Face-to-face, with the point of his index finger, Louima confronts the man he says viciously violated his body.
ASSISTANT U.S. Attorney Alan Vinegrad asks Abner Louima to stand up in the witness stand yesterday.
The packed courtroom grows as quiet as an empty church as Louima, dressed in a dark blue suit, gingerly stands.
The prosecutor asks Louima to scan the Brooklyn federal courtroom for the man he says beat and sexually assaulted him with a wooden stick.
On cue, Louima begins by looking into the faces of every juror sitting to his right.
He scopes the back of the room, containing several rows of reporters, courtroom gadflies and friends and families of the police officers.
His eyes finally circle counter-clockwise to the defense table, where the five cops accused of violating him sit uncomfortably with their lawyers.
Reporters, at the edge of their seats, strain to catch a glimpse of Officer Justin Volpe, who sits with a make-believe tough-guy look.
“Do you see him in the courtroom?” Vinegrad asks.
“Yes,” Louima replies.
And for the first time, face-to-face, with the point of his index finger, Louima confronts the man he says viciously violated his body.
Louima’s hand trembles as he points at Volpe. Volpe – a deer caught in a speeding car’s headlights – blinks and shifts in his chair, trying desperately to disguise his anxiety.
His father, Robert Volpe, 56, sits stone-faced but fidgeting, in the hardwood courtroom seat, picking nervously at the cuticle of his thumb as he watches his son’s future play out.
Volpe’s lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg, who maneuvers around the courtroom like a seasoned matador, sits motionless, his left hand pressed against his face.
It’s one of the dramatic moments in the sixth-floor courtroom where Louima spends more than 90 minutes telling jurors how cops violated him.
In a trembling voice, Louima describes how Volpe entered the bathroom of the 70th Precinct station house and raped him.
His hands cuffed behind his back and knocked to the floor with his face several inches away from a toilet – his third beating that night at the hands of police.
Louima pauses for a few seconds; licks his lips. He’s nervous.
He’s embarrassed.
In a heavy Haitian accent, he describes how Officer Charles Schwarz hoisted him up by grabbing his handcuffed hands.
You can picture Louima’s upper body dangling several inches off the bathroom floor, his toes barely touching the tiles.
“Officer Volpe put an object in my rectum and pull it out, put it in my mouth and told me ‘that’s my s—,'” Louima says, his voice breaking up.
He licks his lips again because, despite rehearsals with government lawyers, it’s hard for the married father of two to relay that horrific moment to a roomful of strangers.
He is ashamed enough to try very hard to keep a tear from streaking down his face.
Volpe and Schwarz should have cried instead. Louima has medical bills to prove that, in August 1997, a foreign object was shoved so far up his rectum it punctured his bladder.
Louima’s insides were torn up so badly that, when he reluctantly drank a cup of water at Coney Island Hospital after a nurse asked him to “it went straight out the other end.”
The jurors cringe.