E-mails convinced jurors of his role in 'big scheme'

Tom Petters is "a very good salesman" who "really, really cared about the people that worked for him," in the opinion of jury forewoman Jolyne Cross.

But Cross and her 11 fellow jurors had no trouble convicting Petters on all 20 counts related to the massive Ponzi scheme he ran for the past decade.

"I don't think he woke up every morning thinking, 'Who am I going to take advantage of today?"' Cross said shortly after delivering the verdict that in all likelihood will put Petters behind bars for life.

"I think he got into [the scheme], and couldn't get out of it. ... It started out bad and he just kept feeding and feeding and feeding it," she added.

Cross, an Apple Valley resident who works as a quality manager at Western Graphics in St. Paul, said the jurors experienced their "big aha" moment Tuesday while they were reviewing e-mail evidence.

"It came together for us that he was involved in the big scheme of it," Cross said. From that point, it was a matter of finishing their review of the evidence on each of the counts.

Prosecution attorneys buttressed their case with tape recordings secretly made by Petters confidante Deanna Coleman, who previously pleaded guilty in the fraud case. But Cross said that evidence didn't hold as much weight as some people might think.

"We tried to be careful with that [testimony] because we knew that they were fighting for their lives," she said.

The e-mails and the totality of the evidence had the greatest impact on the jury, Cross said.

The jury also essentially disregarded a key part of the defense case: That Petters wasn't paying attention to the details of his business after his son John was murdered in 2004 in Italy. "We tried not to make that relevant," Cross said.

Petters was charged with 20 counts of wire and mail fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit those acts.

"There wasn't hard evidence that every single thing he was actually involved in," Cross said. "So we had to go with the aiding and abetting" aspects of the law. "That was a big concept that we had to wrap our brains around."

"I thought, this is the biggest trial in Minnesota in a long time, and they are asking me to make a decision? That's crazy.

"You never feel good about sending somebody to jail, but we feel like after all of the evidence, we came to the right decision," Cross said. "I believe that it was a slippery slope for him."

Juror Chris Harbaugh said: "We made sure we took a thorough look at the evidence. We did our due diligence. We wanted to make sure that Mr. Petters got a fair trial."

He said the deliberations "were stressful at times," a theme repeated by fellow juror Michelle Entsminger.

"In the end, it was very tough," Entsminger said.

Cross didn't describe any major conflicts among the jurors. "We knew that what we did was going to affect his life," she said. "We really wanted to look at everything."