Profiles
Reviled Criminal Starts Over, at 70
After escaping death row, he painted, wrote a book and claimed he’d reformed–but his victims’ defenders won’t forgive him for the murder he committed at 25 [with video]
lgs249@nyu.edu
Like his fellow college students, Tommy Trantino knows peanut butter and jelly is a cheap way to eat. Unlike them, he calls it “jailhouse steak,” and traces his frugal dining habits to the 38 years he spent in prison.
“I had state pay, which was $30 a month at the canteen,” Trantino said. “So I’d get tuna fish, mayonnaise and ramen noodles, and then smuggle some bread out of the mess hall. I’ve seen guys make 12 sandwiches out of one bag of tuna fish and one bag of ramen.”
Trantino, 70, still lives on a tight food budget. At an age when most people are retired, he’s preparing for a career, taking classes at New Jersey’s Camden Community College in order to qualify as an addiction counselor.
Ineligible for social security because he couldn’t contribute to the system while in jail, and with his job options severely limited by his criminal record, these aren’t exactly his golden years.
He’s one of New Jersey’s most notorious criminals, infamous for his role in a brutal 1963 barroom shooting of two Lodi, N.J. policemen, Sgt. Peter Voto and Officer Gary Tedesco.
He was sentenced to die in the electric chair. But his sentence was lightened to 25 years when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional in 1972. Though New Jersey instated a revised death penalty in 1976, Trantino was already out of reach. Largely because of pressure applied by politicians, police and relatives of the victims, he ended up serving 38 years instead of 25, becoming the longest-serving prisoner on record in New Jersey.
He was in his twenties when he entered New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison. On his 64th birthday, February 11th, 2002, he was freed.
He claims that, despite his public vilification, he long ago ceased to be the drug-user, thief and murderer condemned to die in 1964.
“The death house was my laboratory of life,” he said. “I foreswore drugs and violence my first day. I just made a vow to God that I’ve kept to this day.”
Inside his cell on death row, Trantino started reading, writing, creating. The result was “Lock the Lock,” a book of prose, poetry and art. Published by Knopf in 1974, it struck a chord in the progressive political atmosphere of America of the day.
Trantino’s work was exhibited in Tokyo, and in 11 cities in Europe. Radical Abbie Hoffman wrote him letters. The intellectual Howard Zinn provided this jacket blurb: “I haven’t read a book in a long time that has hit me so hard – a book so fierce, so poetic, so wise, so heartbreaking.”
By the time Trantino was freed, the fame of those years had long faded. But the notoriety persisted. He was vilified in law enforcement circles. Police officers protested his appearance on a law school panel. The families of his victims expressed outrage.
“He never should have been let out. I hope he never finds peace,” Sadie Tedesco, the mother of one of the murdered officers, told the New York Times after his release. New York Times reporter David Stout revisited the night of the shootings in a book, “Night of the Devil: The Untold Story of Thomas Trantino and the Angel Lounge Killings,” published in 2003.
Jan Miller, who co-founded the organization Citizens against Homicide a decade after her daughter’s 1984 murder in a different case, says a murderer’s parole can have negative effects on the friends and family of the victim.
“It’s a very stressful time,” she said, “a very fearful time.”
Although Trantino felt like a new man, and by most accounts he had been a model prisoner — one psychologist’s evaluation said he “functions more as a staff member in the prisoner than as an inmate” — society only remembered the old one.
“With my background, and really limited skills except for hard labor, who’s going to hire me?” he wondered. He worked at a few jobs, but they all ended in controversy.
“People would ask ‘What’s this mad dog cop killer doing working here?’ and I would withdraw out of responsibility for the people who hired me,” he said.
Opportunities to rekindle his writing career never materialized, and new legal troubles arose: in 2003 he was charged for allegedly beating his girlfriend. He spent nine more months in jail before being acquitted.
Though he lives comfortably in a two-story brick house in the tough city of Camden — consistently ranked as one of America’s most dangerous cities — he worries about his financial future.
A half million dollar judgment against him in a civil suit, brought by the victims’ families after his release, is to be subtracted from any future earnings.
“I don’t care about money, except to give it away,” said Trantino. “But I have to think, I’m getting older, and what the hell am I going to be able to do? I have no health care, no nothing. No savings, no assets.”
He’s found an answer of sorts in a program that helps people at high risk of failing to find employment. It funds up to $4,000 in training and schooling. If all goes according to plan, he’ll graduate from college in the summer of 2009 — and begin his new career as a counselor at age 71.
“I feel like it’s a place where I belong,” Trantino said of Camden Community College. “I just got lucky.”
Trantino, now, at 70, in New York City.
Photo courtesy of Tommy Trantino
Trantino, then, as seen in 1974
Photo courtesy of Tommy Trantino.