by David Ellis
But none of that changed the fact that he had a basis for charging me, and that I would be one of several defendants sitting at the defense table, when the prosecution tried a multiple-defendant case featuring scumbags like Charlie Cimino and Gregory Connolly. I’d be part of the conspiracy. And I’d be trying, probably in vain, to separate myself from these other pieces of garbage, trying to persuade the jury not to flush me down the toilet with the lot of them. By the time the jury got down to me on the verdict form, they’d be so disgusted that they’d just check “guilty” and hand the slip to the bailiff.
The one guy at the table who walks. It was possible, sure. But guilt by association is a cliché for a reason. It happens all the time, which is why the prosecution likes to try defendants together in these cases. And this is to say nothing of the very real possibility that some of these assholes would plead out and, in exchange for a lenient sentence, point the fingers at everyone they could. Cimino surely would swear that I advised him on how to evade the public-bidding requirements for the bus contract. He and Connolly and Patrick Lemke would be happy to swear that I wrote up a memo disqualifying the obviously qualified bidders who beat out Higgins Sanitation, and they would probably throw in a little bonus fabrication—like how I demanded getting outside legal work from Higgins’s partner, Jack Hauser, in exchange. I would tell the jury that I had no idea that Jack Hauser came to me as part of a kickback, but after hearing months of testimony about sordid dealings from the likes of Charlie Cimino and Greg Connolly, would a disgusted jury believe me?
Advice of counsel. It’s what all of them would say. We’re not lawyers; we relied on Kolarich to tell us what to do.
And even if I did manage to beat the rap, I was looking at a good twelve, eighteen months under the federal spotlight, my reputation ruined, my career shattered. People don’t equate “not guilty” with “innocent.” The burn heals with time, but it leaves a real nasty scar that I would wear forever. I would just be the guy who got away with it.
And then, for the kicker, there was Shauna. Would Chris Moody go after her, just to hook me in? I had no doubt that he would. When the government wants you, they get you, whatever it takes. She would get hauled in for questioning, her one-person law firm hit with a federal subpoena, and I couldn’t rule out the possibility of an indictment. All because she gave an office down the hall to an old friend, and I just happened to invite her to that meeting with Jack Hauser.
I couldn’t let that happen. I just couldn’t.
Moody had me, and we both knew it.
28
I MET PAUL RILEY AT THE MARITIME CLUB, WHERE only about a week ago I’d had lunch with Jon Soliday, who had warned me not to go near the Procurement and Construction Board. I longed for a do-over where I took Jon’s advice and tried a different angle for discovering who killed Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez. But I hadn’t, and now I was dealing with the mess.
“Anyplace but the law firm,” I’d said to Paul. I had not walked into Shaker, Riley since the day Talia and Emily died. I couldn’t stomach the pity or the awkward small talk. Someone there, at some point, had gathered together all my personal items from my office and delivered them to my house. I couldn’t even remember who it was. My memory of that entire stint with Shaker, Riley was much of a blur at this point.
When he showed up at the Maritime Club, Paul looked the same as I remembered him, fit, tan, well-dressed, comfortable in his own skin, quick with the self-deprecation when I asked about his nomination to the federal bench, pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “They’ve been trying to find people to say something nice about me,” he said, when I asked him about the delay. Closer to the truth was a hostile senate, slow-footing the judicial nominations of a president from the opposing party.
“You know you have a standing invite to return,” Paul told me, when we took our seats for lunch. “I won’t belabor it, but it’s there for the taking.”
My laugh was uneasy. Surely, Paul would rethink that invitation after this conversation.
In his lengthy career as a lawyer, Paul had done a lot, and there was very little he hadn’t seen. I don’t know where my plight fell on the spectrum, but as I began to explain it to him, I sensed it was personal to him, particularly as I mentioned characters from our trial together, not the least of whom was the prosecutor, Chris Moody. His face went tellingly blank when I told him I’d gotten involved with the PCB—he held his tongue-lashing, I suspect, because he knew it was going to get worse—and he was white as a sheet when I recounted my conversation last night with federal agents. I ran through everything while Paul listened silently. It was clear that he felt sorry for me, which was the last thing I wanted. I would have preferred a glass of cold water in the face, which I probably deserved.
“Well, we could fight it,” he said, after I’d rehashed everything. I appreciated the use of the word “we.” I had no doubt that Paul would step in to help me if asked. But I wouldn’t ask.
“This guy Cimino has made you the fall guy, Jason. My guess is, the feds know that, and if Chris had an ounce of decency, he’d let this go. You could tell him to go scratch his ass and see what happens. If he charges you, you fight it.”
That was certainly a possibility. “You think Moody would let it go?”
“Probably not,” said Paul, with his characteristic frankness. “He’d want everyone pointing fingers. They blame the lawyer, you blame them, and everyone goes down looking dirty.”
My thought exactly.
“Well.” Paul sighed, examined his fingernails. “You could get immunity and see what that costs you.”
“You know what it’ll cost me,” I said. “The supreme court would be very interested, too.” The state bar is controlled by our state supreme court, which handles lawyer misconduct. Even if I got immunity from prosecution, it wouldn’t be immunity from them. “I’d probably lose my license, Paul.”
“Oh, Jason, Jason.” He shook his head. Paul Riley was the best lawyer I’d ever worked with. It was like disappointing a parent. He looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “You could agree to immunity without stipulating to the charge—”
“Which gets me the same thing,” I said. “I’d still have to plead my case to the supremes.”
He didn’t have a rejoinder. I was right. We both knew it. If I took an immunity deal, I’d probably lose my law license, at least for a while.
Paul shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, so you won’t take immunity. You just sit back and hope they decide against charging you? I mean, that doesn’t sound—”
“Oh, I’m not going to just sit back,” I said. “I’m going to work for them.”
Paul chewed on that, drumming his fingers on the table. Someone told a joke a few tables away that left everyone in stitches. How I wished for that kind of frivolity right now.
“So you cooperate without a deal and hope for leniency later?”
“Fuck leniency,” I said. “I am never, ever going to plead guilty. Never.”
“Then I’m missing something. Why work for the G? Why go undercover? What does that buy you with them?”
Nothing. That’s what it would buy me. Absolutely nothing.
“You don’t want immunity or leniency,” he said. “So what do you want?”
I wasn’t sure what I wanted for myself. I knew what Talia would say, were she here. This would be one of her patient commentaries, with phrases like “hard-headed” finding their way in there.
“Oh,” Paul said. “You’re just pissed off. You want payback.”
I shrugged. “These assholes dragged me into their swamp. I should let them get away with it?”
“Jason. Jason.” Paul reached out a hand toward me. “Don’t do what you’re thinking. You’re mad at those guys—Cimino and the others. I get that. I would be, too. They made you an unwitting accomplice. But you have to look at the bigger picture. You have to think of yourself. Take immunity. Because otherwise, Chris Moody will let you do his bidding as a CI and then fuck
you afterward. He will, Jason. You know he will.”
Paul was making sense. I suppose I was the one who wasn’t. I would work as a confidential informant for the federal government without any promises from them.
“They screwed me, Paul. And they’re screwing the public, if I needed any further motivation. I’m not going to take that.”
“Fine, then work for the feds, but take the damn immunity, Jason. Don’t be a hero. Because I’m telling you, son, no one will be standing in line afterward to say ‘thank you.’ ”
But I didn’t need a thank-you. I just needed to stick to my principles. I didn’t do anything wrong. Taking immunity meant I did. No, if Chris Moody and his thugs wanted to chase after me on a bogus charge, then I’d have to deal with that when the time came. But I couldn’t let Charlie Cimino and the rest of them—whoever they were—walk away from this.
If I was going to lose everything, at least I was going to do it on my terms.
Paul grimaced as we stood at the doorway of the Maritime Club. “I don’t know how much help I was, my friend. I think you already had your mind made up.”
“I needed your input. And you gave it to me. You told me I’m completely nuts.”
“You’re standing on principle, Jason. I admire that. I do.” He offered a hand. “But admirable can still be foolish. Please take my advice and cut a deal. And please let me represent you.”
“I hope I’m calling you Your Honor sometime soon, Paul.” I shook his hand and pushed through the door, into a wind that was colder than I’d expected.
And I hope, I thought to myself, I’m not doing it from a prison cell.
29
AT THREE O’CLOCK SHARP THAT DAY, I WALKED INTO the U.S. attorney’s office in the federal building downtown. I was shown directly into a conference room. Chris Moody, looking fresh and relaxed, walked in with his government-issue white shirt and red-and-blue checked tie and sat across from me. He was wearing bright blue braces strapped over his narrow shoulders that let everyone know he was a hungry prosecutor. He seemed surprised that I wasn’t bringing a lawyer, but so much the better, for him.
He pushed a document in front of me. I took a quick look at it and shook my head.
“I’m not doing a letter agreement,” I said.
“Sure, you are.”
“Sure, I’m not.”
Moody wanted me to sign a letter agreement, in which the government agreed to immunize me from prosecution in exchange for my cooperation, without us ever appearing in court on formal charges. It was standard stuff for people the feds flipped—like Joey Espinoza, for example. They couldn’t very well unseal an indictment and arraign a guy in open court if they wanted him to work undercover. This was how they did it outside the public view.
“Get one thing clear, Chris. I will never admit that I did anything wrong. This is voluntary or it isn’t happening.”
Moody’s initial reaction was a smirk, but it faded after a moment.
“This is what’s happened so far,” I said. “You guys showed up at my door last night, you played me the overhears, it stoked my sense of outrage, and I agreed to help you ferret out this corruption on a purely voluntary basis. You never specifically told me I was being charged with a crime. You never said anything, one way or the other, about what the future might hold. You didn’t make any promises to me; I didn’t make any promises to you.”
This was unconventional, no doubt. Most people jump at the chance to get immunity, a get-out-of-jail-free card. But there was some merit to this arrangement, from Moody’s perspective. Every government informant, when testifying at trial, gets cross-examined on the deal he cut with the G. It’s standard fare for a defense attorney—you were looking at a severe prison sentence so you cut a deal, and you’d say anything to make those prosecutors happy; therefore, your testimony should be discredited. But what I was proposing to Moody would avoid that problem. I wasn’t getting a deal at all. I wasn’t getting immunity or a promise of any kind. The United States would be free to prosecute me if it so chose.
But the problem Moody would have with my proposal was the same reason I wanted it in the first place: He couldn’t control me. I wouldn’t march to his command. If I wanted to shut this thing down, I could, at any time. I’d be risking the prosecutor’s ire, and a federal indictment, but the decision would be mine.
“Too risky,” Moody said. “You sign this agreement or I convene a grand jury.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “I’ll be your CI, but it will be voluntary. No plea agreement. No admission of wrongdoing. I’m just an ordinary citizen volunteering to help expose government corruption.” I leaned forward. “And risky? You want to hear risky? I go do whatever it is you want me to do, and I know that at any time, you can start thinking back to how you got your ass kicked in Almundo, and you can decide to take out your humiliation on one of his defense attorneys. I do all this work for you, you get a hundred-count indictment, and then you are perfectly free to throw in one or two more counts with my name on them. Just because you can, Chris. Just because you can. So don’t you talk to me about risky.”
“Sign the letter agreement, Kolarich.” He pushed it in front of me. “It’s the only way.”
“It’s the only way you control me. And that’s never going to happen.” I got out of my chair. “You want to indict me now, indict me. And Charlie Cimino, and Greg Connolly, and all those other scumbags? It will take them about one-tenth of one second to realize that they should probably fold up their tents and go home. Your big undercover investigation is halted in its tracks. You’re stuck with whatever you have on them as of right now, which I’m guessing is not all that much, or you wouldn’t be yanking my chain so hard for my cooperation. Stop me when I’m wrong, Chris.”
Moody rubbed his hand over his face. As much as he longed for the day that I’d be behind bars in a federal prison, he clearly had preferred the immunity route. It gave him power over me. But from his perspective, he pretty much had the same power, anyway. If I didn’t jump high enough for his liking, he could always turn the screws on me. And if I messed around with his investigation, he could always hit me with obstruction of justice, in addition to the underlying case he might pursue against me. He was a federal prosecutor, after all. He had twenty different ways to fuck me.
I figured this would all come into focus for him, eventually, but either Moody was too cautious to say yes immediately or, more likely, he didn’t want to readily agree to something that wasn’t his idea. More quickly than I’d anticipated, he let out a small, bitter laugh.
“These guys you decided to lay down with?” he said evenly. “They’re scum. They make a joke out of the idea of honest government. And I’m going to take them down, Kolarich. Anyone who gets in my way will be sorry.” He got out of his chair and leaned over the table. His voice lowered to a controlled whisper, as our faces were only a few feet apart. “I’ll have a chain around your neck so tight it’ll hurt when you swallow. And after you’re done dancing for me?” He gave me his best Machiavellian smile. “Well, like you said, no promises, right? I guess we’ll see what the future holds.”
Moody’s taunt felt like an appropriate note on which to exit. I was tempted to make another comment about his courtroom skills, should he decide to prosecute me, but it wouldn’t make me feel any better and it would only increase the odds that he’d come after me at some point. Like it or not, I was going to have to behave myself around this guy. A little, at least.
I walked outside into a cold, gray dusk, inhaling the frigid air and feeling my head clear, my perspective broaden. I stifled the instinct to second-guess my decision. I felt like I did after I filed a document in court, or turned in a paper in law school, afraid to review my work after I’d turned it in, sure that I would find an error that countless attempts at proofreading somehow failed to catch. I didn’t want to think about what I’d just done. I didn’t want to reevaluate. I didn’t want to think about Paul Riley, the best lawyer I know, who was sure I w
as making the wrong decision.
You make your own bed, as they say. I’d gone into this with good intentions, hoping to find some clue to the murder of a man I hardly knew, and instead found myself in the middle of a budding political corruption scandal that already had tarnished me, as well. I had to find a way to come out of this intact. I had to find a way to clear my own name, avoid the same fate that befell Ernesto Ramirez and Adalbert Wozniak, and stop these thugs from selling out the state.
And I had to keep my promise to Esmeralda Ramirez to find out who killed her husband.
As I walked, I wondered if I would have to settle for some, not all, of the above.
30
“THE PROBLEM IS THAT IT’S NOT A FEDERAL OFFENSE TO get around competitive-bidding statutes.” Special Agent Lee Tucker looked comfortable in his white button-down shirt, blue jeans, and loafers. He had a wiry frame, a bad complexion, deep-set eyes, a grassy mop of dirty-blond hair. A tin of Skoal tobacco rested in his front shirt pocket. “Or to contribute money to the governor.”
“And there’s plausible deniability,” said Chris Moody. These two people would be my contacts, Tucker, the handling agent from the FBI, and Moody, the assistant U.S. attorney. We were sitting in Moody’s office in the federal building, the following day.
The problem, they were explaining, was that to prosecute the things Cimino and the PCB were doing, prosecutors had to show a quid pro quo—that people were buying their way into these state contracts, that the awarding of the state job was directly and intentionally tied to the campaign contribution. Was it suspicious that a company landed a lucrative contract with the state, only to turn around the following week and give the governor twenty-five or fifty thousand? Sure. Red flags everywhere. But illegal? Only if you could read minds, or if you could get them on tape admitting that there was a direct relationship between the two. And that was very, very hard to do.