By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — NGN.
In the Rhode Island Senate, that means a piece of legislation is: a piece of legislation is: “not going nowhere,” jurors in the CVS bribery trial were told Tuesday. In other words, the Senate leadership has planted the kiss of death on a bill and it has been sent to a committee to be buried.

In his second day of testimony in the U.S. District Court trial of former CVS executives Jack Kramer and Carlos Ortiz on federal bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud charges, Sen. John Celona told the jury that NGN was a phrase coined by the late Woonsocket Sen. Roger Badeu about bills designated for doom.
The Pharmacy Freedom of Choice legislation that has been the focal point of the trial wore those letters in 2001, applied by new Senate Majority Leader William Irons and sent to his successor as chairman of the Senate Corporations Committee, John Celona.
Finishing up his direct testimony under questioning from prosecutor Stephen Dambruch, Celona acknowledged being CVS’s go-to guy for all sorts of official action in state government.
Among other things, Celona detailed on Tuesday how he:
n Helped kill the pharmacy choice legislation
n Sponsored a bill to allow doctors to submit prescriptions electronically, ending the requirement for prescriptions handwritten on paper
n Sponsored a bill to require drug manufacturers to take back recalled and outdated medicines from drug stores
n Worked against a bill to allow Canadian pharmacies to re-import drugs into Rhode Island cheaper than they were available from local drug stores
n As a member of the RI Student Loan Authority board, he introduced and shepherded through to passage a proposal to reduce student loan obligations for pharmacy students.
 As he did on Monday, Celona answered Dambruch’s questions directly and responsively, even though he tends to mumble and had to be told by Judge Mary Lisi to speak up and talk directly into the microphone.
But immediately upon the start of cross-examination, under questioning by Kramer attorney Scott Corrigan, Celona became uncooperative and combative, forcing Corrigan to extract the testimony from him as if he were pulling teeth.
Corrigan spent nearly an hour trying to get Celona to repeat a sentence of testimony he gave on Monday: that in a telephone conversation with an unnamed person at the RI Ethics Commission, whether Celona mentioned that CVS was the company he was asking about whether it was proper for him to have a consulting contract with.
Every time Corrigan asked whether he specifically mentioned CVS, Celona insisted that he posed the question “in the abstract. I said ‘If I had a consulting agreement,’ I didn’t say I had a consulting contract and I am not saying that now.”
After a few more tries by Corrigan to get Celona to say whether he specified CVS in his phone call to the Ethics Commission, Celona insisted, “the key word was ‘if.’
When a frustrated Corrigan asked, “are you avoiding (the answer) because yesterday you gave false testimony?” Celona responded “The word ‘if’ is a large word.”
On Monday, Celona had testified that he did not specify CVS in his telephone conversation with the Ethics Commission. When Dambruch asked why not, Celona said, “I didn’t want to.” When asked why he didn’t want to, Celona said, “I wanted to give myself cover” because he had reversed his previous support of the pharmacy choice legislation when he went on CVS’s payroll.
But when first asked that by Corrigan, Celon said, “I don’t believe that to be my testimony yesterday.
That was one of several attempts by Corrigan to impeach Celona’s testimony by comparing it to previous testimony given under oath at the Roger Williams Medical Center trial and at several grand jury sessions.
Considered the government’s key witness in the trial Celona’s cross-examination testimony clearly baffled several jurors, who watched him with puzzled expressions on their faces.
Another peek behind the curtains at the operation of the General Assembly came when Corrigan showed the jury and court spectators an obsequious memo sent by Celona to Irons when Celona was making a pitch to become Corporations chairman after Irons ascension to the post of majority leader.
Describing his part in the defeat of Irons’ predecessor, former North Smithfield Sen. Paul Kelly, Celona wrote: “My loyalty is and will be to you as majority leader…Committee approval of all legislation must and will be cleared with you prior to passage.”
When Corrigan asked Celona if he considered Irons and Sen. Joseph Montalbano, then chairman of the Judiciary Committee and now president of the senate to be his “bosses,” Celona answered, “in some regards, yes.”
“You did what Senator Irons told you to do, didn’t you,” Corrigan asked and Celona answered, “yes.”