by Alan Bell
“So it’s absolutely impossible that any personal items of yours are in this suitcase?”
“Yes, that’s what I say,” the defendant repeated.
“You’re sure of that? As sure as you are that this cocaine is not yours?” I demanded.
“Yes,” he said.
I dismissed him from the stand, saying I had no further questions for the witness. This left the defense attorney gloating, thinking I’d gotten nowhere. Even the judge—a close friend of mine—said, “You’re in trouble, Alan,” when we happened to meet during a recess. “You’re not going to win this case.”
I laughed. “Just relax, buddy. You’ll see.”
During closing arguments, I had a field day. I went easy during the first part, but after the defense attorney finished his closing argument, I took the suitcase and easel and put them right in front of the jury. Then I removed a pair of shoes from the suitcase and asked the defendant to try them on. “Your Honor, can you please order this defendant to try on these shoes?”
They fit. The defense attorney was still gloating; I knew he’d argue that the shoes were a common size.
But then I pulled a shirt out of the suitcase, too, saying, “Well, let’s see what else is in here. Wow, what do you know. A shirt! And look at these initials on it right here!”
I went over to the easel and circled the three initials of the defendant’s name—written in his own handwriting—showed the jury that the initials on the shirt matched, then said, “Your Honor, please order the defendant to try on the shirt.”
Of course, the shirt fit. I smiled at the jury and said, “The State has nothing further. Thank you.”
The jury was out all of five minutes before they returned to the courtroom and convicted him. I was getting better, making good on my resolutions.
• • •
During my time with the State Attorney’s office, I prosecuted tens of thousands of cases. Hundreds of these involved the Mafia or drug cartel criminals. People often asked if I was scared for my own life, but I wasn’t. I figured that prosecutors were a dime a dozen. If they murdered me, the State could always find another prosecutor to try the case.
My career was exhilarating, but it was also exhausting, demanding twelve-hour days and involving frequent adrenaline rushes while working closely with local police departments. The cops often put me on the front lines as they made their busts. They didn’t want the criminals getting off because of procedural or technical errors, so I accompanied them as an on-site legal advisor to make sure everything stuck in court.
Working with the police was like being thrown into a real-life Miami Vice. I sped around in cop cars with sirens screaming and joined SWAT teams on drug busts and raids. I flew to crime scenes in helicopters and landed on remote airstrips in the Everglades. I even rode in police speedboats, giving chase to smugglers. On these raids, I typically wore a badge and bulletproof vest. I also carried a .357 Magnum four-inch-barrel pistol in a shoulder holster in case things turned really ugly.
Although at times South Florida felt like the Wild West, it was gratifying work. I felt like I was making a difference.
I had no idea how abruptly my exciting career was about to end, or how important these early courtroom lessons would be to me later in life.
3 • FAMILY LIFE
IN 1982, I ATTENDED MY ten-year Coral Park High School reunion at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. I’d dressed up for the occasion in one of my favorite charcoal-gray gray three-piece suits and spent the first part of the evening catching up with classmates I hadn’t seen in years.
Suddenly, a waiter brought me a drink on the house. Then one more, and another.
The drinks kept coming, but whenever I asked the waiter who was sending them, all he’d say was, “You have a secret admirer.” I looked around the room, yet I had no idea who it might be.
Eventually, an attractive woman walked up to me and said, “I’m Susan. Did you like the drinks?”
Although Susan had been in my high school class, she might as well have gone to school on another planet. Our social circles never intersected. I was an overweight, pimply percussionist who had actually been to band camp and enjoyed it. She was runner-up to the Homecoming Queen with a star quarterback for a boyfriend. Need I say more?
Yet, by some stroke of luck, this attractive, friendly, auburn-haired woman made it abundantly clear that she was interested in me. Susan was divorced from her first husband and had moved back in with her mother. She worked full-time as the manager of a medical practice, but seemed eager to fit into my busy world. We began dating seriously, and she made a point of getting close to my mother. We moved in together two years later; when I proposed marriage, she offered to convert to Judaism without me asking.
Susan and I were married in 1986 and built a brand-new house in the upscale neighborhood of Coral Springs outside of Fort Lauderdale. She was sweet and attentive, got along well with my family, and didn’t seem to mind that our social life consisted of my family, friends, and work colleagues.
Looking back on things now, I realize how immature I was when we got married. I didn’t know what depths of communication every good marriage requires. I hadn’t had many long-term relationships with women because I started dating later in life. I simply accepted Susan as she was and felt grateful that she didn’t mind my busy schedule. She seemed happy to quit her job, and we had a maid who took most of the housework off Susan’s shoulders, leaving her free to socialize with her own friends during the day, shop, or go to the gym.
When we were together, Susan was enthusiastic and athletic enough to keep up with any adventure I suggested. We traveled a great deal whenever I could get time off from work. We took trips through Europe and went skiing in Colorado. We played racquetball on weekends and took scuba diving lessons together before embarking on a fabulous diving trip to the Cayman Islands. In the evenings, we ate out whenever I got home early enough, and we went to the movies a lot. Weekends were spent socializing with my law practice colleagues.
Susan got along well with my sister, Judi, too. I really appreciated this because Judi and I had always been close. During our adolescent years, Bobby was the athlete in the family and I was the musician; he and I often got into scrapes and egged each other on during our various adventures, like wrapping houses with toilet paper. Many times, we drove our poor mother to say, “You boys just wait until your father gets home. He’s going to hear about this!”
Judi, on the other hand, was a quiet, intellectual kid who always had her nose in a book. Because my father frequently worked long hours and I was six years older than Judi, my little sister looked up to me as a surrogate father in his absence. If she ran into any kind of trouble, she could always count on me for protection. When it was time for her to go to college, I was the one who drove her to Gainesville and helped her move into her dormitory. I visited Judi about once a week during the time she lived in Gainesville, and later I helped her find her first job.
When Judi earned her chiropractic license and opened an office in Deerfield Beach, Susan worked right alongside my family as we helped Judi launch her career and make a success of her fledgling practice. Susan helped select the location—she was the only one of us who was experienced in managing a medical practice—and chose the teal carpeting and the linen-white walls for Judi’s office décor. Bobby provided the seed money to get things up and running, and my father handed out fliers advertising free initial visits to get patients into her office. I loved it that Susan was so willing to pitch in whenever it came to family activities.
It didn’t take long before I realized that balancing a family with my work at the State Attorney’s Office would be much more difficult now that I had a wife to consider. Even when I was out all night investigating crime scenes, my schedule demanded that I still return to the office the morning after, often preparing for back-to-back trials. Sometimes I’d have to face up to ten new cases a day.
I was extremely earnest and idealistic a
bout practicing law. However, since I’d been raised in a traditional household, where my father was the one who worked long hours so my mother could be at home with the children, I decided it was time to take another professional leap. I wanted to provide better financial support for Susan and, hopefully, for our children one day. I had grown up with the benefits of a happy, secure family life, and now I longed to recreate that scenario for my own kids.
It felt like the right time to look for an opportunity in private practice, learn about civil litigation, and do defense work. I accepted a position with an insurance defense firm representing Travelers Insurance Company and Fortune 500 companies. This career move not only provided a significant pay raise, but also afforded me opportunities to keep learning as a litigator. I didn’t stop there, though: I also represented private practice plaintiffs during my off hours.
I took criminal cases that interested me—usually for teenagers or the elderly—that I often defended pro bono. I was focused on reaching out to the underdog partly because I always carried that chubby band geek inside, the one who was counseled in high school to apply to trade schools because he wasn’t “college material.” I knew what it felt like to be kicked around.
Fulfilled by my marriage and my career, I was riding high, making my parents proud and embracing every challenge that came my way.
My life was transformed once again in 1988, when Susan gave birth to our daughter, Ashlee. She went into labor on Super Bowl Sunday while we were having breakfast with friends. I took Susan to the hospital and stayed by her side through the birth of our blessedly healthy daughter. Of course, I thought Ashlee was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen.
I left the hospital at 5 o’clock in the morning after kissing my wife and child. Despite having been up all night, I felt energized and drove straight to work. As the sun rose over I-95, the inky black sky faded and then brightened to pink while I experienced the most incredible feeling of joy. This was a new dawn in my life. I vowed to be as loving a parent to Ashlee as my own parents had been to me. The word dawn meant so much to me that we gave it to Ashlee as her middle name.
In the months to come, I worked harder than ever while Susan stayed home with Ashlee. She had become president of a local Jewish group in Fort Lauderdale and socialized with the women she met there. She also took Ashlee to Mommy & Me classes and worked out at the gym. On evenings and weekends, she and I reveled in parenthood together. We took Ashlee everywhere: to the beaches and parks, to restaurants, and to visit family and friends.
I embraced my blessed life with no foreshadowing of what was to come. Maybe that was a good thing, given what I would soon have to endure.
• • •
Shortly after I began working at my new law firm at 110 Tower, I began experiencing odd symptoms. I’d wake up in the morning and feel fine until I reached the office. After an hour or so there, my sinuses would clog up. My eyes burned and my nose seemed to run constantly. I couldn’t swim in the usual community pool without my eyes and skin stinging from the chlorine, and I felt increasingly short of breath any time I exerted myself swimming. I tried pool after pool with the same results. Yet I felt fine whenever I swam in the ocean, and at home on weekends I was usually well enough to take a walk with Susan and Ashlee.
One day in 1989, I suffered an intense episode of vertigo. Even worse, this time the dizziness was accompanied by a high fever, sore throat, and aching joints.
I was thirty-five years old, healthy and fit, still running and working out in the gym every day. It must be the flu, I told Susan. What else could it be?
“Hey, buddy, do you know a good doctor?” I asked a friend. “I don’t have my own physician. I think I’m coming down with something.”
My friend sent me to his internal medicine practitioner, who thought I probably had a virus. The doctor prescribed antibiotics “just in case.”
In time, my symptoms improved, though they didn’t go away completely. I still felt like I was fighting off a low-grade cold.
About three months later, I experienced a relapse. This time I suffered from an even higher fever. Incredible hot flashes swept through my body like flash fires, causing me to feel so nauseated that I would vomit. It felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. Even climbing stairs was a challenge, despite the fact that I’d been running over three miles every morning since college.
I returned to the doctor and told him about the relapse.
“We’ll put you on a different antibiotic, something stronger,” he said confidently and sent me away again.
He was the guy wearing the white coat, so I followed his instructions to the letter. I carried Ashlee in my arms into the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription, wearing a surgical mask to prevent her from catching whatever strange virus I had.
The antibiotics helped, but I still wasn’t myself. Whenever I tried running, my knee joints felt like they were on fire, so I stopped. Even working out on the machines in the gym was too much for me. I constantly felt like I had the flu: exhausted, wrung out, occasionally feverish, and wheezing for breath.
“What do you think it is, Alan?” Susan kept asking. “I’m worried about you. Maybe you ought to get another antibiotic or something. It seems like this thing is still hanging on.”
“I probably just need more time,” I reassured her. “I think I’m just burning myself out by working too many hours.”
I tried slowing down my pace at work, taking on fewer cases and sometimes handing things off to my coworkers. Occasionally, I even worked from home if I felt really terrible; still, after a few hours, I had trouble concentrating. I’d sit up in bed to work on a case, and the minute I opened up my legal books, my eyes would start burning. I couldn’t understand it.
Our social life slowly began drying up. I started declining invitations to dinner or the movies, avoiding social situations the same way someone who’s coming down with the flu might. I just wanted to lie on the sofa in front of the TV and go to bed early. Susan tried hard not to complain, but every now and then she’d turn to me with a beseeching look and say, “Really? You want to stay home again? But it’s Saturday night, Alan! Can’t we at least go out for a little while?”
“I just can’t do it,” I’d tell her. “I’m too exhausted and sick. You go.”
To her credit, Susan stayed home with me most evenings despite her obvious restlessness. And, no matter how lousy I felt, I continued doing my best to be a good father. I spent time with Ashlee on weekends any way my limited health would allow. Sometimes, if my energy level was particularly low, all I could do was take her for a spin in my car. That was fine with Ashlee: my daredevil daughter loved racing around corners in our neighborhood with the top down and feeling the wind blowing through her fiery red hair.
Whenever I felt well enough, I took Ashlee to the playground so she could toddle around with other kids. Ashlee was over a year old by then; it was agony to watch her master crawling and then walking without feeling well enough to play with her. All I could do was watch her and marvel at all the new things my little girl was learning and doing.
The third time I relapsed, I ran a high fever and felt so weak and dizzy that I could hardly stand up. I felt not only frustrated, but angry, too. Being sick was never part of my life’s plan. Not one of my inspirational Zig Ziglar tapes had ever covered illness. There was no such thing as a problem without a solution! Not unless you were a total loser!
I still believed that if you worked hard enough, you could achieve any goal. Obviously, I wasn’t working hard enough to kick this illness. I would look for a different doctor, I decided, because the one I’d seen so far must be incompetent.
By the time I found a new physician—recommended by another colleague—my fever had soared to 104 degrees. My ears were ringing, my vision was blurred, everything hurt, and I was wheezing and spitting up green sputum. This doctor put me on a course of even stronger antibiotics. He also prescribed an additional medication.
“Here,” he said.
“I want you to take these steroids, too. That should help with your breathing.”
I took the antibiotics and religiously sprayed the steroid into my nose as directed. In my view, these doctors were professionals, the next step down from God when it came to health. I never thought to question anything they prescribed.
The next morning, I felt slightly better. I knew that Susan was at the end of her rope with my health complaints, so I suggested that we put Ashlee into her stroller and go out with another couple, my former prosecuting partner, Andy, and his wife. We went to the local Coral Springs carnival, where I was determined to enjoy the day.
It was a beautiful day, the sort of sunny afternoon in early spring that draws people trapped in snow-burdened states to Florida. A salty breeze blew in from the Atlantic as I pushed Ashlee in her stroller past craft vendors selling brightly colored goods. The air was redolent with delicious smells from the Cuban and Latin American food stalls all around us.
Suddenly, I started sweating profusely; waves of nausea swept over me. “Not again,” I thought, as I gripped the handles of the stroller and struggled to stay upright.
It was as if all of the blood were being drained out of my body. My brain was like a loose light bulb, slowly blinking on and off: one second I was there, the next second I was gone. My legs gave out from under me. I would have hit the ground if Andy hadn’t grabbed me around the waist and helped me to a park bench.
My head was spinning, and it seemed like everything was coming toward me at top speed. At the same time, everything was bizarrely happening in slow motion. I wondered if this was what it felt like to die.
“What’s wrong, Alan?” Andy asked.
“I don’t know,” I managed to wheeze.
“We’re having the devil of a time figuring out what’s going on with him,” Susan said.
I closed my eyes, worrying that my wife’s patience with my ongoing problems might start wearing thin. What if she lost her patience altogether? She’d married a dynamic, athletic prosecutor. Now I could barely push our daughter’s stroller.