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Jimmy Polites began the night of Aug. 4, 1994 with friends at the tavern he co-owned in Fort Lee. Hours later he was bound to a chair and hanged with an electrical cord in his Edgewater townhouse.
It has taken nearly 30 years for his killer to finally pay.
Thomas Christopher James was released from a New York State prison late this week after serving 28 years for murdering a reputed Long Island mobster in similar fashion less than a week after Polites.
James, who recently turned 50, is being held in the Bergen County Jail while awaiting assignment to a New Jersey state prison, where he’s expected to spend the rest of his reprehensible life.
The Georgia native was part of a gang of three unemployed men and two New York City call girls who concocted get-rich-quick setups of suburban Johns for torture, robbery and murder.
An NYPD detective compared the crew to the cold-blooded characters in the Oliver Stone film “Natural Born Killers.” A judge in Hackensack likened their spree to something from Quentin Tarantino.
Killing Of "Joey Cold Cuts"
The night before Polites was killed, James and his cohorts kidnapped and robbed a Hackensack man whose life they spared.
Less than a week after the Polites murder, Joseph “Joey Cold Cuts” Fiammetta was slain under similar circumstances in his posh waterfront home in a mob-ridden neighborhood in West Islip, NY.
James was sentenced in July 1999 to life plus 90 years for robbing, torturing and strangling Polites. But that couldn’t begin until he’d completed a 25-year stretch in New York State for stabbing and bludgeoning Fiammetta.
Also serving extended prison sentences for their roles in the killings are James’s dominatrix girlfriend, Ivie DeMolina, fellow prostitute Jamie Farthing and two men -- Efrain Papleo and DeMolina’s half-brother, Benigno Rosario.
The three men had all come to New York from Conyers, GA. Together with the Brooklyn-born DeMolina, they planned to live large by setting up rich, easy marks who’d be reluctant to tell police how they'd been robbed.
The Hackensack victim used an escort service to invite DeMolina to his apartment in The Carlyle, a high-rise on Prospect Avenue. Farthing came with her, as did James, who claimed he needed to use the phone.
The victim was quickly forced at gunpoint to lay on his stomach, then was bound with duct tape while the robbers ransacked his apartment.
They took a camera, several silk ties, his wallet, $50 in cash and a New York Jets jacket, then took off – stopping along the way so that James could use the victim’s debit card to pull cash from a Valley National Bank ATM in Bergenfield.
The next night they went after James Polites.
DeMolina had met the Edgewater bachelor at a Manhattan nightclub two years earlier. Polites, 37, was with his good friend, former New York Giants defensive end and two-time Super Bowl champion Leonard Marshall.
DeMolina and Polites had occasionally gotten together before she called him at the Fort Lee Saloon on Palisade Avenue, a few doors in from Main Street, the night of Aug. 4, 1994.
Polites, who also ran the Nine West shoe store at the Short Hills Mall, was celebrating after a softball game.
He nonetheless agreed to meet DeMolina and Farthing for a hookup at his place on River Road overlooking the Hudson River. DeMolina told him to make sure he was alone.
Polites drove to his apartment in his Mercedes. The women showed up in a cab soon after. He paid the fare.
What Polites didn’t know was that James and Rosario were lying in wait.
Horrific End
As the cab pulled away, they forced Polites into his apartment at gunpoint. They bound his arms and legs to a chair and fastened a pillowcase over his head with a necktie.
The woman ransacked the apartment, taking $4,000 in cash, jewelry and other belongings before the men, realizing Polities could identify them, decided to kill him.
Still tied to the chair, he was strangled from behind and then hanged from the doorknob with an electrical cord.
The body wasn’t discovered until Aug. 8.
A business partner had tried to reach Polites by telephone with no luck, so he paged him. He got a call back from James, who then quickly hung up.
The worried friend went to the bar, but no one there had seen nor heard from Polites in days.
Using a key that Polites had given him, the friend entered the apartment, found the body and called police.
Officers found Polites’s wrists tied behind his back with a telephone cord, the pillow case secured around his head and two more neckties around his ankles.
Another necktie was used to hogtie the hands and ankles. Polites’s thighs were tied down, as well. The electrical cord around his neck was tied to the bedroom doorknob.
It had taken three minutes for him to die, a medical examiner found.
On The Town
Later that day, James and DeMolina hocked a Super Bowl ring they’d stolen from Polites at a pawn shop in Brooklyn.
Crew members then checked into a series of pricey Manhattan hotels – among them, the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West -- paying for everything in cash. They bought clothes, jewelry, crystal and camcorders before eventually running out of money.
On Sept. 6, roughly a month after Polites was killed, crew members robbed $40,000 at gunpoint from the Iroquois Hotel.
It was after they were identified that detectives working the various cases began to compare notes and trace phone numbers. It wasn’t long before James was connected to both the Polites and Fiammetta murders.
The link: DeMolina.
She and James were captured while checking out of the Cross Bay Motel in Queens. NYPD detectives found them carrying two guns and various other pieces of implicating evidence.
The other three were eventually seized, as well, and a series of interrogations had each pointing fingers at one another.
James, who pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and armed robbery in Superior Court in Hackensack as part of a deal with prosecutors, remains held in the Bergen County Jail for now.
He’ll more than likely end up at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, one of the oldest correctional facilities in the United States and the Garden State’s only completely maximum-security institution.
DeMolina was sentenced in New York in 1996 to 25 years to life for killing Fiammenta. She was later sentenced in New Jersey to a consecutive, plea-bargained 30 years for the Polities murder.
Now 57, DeMolina was denied parole two months ago and has passed her minimum stay for the Long Island slaying in New York State’s largest women’s prison, the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County.
If she’s eventually released, like James, she’ll be sent to serve the second part of her incarceration in New Jersey, probably at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Hunterdon County (unless Gov. Phil Murphy succeeds with plans to close it).
DeMolina, who’s been the subject of a cover story in The New York Times, wrote an essay in 2021 for Harper’s Bazaar and at the same time launched both a Facebook page and a fundrazr campaign that has raised $13,650 of its $30,000 goal.
She was also interviewed by former FBI agent and psychological criminologist Bryanna Fox for the current ABC News Studios Hulu docuseries, "The Lesson is Murder.”
Epilogue
The Fort Lee Saloon is long since gone from its Palisade Avenue location. It now houses a Korean restaurant.
The circa-1960 townhouse on the Hudson River side of River Road in Edgewater where Polites was killed was gutted and renovated. It's now owned by a retired New York City schoolteacher.
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