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Wallace had appealed the Bergen County judge’s verdict, which brought him a sentence of probation with counseling — and an order never to approach the object of his obsession again.
After a five-day bench trial in Hackensack, Superior Court Judge Harry Carroll acquitted the married real estate agent of stalking the city salon owner — but convicted him of harassing her, a disorderly persons offense.
Wallace, now 58, got two years probation, provided he receive psychiatric treatment and have no contact with the victim.
Wallace is still known in town, having made a reputation for replacing old buildings with two-family homes. He’s spent quite a bit of time in court: Just a few months ago, Wallace won a year-long battle with the city Board of Adjustment over one of those properties. A longtime Garfield Rotary Club member, he was honored by the group several years ago.
Records show Wallace’s criminal undoing began a few years back, when he showed up at the salon selling tickets for a Rotary event. The owner bought some, the two got to talking, and soon he was a regular customer, according to court papers.
“[T]he two became close friends, so close that each referred to the other as his or her ‘best friend,’ “ Appellate Judges Dorothea O’C. Wefing and Ellen L. Koblitz wrote. Wallace ran trips to the bank for her or picked up lunch for her staff, and even gave her admission tickets to a North Jersey lake, where she took her daughters, they added.
The pair exchanged gifts, some of which the woman said were so too expensive to accept. One was a mink coat delivered to her shop, court records show. She said she returned them all.
Wallace lent her money, too — at least $30,000 that she said she paid back over his objections. “They regularly had lunch together, sometimes alone and sometimes with others,” the judges wrote. “They also had dinner together, although on a less frequent basis.
“Despite the closeness of their relationship, it was never physical in nature,” Wefing and Koblitz continued. “After a few years, however, several instances occurred that began to cause [her] to have concerns….”
When Wallace told her, for instance, that he was coming stag to her daughter’s Sweet 16 party, the salon owner said, she insisted he bring his wife. Later, when she had to relocate her business, she testified, she ended up fighting off his entreaties to move into the Outwater Lane building where he had his real estate office.
At one point, the woman confronted him and his father at a restaurant, asking the elder Wallace to intervene on her behalf, court records show.
Despite her insisting he leave her alone, Wallace continued calling and sent “a constant stream of cards and letters asserting his love for her,” the appeals judges wrote.
Birthday cards began arriving several weeks in advance, and Valentine’s Day gifts were delivered to the salon, the judges said. She said she even found notes on her car. Eventually, cards and gifts arrived at her house, addressed to her children and her mother.
It all “came to a head on January 13, 2007,” Wefing and Koblitz wrote.
Wallace, who was on the council from 1976 to 1980, kept calling her at the salon that day. Now and then she answered, telling him to stop. “Her phone rang all the way on her drive home; by the time she arrived, she was in tears,” the appeals decision says. At that point, “she could no longer hide her distress” and told her husband and children, it says.
As she and her husband drove to the police station to file a complaint, her phone “continued to ring,” the judges wrote, adding that Wallace even showed up at headquarters while they were filling out a request for a restraining order — which was soon granted.
Wallace nonetheless “persisted in leaving messages for [her], including singing lyrics such as, ‘Ain’t no mountain high enough to keep me from you’,” on the salon owner’s voice mail, court records show.
Despite the order, Wallace even left a message the day before his court appearance, telling her to “wear her hair up at the hearing because she looked sophisticated that way,” Wefing and Koblitz noted.
Eventually, Garfield police filed criminal charges. That led to the bench trial before Carroll and the conviction that Wallace appealed. His claim: He wasn’t allowed to enter his own evidence, a “prejudicial error” that he said warranted a reversal of the verdict.
The appeals judges didn’t mince words in their response. Wallace’s argument “lacks sufficient merit to warrant discussion in a written opinion,” they said. His conduct spoke for itself.
Wallace also complained that Carroll unfairly prevented his wife from testifying for him as an “alibi witness” about a day when, the victim claimed, Wallace had been watching her from across the street. Even if Wallace was somewhere else that day, Wefing and Koblitz countered, his documented conduct after Jan. 13 was more than enough proof of guilt.
In the end, the appeals judges said, it was his “repeated telephone calls, tapes of which were played during the trial, his refusal to accept complainant’s statement that she wished to bring their friendship to an end, which led to his conviction.”
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