Diane LaVallee and Dennis Delano talk about changing the system	by Geoff Kelly

Lunch with Diane and Dennis

At a corner table in the former tavern that is the headquarters of the First Amendment Club, Diane LaVallee and Dennis Delano were revisiting the murder cases they’d worked. The jowly Delano, the suspended Buffalo police detective who reporters routinely and generously describe as “stocky,” worked on half a sandwich while LaVallee, prompted by a reporter from the Riverside Review, recalled the 1992 rape and murder of 13-year-old Jennifer Dominiak of Glor Street in Black Rock.

Dennis Delano and Diane LaVallee

LaVallee’s successful prosecution of Anthony Gugino, a friend of the Dominiak family, won her admiring headlines in the Buffalo News back then, among them this one: “Taking the Tough Cases: Prosecutor Diane LaVallee makes the world’s horrors her work.”

“Anthony helped to convict himself,” LaVallee said, “when he hired—well, he didn’t know it was an undercover cop—in state prison to kill the main witness against him.”

When LaVallee announced her campaign to succeed Erie County District Attorney Frank Clark, who is retiring after 12 years in office, she received an email from the victim’s sister and mother, wishing her well. It was a gratifying reminder, LaValle said, of what she loved about being a prosecutor. “In every case that you try, you hope not only to get a conviction of the people you think are actually guilt, but also that you make the system—that is, the criminal justice system, that cold, inarticulate bureaucracy—into a face of someone who really does care.”

LaVallee is a registered Democrat but is running on the Republican line, having lost last month’s three-way Democratic primary to Clark’s deputy in the DA’s office, Frank A. Sedita III. The third candidate, Ken Case—like LaVallee a former prosecutor in the Erie County DA’s office—dropped out of the race and endorsed Sedita. Case’s support for Sedita came a surprise, not only to LaVallee, who had joined Case in calling for a changing of the guard in the DA’s office, but to many of his early supporters, including many law enforcement officers and organizations rebelling against Clark’s heavyhanded administration and seeming reluctance to prosecute difficult cases.

Dennis Delano was one such early supporter of Case, who launched his campaign before Clark had announced his intention to retire. Delano said Case’s endorsement of Sedita, who he regards as Clark’s handpicked successor, “ripped my heart out.”

“He represented a change, that’s why I backed him 100 percent,” Delano said. “Diane wasn’t in the race when Ken jumped in, he was the only one there to buck the system, to take on Frank Clark. I don’t know what to make of it. I’m still just speechless.”

Now Delano is backing LaVallee, which is what brought the two of them together at this political club in Black Rock.

LaVallee, Case, and Sedita are all seasoned prosecutors. Sedita stuck around and became Clark’s number two, but LaVallee and Case both left the Erie County DA’s office to pursue other careers. (LaVallee left the office immediately after Clark took office in 1997.) The hiring and retention of talented lawyers has been a nagging problem under Clark. Vacancies have gone unfilled and prosecutors leave in droves. This, along with Clark’s desire to protect a high rate of successful prosecutions, contributes to the DA’s perceived inability or unwillingness to handle all the cases the cops bring to them.

“Let me tell you a not-so-secret secret,” LaVallee said. “People are not leaving the DA’s office because of the money. For the Buffalo economy, they get decent pay.” And the job, she said, is both demanding and satisfying. “It is a great thing to be a prosecutor. You’re always wearing the white hat, you’re always doing the right thing. That’s why I always worked so hard at it.”

Talented prosecutors have left the DA’s office leave for the same reason Ken Case did: They bristled under Clark’s regime. Delano said he could think of at least three respected prosecutors who left because they were unhappy working for Clark, though he declined to name them.

Retaining talent, LaVallee said, would require two measures. “Number one is getting the politics out of the office. Number two is getting the supervision back in the office, so your supervisor is someone you learn from and is a mentor to you, not someone who blames you if something gets screwed up.

“Getting the right leadership in there is critical. Getting the politics out of the office is critical. Within eight months of the $112,000 in raises that we paid for with our taxes so these good people wouldn’t leave the office for better-paying jobs, $40,000 of it went into the campaign coffers of my opponent. That would be a good raise right there: Don’t take money from the DAs. That’s one of my pledges now and one of pledges as a DA.”

LaVallee’s platform comprises a dozen more pledges; they can be read, along with her CV, at dianelavallee.com.

Delano, of course, is making his own debut in politics: Suspended for insubordination after releasing information to the media about the Crystalynn Girard murder case, Delano is using his time off to run as a Republican against Democrat Bill Stachowski, who’s been a state senator for 26 years. That’s too many years, Delano argued, with too few results.

“I believe that the people within the system have been there so long that they’ve become arrogant,” Delano said. “It’s sheer arrogance that keeps them there.”

Politics, Delano said, mean nothing to him. He insisted that he owes the Republican Party, which is financing his campaign, no special allegiance. “We don’t have the luxury of playing party politics anymore. We need to put in the people who can fix the problem,” he said, gesturing to LaVallee. “It can’t be about party anymore. We don’t have that luxury. We dug ourselves too deep.”

The message must be working: A poll released Wednesday showed Delano with a 13 percentage point lead, 49 to 36, over Stachowski.

If elected, Delano may find himself in the minority party; Democrats threaten to overturn the Republicans’ current 31-29 majority in the state senate. What if Delano goes to Albany and finds himself unable to effect change?

“If I can’t make a difference in two years, I’m outta there,” he said. “I’ll pack my bags and leave.

“What, it becomes a job? I don’t need a job. I got a job. I got a pension.”

—geoff kelly