By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — It is former CVS executives Jack Kramer and Carlos Ortiz who face 23 counts of mail fraud, bribery and conspiracy, but their three-week trial in U.S. District Court has been all about John Celona.

The jailed former senator from North Providence was the state’s star witness against the pair, and it was his testimony that dominated closing arguments Thursday as the trial drew to a close.
Judge Mary Lisi will instruct the 12 men and four women on the jury about the law that applies to the case this morning and immediately afterward they will begin deliberations.
Kramer attorney David Fein told the jurors that Celona “lied” and “changed his testimony during the trial.” He said the onetime influential lawmaker “likes to gild the lily, to build a lie upon a lie.”
Referring to what he called Celona’s “horrendous testimony,” Fein pointed to the chair where Celona spent four days being examined and cross-examined and said, “His performance on that witness stand makes your job easier.”
Fein challenged the jury to find his client “guilty of everything or guilty of nothing” on the 23-count indictment. “They either had criminal intent, or they didn’t. Everything flows from that.”
He said the evidence and testimony presented by the government came “not even close” to proving that.
Thomas Kiley, attorney for Ortiz, agreed that “this is an all or nothing case.”
Kiley started his closing by telling the jury, “This is in some senses not just a unique case, but the strangest bribery case you are ever going to hear.”
Kiley pointed out that Celona “didn’t tell you of one specific conversation with either defendant where they asked him to do anything with regard to legislation. That’s because, ladies and gentlemen, it didn’t happen.”
He said no evidence was presented to show that “individuals from CVS” prompted Celona to “do something against his will or alter any of his positions.”
Prosecutor Stephen Dambruch scoffed at the notion that a “billion dollar corporation” like CVS “is going to hire John Celona to put them on a public access cable TV show.”
He pointed out that the company had a contract with, among others, TV station NBC 10 to publicize the CVS Charity Golf Classic and CVS Downtown 5K road race, prime topics when Kramer appeared on Celona’s cable show, the Celona Statehouse Report.
“The one thing he could offer was his position on legislation,” Dambruch said of Celona. “Not just his vote, but his ability to speak out and draw attention to legislation.”
Responding to a remark by Kiley that Ortiz, who was director of government affairs at CVS, had nothing to do with public relations, Dambruch said, “What the defendants claim was a relationship all about public relations was given to a guy who had nothing to do with government relations. It was given to the guy responsible for government affairs.” 
Pointing out that the account from which Celona was paid by CVS was for political contributions, Dambruch asked “why was Mr. Celona paid from a government affairs account” when what he was doing was community relations.
He recalled testimony given by CVS employee Susan Delmonico that she did the same kind of public relations and senior citizen outreach that Celona was supposedly contracted to do.
Fein emphasized that the defense called no witnesses of its own, but instead made its case by cross-examining the government’s witnesses.
Saying that the prosecution “thoroughly failed” to meet its burden of proof that the two vice-presidents of the pharmacy chain had criminal intentions in hiring Celona, Fein suggested to the jury that “you may be wondering why you are here at all,” because the prosecutors offered “no evidence of criminal activity.”
Instead of the “self-dealing, receiving kickbacks or stealing from their employer” that one would expect defendants to be accused of in a criminal case, Fein said Kramer and Ortiz “are charged with hiring a state senator on behalf of CVS.” That, he said, is not a crime.
Both Fein and Kiley suggested that the question of whether it was a wise move for CVS to hire Celona, a good or bad business decision, “belongs in a corporate boardroom in Woonsocket (where CVS headquarters is located), not in a criminal court.”
“There was no money in brown paper bags, or overseas wire transfers,” Fein noted.
He said charging the pair with 23 felony counts was “an act of complete excess,” since each of the monthly checks mailed to Celona in the course of his three-year consultant relationship with CVS was counted as a separate instance of mail fraud. “If Mr. Celona had been paid weekly, Mr. Kramer would be facing 84 felony charges.”
When Celona famously “took a walk” during a 2000 Senate Corporations Committee meeting on a pharmacy choice bill in 2000, Fein said, he was doing the bidding of former Sen. William Irons of Pawtucket and East Providence, not Kramer or Ortiz.
“Celona was told to take a walk by Senator Irons, not CVS. The prosecution asserted that Celona’s leaving the room before the vote demonstrated Celona doing CVS’s bidding just a short time after he signed on as a consultant with the pharmacy giant.”
Subsequent bills were declared NGN (Senate slang for a bill “not going nowhere”) per then-Senate Majority Leader Irons, the lawyer said; “it had nothing to do with Kramer or Ortiz.”
Kiley told the jurors that the Celona CVS hired for community relations work with the elderly was a comfortable, communicative, self-assured and polished” senator, “effusive in praise for CVS who provided a forum for Mr. Kramer to extol CVS and CVS’s charitable undertakings on his cable TV show, “not the shell of a man who sat before you for four days and couldn’t give a straight answer to a straight question if his life depended on it.”