Heather stared at her water glass and then picked it up like she was going to drink from it but finally set it down. She rose to her feet instead. After thanking me for dinner, she said she was going to her room, abruptly ending our dinner conversation.
As I looked at the vacant chair across the table from me, I tried to put the whole thing in perspective. Fumbling for some practical, concrete signposts. But after failing at that, I managed to construct only one lackluster word of wisdom for myself.
No one had told me that the parenting journey would be this rough or that the rules of the road seemed to be written in Sanskrit.
7
The next day, the plenary session was held in one of the big ballrooms of the convention center, an arena full of cushy seating in a semi-darkened hall. There were two jumbotrons on the stage, one at each corner.
I sat on a stage that was bathed in lights, in a velvet chair positioned just behind the lectern. The high, darkened ceiling twinkled with tiny white lights and reminded me of the night sky over Ocracoke Island—twinkling chips of refracted light in a vast canopy of black. My single emotion: I would rather have been back on my island.
But I thought about my mentor Rev. John Cannon, now a resident of a Wisconsin nursing home. He was a man who stirred up controversy himself. I thought he would have approved the remarks I was about to impart, and then, just as quickly, would have told me to buck up. I said a silent prayer and readied myself for the flailing.
When the session started, an ABA rep came to the microphone to give a few announcements about the convention schedule for the rest of the day. At that point the cavernous hall was about half-full, which was still impressive because the place seated over a thousand people. Suddenly more lawyers started to stream in. Maybe because the attorney general would be addressing them next, right after my speech. Or perhaps there was another explanation. Maybe they came to see the freak show.
I knew why I had come. Attention needed to be focused on the Jason Forester death. But it was going to be a delicate high-wire act. I still had only a cursory backstory on the incident. Yet I felt it was enough for me to suspect something foul was going on. My invitation to speak in New Orleans was not happenstance. I was a man on a mission. Time to kick-start a further probe into Jason Forester’s demise.
As I sat there on the stage, I felt like a country peasant in front of the Star Chamber, straight out of Tudor England. I scanned the audience and thought about my message. And how I would start my speech with some jokes about lawyers. The one that asks: What’s the difference between a dead armadillo run over on a Texas highway by an 18-wheeler, and a dead lawyer run over on a Texas highway? Answer: There are skid marks in front of the armadillo.
In the shadows of the hall, the faces in the first few rows were visible. There was Heather, right in the front, staring up at me, mouth slightly open, as if witnessing her father in the death chamber as he was about to receive a lethal injection.
I glanced down Heather’s row, noticing a female lawyer next to her. And a long line of male attorneys.
But one face jumped out. I squinted hard to make sure. Even with the passage of all those years, I was certain it was him. Vance Zaduck, United States attorney for the District of Columbia. His face was fuller, and he looked to have put on some weight. His hairline had receded over the years in an almost-perfect half circle. But yes, it was Vance all right.
My mind started to race. I knew at that moment how, if I really wanted to, I could improvise. Make some clever modifications to my speech. After all, Vance was Forester’s boss. There was the hook.
Vance Zaduck had pitched a noncommittal recommendation to the attorney general that concluded Forester’s death was by natural causes. Of course the attorney general had the authority to push it further and didn’t, which was the true miscarriage if my instincts were right about Forester’s death. So why was I fixating on Vance? I knew why, of course. And I knew that if I wanted to, I could use Vance Zaduck’s status as the ranking lawyer in that office where Forester had died as the justifiable link to talk about a few of the things that I knew personally about Zaduck.
I could begin with the reality that prosecutors like Jason Forester have tough jobs and do a great service to society. Yet, at the same time, prosecutors have a truly staggering measure of power to ruin innocent people’s lives under the banner of “prosecutorial discretion.” Then I could relate, as an example, how ten years ago Vance Zaduck had charged a client of mine with attempted murder, back when he was an assistant DA in Manhattan, before he got the wink and the nod to become the US attorney in Washington.
I could describe my client, Carter Collins, a young middleweight boxer who grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan, back when the area was still roughneck and before it became gentrified with luxury condos and high-rent properties.
And how, though Carter had a misdemeanor criminal record of minor offenses, he worked hard, trained well, and created a promising boxing career for himself. He also had an attractive girlfriend who attracted a stalker. Fearing for his girlfriend, Carter took matters into his own hands, and that’s where the trouble started. He tracked down the stalker, waiting for him to exit a tavern with his friend at closing time. Words were exchanged, Carter said the guy pulled a knife, and so Carter, who had an arm like a cannon, landed a quick, catastrophic right, causing brain damage to the stalker. We raised the argument of self-defense at trial, but the jury didn’t buy it, primarily because the man’s bar friend testified that he never saw his friend, the “victim,” brandish a knife at all.
And then a year later I discovered that Vance Zaduck had known all along that there was an independent witness, a passerby who had actually seen the guy pull a knife on my client during the short-lived fight. What the law calls exculpatory evidence, because it tends to underscore the innocence of my client, the defendant. Something the law also requires a prosecutor to disclose to the defense. But when I raised the nondisclosure to the court, the trial judge refused to reverse the verdict, justifying it with the harmless error rule, the bane of many a defense attorney. Carter spent almost ten years in prison.
Yet, before even filing my motion for a new trial, I had a sit-down with Vance in his office, thinking that he might voluntarily agree to a new trial, seeing that I had caught him red-handed committing prosecutorial misconduct by hiding evidence from me. Thinking that Vance Zaduck might even regret what had happened to my client.
Instead of that, though, Vance went off about his being “vested with power by the state to enforce the law.”
At the time, I told him in my pitch, “Vance, you also have prosecutorial discretion to do the right thing. To correct an injustice that you created yourself. Maybe Carter should never have confronted the victim in the first place, but if you drop the case, or at least agree to a new trial, Carter could have the chance to become the man he ought to be.”
Vance chortled in my face and he recited a quote, along with its source: “‘A man as he ought to be: that sounds . . . as insipid as: “a tree as it ought to be.”’ Friedrich Nietzsche.”
Then Vance added, “I chose to exercise my prosecutorial authority by sending your client to prison for as long as I can. That’s how I use my power.”
I shot back with a quote of my own: “‘If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.’ Abraham Lincoln.”
Vance was not amused. He abruptly called our conversation to a halt.
Yes, I could have launched into all of that in my speech to the ABA, and I was tempted to.
But I didn’t.
Instead I looked out at the sea of shadowy faces in the crowded convention ballroom. The armadillo joke garnered some chuckles from the audience, but then I moved on to some facts about a brave, honorable federal prosecutor.
“Let me start today with the best of our legal profession. Epitomized by an assistant US attorney named Jason Forester. After spending years putting away mobsters and terrorists, Forester moved against th
e scourge of human trafficking of the vilest form: abduction of children for sexual exploitation and even worse. Now this is a scary trend. California reported thirteen hundred human trafficking cases in a single year alone. Nationally, one in six youth runaways are swept into it. But AUSA Forester won’t be chasing down that hideous network anymore. If my suspicions are right, he didn’t just die from cardiac arrest. Someone, or something, wanted him stopped.
“Which brings me to a flaw in our legal profession.”
That’s when I began to address the modern shotgun marriage between the law and the world of the scientific and empirical, while divorcing itself from all things spiritual and moral. I took the audience through a quick refresher of early American law and its first cousin, the English common law, to prove how far we had wandered.
Eventually I got down to my main point, reciting a few of the facts about how Jason Forester died. I could sense some stirring in the audience, so I sped things up.
“The American public,” I said, “has a right to know whether Jason Forester, a courageous federal prosecutor with a record of facing down mobsters and bloodthirsty terrorists, just might have faced an invisible enemy so horrific and malevolent that he was, literally, frightened to death.”
That is when the herd really started getting restless. I could hear hundreds of them out there in the audience, shifting in their seats.
“The real question,” I declared, “is whether US Attorney Vance Zaduck’s decision to close that matter should be reversed by the attorney general for the United States.”
A few people got up from their seats and walked out as I plowed forward.
“Do we think ourselves so sophisticated today, and are we so rationalistically arrogant, that we are unwilling to consider that there really is a devil—not a metaphor, but a being who is irrevocably evil? That belief is not unheard of, even in the most respected legal circles.”
By then, scattered murmuring throughout the hall.
I tried to ignore it. “The late, great Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once remarked to a reporter that he held such a belief in a real devil himself. Have you—have we—arrogated ourselves to a position of demigods? Unwilling to be taught about where evil comes from and about the God in heaven who is the only one with the power to really vanquish it?”
Voices began to rise up—only a few at first, but they were out there in the dark, complaining, protesting my message.
I kept going. “Our top law oracles have all been schooled in the world of legal pragmatism, and I get that. They comprise the majority opinion in our profession. But I’ve had a personal and rather painful tutorial in the school of supernatural evil. I encourage you to consider the opinion of this dissenting ex-lawyer when it comes to the demonic world and the invidious danger it represents. Including, but not limited to, the untimely death that was meted out to Assistant US Attorney Jason Forester.”
That is when the audience erupted. Boos. Jeering. Catcalls. Things were quickly cascading out of control.
When two burly men in dark suits hustled onto the stage toward me, I suspected at first that they were private convention-center security. Until they got closer. Plain white shirts. Lifeless dark ties. Thick necks. Earbuds. The stone-faced look of official command.
No, not convention security.
One of them grabbed my arm. “Mr. Black, FBI. Please come with us.”
When we were offstage in the wings, I asked a question that I didn’t seriously expect to be answered, at least at that point. “Why am I in federal custody?”
Imagine my surprise when one of the agents actually responded to my question. And imagine my utter shock at the answer he gave me. “Mr. Black, there’s a dead man in your hotel room.”
8
I was backstage with an FBI agent at each elbow. That’s where I encountered the attorney general for the United States, George Shazzar, surrounded by more tough-looking men with earbuds. Probably Secret Service. Much whispering to the attorney general about something I couldn’t hear. Shazzar glared at me with a look of disgust.
I tried to approach Shazzar, planning to suggest to him that he do the right thing, take another look into the Jason Forester death.
“Attorney General Shazzar, can I urge . . . ?” I started out, launching into my short monologue.
But my FBI escorts closed it down, yanking me in the opposite direction and yelling for me to “get away from the attorney general.”
I heard Shazzar say something about “a rotten apple at the bottom of every barrel” before he was politely but quickly whisked away.
Just as quickly I was escorted out of the convention center by a gaggle of FBI agents, though not as courteously as they’d handled the AG.
Next, placed between two special agents in the backseat of a bureau vehicle, I was driven across town, past the Army Reserve building and over to the FBI headquarters on Leon C. Simon Boulevard. The agent who drove us stayed with the car, while the other two walked me up to the red-and-tan brick building. Beyond the white arched entrance I encountered a security screening, where agents patted me down, confiscated my watch and cell phone to be kept “until later,” and returned my wallet only after taking it into another room—likely to photograph the contents. An interesting procedural question from a search and seizure standpoint, but ultimately irrelevant as things turned out. The agents escorted me up in an elevator before depositing me in a nondescript beige room that was empty except for a table, two black plastic chairs with metal frames, and a TV set at the other end, probably for video evidence viewing. They told me to sit down, while they left the room and I heard the electronic click as the door was locked from the outside.
I glanced over at the large mirror on the wall that must have housed the one-way glass.
Minutes went by. And more minutes. Maybe close to an hour, but I couldn’t tell.
I knew, as I sat in the beige room with the one-way glass, what to expect. The routine procedure. This was the observation stage. They were watching on the other side of the mirrored glass. Was I fidgeting? Any furtive movements? Signs of emotional stress?
After a while, I heard a heavy click as the door unlocked and two different agents entered, one young, one older. The younger remained standing. The older introduced himself as Special Agent Roger Fainlock, sat down across from me, and asked me if I needed anything.
“No.”
“Water? Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
They then lit into me with questions.
“Who booked your room at the hotel?”
“I did.”
They followed up with some questions about my credit card, which I pulled out from my wallet. I handed Agent Fainlock my American Express, along with my driver’s license, then dug into my pocket and retrieved the little folder from the hotel with my plastic room key inserted inside, and I tossed that onto the table in front of him too.
All of that to show that I was who I was, and how I had booked the room, and that yes, I had the key to the room. Which, to the naive observer, might seem to imply guilt, given the fact that a dead man had been found in my hotel room. But I knew the FBI must already have all that information anyway and my volunteering it, unprompted, ought to count for something. A small token in favor of my innocence perhaps.
Then questions about my travel route to New Orleans, which led to my telling them that there was an e-mailed boarding pass from United Airlines on my iPhone if they wanted to check it out. The agent pulled my iPhone from his pocket, and I typed in my passcode, accessed my e-mail, and showed him the boarding pass.
He didn’t ask me for my cell back, so I slipped it into my coat pocket. Things were looking up.
Until he shot a question about my “traveling companion” and whether we had flown together.
“First,” I shot back, “she’s not my ‘traveling companion.’ She’s my daughter. Second, yes, she traveled with her father so she could sit in the audience and watch me deliver my message to the A
merican Bar Association. Witnessed by, oh, I’d say maybe a thousand lawyers and judges at the convention center. All of which you already know, of course, considering that your FBI agents were there and must have caught my speech, because the millisecond it was over, they grabbed me and whisked me off the stage.”
That’s when there was a quick eye contact back and forth between the agents, followed, finally, by an interrogation into the heart of the matter. Namely, what exactly did I know about Paul Pullmen, assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice in Washington?
“I never met Mr. Pullmen personally,” I explained. “I handled a white-collar crime case in New York City once that was being reviewed by the DOJ in Washington, and I saw Pullmen’s name on correspondence as the supervising attorney overseeing the case. So from that I knew about Mr. Pullmen’s position at DOJ.”
“Did you ever talk to him back then?”
“No. Only through his deputy, another lawyer I happened to know at DOJ, a guy named Gil Spencer. Once upon a time Gil and I both worked in the New York City public defender’s office for a short period. Anyway, having some knowledge of DOJ personnel, I speculated that Mr. Pullmen would be the logical person for me to try to contact in the Forester matter.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. The death in Washington, DC, of Assistant US Attorney Jason Forester.”
Agent Fainlock eyed me closely on that one, which came as no surprise. That immediately led to a waterfall of questions from him, all having to do with why I would have any interest in the Forester matter in the first place.
“A friend of mine is in law enforcement,” I explained. “A police detective. He had some inside information about the death of Attorney Forester, and he shared it with me. And that piqued my interest. Plus the fact that there might be an occult connection, which is an area of special interest to me.”
The agent’s eyes widened slightly. “And the detective’s name is?”
The Empowered Page 4