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Testimony ends in trial of ex-Tyco lawyer
New York Testimony in the trial of Mark Belnick, Tyco International’s former top lawyer, ended Thursday after prosecutors mounted a brief rebuttal case in an attempt to show that the defendant accepted a payoff from his former boss in a Washington hotel in March 2000. It was in that hotel that L. Dennis Kozlowski, Tyco’s then-chief executive, paid Belnick as much as $17 million after he showed Kozlowski a document indicating that $100,000 of Tyco’s money had been sent to the CEO’s girlfriend, prosecutors say. The first rebuttal witness was Vincent Valenzuela, security chief of Washington’s Four Seasons Hotel. He testified that he had retrieved records showing that Kozlowski and Belnick were in the luxury hotel the night of March 28. Belnick acknowledged at the end of five days of testimony Wednesday that he had met Kozlowski in his hotel room that night. When Assistant District Attorney John Moscow asked what they talked about, he said the CEO promised him a large bonus for his work in successfully guiding Tyco through a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry.