Breach of Trust

by David Ellis

  He went on for a while, and it seemed to me that I had been excused. I wanted to have a few more carefully selected, four-letter words with Mr. Cimino, but I forced myself to stay true to what I was doing. If I’d acted in character, I’d be off this job after less than a week, and none of my questions would be answered.

  “Wait, kid, there’s something else.” Cimino rifled through some papers on his desk. “Right. Here. This was a contract that Corrections put out for sanitation. I don’t have the details but Patrick will. The two lowest bidders on the job—I think there are questions about their qualifications. Okay?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that.

  “I need a memo discussing whether they’re responsible bidders, okay?” he said, as if I were trying his patience. “Make one of those arguments Hector says you’re so good at. That’s all.” He waved at me like I was a peasant and turned back to the window.

  On my way back out, I passed an office where a woman was talking on the phone while she typed on a computer keyboard. Something struck a chord, but I couldn’t place her, on the cloudy periphery of my memory. She didn’t notice me, providing me a moment to stare at her. Nothing particularly remarkable about her—late twenties, light-brown skin, pretty features, typical work attire. Something told me not to linger, to avoid a face-to-face with this woman, which made me even more curious—my subconscious was signaling me but I didn’t know why.

  I stepped past the doorway and approached the front desk, with the beauty queen. She was on the phone and ignoring me, providing me a moment to linger. I did my best impression of someone waiting patiently to ask a question, while my eyes scanned the desk around her until I found a list of phone extensions on a white piece of paper taped to her desk. I ran down the twenty-some list of last names opposite the extensions. Before I’d reached the bottom, my eyes popped back to a familiar name.

  Espinoza.

  Right. The woman in the office was Lorena Espinoza, wife of Joey Espinoza, the principal witness against Hector Almundo. She was in court every day that Joey was on the stand, always wearing a defiant expression and ready with a scowl for any lawyer.

  We’d looked hard at Joey as we prepared for trial, and looking hard at someone includes looking at his family. Lorena, if memory served, was a stay-at-home mother of three whose education was limited to high school. As far as we could tell—and we looked closely at Joey Espinoza’s finances for evidence of bribes—Lorena had not worked or contributed any income to her family for a decade.

  But now here she was, sitting in an expansive, elaborately appointed office, hired by one Ciriaco Cimino.

  Life, it seemed, was full of coincidences.

  21

  THE NEXT DAY, AT THE STATE OFFICE, I WAS LOOKING over the Department of Corrections contract Charlie Cimino had mentioned when Patrick Lemke jumped through my doorway.

  “You’re looking at the DOC sanitation contract,” he said. “The top two bidders.” He dropped a couple of big files on my desk. “This is the background information. Looks like each of them has had some problems on jobs in the past. It probably won’t be hard to find them not responsible.”

  Another term of art in this world. All bidders who won contracts had to be found “responsible.” Otherwise, anyone could put in a lowball bid and win a lucrative contract, and then have no idea how to perform it.

  I looked up at Lemke, though he was staring at the wall, that eye-contact problem he had. “Who said I was going to find them not responsible?”

  “Well . . .” Patrick shifted his feet, stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I mean, why else would Mr. Cimino want you to—”

  “So let me see if I have this right,” I said. “Cimino wants to eighty-six the two lowest bidders. I take it, then, that Cimino has some reason that he wants the third lowest bidder to get the contract?” I flipped through some papers. “Higgins Sanitation is the third lowest. So Charlie wants to fix it so that Higgins gets the contract, and he wants me to make it happen?”

  Patrick didn’t seem to like my framing matters so on-the-nose. But it was clear that my summary was accurate.

  “Patrick, what’s with this guy, Cimino? I mean, how’s he in charge of this?”

  Patrick stood still and said, “He’s an adviser to the governor. Unofficially. He offers guidance. Our direction is to follow it.”

  It felt like he’d said this before, like it came right after name, rank, and serial number.

  Patrick pranced to the door again but put on the brakes so abruptly that I thought he might pull a muscle. “Jason?” he said to the wall, though I think he was talking to me.

  “Yes, Patrick?”

  “You should do what Mr. Cimino says,” he advised me, before disappearing.

  22

  DURING HECTOR ALMUNDO’S TRIAL, WHICH CENTERED around contributions to Hector’s campaign fund, I became acquainted with the website administered by the State Board of Elections. Through its searchable database, you could track campaign contributions made by any particular person, as well as receipts by any particular campaign fund.

  I did a search for the company Charlie Cimino was trying to help, Higgins Sanitation.

  The database showed that, prior to this calendar year, Higgins had made a grand total of zero campaign contributions. Not a dime.

  But in the past year, Higgins had become more generous in opening its wallet. In the last nine months, Higgins Sanitation had made two contributions to our new governor, Carlton Snow, to the tune of thirty thousand dollars.

  Another coincidence, I’m sure.

  Next I turned to the other fix that Charlie wanted from me—the school bus contract, which I was supposed to say was so unique that only a single company in the entire state could perform it. The company Charlie wanted for the job was Swift Transportation.

  I searched the database and got no hits for Swift Transportation. No political contributions from that company.

  But then I searched the campaign fund of Governor Carlton Snow. When I searched for “Swift,” I didn’t get that company, of course, but there were contributions from “Swift, Leonard J.”

  Turned out that Leonard J. Swift had also contributed thirty thousand dollars to Governor Snow. And it only took two minutes on Google to confirm that Leonard J. Swift was the founder and CEO of Swift Transportation.

  Yet another coincidence. Companies contributing thirty thousand dollars to Governor Snow’s campaign fund were becoming remarkably proficient at obtaining lucrative state contracts.

  “Enough,” I said aloud, though I was alone. I got the picture.

  I thought again about Jon Soliday’s words: Cover yourself.

  Now it was time to do the work Charlie wanted me to do. I reviewed the prison sanitation contracts, the documents Patrick Lemke had left me, and some court decisions on the subject of what it meant to be a “responsible” bidder in this state. In the end, it wasn’t a close call. Each of these bidders was more than amply qualified, and my two-page memorandum summarized it as follows:Each of the two lowest bidders for this contract qualifies as a “responsible” bidder under the Code. Either of them is perfectly qualified to be awarded this sanitation contract.

  Next it was the school bus contract. This one took even less time. How could anyone argue that driving kids in a school bus is a unique skill? My conclusion:As multiple, qualified bidders could provide the busing services identified in this contract, the contract is subject to sealed competitive bidding. Swift Transportation, Inc., is by no means the only company capable of performing this contract.

  I smiled when I printed out the two memos—no emails, I was told—and threw them into my bag. I just wished I could see the look on Cimino’s face when he read them.

  Sorry, Higgins Sanitation. Sorry, Leonard J. Swift.

  Sorry, Charlie.

  23

  I WENT BACK TO THE STATE BUILDING AFTER REGULAR business hours. I was hungry and I longed for a burger and milkshake, but I was short on time. Charlie Cimino would b
e bouncing me from this job any day now, after I defied his orders. Before that happened, I wanted some private time with the PCB files. It took me a while to find the cabinets that held that “old” PCB files, from back when the board fell under the lieutenant governor’s office, but eventually I got there.

  Once I found the old files, it didn’t take me long to navigate them. The scope of the PCB under then-Lieutenant Governor Snow was relatively small compared to its gargantuan reach under Snow as governor. It didn’t take me long to find the contract for beverage supplies that Adalbert Wozniak’s company, ABW Hospitality, had tried to secure.

  I knew most of the facts from the lawsuit ABW had filed when it lost the contract. The contract had been let under sealed, competitive bidding, and ABW had been the lowest bidder. But the PCB had made the decision that ABW was not “responsible” because of some prior lawsuit that had been filed over a previous catering contract. Sound familiar?

  The legal memorandum in the file disqualifying ABW was crap. Everyone sued everyone these days. It was just another part of doing business. I had no doubt that the lawyer who wrote this was doing so at the direction of Charlie Cimino or someone like him.

  The next part of the file was even more interesting: It was a legal document prepared by the Office of the Inspector General—I didn’t have great familiarity with that office—detailing an interview with Adalbert Wozniak over his concern with the bidding procedures for this beverage supply contract. Wozniak had apparently pleaded his case to the inspector general, who ultimately concluded, in typical bureaucratic/law enforcement jargon, that “no credible evidence existed” to indicate any impropriety in the sealed bidding process, and that the legal counsel’s determination that ABW was not a responsible bidder appeared to be “sound and even-handed.” The inspector general concluded that the matter would be “closed without referral.”

  Interesting. While preparing for Hector’s corruption trial and poring over all the documents and digital records and appointment books we had reviewed from Adalbert Wozniak’s office, I had never known that Wozniak had met with the state’s inspector general. Maybe it was there and we just missed it, or maybe Joel Lightner had followed up on the lead without success. I would have to ask.

  And maybe it didn’t mean a thing. But it seemed like Ernesto Ramirez thought so. I now had the “IG” to complete the nebulous initials on Ernesto’s note:ABW → PCB → IG → CC?

  ABW Hospitality had bid on a contract before the PCB; it had been the lowest bidder, which normally would have meant it got the contract, but then it was denied when the PCB determined the company was not “responsible.” Then Wozniak turned to the inspector general after being rejected. And the inspector general, if I was deciphering Ernesto’s notes correctly, had turned to Charlie Cimino. And then somebody turned to Adalbert Wozniak and pumped seven bullets into him.

  I wasn’t surprised by any of this. After having spent just a few days with the Procurement and Construction Board, it was clear to me that this place was a cesspool. Adalbert Wozniak had smelled a rat and hadn’t kept quiet. He went to the inspector general and made some kind of noise—what, exactly, he’d said, I couldn’t be sure. This brief report from the inspector general, dismissing Wozniak’s claims, looked like a whitewash.

  I needed to know more. And with Charlie Cimino sure to can my ass any day now, I was running out of time.

  24

  THE REST OF THE WEEK PASSED WITHOUT MY EVEN thinking about the Procurement and Construction Board, or Charlie Cimino, or anyone else. I stayed home from work on Thursday, worked about a half-day on Friday, and had an uneventful weekend. Shauna and I went to a movie Saturday night, but I lost focus halfway through and then I didn’t have an appetite for dinner afterward. I was finding it hard to be interested in much of anything; I didn’t even think my disinterest was interesting. I was tired of the malaise but that probably made it even harder to shake.

  I went to the state building on Monday morning, in preparation for the PCB meeting the following night. Patrick Lemke was bouncing around even more than usual. Strap a battery pack on his back and he could have been in commercials—he keeps going and going . . .

  Three other lawyers, also working for the PCB, were also milling about. I was introduced to each of them and forgot each of their names instantly. “You should meet Greg,” Patrick told me, meaning Greg Connolly, the chairman of the Procurement and Construction Board.

  Connolly had a medium-sized office on the floor above me. Patrick knocked on the door and introduced me. The board chairman was a big guy with graying hair that he tried to tamp down with hair grease, with moderate success. He wore a nice suit but he looked like a guy who might be more comfortable at a ball game wearing a sweatshirt. He had blotchy skin and droopy eyes and was about twenty pounds overweight. “I hope Hector bought you a nice dinner afterward,” he said. It shouldn’t have surprised me that everyone around state government had taken note when the feds lost a case. It didn’t happen often.

  “It was an interesting case,” I told him, because I never give an editorial on the outcome of a case to a stranger. Besides, I wasn’t sure how easily words like good or bad applied to Hector’s acquittal. I thought the feds and their stool pigeon, Joey Espinoza, had been overly ambitious, but that didn’t mean that Hector had been a Boy Scout, either.

  Connolly didn’t speak for a while, preferring to nod his head and smile at me while he sized me up. “You’ve done good work so far,” he said. “I’ve seen your work product. The memo on the DOC sanitation project—the two bidders who underbid Higgins Sanitation.”

  “Those bidders were well qualified,” I said.

  “Course they were.” He chuckled. “Course they were. That’s why I’m saying, good job.”

  Interesting that he would say that. I’d stood up to Charlie Cimino, and he seemed to be applauding me. And he was the chairman of the PCB. How did he rank compared to Cimino?

  “Charlie talked to you about the bus contract, too. I saw that analysis you did.”

  “There’s no way that’s a sole-source,” I said. “Providing a bus? A hundred companies could do it.”

  Connolly smiled with approval. I figured there must have been some kind of rift between Cimino and him, a turf battle. He tapped his fingers on his desk. “So, again, good job on that. You’ll do very well here, Jason, if you want to.”

  It wasn’t a question, as my former partner Paul Riley would have said, so I didn’t answer.

  But it was interesting. Greg Connolly had summoned me to his office to give me a pat on the back for defying Charlie Cimino.

  Why, I wondered, would he do that?

  I HUSTLED BACK TO my law office, where I had a one o’clock appointment, a client who had cold-called me yesterday about representation.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said to a man sitting in our small reception area. I took him back to my office. I probably should have offered him water or coffee but didn’t. I grabbed Shauna, whom I had asked to attend the meeting, because I was told the conversation would include some transactional issues, and I only did trial work. I was hoping I could throw Shauna some work, as she had done for me several times since I moved into these digs.

  “Jack Hauser,” the man said, introducing himself to Shauna and me. I could see from his hands and the weathering on his face that he worked in the trades. “Hauser Construction,” he said. “We’re located out west but we do a lot of subcontract work on jobs here in the city. Flooring, mostly.”

  He gave me the skinny on why he was here. He had an airport job and the city was screwing him. Also, he wanted to form a joint venture with another company for a downstate stadium renovation—transactional work that was Shauna’s domain.

  I nodded along as he spoke, scribbling notes on my pad of paper. “How’d you get my name?” I asked.

  He looked surprised. Most lawyers don’t look a gift client in the mouth. “How did I—I thought you did trial work and things like this.”

 
“I do, sure.”

  “You probably heard about that corruption case with that state senator?” Shauna said, pumping me up, and probably unhappy with the question I’d asked. It’s not good business to seem surprised that a client has come to your door. “Jason defended the senator and won.”

  Hauser nodded, like that rang a bell. He still hadn’t answered my question.

  Shauna said, “The joint venture shouldn’t be a problem. I did one last year for Ralph Reynolds. We’ll just have to be careful with any local business preferences.”

  I didn’t follow very much of what Shauna was saying, but it was clear that Jack Hauser did, and he seemed to like what he was hearing.

  “Okay. Well, you’re hired, obviously,” he said.

  I didn’t understand what was so “obvious” about that, but I wasn’t going to complain.

  “So, what do you charge?” he asked, preparing himself for the bad news.

  “Three hundred an hour,” I said. If it was low enough for the state, why not Jack Hauser, too?

  He didn’t seem to see it that way. He winced like I’d stuck him with a hot needle. “Any chance we can work on that?” He held out his hands. “I mean, okay, fine, I’ll hire you, but—any way to knock that number down?”

  We settled on two-fifty, which was still a decent chunk of change. He showed me the complaint the city filed, left me a retainer, and gave me some basic information on the case. Before the end of the day, I had signed an appearance to enter the case as counsel for Hauser Construction, which Marie took to court to file.

  Maybe, I thought, hanging a shingle in private practice wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. Shauna, dutifully impressed, offered to take me out to dinner of my choosing. “Doubling your clientele in ten days is cause for celebration,” she said. Actually, zero times two was still zero, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance to pick the restaurant, where I ordered two racks of barbecue ribs with extra vinegar and sweet-potato fries.