Zaccaro Acquitted of Seeking Bribe From Cable TV Company

John Zaccaro, husband of 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro, was acquitted today of shaking down a cable television company for the Queens cable franchise.

Zaccaro showed no emotion as the verdict was read but afterward patted his attorney, Robert Morvillo, on the back.

“Thank God it turned out the way it did, and I’m glad it’s over,” Zaccaro, 54, said on the courthouse steps with his wife and their three children at his side.

His wife, clutching a handkerchief, turned and hugged their son John Jr., who faces drug charges in Vermont, where he was known as “the pharmacist” on the Middlebury College campus. The couple’s two daughters held hands and cried as their father was acquitted.

“John is going back to being John Zaccaro, real estate broker, not John Zaccaro, husband of former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro,” said Ferraro, who had sat with the couple’s children in the first row of the crowded courtroom throughout the trial.

Asked if she would return to politics, Ferraro said, “Perhaps.”

Zaccaro had been charged with scheming with former Queens Borough President Donald Manes to solicit a bribe from Cablevision Systems Corp. in return for a contract to wire the borough. Manes, since implicated in unrelated corruption cases, killed himself in March, 1986.

Cablevision executive John Tatta told a grand jury he understood that Zaccaro had demanded $1 million, but during the five-day trial there was no direct testimony that Zaccaro tried to extort any money from Cablevision six years ago.

Nor was there any testimony that Manes ever asked for money or suggested anything improper in his contacts with the cable company.

In summing up the case Tuesday, Zaccaro’s lawyer had ridiculed the federal case as one on which “they wouldn’t try your dog.”

“Where’s the beef? Where’s the crime? Where’s the proof? What are we doing here?” Morvillo asked the jury in trial-level state Supreme Court.

The jury began deliberating Tuesday afternoon after hearing instructions from Justice John Thorp. It resumed deliberations this morning at 9:30 a.m. and returned the verdict two hours later.

“It has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and people had doubt he did this,” said juror Ronald Forte, a postal worker. Foreman Lester Anthony said there was simply “insufficient evidence” to convict.

Zaccaro could have been sentenced to seven years in prison.

Every prosecution witness “said something here that would lead you to believe that my client committed no crime,” Morvillo said Tuesday.

Prosecutor Paul Pickelle said Morvillo used “con-man tricks” to mislead the jurors and he urged them to convict Zaccaro.

Thorp, in his one-hour instruction to the jury, said that in order to convict Zaccaro, a millionaire real estate developer, the panel must find that Manes broke the law.

The chief witness was one-time Cablevision lawyer Richard Flynn, who prosecutors said received the bribe overture at an Oct. 27, 1981, meeting with Zaccaro.

Flynn was called as a prosecution witness but during his testimony he would not say that Zaccaro asked for a bribe, only that Zaccaro was delivering the message that the process was corrupt.