Alarm installer describes system

BY SAMUEL BRUCHEY | STAFF WRITER

October 21, 2004

One day after Theodore Ammon's body was discovered on his bedroom floor, John Kundle was instructed by homicide investigators to drive to the sprawling East Hampton home and tell them about the elaborate alarm and surveillance system he had installed.

For more than four hours on that day, Oct. 23, 2001, Kundle, who owns a security systems business in Massapequa, answered questions about the eight hidden cameras the size of pin heads, and a computer hard drive that recorded everything, tucked under the eaves on the second floor where no one could find it.

"I told them they would probably be there for a year if they didn't know where it was," Kundle testified yesterday in a Riverhead courtroom at the murder trial of Daniel Pelosi.

Ammon knew the alarm system but he was unaware the cameras and hard drive had been installed, Kundle said. All the bills went directly to Ammon's estranged wife, Generosa. In fact, there were only two people, Kundle testified, who had been told where the hard drive was been hidden. One of them was Pelosi.

The 41-year-old Manorville electrician, who has been charged with second-degree murder, was dating Generosa when Kundle upgraded the alarm system and installed the surveillance equipment. Pelosi made sure he knew everything about both, Kundle testified.

Pelosi decided where the eight cameras were to be placed. He set up the alarm so that he would be paged every time it went off, Kundle testified. And, he chose all the new access codes. "All the numbers came from Danny," Kundle said.

Pelosi's attorney Gerald Shargel of Manhattan suggested that other people had been told where the hard drive had been placed. He also said that during the summer of 2001, many people - Pelosi, Generosa and Ted Ammon and their two children - used the same access code.

After the murder, the hard drive was taken from the house. It has not been found.

Kundle said he spoke with Ammon once about the alarm system, but never about the surveillance system.

Kundle also testified how he downloaded a program onto Pelosi's laptop computer after installing the system so that Pelosi could monitor the house remotely and access images from the cameras.

The only thing Pelosi seemed not adept at was turning off the surveillance system, Kundle testified. Whenever he visited the East Hampton estate with Generosa - the two lived there during the summer of 2001 - he simply pulled a plug that ran from the hard drive into an electrical outlet behind a stereo in another room.

Two days after Ammon's body was found, when Kundle led homicide investigators into the house to show them the system, the hard drive was gone and the plug had been pulled from the wall socket, Kundle said.

In another development, a former inmate who allegedly taped Pelosi making admissions to the murder while at the Suffolk County jail was arrested yesterday in Charleston, S.C., on charges of robbery and assault, officials in Suffolk confirmed yesterday.

Clayton Moultrie, 39, told authorities Pelosi confessed to the murder and conspired to commit other crimes when the two spoke in jail earlier this year. He agreed to tape conversations with Pelosi.

John Collins, chief of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Homicide Bureau, said Moultrie's long criminal history is public and the Charleston arrest would have no impact on whether he will be called to testify.

Shargel, however, who has dismissed Moultrie's credibility said the development came as no surprise. "It seems Clayton Moultrie has resorted to type," Shargel said.