When Lucchese crime family acting boss Matthew Madonna went to trial in 2019 for ordering a murder, his defense team had a serious concern: the prosecution might call a former Harlem drug kingpin turned government witness to testify against him. That witness, Leroy “Nikki” Barnes, had once been one of Madonna’s biggest heroin customers. The case centered on the killing of Michael Meldish, a former leader of the East Harlem Purple Gang, who was murdered in 2013. Madonna was convicted of ordering the hit, along with two co-defendants, Terrence Caldwell and Christopher Londonio.
According to federal prosecutors, Madonna became displeased with Meldish after the longtime organized crime associate refused to collect debts owed to Madonna. In a press release, the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York detailed the murder plot.
Londonio, a personal friend of Meldish, helped set him up and acted as the getaway driver. Caldwell drove with Meldish to a Bronx neighborhood to meet Londonio, and as Meldish got out of his car, Caldwell shot him once in the head, killing him instantly. All three men were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in aid of racketeering, murder in aid of racketeering, and use of a firearm in furtherance of murder in aid of racketeering. The concern about Barnes stemmed from Madonna’s criminal history.
In 1976, Madonna was sentenced to 30 years in prison for importing heroin, much of which was supplied to Barnes. He served around 19 years before being released in the mid-1990s. He was inducted into the Lucchese crime family around 1998. In the 1970s, Madonna was Barnes’s principal heroin supplier.
Barnes himself received a life sentence for drug-related crimes in 1978 but later became a government witness, had his sentence reduced, and was released in 1998. In testimony before Congress, Barnes described Madonna as “the most reliable supplier” he had done business with, praising the consistency and quality of the heroin Madonna provided. Madonna’s lawyers argued that any testimony from Barnes would unfairly prejudice the jury against their client. They filed a motion to preclude certain evidence, writing to the district attorney’s office that the prospect of Barnes testifying had been raised during conversations with Assistant U.
S. Attorney Scott A. Hartman. The defense argued that the characterizations of Madonna’s past were prejudicial and did not represent the objective truth.
Ultimately, the defense did not have to worry about Barnes taking the stand. Barnes had died in 2012 while in witness protection, several years before the trial. The defense team only learned of his death from a New York Times article published in June 2019, shortly before the trial began. In a post-trial filing, Madonna’s lawyers noted that the government had not disclosed Barnes’s death.
They argued it was difficult to conceive how keeping the fact of Barnes’s demise secret could have affected his security, and they criticized the government for capitalizing on the failure to disclose his death by citing a passage that would not have been included otherwise. The defense team also sought to have a specific passage removed from the government’s sentencing documentation. The passage stated that, according to Madonna’s own counsel, the drug conspiracy resulted in “the addiction of tens of thousands of people, untold number of overdose deaths, theft, and prostitution to which junkies resorted to feed their drug habits, leading to the multi-generation devastation of an entire community. ”
The government wrote to the judge acknowledging Madonna’s request to remove the phrase, noting that they had not been aware of any continuing desire for redaction after the trial.
The government stated it was aware of no legal basis to redact the sentence but agreed to allow Madonna to state his position before the court ruled on the matter. The redaction effort did not change the outcome for Madonna. He was sentenced to life in prison for the Meldish murder.
His attorneys’ attempt to remove the passage from the public record appeared to be tied to their plans to appeal the sentence, though that interpretation was offered by observers of the case.