Taxpayers foot the bill as Queens DA carries out decades-long vendetta that started with racist attack against the dedendant in 2007.
[Speaking Truth To Power]
Unless there is another postponement of the bogus case we’ve been covering, Queens Assistant District Attorney Peter Lomp –who’s also a law professor– will ask juror to convict Kris Gounden based on the words of a serial liar who himself is on trial tomorrow.
Last year after a Feb. 5 traffic incident, Joseph Adorno claimed Gounden, a Queens resident whose been harassed for more than 12 years by officers from the NYPD’s 106 precinct and ADAs from Queens County, struck him with his car while he was standing on the street and drove off.
Gounden has consistently said Adorno is a serial liar and made up the story. He claimed he was the victim of a crime. He said he’d halted his car at a Stop sign in a Queens intersection while on his way to pick up his children from school. He claimed Adorno, who was driving behind him in a black BWM with his wife Evaline Orovco in the car, struck the rear of his car several times. Gounden claimed when he pulled over, Adorno exited his own car, ran toward him and kicked and punched the side of his vehicle, causing a dent. Gounden subsequently produced records from a police dispatcher proving that he was the one who dialed 911, twice, to report the alleged assault by Adorno.
Gounden drove from the scene of the incident a few blocks back to his grandmother’s house where he lives. He claimed Adorno gave chase and continued to ram the rear of his car along the way.
When officers arrived from the notorious 106 precinct, responding to Gounden’s call, they arrested him instead, based on the words of Adorno and his wife Orovco. The couple claimed they had recorded the alleged assault by Gounden on their cell phone video recorder. No such evidence was subsequently produced. Adorno was once an NYPD auxiliary officer.
One arresting officer, Carlos Bello, never even asked Adorno and his wife to show him the evidence. Later, Bello apparently filed a false police report so that the address of the alleged incident would match the location Gounden had provided on his 911 call. Adorno had provided a different location to Bello. Unknown to both Adorno and the arresting officer, Gounden’s cell phone recorder was running and he captured the entire interactions once Bello arrived on the scene.
Adorno continued his string of contradictory statements when he filed a claim against Gounden’s insurer, Allstate. During an examination under oath on April 26, 2018, responding to a question by an Allstate lawyer, Daniel Gilley, Adorno agreed that he was driving his car on the date of the incident. He had to be “corrected” by his attorney Matthew Marchese that he had emerged from his car and was pedestrian on that date; after all, how else could he have been hit while standing in the street.
Adorno offered more fiction to the Allstate lawyer, the transcript reviewed by Black Star News shows. Playing the race card, Adorno who is White, claimed there had been a Black male passenger in the car with Gounden, a concoction he’s never told the arresting officer Bello. He also provided yet a different location as the location of the incident; it didn’t match the previous one he’d told Officer Bello when Gounden was arrested. It also doesn’t match the one on Bello’s police report.
When he spoke to the Queens DA’s office, documents show, Adorno told ADA Cox that Gounden struck him on his hand. Yet, he told the Allstate lawyer, that he’d been hurt on his neck, his knee, and his back.
Allstate lawyer Gilley also grilled Adorno about several past insurance claims he’d filed. Still, Allstate paid Adorno at least $14,000. An Allstate spokesperson told Black Star News the company continues to investigate the matter. The company did not explain why payment was made to Adorno even though he has made several contradictory statements about the incident. “I’m waiting for Adorno to be charged with insurance fraud,” Gounden said, shortly after Adorno’s examination under oath.
There have been explosive developments that continue to undermine Adorno’s credibility. When Gounden fired his court-appointed lawyer, Michael J. Schwed, who had urged him to accept a plea, the lawyer told the supervising judge in Queens Criminal Court, Michelle A. Johnson, just before he was released from representing Gounden that the DA had informed him that Orovco, Adorno’s wife, had said she was prepared to tell the court that her husband had “made up” the allegations against Gounden. It’s unclear if Judge Johnson ordered an investigation into the statement purportedly made by Adorno’s wife before she assigned the case to another judge. This reporter was in her courtroom when Schwed made the revelation.
Schwed had never previously disclosed this information to Gounden. There is definitely a court bias against Gounden in favor of assistant district attorneys from Queen’s County as previously reported by Black Star News. (In one previous bogus case against Gounden covered by Black Star News, an ADA named Brian Cox was never sanctioned by Judge Johnson after he apparently lied about having incriminating video evidence against Gounden and proceeded to present an empty DVD container in the courtroom; this reporter was also in the courtroom for that charade).
Gounden is now represented by the noted criminal defense lawyer Ron Kuby, former law partner of the late Bill Kunstler the famed civil rights attorney.
The case was adjourned on the last court date because ADA Lomp couldn’t locate his witness, Adorno. Black Star News later learned that Adorno was apparently homeless; he’d been arrested in May, 2019, for allegedly assaulting his wife Orovco, who had been prepared to expose his lies against Gounden to the court. Orovco has an order of protection against her husband.
In the bizarre way in which things seem to unfold in the Queens courts, Adorno is due to appear before a judge tomorrow, Sept. 16, to defend himself against his alleged assault on his wife. After those proceedings he will become the Queens DA’s top witness in the bogus case against Gounden. It’s not clear if he’ll finally show up. It’s also unclear how vigorously the DA intends to prosecute Adorno on the alleged spousal assault case since his testimony is needed in the Gounden trial.
Gounden’s trial was adjourned to Sept. 16 when Adorno was a no-show on July 15. Adorno, the DA’s top witness, also didn’t show up July 30 for the start of his own criminal trial on the spousal assault allegations.
The decades-long vendetta against Gounden by the 106 precinct and the Queens County DA’s office started shortly after his family was the victim of a racist attack after moving into Howard Beach. The Daily News reported the incident on on Aug. 24, 2007 in an article headlined “Family Haunted by Hate in Queens.” The Goundens initially had police protection. After the media coverage died down, it appears, the precinct and DA set out to drive Gounden from the neighborhood.
When contacted about tomorrow’s proceedings, Queens County DA spokesperson Ikimulisa Livingston said, “We do not comment on pending cases.”
