Cabaret owner wants evidence suppressed

September 15, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By Peter Milliken

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

YOUNGSTOWN

The owner of the Go Go Girls Cabaret seeks to bar prosecutors from using evidence obtained from electronic surveillance of the cabaret and from two search warrants executed there in the criminal trial of the owner and others.

The jury trial of Sebastian Rucci, owner of the Austintown cabaret, and five other defendants will begin Oct. 18 before Judge Maureen A. Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.

Rucci, Curtis Jones, Derrick L. Dozier, Wayne Penny and Peter E. Scuillo II are charged with engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, money laundering, perjury and two counts each of promoting prostitution. Jones, Dozier, Penny and Scuillo were club employees last year.

Robert Neill, former club manager, is charged with one count of promoting prostitution. “The warrantless electronic surveillance is illegal under state and federal electronic surveillance statutes,” Rucci argued in a 38-page motion to suppress evidence. The motion, filed Monday, asks for an evidentiary hearing.

Evidence obtained from the subsequent May 2009 search warrants for drugs and evidence of prostitution must be suppressed because the warrants were issued based on “the illegally intercepted communication in violation of the 4th Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution, he continued.

However, Dawn Cantalamessa, chief trial counsel in the county prosecutor’s office, said the surveillance was conducted by an informant, who participated in and recorded the conversations, so no wiretap warrant was necessary under Ohio or federal law.

A warrant would be needed only for a wiretap by a nonparticipant, in which no party to the conversations is aware of the wiretap, she said.

“We did have multiple drug buys. We did have people talking about soliciting sex. We did have people talking about engaging in prostitution,” on the surveillance recordings described in the affidavit that supported issuance of the search warrants, Cantalamessa said.

The affidavit, which came from Detective Jeff Solic of the Austintown Police Department, fails to establish the constitutionally required probable cause for the warrant’s issuance, the defense motion says.

Solic was unable to obtain evidence of a single sex act in a four-month probe, the defense motion says.

However, Catalamessa said the 26-paragraph affidavit was more than adequate to establish probable cause.

Probable cause is the lowest level of evidence normally used in legal matters. It means there is good reason to believe, based on specific evidence, that an accusation is true.

The failure of a warrant to identify the relevant files in a computer seized from Rucci violates the Fourth Amendment; and the search of the computer 133 days after its seizure violates the three-day search-warrant limit, the defense motion says.

“We don’t know what the files are until we get the computer,” and what names have been given to various files, Cantalamessa countered.

All that’s required is scanning and making a “ghost image” of the computer’s hard drive as close to the three-day time frame as possible, Cantalamessa said. Investigators aren’t required to view all images within three days, she said.

The videos show “evidence of promoting prostitution,” Cantalamessa said.

A search warrant provided for seizure of cocaine, heroin and ecstasy and drug paraphernalia. “Forty police officers ransacked the cabaret for five hours and did not find any drugs,” except for a small amount of heroin in a dancer’s locker, the defense motion says.

“This is no surprise, as the police knew that the cabaret was not trafficking in drugs,” Rucci’s motion adds.

However, Cantalamessa said investigators searching the cabaret found illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia in the possession of some people at the club, evidence of semen when they swabbed the cabaret’s furniture and condoms in the cabaret’s office safe.