http://www.palmbeachpost.com/treasurecoast/content/local_news/epaper/2006/06/02/m1c_mcjail_0602.html
Religious magazine used in evidence-tampering plot
By Jill Taylor
Friday, June 02, 2006
STUART — A gathering of winged angels adorns the cover of a religious magazine that was used as the coded key for an alleged murder-for-hire and witness-tampering plot, Martin County sheriff's investigators say.
Detectives arrested inmate Anthony Rotella on Thursday on an evidence-tampering charge after he used a code he created from a paragraph in a Jehovah's Witnesses Watchtower magazine to arrange payment for the theft of his computer hard drive, which was in evidence in a Martin County child pornography case against him.
Rotella, 43, was told he was paying $300 to have someone steal the hard drive from the sheriff's evidence room, and he allegedly implied he would pay more to have his former attorney and a 7-year-old boy killed. The boy is a witness in a St. Lucie County case in which Rotella is accused of offering the boy $20 to have sex with him in a restroom at the Port St. Lucie Super Wal-Mart.
Rotella can be heard on tape making arrangements by providing his sister with a numeric code based on numbers for each letter in a paragraph of the magazine article.
"It's not The DaVinci Code, but interesting how he came about to do it," said Sgt. John Silvas, who investigated the case.
Rotella was being held at the Martin County jail in lieu of $750,000 bail on the pornography charge and an additional $750,000 bail on the new charge.
Authorities say he originally contacted another inmate about the plot, who reported the plan to authorities in October and cooperated in the investigation.
Telephone and visiting-room conversations are subject to monitoring and taping, and more than 450 of Rotella's were recorded, records show.
Silvas said he heard Rotella giving his sister a string of numbers in several February calls but he did not know what they meant until the sister told Rotella she couldn't figure out what he was asking her to do. He had to explain the code in detail, including which Watchtower magazine to check and which page contained the key paragraph, detectives said.
He gave instructions for a money order to be sent to a post office box for a "package" that then would be destroyed, but he did not tell his sister exactly what it was, and Silvas said he does not expect to charge her.
"It's amazing," Silvas said. "I've never had anything like this."
No details of the plans the informant mentioned ever came out in the calls, and Rotella has not been charged with any murder plots, but attorney Robert Udell was notified that he was a possible target.
Contacted Thursday, Udell said he represented Rotella very briefly following his arrest, but Rotella fired him early in the case.
"Clients don't usually threaten to kill me until after we lose," Udell joked. "I like publicity, but I didn't plan this."
It's the fifth time in recent years that Martin County jail inmates have solicited what they thought were either hit men or corrupt cops to break the law. In each case, the deals were done with undercover officers posing as bad guys and the inmates have faced new charges.