Indicted Wall Street honcho Stuart Winkler – obsessed with hatred for the judge who threw him in jail – coldly ordered her murder, Manhattan prosecutors charged in blistering opening statements yesterday.
“Do it! It’s a done deal!” Winkler, 48, told a stoolie posing as an assassin, allegedly ordering the murder of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Leslie Crocker Snyder, which was foiled.
“Don’t worry about it,” Winkler continued, according to prosecutor Daniel McGillycuddy, who read the incriminating quotes from a transcript of the stoolie’s taped conversations during the first day of testimony.
“Just don’t get f- – – ing caught,” Winkler says in the transcript. “And don’t do it around here . . . There’s too many police.”
Winkler, a married father of three from Morganville, N.J., faces up to 25 years in prison if he’s convicted of offering another inmate $35,000 to kill Snyder.
The judge’s strict bail constraints had kept Winkler in jail, pending trial of a 46-count stock-fraud and conspiracy case.
Winkler allegedly hatched his plot in the Manhattan Detention Complex while awaiting trial. The former chief financial officer of the now-defunct A.S. Goldmen brokerage firm, he was accused of helping swindle thousands of mostly elderly investors out of a total of $100 million.
McGillycuddy told jurors that Winkler’s hatred for the judge, who is expected to testify for the prosecution, knew no moral bounds. He suffered “an unbelievable, unfathomable, callous disregard for human life,” the prosecutor said.
But in his opening, defense lawyer Russell Gioiella insisted that it was Winkler who was victimized by the stoolie, a repeat felon named Carl Legan.
Winkler was following Legan’s lead during their conversations only because he was afraid of him, Gioiella said, ticking off the stoolie’s impressive gun- and robbery-cluttered rap sheet.
Legan, 35, is “a man who put[s] guns in innocent people’s faces, even while he’s working for the prosecution,” Gioiella said.
Legan is facing life in prison, but his cooperation against Winkler could get him out of jail by the middle of next year, Gioiella said.