Jonathan F. Oster, left, at the opening of his trial yesterday in Superior Court in Providence.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer photo

PROVIDENCE — Just about six years after he was arrested on bribery and conspiracy charges, former Lincoln Town Administrator Jonathan F. Oster got his first day in court yesterday, as prosecutors sought to portray the former municipal chief as a man more interested in using his position to make money for himself than to serve his town.

But Oster’s lawyer, C. Leonard O’Brien, said the only conspiracy was against his client, one crafted by the state police and ex-Planning Board member and former Oster ally Robert B. Picerno, whom O’Brien described as a “personable scoundrel” and “a flim-flam man” who offered to try to implicate Oster in exchange for leniency in his own bribery case.

Throughout her 40-minute presentation to the jury, Assistant Attorney General Bethany Macktaz referred to Oster as “the defendant” while O’Brien always used his name. Oster is facing two counts of bribery and two counts of conspiracy. In his 2004 case, Picerno pleaded no contest to four counts of bribery and three counts of conspiracy.

Oster’s case centers on a six-acre piece of land on Route 116 near the Blackstone River called the H&H Screw property, for an old manufacturing business there. The land has been in legal limbo since the early 1990s when the owner went bankrupt and no one assumed title to the property.

Macktaz said the state will show that on two different occasions in 2001 and 2002, with different buyers, Oster and Picerno conspired to sell the property at a “rock bottom” price in exchange for bribes. The first try was with Robert Campellone, who owns a Dodge dealership on the other side of Route 146 from the H&H site.

Picerno’s job in the conspiracy was to find buyers, Macktaz said. Oster’s was to get the town to sell. She said Campellone will testify that Picerno approached him in early 2001 about buying the land. The deal was that he pay the town $105,000, plus a $25,000 bribe to Picerno and — the state says — Oster.

“Mr. Campellone knew he was paying a bribe,” Macktaz said.

Later that year, Oster got the Town Council to approve the sale of the land to Campellone for the $105,000 figure even though Macktaz said more than $600,000 in taxes was owed on it. The Town Council approved the sale, but by then Campellone had talked about the deal with his lawyer, who told him to get out of it, and he did.

Macktaz said that left Picerno to find a new buyer. The next targets were David Wayne Daniel and Robert Gelfuso, owners of Major Construction, a company that had done a renovation project at Fairlawn playground. Macktaz told the jury Daniel and Gelfuso will testify that Picerno offered them the land for $105,000 plus a $25,000 bribe and $15,000 for legal expenses.

Besides the testimony of the targets of the conspiracy, Macktaz said the state will show the jury video and audio tape of Oster taking $10,000 from Picerno for his part of the plot.

In his opening remarks, O’Brien told the jury it should pay special attention to what it heard and what it won’t hear. The state’s case was cobbled together with the testimony of people who either admitted taking or paying bribes and who had an interest in ingratiating themselves with state police investigators, he said.

“A majority of these people are not reliable,” O’Brien told the jury. “They were out for their own gain.”

Picerno, he said, was a con man who had been caught shaking down the H&H buyers and was looking to make a deal with the state police, O’Brien said. Oster’s mistake wasn’t taking bribes, O’Brien said, it was trusting Picerno.

The state went into the probe wanting Oster, he said, whether the facts justified it or not. He said every allegation that Oster was doing something for a bribe had a reasonable explanation.

He warned the jury it was in for the equivalent of a real estate appraisal seminar in regard to the H&H land. He attacked one of the basic premises of the state’s case: that the $105,000 price for the H&H land was so low someone would have to pay a bribe to get it.

Though Macktaz was correct that more than $600,000 in taxes was owed on the land, O’Brien said that had nothing to do with its value as real estate. He said the defense would show that cleaning up industrial wastes at the site would cost a new owner between $400,000 and $2 million. The land in effect had a negative value, he said, so a $105,000 price was a bargain for the town, not a sweetheart deal for the buyer.

O’Brien predicted that while the jury would hear tapes of many conversations with Picerno wheeling and dealing and dropping Oster’s name, none of those tapes will show Oster talking about taking money

“You will never see direct evidence that Jonathan Oster took a bribe,” he said.

jhill@projo.com