Like a cat with six more lives ahead of him, Fair Haven developer Angelo Reyes walked free Tuesday afternoon after jurors paid close attention to a complicated argument about how housing-lending deals work — and understood it.
That was attorney John Williams’ take after he convinced a jury to acquit Reyes of nine counts of arranging to burn down his properties to collect insurance money.
It was a surprise and dramatic victory for Reyes, who still faces state charges in connection with a string of arsons at his properties. Reyes turned his life around after serving time for drug offenses, becoming Fair Haven’s leading home rebuilder and one of its leading entrepreneurs. He almost went back to jail a second time after the state charged him with absentee ballot fraud. Now he has escaped a third long-term stay in the slammer.
The jury handed down the not-guilty verdict at 1:45 p.m. in federal court in Hartford.
“The jury has spoken and their verdict stands. We respect the jury for their service, and thank the agents and prosecutors who so diligently investigated and prosecuted this case,” Acting U.S. Attorney Deirdre M. Daly was quoted as saying in a statement released by her office.
“There’s no question what decided that case — pure reason. We were able to prove that not only did Angelo not have any rational motive to do it, but his rational motive had to be not to do it,” Williams, a high-profile civil-rights and criminal defense attorney in town for the past four decades, said later Tuesday.
He cited the testimony of two defense witnesses as making the difference: Reyes’ attorney, Murray Trachten; and his insurer, Charles Flanagan.
The government charged that Reyes burned down his buildings, including his People’s Laundromat on Lombard Street, to meet an upcoming balloon payment of around $500,000 on one his loans. The feds put Reyes’ employees on the stand. They said Reyes put them up to burning his buildings.
Williams countered by not just questioning the witnesses’ motives (they got plea deals), but by arguing economics and business models.
He had Trachten — who is also a financial backer of some of Reyes’ home-rebuilding projects — speak of how balloon payments occur regularly on all of this secondary-market loans; and how the lenders routinely roll them over. So Reyes did not face a particularly unusual or onerous balloon payment, the defense argued.
On top of that, the key to many of Reyes’ loans was the cash flow generated by that laundromat. And while the land around it was insured, the business was not. Insurer Flanagan testified to that.
Burning down the laundromat would eviscerate Reyes’ ability to meet loan payments, Williams and his witnesses argued. It wouldn’t produce insurance money to meet his debts.
“I could see when I was making the argument that [the jurors] were following it. They were nodding their heads. They got it,” Williams said Tuesday afternoon. “It was one of those rare cases where reason trumped emotion.”
Reyes still faces state charges in connection with the same arsons. Click here to read the Register’s Randall Beach’s account of how Reyes defended himself on the stand in the federal trial. Click on the video at the top of the story to watch Reyes discuss the People’s Laundromat arson at the time, in an interview with the Independent.