Area attorney prosecuted case

by Christopher Finan

Staff Writer

It's early in the morning on Aug. 11, 1977, when a phone call wakes then-Bronx Assistant District's Attorney Jim Shalleck from slumber. He gets out of bed, picks up the receiver, greets the person guilty of disturbing his sleep and listens with great interest to the information being relayed to him.

New York City Police have arrested a man outside of his Yonkers home. This arrest will ease the fears of all 8 million New York City inhabitants, halting a summer of paranoia.

It also ends a one-year search for a man -- a cold-blooded, serial killer -- targeting young women in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

The man's name is David Berkowitz, better known to the city and the country as the Son of Sam.

At 4:07 a.m., Shalleck sits across from the now infamous suspect, questioning him about the three murders and one attempted murder that occurred in Shalleck's Bronx borough.

After 30 minutes, Shalleck and a colleague finally get what they want.

"He confessed to me about his three murders in the Bronx," he said.

Shalleck, now 53, lives a quieter life in Montgomery Village, far from the intensity of this case, with his wife of 24 years, Sheila, and his two children, Jason, 20, and Lauren, 14.

He has had his own private law practice since November 1997 and since 1994, he has twice run unsuccessfully for the state's attorney position in Montgomery County.

The rest of his resume includes working as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in the anti-trust division in Washington and as assistant attorney general for the state of New York.

But he always knows what he will be remembered for.

"My role in the [Berkowitz] case will probably be in my obituary," Shalleck said. "No matter what else I do."

The Son of Sam saga began with the first murder in the Bronx and the city as a whole July 29, 1976.

Donna Lauria and her friend Jody Valente, both young women, sat in a car parked in their neighborhood, talking.

After Lauria's parents, ironically coming from a wake, returned to their home about 1 a.m., they told their 18-year-old daughter to come inside for she had to work in the morning, according to a book, "Big City D.S.," by the late Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola.

A few minutes later, right before she planned to obey her parents' wishes, a man stood on the curb outside the car and fired a gun at the passengers; he hit Lauria in the neck, killing her, and Valente in the thigh, according to Merola's book.

Unbeknownst to the city and its police, a serial killer had just started his rampage that would hold New York hostage by way of fear.

The Son of Sam's next four attacks happened in Queens, leaving a man with a steel plate in his head, a woman paralyzed, another woman with a neck wound, Christine Freund, 26, dead on Jan. 30, 1977, and Virginia Voskerichian, 19, dead on March 8, 1977, according to the book.

At this point, the NYPD linked these attacks and murders with one piece of evidence; ballistics proved the killer used same .44-caliber pistol, a distinct, powerful weapon, in all these instances, Shalleck said.

But this could not stop two more murders in Shalleck's jurisdiction. On April 17, 1977, Valentina Surinai, 18, and Alexander Esau, 20, were murdered in a parked car just outside Surinai's Bronx home.

The last of these murders occurred on July 31, 1977, in Brooklyn, about a year after the Lauria killing. Stacy Moskowitz, 20, and her date sat in a parked car when the Son of Sam shot both of them, killing Moskowitz and leaving her date, Robert Violante, 20, with impaired vision, according to the book.

About 11 days later, the Son of Sam sat before Shalleck, then 31.

He described Berkowitz's appearance as just the guy next door.

"But when you looked in his eyes, you knew he was a cold-blooded killer," Shalleck said. "I'll never forget that. He'll look right through you."

During the case's court proceedings, Shalleck's "old adversary," Berkowitz's defense attorney Ira Jultak, who now works as an assistant state's attorney in Broward County, Fla., met the Bronx assistant district attorney.

"He impressed me as being very professional, very honest and trustworthy, really," Jultak said of Shalleck.

Berkowitz's father retained Jultak's services; he had been practicing law in New York for nine years and was only nine weeks out of the district attorney's office in Nassau County on Long Island.

Although they were on opposing sides in the case, Jultak shared his rival's opinion of the Son of Sam.

"You read about these things and you tend to think about some monster," Jultak said. "When I met him he was an ordinary looking, certainly not dangerous-looking, person with a very genteel demeanor ... [but] it was quite apparent from the very beginning that he was a very sick person."

Berkowitz's sickness became even more apparent after Jultak had a discussion with his client and revealed a potentially deadly habit to Shalleck.

From 1974 through his murdering terrorism in 1977, Berkowitz set about 2,000 small fires in the city. After igniting a trash can, mattress or an abandoned car, Berkowitz would call the fire department and document in a diary the location, date, time, weather, among other categories, of these fires.

"We learned he was gratified by that," Shalleck said.

Details such as these were left out of the July 1999 Spike Lee film "Summer of Sam," according to Shalleck. The movie, which takes place in the summer of 1977, documents the insanity of an Italian-dominated Bronx neighborhood in relation to Berkowitz's murders.

"I was disappointed in the movie because it didn't portray the history of the case," Shalleck said, later adding, "But things like that [the fires] I wish were in the movie. It's fascinating stuff."

Shalleck did credit Lee with capturing the mayhem caused by the Son of Sam, but the attorney found the movie failed to tackle the court case itself.

This case hit a snag from its inception when a psychiatrist ruled the Son of Sam incompetent to stand trial, so he was not able to defend himself in court.

This took months to overcome until eventually it was ruled he had become competent and was aware of his actions.

It was then that Berkowitz pleaded guilty to the six murders, ending months worth of searching, fear and the work of a 300-member task force assigned to stop the killer.

"He got the maximum sentence as though it went to trial," Shalleck said. He received 25 years to life for each murder to run consecutive.

But before this, Shalleck and company had to discredit a Berkowitz insanity plea, which proved difficult because the suspect said Satan himself told him via his neighbor's dog to commit these murders.

But after months of 18-hour days and pizza dinners ("I must have gained 20 pounds on great Italian Bronx pizza," Shalleck said), prosecutors found Berkowitz was a women hater and determined this as his motive for killing.

Prosecutors derived this motive from Berkowitz's history. Born David Falco, Berkowitz was given up for adoption as a child but had a sister that did not suffer the same fate. He hated his adoption mother, who later died, and then despised his new stepmother.

In retrospect, after the media coverage, the manhunt and the pressure of perfection in this high-profile case, Shalleck said the thrill for him was to be a part of history.

"I mean, one of the most infamous killers in the history of the country," Shalleck said, "and he was talking to me."