Orleans Trial of the Century frustrates historians

The murder trial became an unprecedented media sensation. The news media breathlessly reported the most incidental details of events inside the courtroom. Satellite trucks lined the perimeter of the courthouse, and television stations hired special correspondents to cover the case.

When the Defense rested, everyone involved in the trial celebrated celebrity status, especially the assembled “dream team” of lawyers with both forensics and “jury selection” experts, the best money could buy.

The government’s case appeared solid, and due to the media hype, a public hungry for justice convicted the man of killing his wife long before his trial began. However, money was no object for the defendant. The accused spent a small fortune and ultimately convinced a jury to vote 10 to 2 for his acquittal.

You feel you have heard this story before, but furniture magnate Aaron Mintz fought and won his freedom a decade before the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.

In 1969, Mintz, a businessman from one of New Orleans’ more prominent families, pleaded guilty to charges of public bribery. As chairman of the Vieux Carré Commission, two years prior, he accepted a two-thousand-dollar bribe to permit changes to a French Quarter residence owned by French Quarter celebrity Chris Owens and her husband, Sol. The couple allowed NOPD investigators Kenneth Simms and George Eckert to tap their phone, where they caught Mintz requesting the bribe.

Aaron Mintz, 48, won a two-year suspended jail term with limited probation, followed by a pardon from Louisiana Governor John McKeithen in 1971.

After District Attorney Harry Connick indicted Mintz in 1967, Mayor Vic Schiro insisted the council temporarily suspend Mintz from the Vieux Carré Commission. However, the mayor did not mention the other boards where Mintz served since there had been no allegations of Mintz accepting bribes in those positions.

Aaron Mintz served on Mayor Vic Schiro’s committee on housing improvements and as General Manager of the Mintz Furniture Company. He was also treasurer of the Wholesale-Retail Music Therapy Fund, chairman of the New Orleans for Israel Bond Campaign, president of the Louisiana Home Furnishing Association, vice-president of the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith New Orleans Lodge 182, Traffic Director of the Metropolitan New Orleans Safety Council, vice-president of the Tulane-Newcomb Hillel Foundation, president of the National Regional Export Expansion Commission, chairman of the Crescent City Concert Association, president of the Baronne Street Improvement Association, a commissioner on the Louisiana Film Industry Commission, chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce’s Merchant Bureau and later president of a new Merchants Association. He also served as chairman of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a commissioner on the Pontalba Building Museum Association, and secretary of New Orleans’ Junior Achievement Corporation.

He served on Mayor Chep Morrison’s Police Advisory Committee in 1960. That same year, he served on the Municipal Auditorium Advisory Committee and the Kennedy-Johnson Election Campaign.

Governor Edwin W. Edwards also appointed Aaron Mintz to the Louisiana Bicentennial Commission in 1976, and he personally crowned Mr. and Mrs. Mintz king and queen of the Knights of Babylon in 1979. Then, in 1980, United States President Jimmy Carter invited Mintz to Washington, where he served as chairman of the White House Conference on Small Business.

For three decades, Mintz chaired the board that presented his annual Aaron Mintz Brotherhood Award to a select Tulane student for “outstanding service in the area of interfaith relations.”

In 1995, federal investigators accused Aaron Mintz of using his license to operate video poker machines to help members of the New Orleans mafia launder money collected through an illegal video poker ring. In time, the courts convicted him on a lesser charge. He lost his gambling license and paid a $15,000 fine.

However, Aaron Mintz’s most prominent headlines came in 1984 when someone shot his wife in the head as she slept.

Police records show Dr. J. Ralph Meier of 25 Versailles Boulevard reported the death of Palma “Pam” Mintz to police at 5:55 on a Superbowl Sunday morning, January 22, 1984.

Meier told police his next-door neighbor, Aaron Mintz, came to his house, asking that he return home with him. Pam, Mintz told him, had shot herself in the head. When Dr. Meier arrived at the house, he found the former model deceased.

When uniformed police arrived at the home, Mintz told them he could not sleep and went downstairs at four that morning to watch television. About 30 minutes later, he said, he heard a noise like a door slamming and went upstairs, where he found his wife lying across the bed with a gun in her hand, according to police records.

Following the man upstairs, the officers found Pam on her bed with a .380-caliber automatic pistol in her hand with a single gunshot wound to the right side of her head.

Homicide Detective John Dillmann told reporters that evidence at the scene was inconsistent with suicide. The detective found a bloodstained pillow with a bullet hole in it three rooms away from the room where Pam Mintz died. The pillow, and the odd position of the gun, he said, led to an investigation that resulted in a second-degree murder charge against Mintz.

Mintz was taken to Central Lockup that afternoon, handcuffed to a team of detectives. On television, his face appeared flush, but he said nothing. Beside him, Defense Attorney Michael S. Fawer told reporters, “This warrant is crap. My client has done nothing.”

Fawer said Pam Mintz committed suicide following depression after a pancreatitis diagnosis. He said she had suffered from the illness for years but that it had become more painful in the weeks leading up to her death.

In Court, Mike and his “dream team” told the jury Pam Mintz staged her murder before committing suicide to frame her husband. They said Pam, days before her death, drove to a shooting range in Metairie, taking her gun and the pillow from the daybed. They said she fired into the foam pillow before placing it on the bed in the master bedroom, where she would later commit suicide.

Aaron Mintz, the attorneys said, removed the pillow from the crime scene simply because it belonged on the daybed down the hall. Then, in a daze after discovering the crime scene, they said their client never noticed the bullet hole or the blood spatter.

After being presented with evidence that he had a girlfriend, Aaron Mintz admitted to his longtime affair, saying his wife was aware and unconcerned. His team also noted that the girlfriend had an alibi. The night of the murder, she was touring France with Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards.