The Mayor Bill de Blasio donor convicted in January of bribing NYPD officers with gifts that included a $60,000 trip to Las Vegas — complete with a prostitute hired to have mile-high sex with the cops on the flight west — says in a new court filing that the star witness lied on the stand.

Now the judge in the case is postponing Jeremy Reichberg’s April 4 sentencing to sort things out.

In pre-sentencing submissions, lawyers for Reichberg, once a major donor to Mayor de Blasio, allege that Jonah Rechnitz, the “money man” in the bribery scheme who turned government cooperator, inaccurately testified that Reichberg used police connections to “fix” tickets so that recipients could avoid getting points on their licenses or fines and that he leaned on the head of the state court officers union to get friends who paid him a fee out of jury duty.

Reichberg maintains he only hired lawyers to help violators with their tickets, and he never helped to get a ticket fixed. He also says Rechnitz asked him about getting one friend out of jury duty, but that the friend ended up serving on a jury anyway.

Overall, Reichberg argues that his pre-sentencing report, which is based on Rechnitz’s testimony, incorrectly characterizes him as trying to “monetize” his relationships with the police. Reichberg alleges that, while Rechnitz gave lavish gifts to NYPD officers, neither man got much in return.

Federal Judge Gregory Woods issued an order Wednesday stating that the April 4 sentencing may instead be a conference used to address the issues raised in Reichberg’s sentencing papers.

Reichberg faces up to 65 years in prison and prosecutors say he should do at least 10, while the convicted businessman argues that he should do between six months and a year in prison.

Susan Necheles, an attorney representing Reichberg, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reichberg’s sentencing submission states that his attorneys did not challenge inaccurate testimony at trial because it was not relevant to the charges contained in the indictment against him or because evidence that would have challenged the testimony was inadmissible hearsay.

Source: Read Full Article