Sean Bell was innocent. Almost everyone seemed to understand that, going into the excruciating seven-week Queens trial of three cops who gunned Bell down the night before his wedding, November 25, 2006. But going in, there also was a lot of talk about how, once the trial started, the police’s defense lawyers might try to rough up Bell a bit, posthumously. It wasn't hard to guess that they would try to bring in his sketchy police record, or at least mention how anyone hanging out at 4 a.m. at the Club Kalua strip joint in Jamaica could be presumed to be up to no good. “They’re not going to say he’s a choir boy,” one veteran prosecutor of police cases told me before the trial started. “I think what they will do is try to disparage Club Kalua, a notorious drug spot. What good upstanding citizen would be there to begin with? It explains that cops are there to try to do the right thing.” Sure enough, the police’s defense lawyers played the Club Kalua card from the start. “Who is attracted to such a place?" defense attorney Anthony Ricco asked imperiously. That (along with the fact that Ricco and two of the three cop defendants were also black) was a convenient way of getting around having to play the race card: The police were in danger, you see — how could they have been profiling?