each morning in the mayoral limousine and hurried home each evening - until the election - to campaign.

Boiardo and his fellow mobsters were defended by three former colleagues of Edward Bennett Williams-Thomas Wadden, Thomas Dyson and Patrick Wall. They rented a house on the Jersey Shore and drove to Trenton each day with Gordon's lawyer, John Noonan, whose summer home was nearby. Noonan provided the trial's comic relief. "He never repeated a joke, and he never stopped telling one," said a colleague. LaMorte was represented by Julius Feinberg, now a state judge, and Callahan by Stern's rival in the Weber case, Joseph Hayden.

It took three days to pick the jury. Then Lacey opened - astounding spectators with Addonizio's adage, "There's no money in being a congressman, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark"; astounding the defense by announcing that the government's first witness would be Irving Kantor.

The next day, judge and jury, lawyers and defendants, plus the whole court entourage, trekked to East Orange for one of the strangest sessions in American judicial history. A makeshift courtroom had been set up in the auditorium of the Veterans Administration Hospital. The participants sat on folding chairs; the witness lay on a hospital bed, the tubes running out of him. Kantor was too weak to testify for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch. The court attendant even had to lift his hand and place it on the Bible so he could take the oath.

Judge Barlow handled the initial examination outside the jury's presence, questioning Kantor, his wife and his doctor to determine his competence to testify and hers to act as "interpreter," since Kantor's grunts were unintelligible to anyone unaccustomed to them. Over defense objections, he ruled that Kantor "is in every respect competent and able to testify."

With Kantor's wife relaying his words to the jury, Kantor told how he had been introduced to Biancone in 1962. Biancone, an agent of Boiardo's, sought Kantor's help in converting kickbacks into cash. Kantor suggested that this be done through a dummy company and phony invoices for plumbing supplies to conceal the true nature of the transactions on the contractors' books. Biancone made a phone call to get approval.

" ... He talked partly in Italian and partly in English," Kantor said.

"Could you understand the conversation?" Stern asked. "The substance, yes."

"Just a second," Judge Barlow interrupted, summoning counsel to the makeshift bench. "Not unusual these days," he whispered, "we have a bomb threat."

Without telling the jury the reason why, the trial was recessed and the auditorium cleared. No bomb was found, but the incident heightened the drama of an already dramatic scene.

When the trial resumed, Kantor said that Biancone relayed the OK for the stratagem. Kantor opened a bank account and ordered invoices-in the name of the nonexistent Kantor Supply Company, whose address was a vacant lot. When contractors' checks came in, Kantor would deposit them and mail out phony invoices to cover the amount. As soon as the checks cleared, he'd withdraw the cash, keeping five percent for himself, passing the rest to Biancone.

Stern calls it "a very difficult examination," but it was even tougher for the defense lawyers who had to cross-examine Kantor. Treading softly lest they antagonize the jury, they went after him - but were unable to shake his story.

When the trial returned to Trenton, Stern called Joseph Patrick Foley, an engineer with Elson T. Killam Associates, which had bid on Newark's South Side Interceptor System. He related how he'd met LaMorte for lunch at Thomm's Restaurant on June 8, 1964. LaMorte introduced him to a "Mr. B," then discreetly left.

"He was a very soft-spoken gentleman," Foley said of Mr. B, "and he said that he is a businessman and I am a businessman. My business is engineering and his business is collecting moneys for - or political contributions or what have you - for the city of Newark administration. He said his job was to keep the `war chest' full....

"I remember him saying to me - how could I ... be so naive in this day and age in the engineering business, not having to make kickbacks or shakedowns for work. I told him that it was not the practice of our firm to do anything of this nature, and he just -

he couldn't conceive that this was possible. He said that anybody that did work for the city of Newark had to give some percent of their fee for this."

But Foley, who had met Mr. B only once, could not identify any of the defendants as him.

Stern next called a bank official to the stand to identify some of the $911,000 in checks that had passed through Kantor Supply. He planned to have a second banker identify the remainder, but, en route to Trenton, Paul Anderson, vice-president of the First National Bank of New Jersey, was killed in an auto accident. Like Mario Gallo's fatal accident, it, too, was a one-car crash-ironically, only a few miles from the spot where the contractor had skidded to his death five months before. As in the Gallo case, the FBI investigated - again to find it only an accident. But newspapers had a field day with the story, further fueling the trial's "circus" atmosphere - "everything except sex," as Noonan put it.

Unlike the Gallo case, Anderson's death did not upset the prosecution's plans. "We got the word in the morning," Stern says. "I didn't tell the defense counsel that he was dead. I said, `To save some time, let's just stipulate what's in these bank records.' They said, `OK.' If they hadn't, I would have just put another bank official on."

The stipulation left Stem without an available witness, and the trial recessed early on Friday afternoon. Hellring sought to extend the recess into the following week so Addonizio could campaign on election eve and election day. Judge Barlow denied the request.

"May I ask for one day?" Hellring pleaded. "Just Monday."

"No day," the judge snapped back. "I am not conducting an election - I am conducting a trial."

Monday's witness was Peter Homack, president of Killam Associates, who picked up the thread of Foley's testimony. On July 14, 1964, he and the late Mr. Killam had gone to city hall to discuss the South Side sewer project with LaMorte. They were intercepted by Biancone, who led them into the mayor's office, introduced them to Addonizio, then steered them back into the hall, where he made his pitch.

"Mr. Biancone indicated to us that a request was being made for five percent of our engineering fee to be paid in consideration of doing this work for the city of Newark," Homack said.

"Did he indicate why he wanted the money?" Stern asked.

"Yes, he indicated that he wanted the money for the political campaign-war chest. . . ."

"Did either you or Mr. Killam make any reply to Mr. Biancone?"

"Mr. Killam shook his head. He indicated that we would not pay five percent."

"Was there further conversation?"

"Mr. Biancone said, `How about four percent?' And we said no. Finally he said, `Three percent?' and said to Mr. Killam, `Won't you even make an offer? How much are you willing to pay?' Mr. Killam said, `You do not understand. We will not pay anything.'"

Killam did not get the job. John Sepede became chief engineer on the project.

On Tuesday, June 16, Addonizio absented himself from the courtroom to vote. That night he received the returns at his election-night headquarters - Thomm's Restaurant, where the mysterious Mr. B had made his pitch to Foley. Kenneth Gibson was elected, 55,097 votes to 43,048, to become the first black mayor in the Northeast. As the bad news came over the TV tube, Addonizio's followers shouted, "Kill the nigger! Kill the nigger!" No "niggers" were on hand; so they vented their wrath on newsmen, beating up an NBC camera crew and then smashing its equipment.

Stern caught the results in his motel room, relieved that Addonizio lost, shocked that a man so steeped in corruption still received 45 percent of the votes. The prosecution had feared that if Addonizio were reelected, the courtroom would be thronged the next day with his cheering supporters. As it was, Wednesday was a day like any other in the trial. The jury was not informed of the results, and Judge Barlow instructed counsel to continue referring to Addonizio as "mayor." But something intangible had changed. "It was like the steam just went out of him," one observer said of Addonizio after his defeat.

A string of contractors and suppliers took the stand in the week after the election to testify about kickbacks on the South Side sewer project.

Ralph Cestone of Verona Construction Company told how he had been approached by Sepede, who was putting together a package of contractors and suppliers willing to kick back one million dollars. Cestone refused to go along -and the construction contract went to a joint venture headed by C. Salvatore and Sons.

Everyone on the project was kicking back ten percentthe engineers, contractors and suppliers. Then a hitch developed. The specifications called for pipe with rubber-and steel joints, but the chief supplier, Mario Gallo, only made a pipe with inferior rubber-and-concrete joints.

The conspirators tried to enlist Interpace Corporation, a major supplier of rubber-and-steel-joint pipe. Harry J. Gillespie, the firm's materials manager, told what happened:
Gillespie met LaMorte for lunch on October 22, 1964. "LaMorte told me the job was mine. I said, `Thank you.' He said, `We will require the usual.' I said, `You mean ten?' And he said, yes. I said, `I am in no position to commit. I will have to report back to my people. If they are interested, they will tell you.'"

As an afterthought, Gillespie asked who else knew that they were meeting.

"The man from Livingston," LaMorte replied-a reference to one of the Boiardos.

"I asked him, `The father or the son?'"

"What did he reply?" Stern asked.

"The father."

LaMorte offered to drive Gillespie to meet Boiardo, but he declined. Interpace also declined to pay the kickbacks, and the city fathers made plans to change the pipe specifications so the contract could go to Gallo.

Gillespie tried to enlist some city-council members in opposition, explaining that if concrete joints were used, ground drainage would seep into the sewer. The line was linked to a treatment plant of the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, the flow metered and Newark billed by volume. If concrete were used, the city would be paying to process rainwater!

Gillespie was not permitted to tell the jury what happened next. He received an anonymous telephone call: "Lay off the city of Newark or you'll get both legs broken or be floating down the river."

With Mayor Addonizio leading the way, the city council voted to change the specifications, and Mario Gallo supplied the pipe.