Carlo Vartinelli, Esq.? First degree sex offender coaches Joe Gentz

Joe Gentz told the cops that Bob Bashara hired him to kill Bob’s wife, Jane, for $2,000 and a used Cadillac in January 2012.

Now, Gentz has recanted the statements that led to Bashara’s conviction in 2014 for first-degree murder.  Just before Bashara’s trial, Gentz announced he would not testify against Bashara, and word came down that Gentz was coached by fellow inmates to hold out for a better deal from prosecutors, who refused to play his game.

We now have a pretty good idea who the leader of that troupe of jailhouse lawyers was; Carlo Vartinelli, who was convicted in 1992 of first-degree sexual conduct and sentenced to life in Houghton County.

The Oakland Press has the most complete story about a recent affidavit from Gentz in which he recants the element of his confession in which he claimed Bashara forced him to murder Jane at gunpoint, a story Gentz told several people, including his family in the days after the murder.

It appears Vartinelli has ridden shotgun through all of Gentz’s antics since Gentz was committed to the state prison system in 2013 for second-degree murder.

From the Oakland Press story:

“In his motion, [Bashara’s appellate lawyer Ronald] Ambrose states he received word of the new version Gentz was offering through a private investigator who obtained it from Carlo Vartinelli, a prisoner serving a life sentence for a criminal sexual conduct conviction out of Houghton County.

Online court records show Vartinelli, 57, is somewhat of a jailhouse lawyer, having filed numerous on various issues in federal court. He was the one who compiled the affidavit with Gentz, according to court records after having several conversations, documents show.”

You can read one of those filings here, to get a picture of how Vartinelli works. 

In it, he speaks of the MDOC’s “torturous” conduct regarding his many physical ailments. I’m no defender of MDOC – far from it – but this should give you an idea of the brain trust that is driving today’s news.

Bashara pushes appeal forward, sends email insisting he is innocent

I received another email from Bob Bashara this week, the fourth since he was sentenced to life in prison in January.
He continues to maintain his innocence and notes that he has filed some motions that he hopes will bring what he insists is truth to the situation.

In a previous email I asked him about the 472 phone calls between he and Joe Gentz, the man who confessed to killing Jane Bashara.  The calls took place, according to testimony, between August 2011 through January 2012.

Bashara says that almost 70 percent of those calls were under 25 to 35 seconds, which would indicate there was no connection made.

According to Stan Brue, the federal agent who analyzed the phone records for the prosecution, the calls originated with Gentz two-thirds of the time through December 2011. In January, Bashara made 67 calls to Gentz as opposed to 32 from Gentz to Bashara.  Jane was murdered January 24, 2012.

His appeal is moving through the system and it will take a long time.

The trial transcripts are trickling in, including the 40 days of trial. The analysis of them will be part of the work of Ronald Ambrose, who is Bashara’s appellate lawyer. 

"I will never, ever stop fighting for justice and the truth, until my hands are raw, blood comes from eyes and I take my last breath, " Bashara said at his sentencing hearing in January, when he received a mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder.

I’ve also talked on the phone with Gentz, who told me of his life as something of a wanderer. He said he worked as a civilian for the military for a while and as an AB, which is an able-bodied seaman in the Merchant Marines. As you can imagine, there's more to it than that. 

The book, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Privilege, Adultery and the Killing of Jane Bashara (Penguin/Berkley), is scheduled for a fall release.

Bob Bashara: “What’s BDSM got to do with it?”

 

Flyer for Bashara's first business enterprise 

The Bashara trial is about to end, with closing statements coming Wednesday, and now we’ll see how the state did. It’s been almost three years since Jane Bashara was murdered, her life snuffed out in her garage under a boot on the foot of Joe Gentz, a man who says he was paid by Bob Bashara to kill Jane. 

Gentz is doing 17-to-28 for second-degree murder in the case.

For Bashara, the state wants a first-degree conviction, saying that without his actions, Jane would be alive. He's also charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder, solicitation of murder, obstruction of justice and witness intimidation.

It’s been a drawn out trial, with 74 witnesses and typically graphic exhibits – a classic murder trial spiced with the BDSM world that Bashara admits he was part of during his last years with Jane.

“They’re using the fact that I had this alternative lifestyle as motive for me wanting to harm my wife,” Bashara told me one day last year. We spoke many times on the phone after he was sent for prison for soliciting the murder of Gentz. A lot of those conversations will show up in the book I’m wrapping up, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Privilege, Adultery and the Killing of Jane Bashara, which comes out on Penguin/Berkley in the fall.   

The state claims that he wanted Jane out of the way so he could have a life with his girlfriend, Rachel Gillett, who shared an affinity for the lifestyle with Bob. Also, the state claims that money issues were pressuring Bashara and Jane had a fat IRA that he would be privy to if she were to die.

“My wife was not inhibiting me,” he told me. “If I didn’t want to have Jane, I would have simply divorced her. But I had plenty of income and money was never an issue. I was paying for two kids going to college, had cars and they got whatever they wanted.  If [daughter] Jessie wanted a $500 pair of boots, Jane got them for her.”

Investigators found statements that showed a wide gulf between the income of Bob and Jane. She made close to six figures some years as a marketing consultant and he made barely $20,000 a year as a landlord and sales rep for a chemical company.

It’s not my job, but the defense failed to note that a self-employed individual should show a low adjusted income; better for taxes. I don’t know if that was the case with Bashara, but I’m sure that fact went by the jury in a state where so many people are desperately clinging to whatever employer will have them.

The state did, however, do a good job of exposing Bashara as a bad guy in terms of character. He cheated on his wife, who was clearly intent on working things out in a troubled marriage. He was a slumlord, and a hot-headed bully by a number of accounts. There was an episode in which his daughter found an incriminating text to one of his mistresses – yes, he had more than one - on his phone and he grabbed the phone, erased it, and handed it back to her: “What text?” he said, or something similar. That stuck with me as particularly mean-spirited. Who does that?

He was also head of the local Rotary Club. Do they let any angry man run that group? The club has done its best to erase all mentions of its connection to Bashara. Was he a great guy who did you wrong? Or did he do such a good job of glad-handing and bringing in money that they put up with him? It was never quite squared in trial. 

There were some lighter moments in a dark setting. He used to go out to the golf course in ritzy Grosse Pointe and do blow and smoke weed with a buddy, and we're talking in recent yeas. That he knocked back lines and joints on the golf course of the local country club was amusing to me; I’m sure he wasn’t the only one doing such a thing.

I wrote about the case at the outset of the trial for the Daily Beast.  We’re done. The jurors will do its best to figure it out after taking nine weeks out of their lives to listen to a parade of characters, some pissed off, some amusing and a few sad depressing. 

Bashara came into the courtroom on Monday whistling, ebullient. He’s apparently confident that the state failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he procured the murder. Hang on. It could get good.

Bob Bashara, the Book, Coming Soon

Bob Bashara

Last week I signed the contract to do a book on the Bob Bashara case. It will be my fourth true crime book for Penguin imprint Berkley.  The case involved the January 2012 murder of Jane Bashara, a wife and mother in Grosse Pointe Park, Mich.  Her killer was Joe Gentz, a handyman and roustabout, who confessed to the killing but alleged he was hired by Jane’s husband Bob to carry out the murder. Bob Bashara is currently serving 6 ½ years in state prison for soliciting the jailhouse murder of Gentz, and is now charged with first-degree murder in the murder of his wife.

Joe Gentz

Also part of the story – the part that drives headlines – is the fact that Bob Bashara was involved in the BDSM lifestyle, coloring the case with a “Fifty Shades of Grey” element.  A September preliminary exam  included a number of parties connected to the case testifying in lurid, colorful detail, talking of Bob's penchant for dominance. Rachel Gillett, who was Bob's girlfriend at the time of Jane Bashara’s murder, met Bob on a BDSM chat site, where he called himself Master Bob. He also had a dungeon created for his trysts in the basement of one of several buildings he owned and rented out.

I’ve worked on the book for some of the last year and it’s in good shape already, plenty of original material that comes from some deep investigation and interviews with players large and small.

I’ve talked with Bob Bashara a number of times in the last year and much of that material will be part of this book. It’s the one thing I do with every true crime book, and I expect some Detroiters, provincial to a lovable fault, will be pissed that I even present the perspective of someone everyone expects to be found guilty. I got a lot of flak when I  did press for the first book, A Slaying in the Suburbs: The Tara Grant Murder, for talking and including the views of Stephen Grant, who was convicted of killing his wife Tara. Frank Beckman on WJR was charmingly critical of including Grant in the book when I hit his show. One book store, Borders in the northern suburbs of Detroit, refused to have an event/discussion of the book. I’m pleased to say that Borders is now out of business. That’s what I call real justice. That book, by the way, has sold over 30,000 copies, not a bad performance in the true crime genre.

The Bashara trial is scheduled for March in Wayne County

. It will be quite the sensation, and could draw national interest, depending on how the news cycle is going at the time. The book will come out late 2014 or early 2015.