B'klyn death penalty slay case set to begin

BY ANTHONY M. DESTEFANO | NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER

8:06 PM EST, February 5, 2008

The last time Edith Cortes spoke with her brother Edward, she said she gave him a fresh dish of chicken, rice and beans to take to his new girlfriend. The date was Feb. 19, 1992.

About 15 minutes after Edward Cortes left his Sunset Park apartment, his sister remembered hearing what sounded like gunfire. Then she heard the screams.

''Your brother! Your brother!'" a girlfriend yelled to her, Edith recalled.

Edith Cortes remembered running into the street and finding her mortally wounded brother lying on the sidewalk a few blocks away at 41st Street and 8th Avenue. He died later of his wounds.

Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn a jury will begin hearing the racketeering-murder case of the man suspected of orchestrating Edward Cortes' murder. The defendant, Gilberto Caraballo, faces the federal death penalty if found guilty of the murder-for-hire slayings of either Cortes or Jose Fernandez, both of whom were reputed drug dealers.

According to federal prosecutors, Caraballo, a former health club owner in Sunset Park, ran a cocaine distribution ring based in that Brooklyn neighborhood from 1989 to 2001. According to testimony in an earlier trial of drug dealer Martin Aguilar, Fernandez was murdered because Caraballo was having an affair with his wife and wanted the victim out of the picture. Fernandez' skeletonized body was found in a drainage ditch in Green-Wood Cemetery, where Aguilar, who is appealing his conviction and life sentence, had once worked.

Cortes was apparently a rival of Caraballo in the drug business when he died, federal court records indicated.

Caraballo's trial is the second death penalty trial so far this year in the Brooklyn federal court. On Monday a jury convicted Folk Nation gang member James McTier of racketeering and murder, and next week will start considering whether to give him capital punishment or life in prison without parole.

Caraballo's lawyer, David Stern of Manhattan, declined to comment on the case. Edith Cortes said her brother, who she said died at the age of 27, wasn't an angel.

"We knew exactly what he was up to," she said in a telephone interview with Newsday.

Edith Cortes, 38, said her mother wouldn't allow her son to bring any drugs into the house and tried to deter him. But it took an earlier shooting incident in 1990, in which he was wounded, to get Edward Cortes thinking that he had to change his lifestyle and repair a fractured marriage, said his sister.

"He wanted to become a paralegal and go back with his wife. He was going to change his life and -- boom -- this happens," said Edith Cortes. "He wanted to stop [drug dealing] for himself and he wanted to stop for his daughter," who is now 21.