“Let me get a look.”
“Yes, of course.” Rush didn’t want to show him the credentials. A police officer might well decide not to issue a prosecutor a ticket as an act of professional courtesy. But this was different. Rush’s DOJ credentials plainly stated he was with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division.
The deputy examined the credentials. “You prosecute cops?”
“Only if they commit crimes,” Rush replied, like it was an admission of guilt.
“I’ll bet,” the deputy said, looking down at Rush. “I already started writing you up, so I can’t stop. You should’ve told me.”
If only, thought Rush, if only.
35
SHARING THE SECRET
Mercer and Rush maneuvered around the monitoring stations like window shoppers along a crowded retail street. The monitors were like display mannequins, sitting in chairs and listening to conversations with their oversized headsets. Rush had long avoided the intercept monitoring room because he didn’t want to risk becoming a witness in the case, but he finally relented. He wanted to stand in the investigation’s pumping heart.
“I’m good,” Rush announced, looking for the exit door after only several minutes in the room. Evidently, the heart beat too slowly for him. “Let’s sit with—who is it, Gill? To go over that call.”
Only two days before, Rush had received the rough transcript of the evidence-room exchange, and he was anxious to hear more about it.
“I need to chat with you before we do that,” Mercer said once they were outside the monitoring room.
“No problem. You OK?”
“I need to review something with you.”
They walked into an interior, windowless office, the same one where Mercer first learned of the surprise affixed like an appendage to the wire.
“I’m listening.”
“The conversation that Gill recorded, it’s got some other stuff with it. The notes you read didn’t cover everything on the tape.”
“OK,” Rush said, oblivious to the tectonic shifts beneath him. “Can’t you have Gill add what she wants to the original entries? Label it supplemental.”
“The extra stuff wasn’t—isn’t—about the evidence room, or anything we’re investigating.”
“What’s it about? Other criminal activity? You know better than me, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Document why it might be evidence of other crimes. If it’s good, maybe we try and expand the wire’s scope.”
“It’s not that.”
Mercer wanted the right angle of entry, one that wouldn’t betray too much worry but would share the secret.
“Don’t play hide-and-seek. Tell me what you need to say.”
“I’ll play you another conversation Gill recorded that day. It’s after the evidence-room exchange. I need you to hear the other one first.”
“Go for it.” Rush closed his eyes so he could focus.
Mercer had already set the tape to start at the very end of the evidence-room conversation, the place where Gill noted the tape ended. Mercer pressed play. The first sounds were of the dial tone and numbers being dialed. After that, the call played.
Mercer stared at Rush.
“That our detective?” Rush asked.
“Got to be.”
“Play that again.”
They again listened to the call. Mercer said he had reviewed the call two dozen times, hoping he would hear something that explained the words away or provided some reason, any reason, to ignore the detective. Rush asked to hear the conversation a third time.
“What the hell is goin’ on?” Rush finally asked, his gut tight and face so flushed his freckles disappeared. “I don’t get it. How’d this get recorded? We’re working a wire about cops doing rips. This has nothing to do with rips.”
“Gill didn’t remember the call until we heard it together. No notes, nothing.”
“How’d we find it?”
“We were reviewing her logs for the report. We listened to the evidence-room talk, and the tape just continued on into this call.”
“When was that?”
Mercer hesitated.
“Why didn’t I know about this before?” The tension between the two drew taut. They were back at their beginning.
Rush had many more questions than answers, but was stuck on the first two: when and how?
“I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I still don’t know what we should do.”
Rush noticed Mercer’s I had become we. “By now, you know I don’t like surprises.”
Rush needed time to absorb what he’d just heard. His world had just changed. He was again a climber on the mountain hearing the rumblings of an approaching avalanche.
36
UPDATING THE CHIEF
Like a nervous pupil, Rush sat square in front of Kay Tipton’s desk, a massive paperweight propping up piles of bulbous case files, dog-eared legal memoranda, a ceramic pot with a plant bent over like it was about to faint, several pictures of children in various poses and uniforms, and a deep plastic bowl with remnants of that day’s salad. It was the desk of someone who was the hub, not a spoke. On a credenza to her left, a framed photograph of a much younger and blonde chief walking with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama in 1966 conveyed moral authority, to the point it cast a spell. Rush looked at the photograph during each and every visit to the chief’s office, and each time he averted his gaze from the subjects’ ageless eyes. Rush never shook the feeling he was an imposter in the room.
“Any developments?” the chief asked.
The chief was conducting one of her infamous case review meetings, events that always started with a deceptively simple question like “How’s the investigation coming?” But what the chief really was asking went far beyond a request for a brief update. She expected, in exhaustive detail, every pertinent fact the lawyer knew about the case, including an explanation of the specific statutes that might have been violated, how the lawyer was going to prove every element of every charge against every possible defendant, and why anyone should care about any of it. It didn’t matter if an investigation had just been opened the day before the meeting. The civil rights prosecutor in the Criminal Section needed to tell the story with no excuses and no apologies.
“We’re up on the wire,” Rush answered.
“And?”
“Some interesting exchanges, but no master key to report.”
“How long has the wire been up?”
“Almost three weeks.”
“How long’s the authorization?”
“Thirty days.”
“What about seeking an extension?”
“Not sure yet. The targets might have switched lines, but that’s an open question.”
“Do you have any informants?”
“We’ve got several informants who tell consistent tales of abuse and rip-offs, but we don’t have any cooperation on the inside.”
“Who are they? The informants?”
“Dealers and hookers working off charges or time.”
The chief frowned at Rush’s word choice. “So no one inside the department is cooperating?”
“No. The plan is to flip a dirty cop when we get enough from the wire to jam someone up.”
“You realize once you approach anyone on the inside and talk cooperation, word will get out, and you’ll burn the wire. Everything goes dead.”
“I plan to approach a low-level co-conspirator, but only after the wire ends,” Rush said. “While we’re still up, we’ll tickle the wire. Maybe the bureau will complain to the department about some issue—”
“What issue?”
“Something related to a RAID case. Maybe say the feds want to adopt a local drug case, where we know there’s missing dope in the evidence room. Or we could ask RAID to produce a particular firearm we’ve been told is a throwdown.”
“You think that’ll prompt a response on the wire?”
“Then we send the main subject a target letter and s
ee if that gets any activity. We need someone worried enough to reach out to a co-conspirator but not lawyer up.”
“Who’s the primary subject?”
“The lieutenant who supervises the RAID unit. Name’s Johns. Tony Johns. He’s the protector and lord of their dominion.”
“Race?”
“Caucasian. Thirty-nine years old. Single.”
“Who else?”
“Subjects? Not sure who’s dirty and who’s just bad, but we’ve got two sergeants on the list and most of the RAID rank and file.”
“Anything exculpatory on the wire?” the chief asked. “Anything being overheard that puts the original allegations in any doubt?”
“Nothing that I’ve been told about. But I’ll follow up with the agents.” Rush knew this was an amateurish response, but he’d been dealing with his other issues as of late.
“You’ve got officers robbing and beating their victims. You’ve got drug dealers as your witnesses. But really what you’ve got is the need to flip a cop in the unit and tie him up with a cooperation agreement or dirty talk on the wire that a jury can’t ignore. Am I right?”
“Yes to all of it. We don’t go forward with just the dealers as the witnesses,” Rush acknowledged. “We need a cop on the inside to admit to what’s going on and that it’s wrong. To tell the whole truth. The jury’s got to accept that the RAID cops are really criminals who happen to carry badges.”
“Any other evidence of criminal activity on the wire aside from the allegations in the application?” The chief might have noticed Rush tense up, but she didn’t react.
“Some references to past stuff that we’re running to ground,” Rush responded, betting his future on a truthful lie. “I’ll update you once we get a better handle on it.”
“You must realize you’re taking a monumental risk.”
“How’s that?”
Did the chief know about the Klan conversation? Rush wondered.
The chief continued: “You’re secretly recording officers’ most private conversations. It’s the most sensitive type of case we handle.
The situation can blow up in an instant, and it’s too late to get out of the shrapnel’s way.”
“I recognize that.”
The chief cautioned her pupil. “Even if it all ends with convictions, don’t expect a pat on the back. It’s not like going after the Klan. Everyone hates the Klan, except maybe the Klan. Prosecuting officers with drug dealers as your victims is infinitely more difficult. No harder case to prosecute. I know you know that, but it’s still a shock when you realize no one seems to care, or worse, the jury ignores the evidence because they’re unwilling to convict a cop of a crime. They’ll be thinking, Fire him, but don’t prosecute him.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m still surprised the bureau agreed to go up on the wire at all,” the chief said. “Let’s hope we get definitive answers with it.”
“I’m on it, I promise.”
“It can’t be some truth you’re selling; it has to be the only truth with nothing left to tell.”
37
ABSOLUTION
Rush escaped the chief’s office and searched the seventh-floor maze for his friend Jack Hall.
“Got a minute?” Rush asked Hall.
“’Course. I’ve got lots of minutes. I saved them up.”
Hall, forty-five, was the section’s practical joker, but his was a mild condition. He laughed with you, not at you. He’d been raised in a Section 8 housing complex, his childhood marked by permanent insecurity about the basics: food, shelter, and family. His path through adolescence was a narrow, fast one and led straight out of Philadelphia. He attended Rutgers as an undergraduate and had gone on to Columbia University for law school. He joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office, securing a coveted slot in homicide before joining DOJ.
Hall leaned back in his sagging chair and put his hands behind his head, the comfortable pose of a man well matched with his element. Rush remained in the doorway of Hall’s office.
“Anything to take me away from writing these close-out memos,” Hall said. “There’s nothing worse than wasting my limited time on this earth with stuff everyone knows is getting delivered directly into a storage cabinet.”
“Sometimes there’s comfort in knowing the end is near.”
“That’s not the Adrien Rush I depend on for unquestioning support and adulation. You hate this bureaucratic crap as much as me.”
“I’m rethinking my world view.”
“Odd. What’s going on? Why you standing in the doorway?”
“This needs to stay here. This isn’t lunch crowd material, not to me it isn’t.”
“Sure. But I don’t think we’ve ever met,” Hall said in mock introduction. “I’m Father Hall. Come, my son, confess your sins.”
Rush shut Hall’s door and settled into the battered couch that a determined soul long ago had maneuvered into the narrow office and shoved up against the wall. The couch predated Hall’s tenure in the Criminal Section by years, possibly decades. A permanent feature of the office, the couch had hosted an impressive list of counseling sessions over its lifetime.
“You know we’re up on an intercept in the Southern District. It’s the police case involving an off-site narcotics unit.”
“Yep, I know. Lynwood. Deep South. Ugly history.”
“Can’t say I’ve become overly attached to it, but that might say as much about me as the place. Something else came up on the wire.”
“Not unusual.” Hall had handled a dozen wiretaps earlier in his career as local prosecutor. “Other stuff often gets intercepted.”
Rush was aching to share the secret, but the more others knew, the less room he would have to maneuver. He had avoided telling the chief for that very reason. She would force his hand, and he wasn’t ready to lose his tenuous grip on a choice.
Rush needed a confidant, an understanding ally to hear him out and then keep quiet no matter what, and Hall was that ally. They had been on the road prosecuting cases together off and on for three years. Like many who traveled for a living, each adhered to his own version of the ubiquitous code of the road, though for them the pact didn’t extend beyond juvenile embarrassments. Both had a touch of the wanderlust, and they looked, and sometimes acted, like a modern Abbott and Costello when traveling together.
“The monitor should’ve shut off the recording, but she got too caught up on one exchange and kept the recorder on too long. Something else got captured by mistake.”
“I don’t see the issue. If the monitors have been even barely competent about minimizing, you won’t get kicked to the curb over it. Just let the judge know about the new stuff in your next report.”
Rush waded around the issue like an inexperienced swimmer fearful of stepping on a sharp shell at the bottom of a murky pond. “It’s a little more complicated than that. We learned something we’d rather not know, not the other way around.”
Rush stared at the artwork of Hall’s three kids pinned in a scattershot array on the office walls. The collage, comprised of odd shapes and clashing colors, was clustered around holes from previous postings. Rush smiled at the chaotic scene and remembered why he liked Hall so much.
“You’re being too cryptic. Just say it.”
Rush decided to risk it. Hall was as close to a trusted friend as he had, and the role-playing of priest and penitent—however worn—rendered his words less revelatory.
“You know the Klan case I did last year?”
“Yep. You had the most sympathetic collection of victims in federal hate crimes history—almost everyone the Klan hates was hit.” Hall remembered the case with uncanny recall. “Grand dragon defendant. You got a jury trial out of it and some extortion served up on the side. And, given this is a confessional, I believe you also got the girl in the end. Why do you ask?”
“The extra stuff on the tape—it’s about the Klan case.”
“You’ve got my attention. Where’s the d
efendant now?”
“Yazoo City FCI.”
“Was the extra stuff good or bad?”
“It’s a short exchange between two officers, one of whom was the detective in the Klan case—the guy who got the confession.”
“What’d he say?”
“He threatened the guy.”
“Threatened to prosecute him?”
“If only.”
“Are you screwing around with me?”
“I’m not done. I put the detective in the grand jury. What was on the wire never came up in his testimony.”
“Are his stories off by a little, like a creek, or is it ocean different?”
“He testified that he arrested the defendant because the defendant had threatened to kill him. He gave a dramatic performance both to the grand jury and at trial.”
Rush—playing the detective playing the Klansman—formed a gun with his hand and pointed it at Hall.
“So, no threat?”
“I listened to the call over twenty times, and there’s nothing about being threatened. The detective went off about being called the N word. You’d think the death threat would have come up. The threatening was the other way around.”
“Anything else?”
“The detective bragging about chaining the guy to a chair and seeing the dude piss in his pants before owning up to the crosses. He didn’t say any of this to me, or the grand jury, or at trial. But there it is on the wire.”
“I take it no Miranda warnings—”
“The detective testified he gave Miranda to the defendant at the precinct station. But that’s bullshit if he had the guy handcuffed to a chair.”
“Did the defendant file a motion to suppress the confession?”
“The defense filed a motion, but nothing about the ride in the car.”
“How could the defense attorney miss something like that?”
“He didn’t miss it. Counsel wasn’t high-priced, but he was good—a senior public defender. He did his job. If he knew that the detective had threatened his client like that, it would’ve been all over a motion. My bet is the defendant, being the exalted Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, didn’t want anyone, especially his minions, to know he was so scared of a black man that he pissed in his pants, but who knows.”
No Truth Left to Tell Page 21