Mary Ann Collura

Small Time

To the cops in Passaic, Omar Marti was born to be a small-timer. A tiny kid with thick Coke-bottle glasses who, as a teen always seemed to be hovering just on the edge of trouble. Every now and then, the cops would hear about him being linked to some minor crime or other, like boosting car radios. He was busted once while still in high school for selling pot, and he had done a few brief stints in county lockups. He had also tried to make a name for himself in Binghamton, N.Y. Maybe it's a measure of how little respect the justice system had for him: Not long before his death, Marti was arrested on drug charges in Binghamton and the cops and courts saw him as such a small fish that they released him on a summons. Rather than face court, Marti fled Binghamton and returned to Passaic. There was no all-points-bulletin put out for him, just a bench warrant demanding his arrest for failing to appear in court, the hallmark of a small-timer.

James Santulli

As assistant Bergen County Prosecutor James V. Santulli put it, try as Marti might to walk the walk, "he wasn't a kingpin," Perhaps, Santulli said, he dreamed that someday he might be. Maybe, the cops speculate, he believed that if he tried hard enough, if he packed enough guns; the .357, the shotgun, the stolen semiautomatic rifle, he could be a big man, a man to be feared and to be remembered.

But on Paulison Avenue, on North Street in Binghamton and in all the other neighborhoods where Omar Marti tried to strut, he's largely been forgotten.

Even Marti's own family, it seems, is trying to erase him. On Orchard Street in Garfield, where his uncle and cousins live, the name Omar Marti is never mentioned. There's good reason for that. Omar not only brought shame to the family, relatives and friends acknowledge, but he also brought the law down on them. Family members who helped Marti escape from New Jersey in the hours after Collura's murder are all either in prison or on their way there.

"We're forbidden to talk about him," said one young cousin, who, like everyone else Omar Marti's life ever touched, would only speak about him in hushed tones and cryptic words through partially closed apartment doors. It's a rule that is enforced inside the family, she said. "We just don't talk about him."

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1. Point Blank
2. Holy Thursday
3. As If He Never Was
4. Small Time
5. An Easy Shift
6. An Act of Courage
7. Last Call
8. The Prodigal Son Returns
9. Not So Innocent
10. A Routine Stop
11. The Chase Begins
12. On His Own
13. Show Down
14. In the Killer's Eyes
15. "Oh, God!"
16. Marti's Flight
17. Legacy
18. Bibliography