Rabbi Baruch Lebovits is in a heap of trouble. He is finally about to be retried, and Brooklyn’s new District Attorney Kenneth Thompson has appointed his office’s top prosecutor, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, to help prosecute him. Nicolazzi — a homicide bureau chief – has never lost a trial.
Rabbi Baruch Lebovits
Top Prosecutor Appointed To Prosecute Accused Haredi Child Sex Abuser Rabbi Baruch Lebovits
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Rabbi Baruch Lebovits is in a heap of trouble.
The 62-year-old hasidic travel agent and hazzan (cantor; pictured at left) was convicted on child sex abuse charges in 2010. That conviction was overturned on a technicality more than a year ago, but the appeals court noted that the evidence against Lebovits was still strong.
Now Lebovits is finally about to be retried, and Brooklyn’s new District Attorney Kenneth Thompson has appointed his office’s top prosecutor, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, to help prosecute him, the Daily News reported. Nicolazzi — a homicide bureau chief – has never lost a trial. She will join sex crimes prosecutor Miss Gregory, the daughter of comedian Dick Gregory, on the case.
Gregory reportedly told the court today that her prosecution team is “ready to proceed to trial.”
Meanwhile, Lebovits’ attorney Alan Dershowitz – the former Harvard Law professor who has a long history of distorting and twisting facts (and, many argue, an nearly equally long history of plagiarism) – continued to insist that an NYPD sex crimes detective, Steve Litwin, helped Samuel Kellner extort Lebovits’ family and coached a witness against Lebovits in the first trial.
“[Litwin is] a major cog in the extortion plot by Kellner. We have independent evidence of that corruption and we offered it to the investigators repeatedly and they have thus far refused to accept it,” Dershowitz reportedly said outside the court today.
All the evidence the prosecution has against Kellner – who was indicted more than a year ago – appears to have come from Dershowitz and another Lebovits attorney Arthur Aidala, who is a longtime crony of Brooklyn’s former D.A. Charles J. Hynes, and from Lebovits’ family. Almost all of that evidence has since been shown to be false, corrupted or, in the case of a secretly made audio tape, mistranslated from Yiddish to English by the former D.A.’s translator. That has thrown Kellner’s prosecution into doubt, and most legal observers believe the case against him will be dropped in the near future.
Dershowitz’s strategy to overcome that appears to be to attempt to implicate Litwin in the same way Kellner was implicated in an attempt to force the prosecution to offer Lebovits a non-prison plea deal.
Lebovits is due back in court February 18.