On the morning of the seventeenth I was in the Compton courthouse representing Darius McGinley at his sentencing. Repeat offenders mean repeat customers and McGinley was both, as many of my clients tend to be. For the sixth time since I had known him, he had been arrested and charged with dealing crack cocaine. This time it was in Nickerson Gardens, a housing project known by most of its residents as Nixon Gardens. No one I ever asked knew whether this was an abbreviation of the true name of the place or a name bestowed in honor of the president who held office when the vast apartment complex and drug market was built. McGinley was arrested after making a direct hand-to-hand sale of a balloon containing a dozen rocks to an undercover narcotics officer. At the time, he had been out on bail after being arrested for the exact same offense two months earlier. He also had four prior convictions for drug sales on his record.
Things didn’t look good for McGinley, who was only twenty-three years old. After he’d taken so many previous swings at the system, the system had now run out of patience with him. The hammer was coming down. Though McGinley had been coddled previously with sentences of probation and county jail time, the prosecutor set the bar at the prison level this time. Any negotiation of a plea agreement would begin and end with a prison sentence. Otherwise, no deal. The prosecutor was happy to take the two outstanding cases to trial and go for a conviction and a double-digit prison sentence.
The choice was hard but simple. The state held all of the cards. They had him cold on two hand-to-hand sales with quantity. The reality was that a trial would be an exercise in futility. McGinley knew this. The reality was that his selling of three hundred dollars in rock cocaine to a cop was going to cost him at least three years of his life.
As with many of my young male clients from the south side of the city, prison was an anticipated part of life for McGinley. He grew up knowing he was going. The only questions were when and for how long and whether he would live long enough to make it there. In my many jailhouse meetings with him over the years, I had learned that McGinley carried a personal philosophy inspired by the life and death and rap music of Tupac Shakur, the thug poet whose rhymes carried the hope and hopelessness of the desolate streets McGinley called home. Tupac correctly prophesied his own violent death. South L.A. teemed with young men who carried the exact same vision.
McGinley was one of them. He would recite to me long riffs from Tupac’s CDs. He would translate the meanings of the ghetto lyrics for me. It was an education I valued because McGinley was only one of many clients with a shared belief in a final destiny that was “Thug Mansion,” the place between heaven and earth where all gangsters ended up. To McGinley, prison was only a rite of passage on the road to that place and he was ready to make the journey.
“I’ll lay up, get stronger and smarter, then I’ll be back,” he said to me.
He told me to go ahead and make a deal. He had five thousand dollars delivered to me in a money order—I didn’t ask where it came from—and I went back to the prosecutor, got both pending cases folded into one, and McGinley agreed to plead guilty. The only thing he ever asked me to try to get for him was an assignment to a prison close by so his mother and his three young children wouldn’t have to be driven too far or too long to visit him.
When court was called into session, Judge Daniel Flynn came through the door of his chambers in an emerald green robe, which brought false smiles from many of the lawyers and court workers in the room. He was known to wear the green on two occasions each year—St. Patrick’s Day and the Friday before the Notre Dame Fighting Irish took on the Southern Cal Trojans on the football field. He was also known among the lawyers who worked the Compton courthouse as “Danny Boy,” as in, “Danny Boy sure is an insensitive Irish prick, isn’t he?”
The clerk called the case and I stepped up and announced. McGinley was brought in through a side door and stood next to me in an orange jumpsuit with his wrists locked to a waist chain. He had no one out in the gallery to watch him go down. He was alone except for me.
“Top o’ the morning to you, Mr. McGinley,” Flynn said in an Irish brogue. “You know what today is?”
I lowered my eyes to the floor. McGinley mumbled his response.
“The day I get my sentence.”
“That, too. But I am talking about St. Patrick’s Day, Mr. McGinley. A day to revel in Irish heritage.”
McGinley turned slightly and looked at me. He was street smart but not life smart. He didn’t understand what was happening, whether this was part of the sentencing or just some form of white man disrespect. I wanted to tell him that the judge was being insensitive and probably racist. Instead I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Just be cool. He’s an asshole.”
“Do you know the origin of your name, Mr. McGinley?” the judge asked.
“No, sir.”
“Do you care?”
“Not really, sir. It’s a name from a slaveholder, I ’spect. Why would I care who that motherfucka be?”
“Excuse me, Your Honor,” I said quickly.
I leaned over to McGinley again.
“Darius, cool it,” I whispered. “And watch your language.”
“He’s dissing me,” he said back, a little louder than a whisper.
“And he hasn’t sentenced you yet. You want to blow the deal?”
McGinley stepped back from me and looked up at the judge.
“Sorry about my language, Y’Honor. I come from the street.”
“I can tell that,” Flynn said. “Well, it is a shame you feel that way about your history. But if you don’t care about your name, then I don’t either. Let’s get on with the sentencing and get you off to prison, shall we?”
He said the last part cheerfully, as if he were taking great delight in sending McGinley off to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth.
The sentencing went by quickly after that. There was nothing in the presentencing investigation report besides what everybody already knew. Darius McGinley had had only one profession since age eleven, drug dealer. He’d had only one true family, a gang. He’d never gotten a driver’s license, though he drove a BMW. He’d never gotten married, though he’d fathered three babies. It was the same old story and same old cycle trotted out a dozen times a day in courtrooms across the county. McGinley lived in a society that intersected mainstream America only in the courtrooms. He was just fodder for the machine. The machine needed to eat and McGinley was on the plate. Flynn sentenced him to the agreed-upon three to five years in prison and read all of the standard legal language that came with a plea agreement. For laughs—though only his own courtroom staff complied—he read the boilerplate using his brogue again. And then it was over.
I know McGinley dealt death and destruction in the form of rock cocaine and probably committed untold violence and other offenses he was never charged with, but I still felt bad for him. I felt like he was another one who’d never had a shot at anything but thug life in the first place. He’d never known his father and had dropped out of school in the sixth grade to learn the rock trade. He could accurately count money in a rock house but he had never had a checking account. He had never been to a county beach, let alone outside of Los Angeles. And now his first trip out would be on a bus with bars over the windows.
Before he was led back into the holding cell for processing and transfer to prison I shook his hand, his movement restricted by the waist chain, and wished him good luck. It is something I rarely do with my clients.
“No sweat,” he said to me. “I’ll be back.”
And I didn’t doubt it. In a way, Darius McGinley was just as much a franchise client as Louis Roulet. Roulet was most likely a one-shot deal. But over the years, I had a feeling McGinley would be one of what I call my “annuity clients.” He would be the gift that would keep on giving—as long as he defied the odds and kept on living.
I put the McGinley file in my briefcase and headed back through the gate while the next case was called. Outside the courtroom Raul Levin was waitin
g for me in the crowded hallway. We had a scheduled meeting to go over his findings in the Roulet case. He’d had to come to Compton because I had a busy schedule.
“Top o’ the morning,” Levin said in an exaggerated Irish accent.
“Yeah, you saw that?”
“I stuck my head in. The guy’s a bit of a racist, isn’t he?”
“And he can get away with it because ever since they unified the courts into one countywide district, his name goes on the ballot everywhere. Even if the people of Compton rose up like a wave to vote him off, the Westsiders could still cancel them out. It’s fucked up.”
“How’d he get on the bench in the first place?”
“Hey, you get a law degree and make the right contributions to the right people and you could be a judge, too. He was appointed by the governor. The hard part is winning that first retention election. He did. You’ve never heard the ‘In like Flynn’ story?”
“Nope.”
“You’ll love it. About six years ago Flynn gets his appointment from the governor. This is before unification. Back then judges were elected by the voters of the district where they presided. The supervising judge for L.A. County checks out his credentials and pretty quickly realizes that he’s got a guy with lots of political connections but no talent or courthouse experience to go with it. Flynn was basically an office lawyer. Probably couldn’t find a courthouse, let alone try a case, if you paid him. So the presiding judge dumps him down here in Compton criminal because the rule is you have to run for retention the year after being appointed to the bench. He figures Flynn will fuck up, anger the folks and get voted out. One year and out.”
“Headache over.”
“Exactly. Only it didn’t work that way. In the first hour on the first day of filing for the ballot that year, Fredrica Brown walks into the clerk’s office and puts in her papers to run against Flynn. You know Downtown Freddie Brown?”
“Not personally. I know of her.”
“So does everybody else around here. Besides being a pretty good defense lawyer, she’s black, she’s a woman and she’s popular in the community. She would have crushed Flynn five to one or better.”
“Then how the hell did Flynn keep the seat?”
“That’s what I’m getting to. With Freddie on the ballot, nobody else filed to run. Why bother, she was a shoo-in—though it was kind of curious why she’d want to be a judge and take the pay cut. Back then she had to have been well into mid six figures with her practice.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened was, a couple months later on the last hour before filing closed, Freddie walks back into the clerk’s office and withdraws from the ballot.”
Levin nodded.
“So Flynn ends up running unopposed and keeps the seat,” he said.
“You got it. Then unification comes in and they’ll never be able to get him out of there.”
Levin looked outraged.
“That’s bullshit. They had some kind of deal and that’s gotta be a violation of election laws.”
“Only if you could prove there was a deal. Freddie has always maintained that she wasn’t paid off or part of some plan Flynn cooked up to stay on the bench. She says she just changed her mind and pulled out because she realized she couldn’t sustain her lifestyle on a judge’s pay. But I’ll tell you one thing, Freddie sure seems to do well whenever she has a case in front of Flynn.”
“And they call it a justice system.”
“Yeah, they do.”
“So what do you think about Blake?”
It had to be brought up. It was all anybody else was talking about. Robert Blake, the movie and television actor, had been acquitted of murdering his wife the day before in Van Nuys Superior Court. The DA and the LAPD had lost another big media case and you couldn’t go anywhere without it being the number one topic of discussion. The media and most people who lived and worked outside the machine didn’t get it. The question wasn’t whether Blake did it, but whether there was enough evidence presented in trial to convict him of doing it. They were two distinctly separate things but the public discourse that had followed the verdict had entwined them.
“What do I think?” I said. “I think I admire the jury for staying focused on the evidence. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. I hate it when the DA thinks they can ride in a verdict on common sense—‘If it wasn’t him, who else could it have been?’ Give me a break with that. You want to convict a man and put him in a cage for life, then put up the fucking evidence. Don’t hope a jury is going to bail your ass out on it.”
“Spoken like a true defense attorney.”
“Hey, you make your living off defense attorneys, pal. You should memorize that rap. So forget Blake. I’m jealous and I’m already tired of hearing about it. You said on the phone that you had good news for me.”
“I do. Where do you want to go to talk and look at what I’ve got?”
I looked at my watch. I had a calendar call on a case in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. I had until eleven to be there and I couldn’t miss it because I had missed it the day before. After that I was supposed to go up to Van Nuys to meet for the first time with Ted Minton, the prosecutor who had taken the Roulet case over from Maggie McPherson.
“I don’t have time to go anywhere,” I said. “We can go sit in my car and grab a coffee. You got your stuff with you?”
In answer Levin raised his briefcase and rapped his knuckles on its side.
“But what about your driver?”
“Don’t worry about him.”
“Then let’s do it.”
ELEVEN
A fter we were in the Lincoln I told Earl to drive around and see if he could find a Starbucks. I needed coffee. “Ain’ no Starbuck ’round here,” Earl responded.
I knew Earl was from the area but I didn’t think it was possible to be more than a mile from a Starbucks at any given point in the county, maybe even the world. But I didn’t argue the point. I just wanted coffee.
“Okay, well, drive around and find a place that has coffee. Just don’t go too far from the courthouse. We need to get back to drop Raul off after.”
“You got it.”
“And Earl? Put on your earphones while we talk about a case back here for a while, okay?”
Earl fired up his iPod and plugged in the earbuds. He headed the Lincoln down Acacia in search of java. Soon we could hear the tinny sound of hip-hop coming from the front seat and Levin opened his briefcase on the fold-down table built into the back of the driver’s seat.
“Okay, what do you have for me?” I said. “I’m going to see the prosecutor today and I want to have more aces in my hand than he does. We also have the arraignment Monday.”
“I think I’ve got a few aces here,” Levin replied.
He sorted through things in his briefcase and then started his presentation.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s begin with your client and then we’ll check in on Reggie Campo. Your guy is pretty squeaky. Other than parking and speeding tickets—which he seems to have a problem avoiding and then a bigger problem paying—I couldn’t find squat on him. He’s pretty much your standard citizen.”
“What’s with the tickets?”
“Twice in the last four years he’s let parking tickets—a lot of them—and a couple speeding tickets accumulate unpaid. Both times it went to warrant and your colleague C. C. Dobbs stepped in to pay them off and smooth things over.”
“I’m glad C.C.’s good for something. By ‘paying them off,’ I assume you mean the tickets, not the judges.”
“Let’s hope so. Other than that, only one blip on the radar with Roulet.”
“What?”
“At the first meeting when you were giving him the drill about what to expect and so on and so forth, it comes out that he’d had a year at UCLA law and knew the system. Well, I checked on that. See, half of what I do is try to find out who is lying or who is the biggest liar of the bunch. So I check damn ne
ar everything. And most of the time it’s easy to do because everything’s on computer.”
“Right, I get it. So what about the law school, was that a lie?”
“Looks like it. I checked the registrar’s office and he’s never been enrolled in the law school at UCLA.”
I thought about this. It was Dobbs who had brought up UCLA law and Roulet had just nodded. It was a strange lie for either one of them to have told because it didn’t really get them anything. It made me think about the psychology behind it. Was it something to do with me? Did they want me to think of Roulet as being on the same level as me?
“So if he lied about something like that . . . ,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Right,” Levin said. “I wanted you to know about it. But I gotta say, that’s it on the negative side for Mr. Roulet so far. He might’ve lied about law school but it looks like he didn’t lie about his story—at least the parts I could check out.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, his track that night checks out. I got wits in here who put him at Nat’s North, Morgan’s and then the Lamplighter, bing, bing, bing. He did just what he told us he did. Right down to the number of martinis. Four total and at least one of them he left on the bar unfinished.”
“They remember him that well? They remember that he didn’t even finish his drink?”
I am always suspicious of perfect memory because there is no such thing. And it is my job and my skill to find the faults in the memory of witnesses. Whenever someone remembers too much, I get nervous—especially if the witness is for the defense.
“No, I’m not just relying on a bartender’s memory. I’ve got something here that you are going to love, Mick. And you better love me for it because it cost me a grand.”
From the bottom of his briefcase he pulled out a padded case that contained a small DVD player. I had seen people using them on planes before and had been thinking about getting one for the car. The driver could use it while waiting on me in court. And I could probably use it from time to time on cases like this one.
The Lincoln Lawyer Page 10