Brothers guilty of slew of Skwentna burglaries

PALMER — Were Ben Cross and Jeffrey Indellicati just two hapless brothers from the East Coast playing around with a cache of stolen guns they’d stumbled upon or were they in fact the ones that broke into more than a dozen buildings to steal those guns?

On Wednesday, a Palmer jury decided it was the latter, convicting the pair of more than 50 counts each of burglary, criminal mischief and theft. In addition to the guilty verdicts, the jury chose to acquit the brothers on one theft count each.

The charges all relate to two weeks of mayhem inflicted on the Fish Lakes Creek area of Skwentna in April 2010. Trial lasted about two weeks, wrapping up Tuesday when attorneys summed up their take of the evidence.

Assistant District Attorney Michael Perry, it was pretty clear-cut. He spent a significant portion of his time pointing to a pile of a dozen long arms — rifles and shotguns — seized the day the brothers were arrested from the Skwentna cabin they were renting.

No matter what the defense wants to say, Perry told the jury, gesturing to the guns, “you can’t get around this.”

Besides the guns, he pointed to a slew of evidence. One cabin had two pairs of sunglasses missing. Another had a pair of walkie-talkies missing; one was found in one of the brother’s suitcases, the other in their rental cabin. At one cabin somebody made a call to one of Cross’ friends in Florida.

Over the course of a week or two in the area, Perry said, this is how the two brothers entertained themselves — breaking into cabins, looting them of guns, and sometimes trashing them. There were bullet holes everywhere. A knife stabbed into a wall. And a counter top apparently attacked with a hatchet.

“They’d kick it for a while, put their feet up, then head back out, see if there was anything cool at the next cabin,” Perry said.

But defense attorneys said there’s no way their clients did all of this. All of this was supposed to have happened at around breakup, when the area was muddy and hard to get around. Troopers say it took three truckloads to get all the evidence out.

“These two young men by hand, on foot, carried three truckloads of stuff over 25 square miles?” said Cross’s attorney Michael Horowitz.

Unlike Perry, he spent less time talking about the pile of guns and more about a couple pairs of hip waders entered into evidence.

“The state would have you believe that these boots right here are the smoking gun,” Horowitz said, referencing supposed proof that those boots left tracks at all of the burglary scenes.

But they are common boots with a common tread. And, again, this was mud season.

“These are clean boots,” Horowitz said. “They traveled for miles and miles but kept them in the state they found them?”

He also pointed out how wildly inconsistent the break-ins were. Some involved sneaking in through a quietly removed window screen. Others involved kicking in a door or shooting a lock.

His theory? There was another burglar or burglars at work in the area. They were staying at a cabin neighboring the one the brothers rented. They’d been at work for a while when the brothers showed up and had amassed a pile of weapons. The brothers stumbled upon the burglary while out exploring.

They probably shouldn’t have but they grabbed those guns and went to go play with them, shooting up the trees beside their rental. And who are these other burglars?

“You’ll never know who they were because there’s apparently been no effort to identify any of them,” Horowitz said.

Troopers, he said, settled on Cross and Indellicati and then succumbed to tunnel vision, ignoring any evidence that didn’t fit.

Indellicati’s attorney, Rex Butler, continued on in much the same vein.

“Did these young men have possession of stolen property? You can say ‘yes’ beyond a reasonable doubt. But can you say yes beyond a reasonable doubt that they took it?” he asked the jury.

He said that a lot of the evidence — a skull and crossbones pattern left on one cabin’s bed, for instance — seemed to indicate the burglars had some kind of personal vendetta against their victims.

And, he said, there were missing guns that were never recovered. Butler said Perry argued maybe they were tossed in the lake or left along a trail.

“And I thought to myself, ‘Shameful. Is that the state of evidence in this case?’” Butler said.

Perry, when given a chance to rebut those arguments, zeroed in on that last statement.

“Did Mr. Butler just point at the guns and say, ‘where is the evidence, what is the state of the evidence?’ I think that just happened.”

He pointed out that the area the brothers covered was not 25 square miles. The cabins were a mile or a little over a mile apart from one to the next. Also, it wasn’t three truckloads of stolen stuff, it was three pickup beds and most of the stuff troopers had to haul out wasn’t stolen property but gear that the brothers brought with them to the cabin which the owner of the place wanted reemoved.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.