Lisa DiBello and wiretaps

“I’ll be watching you” and listening, too

By Will Collette

If Council member Lisa DiBello’s lawsuit against Charlestown and nine present and past town officials ever gets underway – i.e., the ethical gridlock gets unlocked – the Rules of Civil Procedure lay out a process and sequence of events for the case.

Very likely, DiBello’s lawyer, Robert Savage, and the town’s lawyer, whether it’s Town Solicitor Peter Ruggiero or someone brought in specifically for this purpose, will file motions with the judge at first opportunity.

Savage will probably file a Motion for Summary Judgment – asking the judge to declare DiBello the winner based on the brilliance of Savage’s presentation of DiBello’s airtight case.

The Town’s attorney will probably file a Motion to Dismiss on the grounds that DiBello’s case is total crap, using more elegant language of course.

The judge will probably dismiss both motions out of hand.

Then comes my favorite part of civil litigation, the “Discovery” phase. Under discovery, each side is entitled to ask for and get information from the other side so that neither side has the unfair advantage of surprise.

The basic elements of discovery are:

Requests for admission. One side asks the other side to agree or “stipulate” to certain basic facts, such as how long did Lisa DiBello actually work for the town of Charlestown. (She gave several different answers on her ethics disclosure forms ranging from 19 to 22 years.)

Motions to produce. Both sides can demand that the other side produce various documents, files, tapes, etc. I'd expect the Town to demand that DiBello fork over any audio or video wiretap material she has to back up some of her more fabulous claims. DiBello will probably ask for Bill DiLibero’s birth certificate. There may also be efforts to unseal the record of the results of the investigation into DiBello’s 2006 allegations against then–Town Administrator Richard Sartor.

Interrogatories. These are generally very long and tedious lists of questions by one side’s lawyer that must be answered by the other side. If you refuse to answer the question, you have to cite the grounds (e.g., irrelevant), but the other side can ask the judge to compel you to answer.

From the deposition scene in The Social Network

Depositions. These are face-to-face sessions where one side’s lawyer gets to grill people who may have some evidence to give in the case. Though this is not done in the judge’s presence, many witnesses say it feels like being on the witness stand in a court room. There is a record of the deposition, usually done by a court stenographer, but sometimes the deposition is videotaped.

The movie The Social Network, about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, is essentially one long deposition session with the movie’s story woven into the lawyer’s questions.

The numerous people who are mentioned, but not listed as defendants, in DiBello’s lawsuit complaint might be asked to answer interrogatories or appear for a deposition.

In a nasty, mean-spirited case like DiBello v. Charlestown, the lawyers for both sides tend to fight over every discovery request – over every document or tape demanded, over the wording of questions, over the relevance of the questions, the adequacy of the answers and so on.

Let’s look at two critical segments of DiBello’s complaint that are likely to be major items in discovery. Both of them may involve wiretap evidence.

First, DiBello alleges at least one crucial meeting took place between Richard Sartor, the Town Administrator in 2005 when DiBello claims the conspiracy against her began, and William DiLibero, the current Town Administrator, who fired her in 2010.

DiBello alleges Sartor met with DiLibero at Hopkinton Town Hall. She claims Sartor offered DiLibero the better paying job of Charlestown Administrator in return for DiLibero’s promise that he would fire DiBello. Read for yourself how DiBello describes this alleged deal between Sartor and DiLibero:

Other members of the executive search committee who hired DiLibero say this never happened.

But this is the crucial event – it’s the linchpin of her conspiracy case. Obviously, Charlestown’s attorney is going to demand to see DiBello’s evidence – does she have audio tape, video tape or witness statements? Whatever she has, Charlestown is going to want to see it. It seems unlikely that the judge will allow DiBello any latitude about disclosing her evidence on an event so central to the case. If she fails to fork over this evidence during discovery, there's little chance the judge would allow her to use it in her case later.

The second event likely to draw a lot of attention in discovery is a conversation that DiBello alleges she had with former Town Council member Forrester Safford at his home. Here’s how DiBello describes that event in her court filing:

A verbatim account like this will require some very solid evidence. It is the only conversation DiBello reports at this length, verbatim. Was she wired when she went to Forrester’s house? If not, how can she recite what happened word-for-word?

Rhode Island’s Wiretap Law is a very bad law for privacy. Rhode Island is one of a handful of states with a “one-party consent” law that allows the taping of a non-electronic conversation if one of the parties (namely the person doing the taping) consents to the taping. 

However, absent at least one person in the conversation consenting to the taping, there are very harsh penalties for wiretapping.

I doubt Lisa DiBello was in the room when the alleged plot between Sartor and DiLibero took place. It is hard to imagine the circumstances where a wiretap of the alleged conspiracy conversation between Sartor and DiLibero in DiLibero’s Hopkinton office would be legal. Only the State Police or FBI, and only with a court order, could legally tape that conversation.

If, hypothetically, the meetings took place and law enforcement taped them, they would use it for prosecution – since trading a job for a favor is a crime – and not to aid Councilor Lisa DiBello’s lawsuit against the town of Charlestown. DiBello would have to explain how she came into possession of such a tape.

In this instance, I don’t believe there is a tape because I don’t believe those meetings ever happened. But it will be DiBello’s challenge to prove that they did.

The alleged Forrester Safford conversation is also not clear-cut. Rhode Island wiretap law permits legal taping if only one person (e.g., DiBello) consents to the taping – unless the person being taped has “some reasonable expectation of privacy.” So DiBello goes to Safford’s house wired with the intent of confronting him. Safford admits DiBello onto his property and talks to her. Does he have a “reasonable expectation of privacy?” This is another issue that will probably go to the judge for a ruling.

Many other sections of DiBello’s complaint involve things she overheard or words that were spoken to her. Some are significant events, others are not. To what extent will DiBello seek to prove her claims through the use of wiretap evidence?

DiBello had a reputation for taping conversations of her co-workers. Sources requesting anonymity for fear of reprisal told me Town Hall workers were afraid to say anything around her because she was reputed to be constantly “wired.” That might explain some of the incidents in DiBello’s complaint where she claims other staff went silent when she entered a room.

In 2006, during “sensitivity training” ordered for town staff after DiBello’s report of the overheard raunchy conversation in 2005, this issue was discussed. It resulted in a new town personnel policy that forbids use of tape-recording unless expressly permitted for some necessary cause. Each town employee was given a copy of the personnel policies and asked to sign that they read, understood and would follow those policies. My sources tell me that only DiBello refused to sign.

Here’s the policy:

This 2006 town employee policy may create another problem for DiBello. If she has tapes of conversations involving any of the many town employees named in her complaint, those tapes could be subject to challenge because this 2006 policy created "the expectation of privacy."

Indeed, this policy was enacted by the Town Council to give town employees exactly that: the expectation that they would not be tape-recorded. If DiBello taped her co-workers, she not only violated a rule that subjected her to "immediate termination," but also state law that could trigger criminal prosecution.

Last June, in an especially fiery Town Council meeting, Councilor DiBello attacked the Town Administrator, the Town Council President and her long-time enemy, fellow Council member Gregg Avedisian, over a range of issues, each time involving secret sources and spies as the basis for her attack. 

It was a pretty sorry display. That meeting not only convinced me DiBello was unfit to serve on the Town Council, but also started my deep research into her dealings in this town. Regular Progressive Charlestown readers have seen the resulting research on her conflicts of interest over the town beach concession, her odd in-house charity and her casual relationship with the normal rules and norms of conduct.

If her lawsuit proceeds into the discovery phase, the issue of DiBello’s use of eavesdropping and surveillance in its various forms are certainly going to be a subject of intense scrutiny. I just hope that the innocent are not caught in the crossfire.