Alleged snitch takes Fifth in Tabish case

The jailhouse informant accused of stealing personal notes from murder defendant Rick Tabish asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on the witness stand today.

David Gomez refused to answer questions during a hearing before District Judge Joseph Bonaventure.

Lawyers for Tabish, who is charged with killing Ted Binion in September 1998, have accused prosecutors of planting Gomez in Tabish's cell block to steal confidential defense papers for the upcoming murder trial.

One Tabish lawyer, Louis Palazzo, took the witness stand himself during a daylong hearing on Friday to call the purported theft "devastating" to the defense.

Defense lawyers spent most of Friday calling corrections officers who dealt with Gomez and Tabish to the witness stand in an attempt to ferret out information about the alleged theft of papers from Tabish.

The papers allegedly stolen include handwritten notes by Tabish analyzing statements from key witnesses, Palazzo testified.

"There's no recovering from it," Palazzo said, when questioned under oath by the lawyer for Tabish's co-defendant, Sandy Murphy. "It would be like me sitting down with the prosecutor and telling him what I'm going to do in this case. Who would do that in their right mind?"

But Chief Deputy District Attorney David Roger, lead prosecutor in the case, contended Friday that Gomez was not deliberately placed next to Tabish to steal his personal papers.

And evidence presented by Palazzo and Murphy's lawyer, John Momot, during Friday's hearing did not show that Tabish's papers were stolen.

Roger called the defense motion a "waste of precious court time" and asked Bonaventure to consider sanctions against the defense.

"It is very apparent that this motion filed by the defense and their request for an evidentiary hearing is an attempt to generate pre-trial publicity that disparages the character and integrity of the prosecution team," Roger wrote last week in court papers.

Roger also submitted a two-page report by a Metro intelligence officer who described how authorities were approached Gomez.

Intelligence detectives, the report said, first learned last week that Gomez was in the same protective custody area as Tabish, when Gomez said he had information that Tabish was plotting to kill Binion's gardener, Tom Loveday, a key witness in the murder case.

Gomez, the report said, claimed to have a hand-written note from Tabish indicating he was willing to pay $200,0000 to have Loveday killed.

Detectives, however, concluded the note was not written by Tabish, and they dropped the matter, the report said.

"It was our opinion, at this stage that it was highly unlikely that Tabish would have committed any such solicitation for murder in writing and trusted it with a fellow inmate," the intelligence officer wrote.

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