For almost a decade, Ted, Deb and Haley Zale hoped their famed relative’s stolen boxing championship belts would turn up.
If not the entirety of Tony Zale’s two middleweight title belts, maybe a sliver, a cloth strip or a fragment.
In a Scranton federal courtroom Tuesday, the Zales heard a key witness testify the thieves destroyed every shred and lost money on the theft.
Admitted burglar Thomas Trotta, 49, delivered the definitive answer as he testified against four Lackawanna County childhood friends accused of joining him in looting or conspiring to loot 20 museums and other venues over two decades.
“Hearing him say that ... basically, they did that for nothing, and it cost them money?” Deb Zale said, disgust mixing with tears while she stood outside the federal courthouse later. “Too bad. Cost them money,” she said with a fed-up tone.
The trial will resume Wednesday with defense lawyers taking their crack at shaking Trotta’s claims about their clients, Nicholas Dombek, Damien Boland and brothers Alfred and Joseph Atsus.
On Tuesday, Trotta sat in a witness box only about 25 feet away from the Zales, who watched from Courtroom 4’s benches. Ted Zale stoically stared at Trotta as he testified. As wife Deb wept, daughter Haley dabbed a tissue at her own eyes.
Trotta said he and/or Boland and Dombek visited the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York, “Five, six, seven” times before the Nov. 5, 2015, theft.
They recorded videos that showed the loot they wanted: Zale’s belts and four title belts of a later middleweight champion, Carmen Basilio.
Though Trotta didn’t testify to what else he recorded at the boxing museum, he previously said they often recorded potential break-in points, normal entrances and exits, motion detectors or alarm panels and potential weaknesses in displays.
The boxing museum visits showed the glass cases holding the belts would “break really easy,” he said.
The night of the theft, Boland drove them to the museum in a maroon pickup truck. Trotta said Boland waited outside as he broke in through a rear window, smashed the cases with an axe and grabbed the belts.
He got confused. Instead of heading out the same window, he found another exit, he said.
They drove back to Scranton and stopped in at The Colliery, a Meadow Avenue bar that Boland owned. They thought the belts were solid gold, he said.
They weren’t.
“They were just gold-plated,” he said.
In his North Pocono garage, Dombek, who knew how to use chemicals to extract precious metals, squeezed out whatever gold he could from the plating.
The gems in the belts were glass and “not real stones (diamonds or other real gems),” Trotta testified.
Boland drove Trotta to New York City where they sold the gold for “a few hundred dollars,” Trotta said. The federal indictment of the four men says about $400.
“Nick kept most of the money,” Trotta said.
The expense of committing the theft and extracting the gold cost more than they earned on the sale, he said.
'It's just such an affront'
Later, Deb Zale said the family often thought maybe the thief stored the belts “out in the country or under some bed” and maybe the thief was some “punk--- teenager guy.”
“We had this campaign,” she said. “(Actor) Rosie Perez started ... (a) hashtag, ‘#bringback the belts.’ And, you know, we flew with that. I mean, we made T-shirts, we made cards, we made postcards, and, you know, it was all in vain.”
Standing next to her parents on North Washington Avenue, Haley Zale, Tony Zale’s great niece, fought through tears.
“I was always holding out hope that we would be able to have something back, like maybe the silks in the belt part that my uncle wore around his waist,” she said. “And to hear him say that they burned them, it’s just such an affront. It's callous, and he was so careless.”
Trotta, she said, “just doesn't care.”
“It means so much to us because it represents my dad getting out of poverty in Gary, Indiana, and having opportunities in life which indirectly affected my life," Haley Zale said of the belts celebrating her great uncle's success.
"That he just destroyed them so carelessly, so quickly ... it's painful. It breaks my heart,” she said.
Ted Zale, the boxer’s nephew, started taking off his coat.
“What I would like to do is simply put this down, take my coat off and go up and cold cock him,” he said forming a right-hand fist and jabbing the air. “Just like he cold cocked my uncle. Just like he did to my uncle, the mighty right hand would take care of it for me.”
A close call during Berra heist
The Zales weren’t the only relative of a famous athlete to hear Trotta tell of the destruction of symbols of a legacy.
Lindsay Berra, the granddaughter of New York Yankees baseball Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, drove in from Montclair, New Jersey, home to the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center.
Berra heard Trotta testify how the thieves cased the museum similarly. This time, Joseph Atsus, another of the four defendants, drove Trotta to Montclair for the actual theft.
They followed a cell phone weather app and waited for an expected heavy downpour before he began the theft, Trotta testified. They believed heavy rain slowed police responses. They kept in touch through a walkie-talkie and an untraceable cell phone.
Trotta climbed over the centerfield fence of the museum’s adjacent baseball stadium.
He brought a collapsible ladder with him, climbed to a balcony and broke in. Inside, using an electric grinder, he cut a square hole in heavy glass that protected Berra’s 10 World Series rings and other championship rings. He took nine World Series rings and seven championship rings, the indictment says.
Trotta cut a triangular hole in another case that held Berra's two Most Valuable Player plaques.
As he usually did at theft scenes, Trotta left behind the ladder and the grinder. He raced back toward the centerfield fence but could not climb over because of the rain.
He retrieved the ladder and finally got over the fence. The whole endeavor took 30 to 45 minutes, much longer than planned, he said.
He finally got over the fence and saw Atsus driving the wrong way down a one-way road. As Atsus “did a three-point turn” to head in the right direction, they saw police lights.
“The cops were flying toward the back of the museum,” Trotta said. “One more second, and the cops’ (police lights) would have gotten us right on that road.”
At Trotta’s sister’s house, they tried on the nine World Series rings, though Atsus couldn’t get one on his thumb.
“We tried them on, and Nick tried them all on,” Trotta said.
The next day, Dombek pried gemstones and other precious stones off the rings and melted down the rings and the metal on the plaques in his garage. He poured the molten metal into a round-disc mold, Trotta said.
All told, they got about $2,000 for the gems and netted $14,000 to $15,000 overall when they sold the loot in New York City, he said.
He paid Atsus $1,700 or $1,800. Dombek got $2,500, according to the indictment.
'They got off on taking important stuff'
Lindsay Berra said she heard the story about Trotta getting stuck behind the centerfield wall for the first time. That made her think about police who drove by five minutes after the museum alarm went off and didn’t see anything amiss.
“So had they gone in and, you know, thrown a spotlight over the field, he was at that point, like a rat in a cage,” she said. “They would have seen it, literally, because he was stuck on the field.”
Berra, a sports journalist who was interviewed for a CBS News “60 Minutes” story last year that featured Trotta, said she had never sat in the same room with him before.
“I've tried to make myself like, as emotionally detached as I can,” she said outside the courthouse. “You know, we're not getting this stuff back. I had just wanted to hear him say how he did it, like, you know, I'm a reporter too, and I just kind of wanted the information. And I wish I had been able to ask him questions.”
She wants more details on why.
“When you're only making $10,000 on these things that are worth bajillions, right, you leave your tools behind, and then you got to go buy new tools out of the money that you may make, they’re not netting very much at all,” she said. “For guys who are smart enough to evade law enforcement in multiple states for two decades ... they're so stupid in other ways. It's mind boggling to me.”
Though Trotta testified earlier it was all about making money, Berra said she’s doubtful because they might have earned more robbing gold from jewelry stores.
“It feels like they went after the sports memorabilia (because) they got off on taking important stuff, and that part of it really bothers me,” she said. “Because it just doesn't make any sense.”
At one point, Berra heard Haley Zale say, "I do feel like I've wasted 10 years of my life trying to find them (Zale's belts)."
Berra reminded her the effort to retrieve the belts reminded everyone of Tony Zale's greatness.
"They can take whatever they want from Yogi Berra and Tony Zale and Roger Maris (the ex-Yankee whose museum in North Dakota Trotta also hit)," Berra told Haley Zale. "But these losers can't take anything away from Yogi Berra, Tony Zale. And do not forget that ... The stuff all of those men did were bigger than any of the stuff that they won. And these little, small individuals cannot change that."
