Cestone's Verona Construction was low bidder on the project. Since Cestone had refused to kick back on the South Side sewer, all bids were thrown out and new ones solicited. Again, Verona was low bidder, and Newark's officials had no choice but to give it the contract. But they withheld payment until Cestone agreed to kick back. He capitulated and eventually paid $100,000.

The new main required high-pressure pipe, another product made by Interpace but not by Gallo. So Biancone met with Gillespie again and asked how much Interpace would kick back on an order of 20,000 feet of pipe. Gillespie said a dollar a foot.

"Biancone said it was peanuts, wasn't worth talking about, that other people in Alabama were interested, and we would have to do better," Gillespie said.

Charles Mack Albertson, former vice-president of marketing for Interpace, told what happened next: He, too, was summoned to lunch with Biancone.

"He said that if we were interested in supplying pipe for the particular project, the only way we could participate is by paying a ten-percent kickback to him. . . . I told him the idea was ridiculous and that we would not participate."

But it was not too ridiculous to preclude another meeting with Biancone, this time over breakfast.

"I pointed out that . . . we obviously could not come up with the ten percent that he was asking for," Albertson said. "He seemed to recognize the position we were in and said, `Well, could you pay five percent?' ... I told him that I felt that we probably could pay a five-percent kickback.... He said, `We will see that you get the contract for the pipe.'"

He said Interpace eventually paid $35,000 in kickbacks - first to Biancone, then to Paul Rigo.

That set the stage for the government's star witness. On the afternoon of June 20, Stern announced, "The government calls ... Paul Rigo."

There was an electric shock in the air-and an electronic frisk at the door. Rigo's life had been threatened before, and he had been under guard since December. All spectators who came into the courtroom were screened for weapons. The government even feared that snipers might try to pick off Rigo on the witness stand; so each day he testified, the blinds on the large window behind him were drawn, darkening an already dim courtroom.

The man who stepped to the stand was 45 years old, short, immaculately groomed and well dressed - "in showy good taste," as one observer said. Rigo liked to live well and enjoyed the use of a yacht and a helicopter that took off from a pad on his estate. His path to fortune had started only a few years before when he'd won $65,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes, quit his $12,000-a-year job and started his own engineering company, Constrad, Inc.

Although he'd never finished college, Rigo was an articulate witness. "That became very important to us," Stern says. "Although the public feeling about the case was that there was overwhelming evidence of guilt, virtually the only direct testimony to the guilt of Addonizio and the others was supplied by this one witness."

Rigo was given immunity and started his story. He was to remain on the witness stand for two weeks.

In 1964, after Sepede's death, Rigo became chief engineer on the South Side sewer project, in partnership with Sepede's partner, an elderly engineer named Charles Capen. A few weeks later LaMorte called him on a Sunday morning and asked him to come over right away. Rigo drove to LaMorte's house. LaMorte met him outside, led him to his own car and drove off.

"This is the most important meeting you will have in Newark," LaMorte told Rigo. "I am going to take you to the man who really runs this town."

Rigo asked who.

"You will see," LaMorte said. "We are almost there."

LaMorte pulled up at the "dingy" office of Valentine Electric Company, led Rigo into the back room and introduced him to a man named Tony. Again, LaMorte discreetly left. Tony told Rigo, "This job you have down there on the South Side - that was set up by Johnny Sepede and me, and Johnny Sepede and I had an understanding, and that understanding is that you pay ten percent of what you get on that job."

"I can't pay you ten percent," Rigo replied.

"You will pay ten percent and you will pay it in cash."

"We can't pay you ten percent. What are we getting for paying you ten percent?"

"There is a lot of mouths to feed in city hall," Tony said. "You pay me the ten percent. I take care of the mayor. I take care of the council. I take care of anybody that has to be taken care of down there."

At this point Stern stopped the narrative and asked Rigo to identify Tony. Rigo pointed to Tony Boy Boiardo.

"I bargained, tried to get it down to five percent," Rigo continued.

"No, it's going to be ten percent," Boiardo told him. "Everybody in Newark pays ten percent or they don't work in Newark and they don't get paid in Newark... . Look what happened to Killam.... He didn't pay. He is not in Newark, and he is going to sweat a long time before he gets what is owed to him."

There was the problem of how Rigo would raise the cash. Boiardo suggested Kantor's operation, but that wouldn't work for Rigo, since engineers don't buy plumbing supplies. Rigo said he'd raise the cash his own way.

The conversation was cut short when Boiardo's wife called, summoning the mobster home for spaghetti dinner.

On the way back, Rigo asked LaMorte who Tony was.

"Don't you know?" said the incredulous LaMorte. "That's Tony Boy Boiardo. Don't you know Tony Boy Boiardo? Don't you know `the Boot'?"

"I said, `No.... Who are they?'

"He said, `They are-"

Stern interrupted, "Well, all right."

And Judge Barlow interrupted him, "That's enough." No mention of Boiardo's mob connections would be permitted in evidence.

Rigo kicked back-first to Gallo, then to Biancone.

During the water shortage, Rigo continued, he met with Mayor Addonizio, LaMorte and Schiff to discuss the Southerly Extension.

"Mr. LaMorte told the mayor that he had discussed the project with Mr. Boiardo and Mr. Boiardo approved of the project," Rigo said. "The mayor was quite upset and questioned me about why we had to use pipe other than Gallo's. The answer, of course, was that Gallo didn't make pressure pipe and we had to use Lock Joint [Interpace's old name] pipe.

"He said . . . `If you have to use this Lock Joint pipe, Tony Boy better figure out a way to get something out of Lock Joint.' . . .

"Mr. Schiff made some kind of a remark to the effect, `Will he get enough?'

"And the mayor said something to the effect, `If he goes after it, he'll get enough.'"

Rigo started to work on the Southerly Extension, at first without contract or pay. Since he was still kicking back on the South Side sewer project, he quickly felt the financial pinch. He took his problem to Addonizio, who told him that only Boiardo could settle the matter.

Rigo lingered in Addonizio's office and engaged the mayor in small talk.

"I don't know why in the world you ever left Washington and a nice job in Congress to come up here in this mess," he told the mayor.

"Simple," Addonizio answered. "There's no money in Washington, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark."

Riga took his problem to Boiardo, meeting the mobster at his home in Livingston.

"He was somewhat angry with me," Rigo said. "He said that we hadn't been making our payments, didn't know, couldn't understand why we were having money difficulties. .. I explained to him . . . that if we didn't get a contract on that Southerly Extension job, I wasn't going to be able to pay ten percent, because we had more money eaten up in interest again and everything else, and we wouldn't have any money left.

"He told me, `You pay your ten percent or I'll break both your legs.'"

Stern interrupted the narrative and asked Rigo to step off the stand and draw the floor plan of Boiardo's house.

"Here's a jury in Trenton listening to this thing," he explains, "a person like Boiardo saying the kinds of things he was saying. I was afraid it would be so shocking, so out of context with their particular world, they might not believe it. I had Rigo get off the stand and draw the interior of Boiardo's house. If the man had lied, it would be an easy matter to prove that that's not what the interior was."

The defense objected vigorously, fearing that Rigo would describe the statues "Richie the Boot" had erected of himself and his family out front and the ovens behind, where he supposedly disposed of mob victims' remains. But it turned out that Tony Boy lived in another town and Rigo had seen neither statues nor ovens.

Riga eventually got the $300,000 engineering contract on the Southerly Extension and kicked back $30,000 to Boiardo's new bagman, Ralph Vicaro.

The mob soon found additional chores for him. Boiardo told Rigo that he'd have to collect the $100,000 from Cestone and later money from Interpace. When the Essex County grand jury started its inquiry, LaMorte summoned Riga to city hall and told him that because of the "sensitive situation," Boiardo could no longer personally pay off the city officials - Rigo would have to do it. The amounts were $10,000 each to Mayor Addonizio and eight councilmen, $25,000 to LaMorte and, later, $10,000 to corporation counsel Schiff. The money would be paid in installments as the contractors received their checks from the city.

Rigo started keeping a diary to keep track of the payments. Each individual was identified with a code word or letter keyed to Boiardo's nickname for him. Addonizio was "the Pope," because of his physical resemblance to Pope John XXIII; Cestone, "Chestnuts"; Schiff, "Swifty Morgan"; Bernstein and Frank Addonizio, "the Katzenjammer Kids."

Stern led Rigo item by item through the collections and payments. He calls it the "toughest" examination he's ever conducted.

"I had to change my game plan," he explains. "I had counted on introducing the diaries into evidence as business records and taking him through each payoff as reflected in the diaries. The defense prevented it. So I shifted my strategy."

Rather than use Rigo to confirm the diaries, he had to use the diaries to confirm Rigo. In addition, he led the witness through a long litany of personal outlays.

"I knew that they would try on cross-examination to say that he had generated that cash for himself," Stern continues. "I had to show that he had generated that cash to make the payoffs. I took him through every trip he ever made and proved that he paid for everything by check. When he needed cash, he wrote a check. This had the effect -at least it was my intention - of convincing the jury that whatever he was doing with that cash, he sure wasn't using it for himself.