Disgraced Army Captain Faces Trial in Double Murder

John Lau was a con man who couldn’t keep his lies straight.

“My trail is covered with mistakes” is how the former Army captain once described the clumsy real estate schemes that got him booted out of the military and convicted of fraud.

But Lau’s evil impulses, authorities say, ran much deeper: In June he goes on trial for the socket-wrench beating deaths of a Brooklyn couple he had swindled. A conviction could result in a life sentence.

Prosecutors allege that on May 22, 1996, Lau hastily left his Army post in Italy and hopped on a jet to New York, where he--and possibly an unidentified accomplice--killed Alexander and Liane Barone.

The crime was so brutal police first assumed it was the work of desperate bandits. But Lau later emerged as a suspect after claiming that he made his 50-hour trip to New York so he could buy Chinese food.

Whether Lau, 37, will use the Chinese food defense against what prosecutors insist is overwhelming circumstantial evidence remains unclear. His attorney refused comment; his family declined requests for interviews.

Lau befriended Alexander Barone in the Army Reserves in the mid-1980s. A real estate agent, Lau persuaded Barone to borrow $13,000 from him to invest in a development near Port Charlotte, Fla., called Deep Creek.

It was a scam from the start: Lau never completed the deal for the vacant lot. But he did begin collecting $200 a month from the Barones to pay off the sham loan.

Later in 1987, in another bogus deal brokered by Lau, the Barones sold the same phantom property to another couple for $21,500. The second couple gave Lau $2,150 as a down payment and agreed to pay the Barones $224 a month.

The scheme began to unravel in 1996 when the buyers learned through a title search that Barone’s name wasn’t on the deed. Their lawyer warned Barone they had a big problem; he in turn contacted Lau in Italy.

At the time, Lau had “turned his life around” by deciding to serve in the Army full time, said Steven Brounstein, his former defense attorney.

Lau had been sent in 1995 to Vicenza, Italy, to command a 35-officer support unit. His wife and three small children joined him there in April 1996.

A month later, Lau got permission to go to New York on what he later called a whim. He wanted to ask a general there to help him get a transfer back to the United States. He also wanted to pick up sauces, mushrooms and other Chinese goods not available in Italy.

“I wanted to come back because it was a taste of America,” Lau told a judge in 1999.

There also was the matter of the Barones. He was convinced he could work his way out of that scam as he had others: with some fast talking or, failing that, by confessing.

“As you can see from my record, when confronted, I usually fold,” Lau said.

Lau bought a $900 plane ticket and flew to New York’s Kennedy Airport.

Alexander Barone, 32, and his 29-year-old wife, Liane, were living on the second floor of his father’s Brooklyn home. He was about to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in architecture.

The father heard the couple’s red 1984 Trans-Am drive away from the home on the night of May 23. The next day, firefighters fished their bodies out of a creek. Barone had a skull fracture so severe it exposed his brain; his wife had been both beaten and strangled.

Police found the victims’ car ditched on a Lower Manhattan street. Inside a black plastic bag on the back seat was a 16-inch socket wrench stained with blood.

A few days later, Barone’s father received an envelope from the Postal Service containing a wallet, credit cards and keys--items belonging to the victims that had been tossed in a downtown mailbox.

The father notified detectives about the parcel. He also gave them another clue: The night before his daughter-in-law vanished, she mentioned dinner plans with an old friend of her husband--John Lau.

Under questioning, Lau told investigators that the day after he arrived from Europe, he arranged to meet Alexander Barone to give him a fake deed. He claimed the meeting went so well the Barones agreed to have dinner with him.

“I just told Alex everything was going to be all right,” Lau later said in court.

Lau said the Barones invited a close friend named Gene to come along for the dinner. They were to rendezvous with him at a parking lot at Shea Stadium because it was a central meeting point.

The captain and the Barones drove in separate cars, arriving at the desolate parking lot about 10 p.m. More than two hours passed, but Gene never showed. Lau said goodbye to the couple and drove to his mother’s house around 12:30 a.m.; he was on a flight back to Italy that afternoon.

The story sounded farfetched to U.S. District Judge Reena Raggi, who said, “No reasonable New Yorker arranges to meet a dinner companion at 10 p.m. on a lonely stretch of road in Queens.”

Adding to suspicion were Lau’s injuries. Investigators found a gash on his left shoulder. His explanation: Debris had fallen on him while he was fixing a ceiling.

The deep scratch across the middle of his back? Caused by his own jagged fingernail.

A second scratch on his back? Acne. A third under his arm? A rash.

Over time, investigators came up with another theory for the wounds: They were evidence of a life-and-death struggle.

That theory, authorities say, was bolstered by Lau’s bald lies. For one thing, there was no evidence the Barones knew anyone named Gene.

The captain also said that while in New York, he called a general’s office numerous times for an appointment. The general’s secretary produced a computerized log of all calls--none from Lau.

Finally, Lau described picking up about $100 worth of Chinese provisions from his sister-in-law. But she told detectives she hadn’t seen him since 1995.

As state investigators built a murder case, federal authorities decided to arrest Lau in 1998 and charge him with fraud. Less than a year later he pleaded guilty to a white-collar crime normally punishable by less than two years in prison.

A federal judge in Brooklyn ordered the hearing to let prosecutors argue for a higher-than-normal sentence. Relying on evidence from the murder investigation, the government alleged Lau turned into a killer because he feared the couple would expose him as a crook.

Lau’s former attorney, Brounstein, countered that there was no direct evidence linking him to the slayings. Prosecutors, the lawyer noted, could not say exactly how his client allegedly committed the murders, or even where.

Lau tried to persuade the judge that he was not a violent man. “I’m sorry for what I did with the fraud,” he said. “But murder is outside my realm.”

In the end, Raggi deemed Lau’s explanations “so patently false that they only evidence consciousness of guilt.” She increased his sentence to 10 years, but not before hearing from Barone’s father, Francesco.

The father said his traumatized wife had returned to Italy. His daughter also had decided she couldn’t live in the city where her brother was murdered.

“My family,” he said, “is completely destroyed.”