Breach of Trust
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
TRIALS - March-June 2007
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
ADVICE OF COUNSEL - Six Months Later: December 2007
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
DEEPER - February 2008
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
THE GOVERNOR - March 2008
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
CLOSING STATEMENT
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
ALSO BY DAVID ELLIS
The Hidden Man*
Eye of the Beholder
In the Company of Liars
Jury of One
Life Sentence
Line of Vision
*A Jason Kolarich Novel
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2011 by David Ellis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellis, David, date.
Breach of trust / David Ellis.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-48635-1
PS3555.L59485B74
2011
2010036875
813’.6—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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To Julia Grace Ellis, my little treasure
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
—SUN-TZU, CHINESE GENERAL AND MILITARY STRATEGIST (ATTRIBUTED), FIFTH CENTURY B.C.
Unless your enemy’s wearing a wire.
—CIRIACO “CHARLIE” CIMINO, POLITICAL FUNDRAISER, 2007
OPENING STATEMENT
I AM RECOUNTING THIS STORY IN CASE I AM NOT AROUND WHEN THE dust settles. If some unfortunate accident should befall me, as they say, and I am unable to testify, I want to have some account of what I did and why. I will not try to justify my actions. I could tell you that they made me do it, but that’s hardly the point, and it may not be entirely accurate.
I won’t lie to you, which is to say I will not deliberately mislead you. I will give you the most accurate account of events I can muster, but I can’t promise it will be the truth. Truth is a matter of perspective, and if you don’t believe me, then just watch how this whole thing plays out. Everyone who is a part of this story will tell a different version, when their time comes. In most of those versions, the hero will be whoever is telling the story.
In many of those versions, no doubt, the villain will be me.
TRIALS
March-June 2007
1
IF ERNESTO RAMIREZ HAD BEEN A BETTER LIAR, HE’D still be alive.
If he had told me right off the bat, or never given me the slightest indication that he had anything to tell me, I would have been on my merry way.
Joel Lightner was the private investigator. I was the lawyer. We were in Liberty Park, by which I mean not the southwest-side neighborhood bearing its name but the actual park itself, a city block of unhealthy grass and broken-down playground equipment, with a war-torn aluminum fence on the perimeter and a large wooden park district building with more graffiti on it than actual paint. The spray-painted gang insignia was an even split between the Columbus Street Cannibals and the Latin Lords. This was La Zona, disputed territory claimed by each of the gangs.
Almost two years ago to the day, exactly a half-mile straight west from this park, a small business owner named Adalbert Wozniak took five bullets to the chest, neck, and face. My client, State Senator Hector Almundo, was charged with his murder.
Nobody
thought that Hector had pulled the trigger, of course. The Wozniak murder was part of a larger federal prosecution that went like this: Senator Almundo, harboring ambitions to be the state’s next attorney general, had cut a deal with the Cannibals street gang to shake down local businesses for monthly payments—an old-fashioned street protection tax—which the Cannibals then shared with Hector’s campaign fund. The government figured that the take was roughly a fifty-fifty split between Hector and the Cannibals. That meant that, over an eighteen-month period, Citizens for Almundo took in about a hundred thousand dollars courtesy of the Cannibals’ extortion of local businesses.
Anyway, Wozniak was one of those business owners but refused to pay. The feds figured that the Cannibals decided to teach Wozniak a lesson and send a message to other like-minded dissenters that the street tax wasn’t optional. The message was sent well enough that Wozniak’s family couldn’t have an open casket at his funeral.
But the feds charged the whole thing, from the shakedown to the murder, as a conspiracy—their favorite word, that one—which meant that all of the crimes that were a part of the overall scheme could be attributed to all of the co-conspirators. Thus, State Senator Hector Almundo, as the supposed architect of the whole extortion scheme, was on the hook for the murder of Adalbert Wozniak, regardless of who pulled the trigger or who made the ultimate decision to pull it.
Joel Lightner and I passed a group of kids playing soccer, using anything they could find—a stone, a brick, a backpack—to frame their goals. I narrowly missed an appointment with a flying soccer ball, which made the kids howl in laughter almost in unison. I felt more than a decade and a half removed from that carefree bliss, having no other responsibility than to run around in a field chasing after a ball, though my sport was the American version of football.
Ernesto Ramirez was standing near the basketball court, in part observing and in part refereeing a four-on-four game of half-court hoops. The backboard was tattered and the rim had no net, but it didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the kids, who looked to be ages six through mid-teens. Ernesto was shouting something to them in Spanish I couldn’t place. I spoke the language pretty well but had trouble keeping up with native speakers.
“We can talk right here,” he said to us, which wasn’t our preference but we didn’t have any leverage over him. I wasn’t used to that. Until recently, I’d been a county prosecutor, where the failure to cooperate meant an arrest for obstruction.
It didn’t take long to learn that Ramirez knew of Senator Almundo, the criminal case, and Adalbert Wozniak. “I didn’t know Wozniak,” he said. He spoke well but it was clear that English was his second language.
“Did you know Eddie Vargas?” asked Lightner.
After Wozniak’s murder, eyewitness accounts of the make and model of a Chevy sedan, together with partial license plate identification, led police to discover what they believed to be the killer’s vehicle in a dump several miles away. The feds used some of their fancy forensic technology to conclude, from sediment found within the tire tracks, that the vehicle had spent some time parked behind a housing project controlled by the Columbus Street Cannibals. They also found a print on the rearview mirror that belonged to a sixteen-year-old Cannibal recruit named Eddie Vargas. When the FBI raided Vargas’s home, they found a small pistol, a Kahr MK40, which could be mistaken for a metal spray nozzle on a garden hose, and which they confirmed was the murder weapon. Young Mr. Vargas has never been located and is strongly believed to have suffered an unfortunate accident of one kind or another, probably involving a machete, the Cannibals’ weapon of choice when silencing potential talkers. Bottom line, the feds had their shooter, and he was a Cannibal, but that shooter wouldn’t be talking.
Ernesto Ramirez stared forward in the direction of the hoops game, but his eyes weren’t tracking the players or the movement of the ball. He’d drifted away momentarily at the mention of the name.
“Eddie was a sixteen-year-old kid,” he said. “A sweet kid.”
Though Ramirez was only thirty-two, his skin was weathered and his wavy dark hair was flecked with gray. He was a former Latin Lord member and drug addict who had managed to break free of both problems, but not without some residual wear. He spent his time these days running youth programs to provide alternatives to gangs. Eddie Vargas had been one of those youths.
“He didn’t shoot nobody,” Ramirez added.
Lightner shrugged. “The federal government is saying he did. Can you help us out?”
Ramirez’s jaw clenched and his left eye twitched. He was still making a show of watching that stupid basketball game. But I thought he was thinking. His mouth parted and his tongue moistened his lips, like he was on the verge of speaking.
“Senator Almundo shouldn’t have to go down for something he didn’t do,” Joel said.
Ramirez snapped out of his trance, turning on Joel. A vein throbbed near his left eye. “Hector Almundo can go to hell. I don’t know nothin’ about this, anyway. I can’t ‘help you out.’ Okay, guy?”
Another satisfied customer, Joel would say; I’d done a few of these interviews with him. Joel tried a couple more times, but Ernesto Ramirez wasn’t going to budge.
“Almundo shouldn’t go down for something he didn’t do?” I said to Joel, when we got back in his car.
Joel laughed. “It sounded good at the time.” Neither of us thought we were representing an innocent man. We didn’t think Hector had ordered a hit on Adalbert Wozniak, but the part about working out a deal with the Cannibals to shake down the local businesses? We figured the government had that part right.
“ ‘He didn’t shoot nobody,’ ”I said, quoting Ramirez.
“He was speaking well of his friend. Doesn’t mean he has any information. A dead end, kid,” Joel pronounced. “Mr. Ernesto Ramirez doesn’t know anything.”
Maybe. But I thought differently. Joel was pretty good with these things, but I thought he’d made a misstep. I thought Ernesto was about to tell us something back there, before Joel had invoked a name that clearly upset Ramirez and knocked him off the rails.
Joel kicked his Audi into gear and drove off. I looked back at Liberty Park.
Ernesto Ramirez was watching us drive away.
2
I REACHED OVER WITH BLEARY EYES AND TOOK A GOOD whack at my alarm clock. My head sank back into the pillow until I got a nudge in my rib cage.
“It’s five, babe.”
I rolled over and peeked up at my wife, Talia, who was sitting up in bed, wide awake.
“Can’t sleep?” I moaned. “Your back still?” I nestled up against her warm body and moved my hand onto the hump of her belly. Technically, the due date was ten days away, but Doctor Waite said it could be anytime. “Hurry up, Emily Jane. Daddy’s big trial is starting soon. I want to see you as much as possible before—She kicked.” I popped up in bed. “I felt her.”
Emily Jane—we’d already named her—had made an art of kicking for her mommy but never for me.
“She’s been doing that for over an hour.” Talia ran her hand through my hair. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
“A few hours.” I was trying to get as much done for the Almundo trial as I could before I had to take some time off for the arrival of Emily Jane. Her due date was five days before jury selection.
There were all sorts of reasons for me not to work as second chair on the Almundo trial, given Emily’s impending arrival. But there were even more reasons for me to take the assignment. Starting with this: Every single associate at Shaker, Riley and Flemming would give a major organ to be in my position. This case could make my career if it went well. And it was the chance to work alongside Paul Riley, our senior partner and, by most people’s accounts, the best trial lawyer in the city. I was new to Shaker, Riley and to private practice in general when Hector Almundo walked through the door and hired Paul to defend him in one of the biggest public corruption cases the city had ever seen. I don’t know what I did to catch Paul’s att
ention. I’d handled a few projects for him but nothing huge. Maybe he’d asked about me at the county attorney’s office, where I’d cut my teeth before landing at the firm. I didn’t know and didn’t care. I said “yes” to this assignment before it was out of Paul’s mouth. I couldn’t have known at the time that my wife and I would be expecting our first child just as the trial opened.
I warmed up a couple of breakfast sandwiches in the microwave and brought them up to Talia before I left for work. Last week, these sausage-and-egg biscuits would have made her gag; this week she couldn’t live without them. “I miss coffee,” she told me. She’d forsworn it, even though her doctor told her she could have a little caffeine now and then. This was our first, and Talia was taking no chances.
Even sleep-deprived and uncomfortable, my wife was a classic Italian beauty. I wiped her flattened bangs off her forehead and kissed her there, then her nose and cheeks and soft, warm mouth. “I miss sex,” I told her. “Unless—”
“Sorry, mate. If you touch my boobs, I’ll scream.” She pulled on my tie. “Get home early, okay?” By early, she meant some time before she went to bed.
“And keep that cell phone handy,” she added.
3
“THE TAPES, THE TAPES, AND THE TAPES,” SAID PAUL Riley, his feet up on his desk and his tie pulled down. “That’s what it comes down to. Hector’s own words caught on tape.”
“And Joey Espinoza,” said our investigator, Joel Lightner. Joey Espinoza was Senator Hector Almundo’s chief of staff. The feds, who had caught wind of the Cannibals’ shakedown scheme as early as February of 2005, liked Espinoza for one of the ringleaders. Thus, one early morning in April of 2005, as Joey Espinoza carried a mug of coffee and briefcase to his car, FBI agents stormed his garage and did what FBI agents do best—they scared the shit out of him. They told him his life, as he knew it, was over. They had him cold. His only chance of survival? Wear a wire and help them nail his boss, Senator Hector Almundo.