Tomorrow, Marc DeSisto will argue the case of contempt against TV reporter Jim Taricani for refusing to say who gave him a copy of a secret FBI videotape.

01:11 PM EST on Wednesday, November 17, 2004

BY TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Marc DeSisto, 49, wakes up at 4:30 every morning and does an hour of yoga, and then either runs five miles, swims a mile or skips rope -- 5,000 turns without stopping. He then works 12-hour days in his legal practice, and tries to go to Mass at least five times a week.

For the last three years, one of his clients has been the U.S. District Court, which hired him as a special prosecutor to find out who leaked a videotape to TV reporter Jim Taricani.

Tomorrow, Taricani will go on trial for criminal contempt for refusing to tell DeSisto the source of the videotape, which Channel 10 aired before the trial of former Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. and three codefendants. Taricani is facing up to six months in prison.

Taricani, who has built a reputation over the years as a tough investigative reporter, has vowed not to disclose the identity of his source.

The reporter's tenacity has been matched in the contempt proceedings by DeSisto, the Providence lawyer appointed by Chief U.S. District Judge Ernest C. Torres to investigate how Taricani obtained the tape.

SINCE 2001, DeSisto has expended considerable effort in his quest to determine who violated a pretrial court order prohibiting the prosecution and defense camps in the Operation Plunder Dome case from disseminating the FBI videotapes.

DeSisto refused this week to say how much his investigation has cost taxpayers. Torres said the lawyer's initial bills -- submitted to the court for work done at $125 per hour through September 2002 -- totaled $42,334.

DeSisto has interviewed 14 people who were possible sources of the leak, according to representations made in court. All these people, he has told Judge Torres, have denied being Taricani's source.

As a last resort, DeSisto has gone after Taricani. Unless the reporter reveals who gave him the videotape, Judge Torres has said, DeSisto's investigation probably will be stalled forever.

And that, Torres has pointed out, will leave a criminal act unpunished -- something that does not sit well with DeSisto, who began his legal career putting felons behind bars.

It was not surprising that Judge Torres chose DeSisto to represent the court's interests. Judges, high-profile officials and municipalities often reach out to DeSisto in thorny situations.

It has been that way ever since the 1977 Providence College graduate became a member of the Rhode Island bar in 1982, after graduating from Suffolk University Law School. Between college and law school, DeSisto spent two years selling rubber gaskets over the telephone.

While attending Suffolk, DeSisto interned in the Rhode Island attorney general's office, where he was given the opportunity to help prosecute probation violators in the Superior Court.

"The last three cases I had, I violated three people. I think they got 9 years and 10 years and 9 years," DeSisto told a reporter in a 1985 interview.

Upon passing the bar and joining the attorney general's staff, DeSisto specialized in prosecuting rape and murder cases.

THEN, WHEN HE WAS just 30, and less than three years out of law school, he landed a starring role prosecuting Claus vonBulow, when vonBulow was retried for twice trying to murder his heiress wife with insulin injections.

The trial attracted international media attention. It ended in vonBulow's acquittal, but veteran trial lawyers said afterward that they were impressed by DeSisto's diligence.

A few months after vonBulow was found not guilty, DeSisto was hired to work in the Providence law firm of Carroll, Kelly and Murphy, where he would specialize in insurance defense cases, working under the tutelage of renowned trial lawyer Joseph A. Kelly, who became his mentor.

Almost immediately, he engaged in battle with his former boss, then-Attorney General Arlene Violet, who tried unsuccessfully to prosecute the Gilbane Building Co., which Kelly and DeSisto represented. Violet ended up dismissing the fraud case against Gilbane and two of its employees after it was disclosed that one of her prosecutors had given the defense lawyers incomplete transcripts of interviews with a key witness.

Later, DeSisto would go on with Kelly to represent Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas F. Fay, who was forced to resign and pleaded guilty to criminal ethics and obstruction of justice charges and converting state money to personal use.

DeSisto and Kelly also represented former Cranston Mayor Michael A. Traficante, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges relating to improper campaign-finance reporting and was sentenced to one year's probation -- after his admission to investigators that he and his wife had accumulated $115,000 of unreported campaign cash in a safe-deposit box.

While working with Kelly, DeSisto developed expertise in defending doctors who were sued in medical malpractice cases, and in representing Rhode Island's cities, towns and police departments as a lawyer for the municipalities' insurer, the Rhode Island Interlocal Risk Management Trust.

As a lawyer for the trust, he is representing the Town of West Warwick in connection with civil lawsuits filed by victims of The Station nightclub fire.

In 1994, DeSisto formed his own law firm, on Providence's East Side, with his wife, Kathy, and brother, Michael. While judges say he is equally adept in the criminal and civil arenas, he stopped representing people charged with crimes several years ago. He felt that his role as a criminal defense lawyer might conflict with his job for the interlocal trust, for whom he represents police departments and officers in lawsuits.

DESISTO'S STYLE in the courtroom is just the opposite of the flashy trial lawyers portayed in TV dramas. His presentations are methodical and monotone, low-key and to the point.

Torres is not the only judge in recent years who has called upon DeSisto to represent the judicial system.

The state Commission on Judicial Tenure and Discipline hired him to prosecute now-retired District Court Judge Robert K. Pirraglia for ethics violations. Pirraglia still stands accused of violating a criminal defendant's rights during a plea-bargain session by telling the offender that if he exercised his right to speak with a lawyer he could face additional jail time.

DeSisto was also retained to give legal advice to the commission on a matter that never became public, according to the commission's former chairwoman, Superior Court Judge Alice B. Gibney.

Gibney said the commission hired DeSisto because "he's very bright, very honorable, very to the point and very candid. He's very tenacious and he's very thorough. He anticipates every conceivable nuance of a case, every possible twist and turn in the litigation road. But he's also one of those attorneys that, notwithstanding his tenacity, is highly regarded by lawyers who are on the opposite side of a case."

Digital Extra: Browse a collection of surveillance tapes from the Operation Plunder Dome trial, including the videotape aired before the trial by Channel 10, at:

http://projo.com/cgi-bin/include.pl/trial/trial_avtapes.htm