For Big Trial, A Look Back, A Look Forward

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

If they made a movie out of Big Trial's top stories from 2017, it would be called Trading Places, starring former District Attorney Rufus Seth Williams and convicted child rapist Bernard Shero.

Shero, falsely accused of rape by a lying scheming altar boy, got out of jail nearly a dozen years early, thanks to the dogged reporting of this blog, and the revelatory testimony of retired Detective Joe Walsh.

Williams, the corrupt D.A. who cooked up the fraudulent "Billy Doe" prosecution that sent former Catholic schoolteacher Shero to jail, along with three falsely accused Catholic priests, wound up in prison for political corruption, thanks to the work of the U.S. Attorney's Office from Jersey, which prosecuted the case.

If it wasn't legal justice, it certainly was poetic justice -- Shero, finally a free man, and Rufus, in a jump suit, finally where he belongs, behind bars.

Williams is currently doing a five year stretch in a federal prison in Oklahoma because the U.S.
Attorney nailed him for taking bribes from, as the judge who sentenced him put it, the "parasites you chose to surround yourself with."

Big Trial's Man Of The Year

But readers of Big Trial knew that our corrupt D.A.'s most serious crimes were committed against poor blind Lady Justice, and the people he was sworn to protect. On this blog last year, we chronicled how the D.A. let 1,000 drug dealers out of jail, bought 300 of those newly freed drug dealers a lottery ticket, refused to prosecute perpetrators of domestic violence, and let a bank robber out of jail that the cops had caught red-handed inside the bank, where they had pictures and video of him trying to crack a safe.

Along the way, we broke the story about how our illustrious cigar-smoking former big shot of a D.A. got himself kicked out the Union League, and how eight years ago in Election Court, he got nailed for misusing his mother's credit cards.  We capped off our all-Rufus coverage by describing a  face-to-face meeting with the man himself inside the men's room at the federal courthouse, where he was on trial for corruption.

Here at Big Trial, we sure are sorry about not having Rufus to kick around any more in the New Year. But we do look forward to chronicling the exploits of our new D.A., Progressive Larry Krasner, as he sets out to not only reform the D.A.'s office, which could use a fumigating after Rufus, but also the entire criminal justice system in our city.

Memo to Larry and his new spokesman, Ben Waxman: Your predecessor stonewalled this blog for six years, and it didn't turn out so well for him. You may want to consider a new media strategy.

Last year, when we weren't writing about Rufus, we began covering the so-called sex abuse scandal at Penn State. What a freaking travesty that case is. Attention Penn State Nation: We are about to get into this subject big-time as I've been working on a long story to be published soon in Newsweek, which just published a cover story about retired Detective Walsh.

Stay tuned for further developments. And to all our readers, a belated Happy New Year.