“Being called homosexual was substantially, considerably worse then,” Mr. Orlando explained in a current cellphone job interview. It was 1976, and the topic of homosexuality was so taboo, he determined, that directly challenging the claim of an affair would be pointless.
Irrespective of what his tale lacked in logic or evidence, Mr. Lynch, the notably taciturn fireman, was mesmerizing as a storyteller in the course of four times on the witness stand. N.Y.P.D. officers and F.B.I. brokers would contradict on their own recounting primary police get the job done Mr. Lynch, whose tale alleged an intricate hoax, could not be tripped up. “Anybody else join you at the desk?” Mr. Orlando asked Mr. Lynch about his initial assembly with Mr. Bronfman. “No, sir,” Mr. Lynch replied, confirming a minor detail of his testimony. “We ended up at the bar.”
Making ready for the demo, Mr. DeBlasio planned to assault Mr. Lynch as “a monster who preyed upon his feebleminded close friend Dominic, forcing him beneath duress to assist in the most awful of crimes imaginable.” Then he saw Mr. Lynch on the stand.
“I can seem back again now immediately after a 50-calendar year, 600-trial career and say that among the the hundreds of witnesses I observed, nobody approached the magnificence of Mel Patrick Lynch,” Mr. DeBlasio wrote. “He was the Arturo Toscanini and Enrico Caruso of witnesses. He turned a horror tale into a tragedy of operatic dimension. The jurors were mesmerized. If they could have, they would have exploded in applause and cried for an encore.”
Mr. Orlando agreed with that evaluation. “He was a great liar, totally positively, and a sympathetic character,” Mr. Orlando claimed of Mr. Lynch.
Mr. Bronfman, conversely, appeared to jurors like a person caught in a nightmare, preventing again tears and biting his fingernails although on the stand. Pursuing a torrent of accusations about magic formula sexual escapades and programs to movie pornography, the choose halted proceedings, took Mr. Orlando apart, accused him of a “lack of propriety” and stated he was “amazed” Mr. Orlando experienced not objected when the defense made “smearing innuendos” about Mr. Bronfman.