Re: 9/16/99 - Raucci's Latest Escape
Raucci's Latest Escape
Hit & Run
By Paul Bass
Published 09/16/99
The woman was distraught. She told the cops someone had raped her.
The lead detective on the case, Vincent Raucci, had a novel approach for how to deal with the victim. He spent the night at her apartment having "wild sex" with her, according to court documents.
Raucci's not a cop anymore. In fact, the cops wanted him. He was a fugitive, hauled back to New Haven last month to answer criminal charges.
But then something funny happened. Local cops and prosecutors helped him escape again, this time legally. Raucci is now back in New Mexico.
That means he's not around to add fuel to new questions about cases that date to his years as a city cop--like the rape case, and a 1990 double murder in which the FBI believes Raucci set up two men because of a drug-dealing debt to one of Raucci's pals.
No one knows how many other drug or murder cases rogue cop Raucci may have compromised. Lots of people would like--and deserve--to know.
Local authorities, however, might prefer not to know. You can't help wondering: Did the police and prosecutors want Raucci on the other side of the United States to protect their own hides?
Take the rape case, which occurred in 1995. The state doesn't deny that Raucci bedded a traumatized victim he had just met. The state claims merely that the victim says Raucci waited not just a few hours but two whole weeks to have sex with her. That was long enough, the state claims, to make the detective's personal involvement with the victim irrelevant to the prosecution.
Meanwhile, a witness--a woman living upstairs from the victim--says she saw Raucci's car at the house all night after the rape and into the morning. The neighbor says the victim apologized to her the next morning "for any noise she may have made" overnight while "she had engaged in 'wild sex' with Det. Vinnie Raucci."
Prosecutors acknowledge that the upstairs neighbor told that story. But, the state argues, her account was irrelevant because she's a stripper.
Prosecutors succeeded in keeping Raucci's role, and Raucci himself, out of the rape trial. A jury convicted the defendant in 1997.
Now his attorney, Assistant Public Defender Lauren Weisfeld, will argue before a three-judge state appellate panel on Sept. 27 that her client deserves a new trial. Her brief, from which the above was taken, argues that the sex between the woman and the convicted rapist was consensual, and that the victim's story in police reports doesn't match other evidence from the case. And, Weisfeld argues, Raucci's personal relationship with the victim biased his investigation.
Officials pushed Raucci off the force in 1996 after an investigation found he'd been doing cocaine and spending long hours at drug houses he'd been ordered to avoid.
Raucci first fled to New Mexico two years ago to avoid unrelated criminal charges--for harassing his ex-wife and for cheating the police department out of money by lying about his hours while a cop.
He would have been left alone in New Mexico if a secret FBI report hadn't become public last year, the report about the 1990 double murder. (See "The Cop & The 'Killer,'" Sept. 17, 1998, on the Web at <http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/newarchive.phtml>.) Because of those questions, the FBI brought Raucci back here against his will. The pretext was to clear up his outstanding criminal charges. But the local cops were also going to interview him.
The first time the FBI went to get him, this summer,Raucci hid out. The second time, he engaged in a stand-off for four hours before surrendering, according to the FBI.
And yet... the feds, perhaps out of deference to local authorities, never filed charges against him for resisting their arrest.
And yet... when Raucci returned to New Haven, an otherwise tough judge lowered his bond from $450,000 to $50,000 surety. That meant he could immediately walk out free. Meanwhile, many incarcerated men who'd never posed anywhere near as much of a threat of flight remained behind bars with higher bonds.
Local cops did privately interview Raucci. Then Police Chief Mel Wearing publicly denounced the FBI's investigation and its conclusion that Raucci framed two men who now sit in jail for the rest of their lives.
In just a few short weeks, Raucci's lawyer persuaded the court to dispose of several outstanding criminal charges, from which Raucci had originally fled. State prosecutors made no effort to keep him here longer.
Now remember that Chief Wearing used to serve as the department's chief of detectives. He supervised Raucci.
If Raucci were here too long--if the FBI investigation got legs and led to further public inquiry--suddenly Wearing could look bad. Cases closed under his supervision could fall apart.
That would look bad for the state's attorney's office, too. Who knows how many people sent away for murder or drug dealing might have been framed?
Who knows how many court briefs seeking new trials might contain sentences like this one in Weisfeld's:
"This [his "wild sex" with the alleged rape victim] called into question all that Raucci--whose veracity was suspect--reported about the case."
Raucci has already stopped by the Grant County Sheriff's Department upon his return to Silver City, N.M., according to Detective Steve Gonzalez. The department had been investigating a burglary charge against Raucci. The investigation has gone nowhere.
"He just stopped by to pick up some property he had," Gonzalez said.
Raucci also reported that he's been a victim. During his unplanned vacation to New Haven, he claims, someone in Silver City stole his chickens.
E-mail: pbass@newhavenadvocate.com
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