Audio By Carbonatix
“Criminals develop the panic disease,” Joseph Charles Stedino says.
His remark is greeted by silence.
Murray Miller, the criminal attorney representing ex-Senator Carolyn Walker, sits across the table from Stedino. Next to Miller sits Walker, facing Stedino. Their faces display no emotion. They are at the start of three days of deposing that will take twelve hours.
“I had sweaty palms all the time,” Stedino says, speaking of his life as a criminal.
“I had palpitations of the heart. I had this inability to go outside the house. I would force myself to do things like gardening. Later I learned my condition was called `agoraphobia.'”
Stedino, who has spent lengthy portions of his life in various prisons, now lives the life of a well-paid executive because he was the front man for the AzScam sting run by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
He ran it with the panache of a lifetime confidence man, which he most certainly is. Eventually, Stedino succeeded in bringing grief to the entire Arizona State Legislature.
Everyone who has pursued a long criminal career recalls a defining moment when his nerve was broken.
Stedino tells Miller and Walker about the event that broke his nerve as a criminal at four o’clock one morning in his Las Vegas hotel.
“A detective, who was then with the Las Vegas Sheriff’s Office, kicked in my door. He handcuffed me and threw me on a couch. He put his gun to my nose and cocked the trigger.
“`I’m going to kill you,’ he said.”
“Why did he do this?” Miller asks.
“He had been shaking me down for money. I stopped giving it to him. This was a game they used to play with felons in Las Vegas back in those days. It was an accepted form of life for myself and every other felon.
“This was the holocaust of the 1960s in Las Vegas. Felons disappeared every day. Their bodies would not reappear until months later in what was called `the spring crop.'”
“What does that mean?” Miller asks.
“When spring rolls around and the weather turns nice, they start finding bodies.”
Stedino talks about the time when he was peddling jewelry in Las Vegas and decided to return home to Pittsburgh for a visit over the holidays.
“During this phase of my life, I am somewhat entwined with many of my types of person in that they are unsavory,” Stedino says. “I went back to Pittsburgh, and one would have thought I was John Dillinger from the way the police reacted.”
“What had you done?” Miller asks.
“Absolutely nothing. Not wanting to leave my jewelry in Las Vegas, I had taken a lot with me. I also was carrying about $20,000 in cash. The cops became nervous and suspicious. They came and got me because I had quite a rep in the community. I socialized with Frank Bompancero, Mickey Cohen, and Jimmy Frattiano–people listed in organized crime.
“My business at the time was simple. I had a safe in my home and some friends who owned a jewelry store where I could get goods on consignment. I also knew a lot of people in the casinos who would give me a call when someone was on a losing streak and wanted to sell jewelry to raise quick cash.”
It turned out that the main problem was that Stedino was carrying a Super Bowl ring stolen from a member of the Denver Broncos.
“It was a mistake. The ring had been stolen a year before when someone broke into a car. I had bought it in Las Vegas at a jewelry store. They just thought I had stolen the ring. No harm.”
From the above account, you can recognize that Stedino is a past master at the art of “vouching.” Whenever a wise guy is trying to make himself sound like an important criminal, he mentions the names of well-known mobsters and says they are friends.
Who is going to doubt him? Usually most of the well-known hoods mentioned are in prison or dead anyway. Until now, Stedino has been presented to television audiences in carefully edited police videotapes as being confident and fearless. They have seen him as a romantic hired gun who has gone straight and wants to put a stop to corruption in the Arizona legislature.
So much for perception.
Miller, in his role as Walker’s defense attorney, grilled Stedino for twelve hours during three days of depositions.
When you read through the thick deposition book, a different Stedino pops up from the pages. He is a terrified and worn-out hoodlum.
But he has managed to survive by transforming himself into a toady and a lickspittle for the cops employing his services. Stedino clings to them pitifully now for the smallest signs of approval.
Stedino brags about his friendship with George Mount, one of the deputy county attorneys running the case. “Mount took me to his private club, the Renaissance, and sat in the members’ dining room with me and bought my lunch.” He talks of meeting Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley and shaking hands.
Jim Keppel, another county attorney on the case, attended Stedino’s surprise birthday party thrown at the Registry Resort in Scottsdale this past winter.
Other guests at that party were the two Phoenix cops who worked undercover with Stedino. There was also an FBI man who surprised him by flying over from Nevada. Stedino had worked a previous sting there for which he claims he is still owed more than $100,000.
“What date was this birthday party held?” Miller asks.
“I can’t tell you that,” Stedino says. “It goes to the matter of my safety.”
“Who paid for the rooms and the catered food and the booze?” Miller asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Did the taxpayers of Arizona pay for this party in which you and the police and the man from the County Attorney’s Office had such a grand time?”
“Based upon my personal safety, I have gone as far with that as I care to go,” Stedino says. “I would ask you to respect my safety at this time. It could lead to other areas wherein I should be in serious jeopardy.”
Mount, the county attorney, chimes in uneasily.
“He means that might compromise his security,” Mount says. “That might lead to his eventual location in the Valley.” So the question as to who paid for Stedino’s birthday party is never answered.
But Stedino talks comfortably about the fine lifestyle he has been given by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
He was provided with a swanky place to live and a salary of $3,500 a month. All of this will continue until every last one of the cases Stedino worked has been finished.
He boasts that they first rented him a Thunderbird and later realized it would be cheaper to buy him a car.
So they bought him a brand new Chevrolet Camaro and also a cellular telephone so that he could look like your average bond salesman as he drove up and down 24th Street to his sting office near Camelback Road.
Later, after his cover was blown when reporters Randy Collier and Chuck Kelly of the Arizona Republic broke the AzScam story, they bought Stedino still another fancy new car and still another cellular telephone.
It was reasoned that the defendants knew Stedino’s Camaro and that he would not be safe in it any longer.
“They gave me two choices,” Stedino says proudly, almost as though he were a kept woman. “I could have a Thunderbird or a Caprice. I picked the Caprice.”
But all was not a loss for the police. Detective Gary Ball got to take over the Thunderbird and its cellular telephone.
Why not? There is money to burn in this secret County Attorney Office’s fund collected from confiscated drug money. Before the indictments of the various legislators were announced, the cops and the County Attorney’s Office admitted to spending $750,000.
A lot of it went toward bribes. But there was money spent on high rolling that no member of the Phoenix Police Department or County Attorney’s Office will ever have to account for.
This should not surprise anyone. There is much that remains unexplained about County Attorney Romley’s office.
No one has ever explained why the county attorney drives a Lincoln Continental. Did the money come from the notorious tavern on Van Buren in which he once held an indirect interest, or from the bottomless well of dirty money in the drug fund which he now controls?
What other county official has his own media-relations room set up in which there are three television sets and three VCRs so his press aide can monitor and tape every mention of Romley’s name on local television?
You can go down to the Superior Court building any morning and see men with minor criminal records bound together by chains. They are dressed in jail suits and most have no hope of getting out of the county jail for months.
When was the last time Stedino, a two-time prison loser, now 54, ever held an honest job in his life? But he moves around town, able to dine at restaurants along Camelback and Scottsdale Roads. He rarely pays with his own dough. It’s usually on his liberal expense account. It’s part of the deal.
Before being hired by Richard Romley and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, Stedino never had it so good. Never in his life.
Stedino has been a wise guy since he was a kid of fifteen back in Pittsburgh. Already 6 feet 2 inches tall, he weighed 200 pounds.
“I worked in Mo Wasserman’s gambling establishment. When the police came, I would take the fall for him. Later he would come by the station and bail me out.
“About this time, Buddy Bender, the boss at the cab garage, gave me a job driving a cab, even though you were supposed to be 25. I started running my own book right out of the cab.”
In 1960 he was arrested for white slavery.
“I was driving a cab in Pittsburgh and I would run four or five guys down to Wheeling or Steubenville, where prostitution was wide open. I called a place called the 26th Street Club, where the madam was a friend of mine.
“I told her about a girl who lived in Pittsburgh and would like to come down and work for a while. I went to trial and was found guilty of white slavery.”
For that, Stedino served three years in the federal prison in Chillicothe, Ohio.
He knows that small-time criminals don’t grow old gracefully.
Things happen. As people age, events take on more shattering effects. People in this line of work get so jittery after a while they become hesitant to go out on the street to buy a newspaper.
Even when they are protected by police while working stings, they find the work of being a con man hard on the nerves. Most of it is spent sitting around and waiting for a mark to call.
Men like Stedino never know when the doorbell rings if it is some politician coming to pick up money or someone with a gun who is coming to kill them because they have ruined his life.
“When spring rolls around and the weather turns nice, they start finding bodies.”
When a wise guy wants to make himself sound important, he mentions the names of well-known mobsters and says they are friends.
Stedino is a terrified and worn-out hoodlum.
“They gave me two choices,” Stedino says. “I could have a Thunderbird or a Caprice. I picked the Caprice.
