Dalton’s Pleading Guilty 101 lesson was clear and thorough, but he was wasting his energy. Under no circumstances was I going to plead guilty. I felt a little bad for him. This was the most animated I had seen him since this all started. I studied the board for a few moments to at least appear to be considering his counsel. Then I said, “Why don’t we just try telling the truth and see what happens.”
Dalton looked at me as if I had two heads. “If you go to trial and take the stand in your defense, you will almost certainly be charged with obstruction of justice.”
“What?”
“If you take the stand to defend yourself and you are found guilty, the court will assume that you lied, therefore that you have obstructed justice. And that could add two years to your sentence.”
“Are you telling me that in America, if I go to trial and defend myself because I contend I am innocent, I might have two years added to my sentence if I’m found guilty?”
Dalton nodded.
I left his office confused and scared. I felt that I was being funneled into some kind of choke point in the federal justice system, like cattle herded into the killing chute.
My father now had his own copy of the discovery disc, and he was spending hours reading, printing, and organizing documents. We talked on the phone several times every day, excitedly sharing tidbits that we felt sure would turn the tide. We knew Dalton wasn’t doing any digging of his own; it was up to us. We decided that I should request permission to go to California for a week so that we could work on this side by side. If we could get the facts in order for Dalton, we could walk him through it. I sought permission to travel and got it.
Dad met me at the airport, hugged me, and started right in. “What a crock of shit this is. These brokers really stuck it to you,” he said, as we walked to his car.
“I know.”
“They used the banks’ nonexistent lending guidelines and the government’s lack of oversight to screw borrowers by saddling them with predatory loans destined to fail—but they didn’t care because they weren’t lending their own money! The bankers got rich and you lost your ass!”
“Exactly.”
“And now they want to put you in prison? This is total bullshit! Those crooked bastards.” He climbed into the driver’s seat and looked at me. “So, how was your flight?”
I laughed. Dad’s bulldog approach to things had sometimes caused problems between us, but at this moment I loved him for it. For the first time in my life, my dad and I were a team. It felt good. I was just sorry it had taken this to unite us.
My dad’s office was a sea of documents laid out on tables and the floor.
We felt we could prove beyond doubt that my home loan was handled per the status quo of those years. Brokers inflated the incomes of borrowers without their permission, often forged their signatures, and for that they were rewarded with big commissions. My loans were no different from the ones millions of other Americans took out at the time. I didn’t ask for a certain type of loan. That’s not how it worked. John Hellman put me into a no-doc or stated-income loan, which type, only years later, came to be known colloquially as liar loans. If I was guilty of anything, it was of trusting the professionals.
Most of the treasures I excavated while sorting through the documents were generated by Special Agent Nordlander. Page after page revealed new information about the tactics he had used to investigate me. He had spent more than seven hundred hours investigating me and my past tax returns—yet internal IRS documents showed no sign of unreported income. That did not deter Nordlander.
Eventually he used the Patriot Act to express nonspecific and unsubstantiated concerns to his superiors regarding money laundering. This allowed him and his IRS cohorts to search through my garbage, sort through my mail, and keep me and even some of my friends under surveillance.
For whatever reason, he seemed to have started with “Charlie Engle is guilty of . . . something” and worked backward. I didn’t understand it. What could I possibly have done to put myself in this guy’s crosshairs? The grand jury, I read in the transcripts, had wondered the same thing. One juror had asked Nordlander how he became so interested in a runner with no criminal background.
To this, Nordlander replied, “I mean, there’s no way a guy could be going to the Gobi Desert, running here, going here, doing all these things in the last couple years, with no income.”
The grand juror had followed up, “I’m still having a hard time understanding why you picked on Mr. Engle here. Is there something else going on with him that you were following him for? It seems like we are missing something. Do you do this for other people?”
“Well, ummm, sometimes it’s just a—really—it could be as simple as a nice Ferrari. If I pull his information, it looks like he makes five hundred thousand dollars a year, it looks good. No problem. Doesn’t look good, I look into him more.”
- - - -
One afternoon, Dad looked up from his desk wide-eyed. “You know what? There is no FDIC-insured lender involved in your loans! Your lenders, except for Shore Bank in Cape Charles, were what they call pretender lenders. They just do the loan origination and then bundle it and sell it off. Your one loan with Shore was a full-documentation loan and you paid it off in full. The others were not FDIC insured.”
“So did Nordlander not understand that or did he know it and ignore it?”
“Shouldn’t matter. As soon as the Feds saw there was not a federally insured bank loan in the mix, they should have dropped the case. The federal government had no standing to bring charges. But they already had seven hundred hours invested.”
I returned to Greensboro fired up, certain we had what we needed to convince a jury that these charges were bogus. I arranged a meeting with Chris Justice. I wanted to show him what we had found—and I wanted to hear him tell me we could win.
“Check this out.” I pointed at some handwriting on a loan document. In what looked like black Sharpie, the words “NO INCOME NEEDED, THANKS!” had been circled. “Hellman never even asked for my income!”
“Okay, I see it,” Chris said.
“And look. This document shows where the underwriter calculates that the income required is thirty-two thousand five hundred dollars per month, and magically that’s the figure that appears on my loan application with the forged initials. The underwriter works in the same place as Hellman. It looks like they were in this deal together.”
“Yeah, maybe. But you got the closing paperwork in the mail and you signed it—including the loan application with the false figures. I know the loan was already approved by then, but still, you signed it.”
“I signed where the red sticky notes were! I didn’t read the closing package. Does anybody ever read it?”
Chris shrugged. “Some do, not many—but that doesn’t matter. You signed it.”
“I didn’t know I was signing something that was full of lies! I just signed where the notary told me to sign—like I have always done.”
Chris placed a hand on my shoulder. “Charlie, I get it. Really, I do. This situation sucks. I can see that you’ve worked hard and you are right about pretty much everything. You’re getting screwed. But you need to know something. When a person is indicted by the Feds in America, he has a ninety-nine percent chance of being convicted whether he goes to trial or takes a plea deal. I’m sorry, Charlie, but you are going to prison.”
I brushed his hand away. “That’s a fucked-up thing to say.”
“That’s just the way it works. You can’t beat them. Nobody can.”
I wanted to punch him. I grabbed all of my perfectly organized documents and stormed out. I got in my car and drove to Country Park. I had already run ten miles earlier in the day, and I still had running clothes in my car. It was nearly dusk, but still hot, and the parking lot was empty. I changed into my shorts and T-shirt, then took off too fast down the wooded t
rail. I ran for a few miles at a blistering pace, wanting to get quickly to the purge, the feeling of relief that I so desperately needed. I knew every inch of these paths. I knew where the roots had pushed up through the earth and where the camber wanted to send me off the trail.
Finally, when I couldn’t push any longer, I slowed my pace. It was dark now and I felt the tall oak trees envelop me. I heard the rasp of cicadas and the trill of tree frogs. I was drenched with sweat. When I reached the parking lot, I stopped and looked up at the sky. The light breeze felt cool on my damp skin. At least I have this, I thought. I have running. They can’t take this from me.
- - - -
After much discussion about Dalton’s attitude regarding my case, my father and I decided that I needed to find another attorney. Dad offered to put up some money toward getting an attorney from the private sector. He wasn’t a wealthy man, so this was no small thing. I could never have asked him for help, but I was grateful that he offered.
Attorney Paul Sun, a partner of one of my dad’s childhood friends, agreed to work on a sliding scale. This was great news. I had only one reservation: he’d gone to Duke Law School. As a die-hard Tar Heel, I had to set aside my genetic predisposition against anybody who went to Duke University. Paul agreed to ignore the Carolina T-shirts I wore almost daily. I promised that if he could make this mess go away, I would commit to wearing a Duke basketball shirt during the upcoming hoops season.
Paul, whose office was in Raleigh, was about my age and an avid cyclist. He struck me as quiet and understated for a lawyer. I hoped he would be assertive when it counted. He had little experience with real estate law. But I thought if my dad and I could sort out the details of my case, Paul could do the same.
My trial started on September 28, 2010. The prosecutor called me a liar a hundred times and ranted about my lifestyle as if I lived in a penthouse on the Riviera. The thirty-second tape recording was played over and over. I waited anxiously for my attorney to present my case. But each day, I grew more worried about his approach. He seemed more concerned about not offending the judge than using the parts of our defense that I thought packed the most punch. He didn’t ask Nordlander about his grand jury testimony. He didn’t even press John Hellman, my mortgage broker, who the prosecutor brought out and had already pled to his crimes and had not yet been sentenced. Plainly, he anticipated his own sentence would be reduced if he pointed a finger at me.
I had one moment of hope during a strategy meeting with Paul. I told him about Nordlander’s offering me a ride after my arraignment. Paul was livid. He said handcuffing me and tossing me into the car after my release was considered false imprisonment, and the interrogation that followed was illegal since my attorney wasn’t present. Paul brought up this matter with the court, and though the judge seemed upset with Nordlander, nothing came of it.
Six long days of confusing testimony about mortgages and loans and bank regulations seemed to put everyone—even the judge—into a stupor. Several members of the jury nodded off, then woke up with a start, only to look deeply disappointed that they were still sitting in this airless courtroom, having to listen to more ramblings about loans and faxes and notaries. By the time the trial wrapped up, I was pretty sure Chris Justice had it right. I was screwed. And in fairness to Paul, I realize there was probably nothing he could have done about it.
Late in the afternoon of October 8, 2010, with my family sitting behind me, I was found guilty of twelve counts of bank fraud, wire fraud, and mail fraud. Ironically, I was found not guilty of providing false information on a loan application. My first reaction was relief: knowing was better than not knowing. But then I turned and saw that my mother was crying. It broke my heart. I knew I would find a way to get through this ordeal, but I wasn’t sure that she would.
The judge allowed me to go back to Greensboro to wait out the ninety days until my January 10 sentencing.
I cleared out of my apartment, put my life into a storage unit, and moved in with my friend Chip Pitts. I spent as much time as possible with Brett and Kevin. I hugged them incessantly, trying to store up a surplus of love. I visited my mom often, always trying to keep our conversation simple and light, though it inevitably turned to the subject of prison. She seemed to be disappearing before my eyes. If I was sent to prison, I didn’t think I would ever see her again as a free man.
To add to the misery, Brett was stopped for drinking and driving on campus at UNC Greensboro. His blood alcohol level was below the legal limit, but he was underage so the university suspended him. He was floundering and I was sick with worry about how he would deal with my absence.
In those weeks after the verdict, my need to run became maniacal. It was like my early days of sobriety when I felt I might die if I didn’t run. Nothing else relieved the pressure. I went out day after day, pounding out miles with ferocity, the ankle monitor rubbing me raw. Then one day I started down a trail and was in so much pain that I couldn’t take another step. I had first noticed a twinge in my right knee after falling at the Barkley Marathons in Tennessee a few weeks before my arrest. The pain had gotten worse, but I had run through it—until it was, at last, unignorable. With dread, I went to the doctor. He said I had a torn meniscus that would have to be surgically repaired before I went to prison. It required a more complicated and riskier procedure than I’d had with other knee surgeries. Tiny holes would be drilled in my knee, injuring it further to make it work harder to heal itself. My doctor said it only worked about half the time.
Something shifted in me, like the barrel of a lock being slid open. I found myself thinking about booze and drugs. I hadn’t had “using” dreams in years, but now they came to me almost nightly. I often woke up sweating or in tears, certain that I had relapsed. I knew how to make this pain inside go away. A few drinks, a little blow. It would be so easy to let that relief wash through me. I understood that if I got caught, my situation would get much worse, but I couldn’t turn off the craving.
I had the surgery to repair my torn meniscus. Afterward, my friend Liz picked me up to drive me home. After my previous surgeries, I had used only ibuprofen and some natural anti-inflammatories. I knew I couldn’t risk taking narcotics; I might like them too much. But this time, when Liz asked if we should go by the drugstore to fill the prescription I’d been given for painkillers, I said yes.
We got to Chip’s house and she put the bottle of pills on the kitchen counter. Then she got me set up on the sofa with food and drinks and pillows. Chip was out of town and wouldn’t be back for a few days, so Liz promised to come back later to check on me. I fell asleep immediately, and when I woke up, I had an urgent need to pee. I grabbed my crutches and stood up too quickly, nearly passing out from the pain.
It was much worse than I remembered from other surgeries. I hobbled toward the bathroom and noticed the bottle of pain pills in the kitchen. I had a hazy memory of stopping at the drugstore. After I peed, I went over to the counter and picked up the pills. “Oxy-codone,” I sounded out. Oxy-anything sounded like something I might like. I had never been a pill user, but I had plenty of friends who were. It said right on the bottle, “Do Not Drink Alcohol While Taking This Medication.” Alcohol!
I thought I remembered seeing some beer in the fridge. I went to the refrigerator and peered in. There in the door were a couple of bottles of beer, brands I was unfamiliar with. I took one out and set it on the counter next to the pills. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale—that sounded refreshing. I sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the beer and the pills. I stood up and grabbed the beer again. It was wonderfully cold. I liked the way it felt in my hand. Then I examined the pill label: “1–2 pills every four hours as needed.” It was a big bottle.
I left the pills and beer on the counter and hobbled back to the sofa. The pain in my knee was unfathomable. Why couldn’t I be a normal person and take a couple of pain pills to help me rest after having surgery? What was the big deal?
Jus
t do it, I thought. It’s medicine. It’s not a relapse.
I went back to the kitchen and shook out one pill, then another. I put the pills next to the beer. The beer had a screw top. Had beer always had screw tops? I couldn’t remember. I grabbed the top and turned it. Stuck. I tried again and still couldn’t open it. I pulled out a drawer and found a bottle opener and wedged it under the lid. Pssst. That sweet sound I had heard so many thousands of times. The bright piney smell of the beer rose to my nose. Fantastic. I wanted it.
I had memorized dozens of catchy AA slogans, but at that moment I couldn’t come up with a single reason not to take these pills and drink this beer. If things got out of hand, I reasoned, I could just use prison as my rehab and nobody would ever know. I had decided.
I had to plan, make sure no one would interrupt me. Was Liz coming back? Maybe I should wait until she checked on me. Or I could call her now and tell her I was fine, she didn’t need to return. My kids might stop by in the morning, so I should text them to say I was feeling sick and they shouldn’t come. I picked up the phone to call Liz, but before I started dialing, it rang in my hand. I saw that it was my mother’s number. I clicked the ignore button. It rang again. Maybe she was in trouble. I answered.
“Hi, Mom.”
No response.
“Mom? Are you there? Hello?” I said louder.
“Hello?” I heard her say. “Is somebody there? Hello?”
“Hi, Mom. It’s Charlie. You called me. Is everything okay?”
“I called you? I don’t think so. But since I have you on the phone, I have a question for you.”
I waited. Silence.
“What did you want to ask, Mom?”
“Damn, I can’t remember.” She let out a long, deep sigh.
“Was it about the dogs? Or maybe your medicine?”
“I’m not sure. Oh, wait. I’m glad you called. Do you know where the coffee filters are?”
She had asked me this before. “Look in the cabinet just above the coffeemaker. I think that’s where you keep them.”
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