Crime and
Punishment
by Murry Olderman
Reprinted from Hwy 111 Magazine
The state
of California is still not ready to forgive and forget.
After he clambers into his upper bunk bed on C Yard to hunker down for the night,
he thinks of his family 100 miles away in the Coachella Valley and "how
much love I have for them and what I want to do for them when I'm on the other
side of these prison walls." Then when he gets up the next morning, his
first thought is, "How am I going to get through this day?"
What exactly led Jeff Perrotte to this point of hopeless despair? This: One evening, speeding down a road in Rancho Mirage, intoxicated and already warned about drunk driving, he collided with the rear end of another vehicle, setting it ablaze and killing its passenger. To make matters worse, he then fled the scene, convinced his girlfriend to take the rap and lied about all of it to the police.
One bad decision after another led Perrottee to this daily hell.
Nearing midnight on May 5, 1992, Jeff Perrotte was speeding down a rain-slicked, divided boulevard in Rancho Mirage. It was dark and drizzly, and the wipers were clacketing across the curved glass windshield of his 1991 Mercedes 300 sedan. He was on Gerald Ford Drive approaching the cross street where Los Alamos Drive ends and becomes Inverness Drive at the entrance to Mission Hills Country Club. At the time no signal light was installed at that intersection to control traffic, and cars regularly roared down the roadway at speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour. Perrotte's black sedan was doing all of that, and more, in the posted 50 mph zone.
He reached down to the console to turn off the CD player - he was only half a mile from his home inside the country club. He looked up, and in the inside lane next to the median, he was startled to see that straight ahead a Jaguar automobile, blending into the black inkiness of the hour, as it crept across the intersection. Perrotte's foot jammed the brakes; he swung his wheel to the left, trying to avoid the other car. But it was too late. The front of his Mercedes crumpled as it smashed into the right rear wheel well of the Jaguar, the force of the collision spinning and separating both vehicles before they lurched to stops.
Almost immediately, a sheet of flame enveloped the back seat of the Jaguar. That particular 1986 model had twin fuel tanks in the rear that ruptured and caught fire. Perrotte jumped out of his car and ran around to the driver's side of the blazing Jag. The man inside was slumped on the wheel, not moving.
Perrotte took one look and panicked and, in that instant, decided to flee. He turned and squirmed through the oleander bushes bordering the country club, jumped a six-foot cyclone fence and ran to the home he shared with his girlfriend, Michelle Churis, about a half-mile away. It was a fateful mistake of judgment.
Back at the scene of the accident, the heat of the fire was so intense that no one from the Mission Hills gatehouse, 100 feet away, could approach the car to free the driver, who perished from burns and smoke inhalation. The victim, identified as Jilly Rizzo, was friend, confidant and sometimes bodyguard of desert icon Frank Sinatra.
From his home, Perrotte called 911 and then, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's report, downed a glass of whiskey because he "thought it would help calm him down." He coached Michelle to say that she had been driving the car - another big mistake - and together they returned to the accident scene, arriving seven minutes after deputies from the Sheriff's office. Michelle reported that she was behind the wheel of the Mercedes. The officers didn't buy the story, noting that Perrotte's arms showed signs of contact with an inflated airbag, and they arrested him. His blood-alcohol level tested at .13, above the legal limit of .08. (The sample, later sent to the Department of Justice in Sacramento, also confirmed the use of marijuana.) Michelle was held for "aiding and abetting."
In the glove box of the Mercedes, the deputies found paperwork indicating that, following a DUI accident in the same car just 42 days earlier, Perrotte was attending a traffic school in Orange County as part of a program for which he signed an agreement not to drink during its duration. A subsequent check revealed other DUI convictions as well as two convictions for speeding in one year.
The victim, Jilly Rizzo, was on the eve of his 75th birthday at the time of his death. A 30-year relationship with Sinatra gave him celebrity cachet. He was a tough-talking, swaggering, high-rolling New Yorker who once owned a nightspot called "Jilly's" in a basement on 58th Street in Manhattan. Sinatra had, according to sources, met Jilly in Miami and they had become fast friends, with Rizzo eventually going to work for the singer as an aide-de-camp. Sinatra moved him to the West Coast. They were close enough that, reportedly, Sinatra's will at the time contained a bequest of $100,000 to Rizzo. Rizzo bought a home on Tamarisk Lane in Rancho Mirage so he could be close to his boss, whose compound was nearby on Frank Sinatra Drive. Even in death they're close. Rizzo is buried adjacent to the Sinatra family plot in Desert Memorial Park off Davall Road in Cathedral City, where Frank Sinatra was later interred in 1998.
The night of the accident, Rizzo had sent his friend, Artie Funair, out to buy a Racing Form. On his return, Jilly said he was going to drive the Jaguar, which belonged to his girlfriend, over to her place in Mission Hills, a mile away. Jilly was blind in one eye and was being treated for an ailment in the other eye. "It's raining," said Artie. "At least, let me drive you over." "Naw," Jilly declined the offer and took off. In the darkness, the car was crawling an estimated six miles an hour across Gerald Ford Drive when it was hit.
That same evening, Jeff Perrotte attended a Cinco de Mayo celebration at Don Diego's, a Mexican restaurant in Indian Wells, where he emceed a beauty contest sponsored by the Rotary Club. He had dinner with Michelle, who left at 10 p.m. - his three young children from a previous marriage were living with them. Jeff stayed and had a few beers before leaving the restaurant at 11:40 p.m.
Jeff was an aggressive business entrepreneur who two years earlier had started his own telecommunications company, installing commercial systems. Before that he was a senior territorial manager for AT&T and had also worked in banking and data processing.
He was born in 1963 in Plattsburg, N.Y., where his father was a sergeant in the Air Force. The family - he has four siblings - moved frequently until settling in the Palm Springs area when Jeff was 15. After high school, he joined the Navy in 1980 and served until 1983. He was married for the first time in 1985 and divorced in 1989, gaining custody of the children. It was a rocky period in which he incurred a misdemeanor conviction for brandishing a gun and was arrested for spousal abuse, though charges were never filed.
Jeff, a husky, athletic, extraverted six-footer, met Michelle at the Palm Springs Tennis Club - she is an excellent player. Her parents, longtime residents at Mission Hills, weren't happy about the liaison with their quiet, introspective, recently widowed daughter. Ed and Leila Lambert perceived him as cocky, arrogant and selfish - trying to transfer the heat for the Rizzo accident to their daughter was symptomatic. And their feelings weren't assuaged when, between Jeff's arrest and subsequent trial in the death of Jilly Rizzo - Michelle was granted two years probation for being an accessory - the two of them eloped without warning and were married in Las Vegas.
The Lamberts at first stonewalled Perrotte's predicament.
Faced with the enormous expense of defending himself at trial and the specter of jail time, Jeff reached out and, while free on bail, arranged a reconciliation dinner with the Lamberts and convinced them of his remorse and penitence for his actions. This confessional proved to be of enormous support for him, both tangibly and emotionally.
The initial charge of vehicular manslaughter against Jeff Perrotte was upgraded by the Riverside County District Attorney's office to second degree murder in November 1992 because of his "egregious actions" in running from the scene and then trying to lay the blame on someone else. It was a period of aroused awareness of deaths resulting from drunk driving, spurred by the emergence of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) as a national movement.
Interpretations of second degree murder vary. One definition holds that it is "a non-premeditated killing, resulting from an assault in which death of the victim was a distinct possibility." Edith Wharton, a novelist of a century ago, wrote, "Murder in the second degree, in most jurisdictions, is a malicious homicide committed without a specific intention to take life." One law library lexicon stipulates that "the government must prove that... the person killed the other person with malice aforethought..." In the California Penal Code, a paragraph on "Murders, degrees" reads, "Second degree murder with implied malice has been committed when a person does an act, the natural consequences of which are dangerous to life, which act was deliberately performed by a person who knows that his conduct endangers the life of another and who acts with conscious disregard for life."
Although Jeff Perrotte didn't knowingly set out to kill Jilly Rizzo, whom he had never met, a jury in Indio decided there was malice aforethought in his behavior and found the defendant guilty as charged on July 23, 1993. On August 19, he was sentenced to state prison for a term of 15 years to life, with a minimum eligible parole date set for April 29, 2003. In the arch language of lawyers, Prisoner H-89472 was "received" by the California Department of Corrections on September 7, 1993, 16 months after the fatal accident, and was assigned to Centinella prison near Calexico on the California border. Six weeks before his incarceration, Michelle Churis gave birth to their first child - a girl, Haley.
Because of difficulty in getting visitation rights for his family, Perrotte was sent in February 1994 to Robert J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego, where he enrolled in vocational trade courses. With 18 letters of recommendation for his diligence from correctional officers at Donovan, he applied for transfer to the Chino Institute for Men to participate in a Permanent Work Crew program. Instead, he was moved to the California Correctional Facility at Tehachapi east of Bakersfield in November 1996, and after six months was shipped north to the California State Prison in Solano, east of the San Francisco Bay area. Because of the inconvenient travel distance for visits, his wife requested his return to Southern California, and on January 13, 1998, Perrotte was transferred to Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, 15 miles east of Blythe on the border of Arizona.
From the start of his incarceration, Jeff acknowledged his addiction to alcohol and substance abuse and actively joined prison chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA), chairing the organization in Chuckawalla. In a tome entitled, "Message to a Newcomer," he wrote eloquently about being "deceived by the euphoria of alcohol and/or drugs." The Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage ordered 500 copies to distribute to its new patients. And he described vividly the introduction to prison living:
"From the first moment you are let off from the bus that transports you, in a cage, to the intake facility you begin to understand the magnitude of your punishment. You become familiar with a society that is unforgiving and incomprehensible to the outside world. You realize from this point forward, your only goal is survival. Imagine living in a world that is completely made of steel bars, concrete and filth... of individuals who seem to have lost their souls and their desire to live... Once you arrive here, you will never hear a moment of silence again. This alone can have powerful physiological effects on a person. There is the constant sound of boots scraping along concrete floors, guards practicing their accuracy of shooting at the range, prisoners yelling for guards, toilets constantly flushing, jingling of keys and the unintelligible outbursts by those suffering from mental illnesses or nightmares.
There is also the sound that many attempt to disguise, the sound of someone crying into their pillow. But this sound pales compared to the rest."
Adapting to prison routine, Jeff Perrotte completed vocational trade courses in office machine repair, computer repair and mill and cabinet work. He participated in tutoring programs to improve the literacy and language skills of other inmates. He taught himself to play the guitar and staged impromptu concerts.
Once settled in at the Chuckawalla facility, Jeff set out to upgrade his education "to be an example for my kids." He enrolled in extension courses at California Coast University in Santa Ana, and between the years 2000 and 2002, received a Bachelor of Science degree, a master's degree and a Ph.D., all in Business Administration. His student transcripts reveal straight-A grades in all his courses, except for a B in Managerial Economics when he was pursuing his doctorate. "I couldn't get a calculator," he says sheepishly, "to help me do linear equations."
In separate incidents while in prison, Perrotte has received two Meritorious Awards for saving the life of one inmate and preventing serious harm to a couple of others, qualifying him for sentence reduction "upon a finding of suitability." On November 13, 1994, observing a semi-conscious inmate writhing on the dayroom floor, apparently choking to death, Jeff stepped in and performed a Heimlich maneuver to dislodge a piece of meat stuck in his throat. Four years later, at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, a big coffee urn was about to fall off a table when its electric cord became tangled in a chair. As it teetered directly over two inmates sitting there, Jeff quickly grabbed the steaming hot vessel, incurring painful burns on his arms and legs.
The commendations helped advance his eligible date to file for parole - originally April 29, 2003 - by a year, though the California Board of Prison Terms didn't meet to consider his case until November 2002. Included in the prisoner's petition for parole were two letters from Judge Robert Lee, who had presided over his criminal trial back in 1993, urging his release: "I feel that the time Jeffrey Perrotte has spent in prison is sufficient punishment for the crime committed. I understand that he has been a model prisoner... His release would allow Mr. Perrotte to resume a productive life with his wife and his four children."
Moreover, Carole Collins, one of Jilly Rizzo's two adopted daughters, wrote in longhand from her home in Florida: "I loved Jilly very much and miss him a lot to this day. I do feel, however, that Jeffrey Perrotte was given an extremely stiff prison term and that after all these years he has been done more than enough prison time."
Perrotte expressed remorse directly to the Board: "I feel terrible pain for the suffering that Mr. Rizzo's family and his friends had to endure as a result of my negligence and irresponsibility... It's hard to explain the magnitude of the guilt that I live with each and every day over this accident. Mr. Rizzo was an innocent man driving from one point to another, and due to my inability to manage my life, his life was lost...
"The person that I am today is the person that I've always wanted to be. And the terrible tragic part is somebody had to lose their life for me to become that person. It's going to take a lifetime of contrition to pay back what I stole so freely from society."
Four job offers that awaited him plus a solid family support system were noted to buttress the case for Perrotte's release.
However, the victim's other adopted daughter, Abby Rizzo of Las Vegas, argued vehemently against Perrotte's freedom in a letter to the board, and Deputy District Attorney Sean Crandell, representing Riverside County, opposed release, noting, "If he's given a parole date this soon, the message it sends to society is that this crime was a less serious second degree murder than your typical second degree murder. And I don't think that's the case. It was more severe, a more egregious type of offense."
The parole board denied his petition on the grounds that he hadn't served enough time for the severity of his crime, with Al Angele, the presiding commissioner, commenting, "The offense was carried out in an exceptionally cruel, callous, violent and brutal manner, a wanton disregard for humanity." After a decade behind bars, Perrotte could try again for a parole date two years hence.
The mood of the time and the vagaries of court systems can influence prison terms. From 1981 to 1987, the average time served for a first-degree murder conviction in California was 10 years, nine months. Spade Cooley, the country and western band leader who blatantly murdered his wife, served just eight years on a first degree-murder conviction. Bernard Finch, the Los Angeles doctor who conspired with nurse/girlfriend Carol Tregoff to murder his wife - it was the O.J. Simpson case of its time - got seven years to life and was out in nine years. He practiced medicine again at a Hemet clinic; he collapsed and died on a tennis court at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage.
In a headline case in Miami, Fla., a former FBI agent was acquitted in December 2002 of vehicular double murder after he killed two young blacks in a head-on collision on I-95. He was allegedly driving in the wrong lane, and his blood-alcohol level was .14. On Thanksgiving night 2001, a truck ran a stop sign in Palm Desert and slammed into a car, killing a 69-year-old woman. The driver pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and was sentenced to four years in prison. In July 2002, a driver in Cathedral City rear-ended a pickup truck and killed a 14-year-old boy. The driver was intoxicated at three times the legal limit and had a prior alcohol-related misdemeanor conviction. He was found guilty of vehicular manslaughter and drew a maximum 10-year sentence.
Even a parole date didn't guarantee release while Gray Davis was governor of California. Of 86 cases treated favorably by the parole board during his first term in office, he approved only two (both were women who had suffered years of spousal abuse) and told the Los Angeles Times that he believed murderers, even those with second-degree convictions, should serve life sentences. "If you take someone's life," he said, "forget it."
Last April, Jeff Perrotte applied for a writ of habeas corpus in Superior Court of California, Riverside County, seeking another parole hearing. After considering the arguments from both sides, Judge Thomas N. Douglass, Jr., denied the writ in February of this year. Perrotte is eligible for parole in November, 2004.
Fortunately for Perrotte, he hasn't been alone in his quest for freedom. It takes money and research and legwork to challenge the legal system. Lawyers were hired to represent him at trial, at various appeals, at the parole hearing. Investigators, paper work and legal fees added to the costs. Because Jeff's highest salary since he was put away a decade ago has been $18 a month, his father-in-law, Ed Lambert, stepped into the breach. Ed has laid out more than $150,000, plus limitless hours of effort running down leads and lobbying support for his son-in-law.
Out of the blue one night, Lambert received a phone call from New Jersey. The man identified himself as Tony LoVecchio, best friend and business partner of Jilly Rizzo. "Your kid," said the caller, "got a raw deal." LoVecchio voluntarily sent a letter to the parole board, appealing for Perrotte to be freed after a decade in jail, insisting that's what "Jilly Rizzo, who was profoundly fair," would want.
On Saturday or Sunday virtually every weekend - visiting days at the prison - Perrotte's wife Michelle and Lambert travel due east down the 90-mile corridor of Interstate Highway 10 from Rancho Mirage to Chuckawalla Valley. Frequently, daughter Haley, now a perky, bright 10-year-old, comes along. Since infancy, she has never spent a night under the same roof with her father.
It is fairly desolate country, crossing over Chiriaco Summit where Gen. George Patton used to run his World War II tanks and down to a desert table top, flat as a billiard surface, with the low-slung Chocolate Mountains visible in the background. A right turn off I-10 at Wiley's Well Road, 15 miles west of the Colorado River, leads two miles south, past a row of newly planted palm trees in the arid landscape, to the low-slung gray concrete buildings of Chuckawalla Valley State Prison (CVSP), enveloped by tall steel fences topped with electrified razor wire. (A short distance further down the two-lane macadam is Ironwood Prison, a higher security facility.)
Signing in at a small guardhouse, a visitor carries only an identity card - i.e., a driver's license - no wallet, no food, no metal object are allowed - and enters the prison grounds through a metal cage, with electrically operated gates at each end. The visitors' building has a cafeteria-size waiting room with round tables and chairs.
But on this Sunday in early June, Jeff Perrotte can be seen only behind a glass partition in a small cubicle off a corner of the waiting room. He's led into it with his wrists manacled, in a white smock (no buttons), with cloth ties down the front like a hospital gown. The only communication is via telephones on each side of the glass. He is in solitary confinement, euphemistically called "Administrative Segregation" or "Ad-Seg" for short - in prison vernacular, the "hole."
On May 27, 2003, the prisoners on B Yard, to which Jeff was assigned, instigated a work stoppage to protest a reduction in the hours they could take showers. There had been a water pump failure and no money in the CVSP budget to correct the problem. The prisoners skipped breakfast the next morning as a signal to begin the stoppage, but authorities seized 19 alleged leaders and placed them in the "hole."
Subsequently, a snitch fingered Perrotte as a leader of the white inmates, allegedly seen plotting with co-conspirators from the other ethnic groups in the Yard the afternoon before the work stoppage, and on June 2 he was put in Administrative Segregation, pending investigation.
Perrotte told the investigative officer that at the time he was purportedly in the Yard, he was actually performing in a concert in the prison gym before several hundred inmates. He skipped breakfast the morning of the incident "because I never eat breakfast anyhow." He was one of only three prisoners who crossed the picket line that day and reported for work in the kitchen. He offered to address the other prisoners to convince them to return to their jobs.
After being held in Administrative Segregation, he filed an inmate appeal form and requested a "polygraphic examination at my expense to prove my non-involvement in the work stoppage." From solitary confinement, he complained in a letter to Lambert, "I am sitting in this cage both bored to death and furious over the circumstances I find myself in. I can't for the life of me understand why they are doing this to me after all the positive things I do on a daily basis to help staff and inmates alike." To Michelle in the same envelope, he wrote, "I see our life and our world slipping away and I can't do anything about it. So many years of hard work and tolerance can be wiped away based on false accusations and absurd conclusions. I am deeply troubled right now."
In his ninth day in the "hole," from behind the glass partition, he said to a visitor, "Had I organized this and crossed the picket line after 19 other people had already gone to the 'hole,' they would kill me." No charges had been filed, but under prison protocol he could be kept in "Ad-Seg" for up to 30 days before they had to release him.
In early August, another trip to Chuckawalla Valley finds a visitor face to face with Prisoner H-89472 in the large, open visitors' space. Jeff has on a light blue shirt and dark blue trousers, modified work shoes - the same garb worn by all the other inmates meeting with their families that Sunday. On their bare arms and even on their heads, most of them are adorned liberally with tattoos. Jeff's skin is clean. He wears wire rim granny glasses - "this is no place for vanity" - is clean shaven, and his dark brown hair is full and combed straight back, neatly barbered, with a touch of gray around the ears.
He was released from the "hole" on July 3 after almost five weeks in solitary, never charged, but he is now on C Yard (CVSP's 3,700 inmates are divided into four Yards, in a facility designed to hold 1,738) because the authorities decided to separate him from the snitch who ratted him out. He's not happy about it. He had been a porter on B Yard, making 13 cents an hour, $18 a month. He also conducted a literacy program for other inmates, taught basic math and lectured on how to start a small business. Now he works in the laundry from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., without pay.
"The reality of prison," he says diffidently, "is that they (the authorities) can do whatever they want. You become part of a system to survive. Life is different than you're ever going to know it. It has taught me how to do time. The whole weight of the world is off my shoulders."While he was sequestered, he says, "A lot of my stuff was stolen, like my watch and cosmetic items and five cartons of 'prison money' - Camel cigarettes." He misses most a piece of jewelry in the shape of a barbell that was won by his son Jeff, 17, as an eyebrow pierce. His last conjugal visit with Michelle - he is precise about the date - was October 16, 1996. Conjugal visits were thereafter suspended for serious offenders, including "lifers." It was also the last chance he had to be alone with his children.
How does he spend his solitary moments?
"I read a lot. I play guitar. I have become really good at thinking of nothing, just making myself go blank."
His outlook has changed: "The sky is a lot bluer to me on the other side of the fence than it is to you. Eleven years ago, I could smell the flowers. Today I have different dreams. I dream about untying the ropes on my boat in a Southern California harbor and sailing around the world." But he's realistic. "I take full responsibility for my predicament," he adds, "something I never used to do. I came to prison because I was stupid enough to drink and drive."
His predicament took on another dimension a month later. Although he looks fit and robust, Jeff suffered from a herniated disc that may require back surgery; he also had a knee operation that didn't mend properly and needs further surgery. Because of his ailments, he was given a lower bunk and was allowed to wear tennis shoes. On the first Sunday of last September, a free day when he had no visitors, Jeff joined a group of other prisoners in the Yard for a game of softball. A prison officer saw him playing and reported him for participating in sports when he was supposed to be incapacitated. Jeff was cited for a "115" violation - "manipulating the system"- and at a prison hearing was found guilty. The ruling took away his lower bunk assignment, the right to wear shoes, and eliminated his prescribed anti-inflammatory medication. He was also denied 90 days of privileges - such as no phone calls for three months - and 30 days were added on to his sentence.
Ed Lambert mailed an impassioned Citizens Complaint to Warden Thomas Vaughn, noting that Perrotte was forbidden to shower on the two days off from his job weekly - they were considered privileges. He could not attend AA and NA meetings - they were considered privileges. In a phone call to Associate Warden Truman Durley, Lambert claims he was told, "Jeff is so smart that he poses a threat to the institution because of his ability to organize inmates."
Are Jeff Perrotte's strident efforts to seek parole after spending more than a fourth of his life in prison, all within his legal purview, connected to his problems - some might call them harassment - of recent months? There is no discernible link. But one verity is obvious.
At a time when jail population is at more than 200 percent of capacity and recidivism in California hovers at 70 percent - that means seven out of every 10 convicts released from California prisons will return to jail within two years - one man who may be the best bet in the criminal justice system to make a stable, productive return to society lingers indefinitely behind bars at Chuckawalla State Prison.