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In tossing the civil rights complaint, U.S. District Court Judge Faith Hochberg ruled that Molinelli’s office “is entitled to immunity” from the heirs of Frank P. Lagano, 71, who was shot in the head on April 12, 2007 in the parking lot of a Middlesex County diner he co-owned.
Hochberg cited federal case law aimed at preventing “unfounded litigation that would cause a deflection of the prosecutor’s energies from his public duties.” Not giving prosecutors immunity from such suits could prevent them from “exercising the independence of judgment required by public trust,” she added.
Molinelli (above, left) wasn’t immediately available to comment.
However, he told CLIFFVIEW PILOT late last year that the suit was “nonsense,” filed to prevent the county from keeping the seized assets.
Lagano’s family was seeking more than $4 million in damages, which they claim the former Lucchese soldier would have earned over the next 14 years if he hadn’t been whacked.
Lagano’s cooperation with law enforcement began after investigators from Molinelli’s office seized more than $50,000 in cash and other items during a Dec. 1, 2004 raid on his home.
The raid was part of “Operation Jersey Boyz,” a sweep that netted 40 or so organized-crime figures in what was billed as one of the largest gambling busts in North Jersey history.
Lagano’s estate claimed that the investigators didn’t produce an inventory of what was taken and then used the haul “to their own benefit or to the benefit of their confederates or supervisors.”
Following the raid, Molinelli’s office went to court in a forfeiture action, indicating that a total of $265,428 was seized, according to court records. The money went into a fund used to subsidize a variety of law enforcement- and justice-related services throughout Bergen County.
As the civil and criminal cases were proceeding, Michael Mordaga – then Molinelli’s chief of detectives and now the Hackensack police director – met with Lagano, a personal friend and business associate.
Mordaga (above, right) gave Lagano the card of an attorney who he said would make “90% of [his] problems go away,” according to the lawsuit.
Instead, Lagano threw in with James Sweeney, a former DCJ investigator, apparently hoping he could dime out fellow mobsters in exchange for a lesser sentence, court papers show.
The estate claimed in its suit that Mordaga told Lagano he could not “count on Sweeney helping” with Lagano’s legal problems because “Sweeney is going to jail.”
Soon after, someone in the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office tipped off “alleged members of certain crime families” arrested in a major sweep the day of the raid that Lagano was an informant, the dismissed suit alleged.
This “created a dangerous situation that resulted in Lagano’s death,” it said.
The gangland-style killing still hasn’t been solved. Sweeney, who has since died, brought his own case against the state, in a suit very similar to that filed by Lagano’s estate.
Law enforcement sources with knowledge of the situation told CLIFFVIEW PILOT that Lagano was introduced to Sweeney by another informant who allegedly owed Lagano money.
Two other associates he owed money to ended up shot dead, something Lagano may have been aware of, one of the sources said.
All of them questioned how much, if at all, Lagano cooperated. One noted that the charges from the earlier sweep were still pending against him when he was killed.
Molinelli, in response to the estate’s federal suit, presented several counter-arguments – primarily: prosecutorial immunity.
He cited a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the Michigan State Police that found that states, state agencies, and state officials acting in their official capacities aren’t “persons” subject to federal civil rights suits.
Hochberg agreed.
“[T]he BCPO was acting within its classical function of investigating criminal activities and conducting criminal prosecutions with respect to Mr. Lagano,” she wrote in her ruling.
This extends to New Jersey’s Civil Rights Act, which the judge said doesn’t allow the estate to claim that Lagano was a “victimized property owner.”
Molinelli also argued that New Jersey and its agencies and officers “are immune from suit brought in federal court under the Eleventh Amendment because the State of New Jersey has not consented to jurisdiction in federal court.”
More specifically, he said his staffers “was engaging in classic law enforcement and investigative functions, and thus were acting as officers of the State during the series of events which form the basis” for the complaint.
The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals already has found that county prosecutors in New Jersey are “acting as officers of the state” when they are investigating and enforcing – a decision backed by a U.S. Supreme Court finding that “state prosecutors who act within the scope of their duties have absolute immunity from civil suits.”
It’s only when they perform “administrative tasks unrelated to their strictly prosecutorial functions [that they act] on behalf of the county and not the state,” Hochberg wrote.
She also confirmed Molinelli’s contention that the statute of limitations ran out on the illegal seizure claim in 2007, two years after the forfeiture request was filed. The federal complaint dismissed by Hochberg today was first filed last August.
The estate, she said, “should have known about the search and seizure claims” in March 2005 – “or at the latest, in 2007,” because it “had access to Lagano’s documents and filings.”
As it turned out, the gambling case unraveled: A state judge vacated pleas from 10 defendants and opened the way for 33 more before sealing evidence obtained through wiretaps and searches after a State Police detective testified that a DCJ investigator tipped off one of the targets — and promised to protect him.
The call, one of 21,000 conversations recorded by the prosecutor’s office and the State Police, crippled the massive probe.
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