by Bill Mason
That was it. I’d about had enough from the cops and didn’t need this from my attorney. I reached over and pushed the lid down, making him look up at me.
“Listen,” I said as calmly as I could, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here. I’ve been cleaner than Snow White for over a year, which those assholes”—I pointed outside the room, intending for the gesture to encompass the entire Fort Lauderdale Police Department—“know damned well is true, because they’ve been hounding my ass the whole time. I can barely tie my shoe without looking up to see one of them staring at me, so do me a goddamned favor and tell me what they say I’ve done!”
I think I got a little strident toward the end of that rant, which I hadn’t intended, but it seemed to give Damore some pause. He looked at me for a few seconds and then decided to give me the benefit of the doubt. “You’re telling me you really don’t know why you were arrested?”
He didn’t need to wait for a response. He knew I was savvy enough about how things worked to know not to lie to my own attorney. Do that and there’s no way he can help you.
Damore stood up and took off his jacket, then sat back down and picked up the police reports. “A cop named Matt Palmeri . . . you know him?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, he said he was down on the beach talking to someone early Saturday evening when he saw your car pull up and park. You got out, and just as you began walking away, he saw you put a crowbar up your sleeve. Then he lost you in a group of apartment buildings. Any of this familiar?”
I assured him I had no idea what this guy was talking about.
“He goes back to the beach,” Damore continued, “and finds your car gone, so he puts out an APB on it. Then he found it again at the Stouffer’s on U.S. 1. Parked.”
“Wait a minute!” I needed a moment to digest this. “He goes back to the beach, heads out to look for me and somehow finds my car at the Stouffer’s?”
He tapped the sheaf of papers. “That’s what it says.”
From the look on his face I could see I didn’t have to tell him the obvious, which he’d probably not thought about when he did his initial read. The Stouffer’s is five miles away from the beach, on the other side of the Intracoastal. In barely the time it would take just to drive up there at full tilt, this guy just happens to come across my parked car when the APB turned up nothing? Damore saw the point, so we didn’t have to belabor it, and he went through the rest with increasing skepticism.
“He saw you throw something into a dumpster—”
“What was it?”
“Doesn’t say.” We never did find out. “Just then a report comes over his radio of a burglary in the same beach area where he saw you with the crowbar. The victims said they saw the guy split. Wearing a green jacket.”
I still had on the white jacket I was arrested in, which Damore took notice of. “You could have stashed the green one. . . .”
“Yeah,” I said sarcastically. “I planned on getting spotted and caught, so I brought a change of clothes. Keep going.”
“Okay. So he follows you in his car—”
“He let me get into mine and drive away?”
“Whatever. Says he pulled you over, but when he got out of his car, you floored yours and took off. He goes out after you . . . ‘high-speed pursuit,’ it says . . . on streets close to where you live. Then you tossed a paper bag out the window—”
“He could see that? At high speed at night?”
Damore leafed through the papers. “Seems you threw it at the exact moment you passed under a streetlight.”
He couldn’t suppress a smile at that. I had my lawyer back.
“He finally lost you in a parking lot on U.S. 1,” Damore continued. At the time that actually sounded plausible. Later he and I would visit that parking lot, which still exists on Federal Highway between Thirtieth Street and Thirtieth Place. It has a grand total of six rows of fewer than twenty-five cars each and is completely empty on Saturday nights. Helen Keller couldn’t have lost me in there. “Then later on he sees you walking across Oakland Park Boulevard. Jeez, this must be the luckiest goddamned cop in the world, the way he keeps running into you. Anyway, after they arrest you, he goes back to where you tossed the bag and retrieves it. Inside they find jewelry and a gun, which they determine had been taken in the robbery. Then they came and got your car and towed it to the impound lot.”
“Where’d they find my car?” I asked, a shot in the dark. Damore gave me the location. Why wasn’t I surprised to find out that it was a parking lot across the street from where I’d actually left it? The report also said that when they went back to the burglary site to look for the green jacket, miracle of miracles, they found it. It was a size small, which I couldn’t get into if I lost fifty pounds. As Damore finally flipped the pages closed, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or tear the door off its hinges.
“I take it this is all bullshit?” he said.
“No. The part about how they arrested me was real. The other stuff is bullshit.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything, and I knew what he was thinking: If the cops had it basically right, he could dig right in and start hunting for small discrepancies to exploit. But if I was maintaining that their entire account was a fabrication, where did he start to counter that? The only thing to do was figure out how I could establish that I’d been somewhere else at the time, or come up with any other evidence that would directly contradict the report.
After a minute of thinking he said, “There was a burglary. That part was real.”
Good point. “But I didn’t do it.” Actually, that didn’t really make much difference. Damore didn’t care if I’d done it or not. He was only interested in what we could prove. “Maybe we’d better talk about the arraignment,” I suggested, and that’s when he gave me the bad news: There wasn’t going to be an arraignment, at least not a timely one. That threw me into even more of a tizzy, which was about the time there was a knock on the door. Damore opened it and Cheryl, my probation officer, waved and asked him if she could have a few minutes with me. Damore got up quickly, as though relieved to pass the baton to someone else.
Cheryl was a good person and a good friend. So my heart—and I wouldn’t have thought it possible—sank even further when I saw the hard, all-business look in her eyes. It wasn’t hardness toward me; it was Cheryl keeping a tight grip on herself so she could get through the next few minutes.
“You got serious problems, Bill,” she said, getting right to the point. “I can’t let you out.” Then she waited, probably to allow the panic she saw rising in me to set in. Even through my fear I could see the kind of determination she’d worked up, and I figured she must have rehearsed all of this. “On account of the VOP charge. And if you get convicted of everything, you’re looking at life plus forty-five years.”
Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “But I didn’t do anything!” It was a dumb thing to say for several reasons. For one, Cheryl was now my P.O. and not my friend, and she couldn’t do anything for me unless she could defend it to her superiors as reasonable under the circumstances and no different from what she’d do for any other person in my position.
“Personally, I don’t think you did,” she said, “but if I let you go, they’d throw my ass into the street and keep you here anyway.”
Maybe you noticed her strange phraseology, about how she couldn’t let me out, she couldn’t let me go, as if she were the supreme authority here and due process and civil rights didn’t enter into it. Well, she was and they didn’t, because in Florida you could get your parole revoked just for being arrested, even if you weren’t convicted. And since the court based its decision almost entirely on a report submitted by the P.O., she had your life in her hands. There were no “beyond a reasonable doubt” kinds of criteria and few procedures available to fight back. The whole thing was purely judgmental, like the probation condition that forbids you to consort with undesirables or known criminals. “Known
” meant known to the police, even if the supposed criminal had never been convicted of anything or even arrested. How do you defend yourself against something like that?
I asked her about this life-plus-forty-five-years business, and she explained that as well, starting off with a real gem: “If you get violated, you have to do the whole twenty years of your original sentence.”
This was getting worse by the minute. “But that sentence was suspended,” I protested. “Probation was for seven years!”
“Suspended doesn’t mean dismissed. It’s technically still in effect. You’re out but still under parole, and if you fail to keep your nose clean during the parole period”—she flipped a hand up and let it drop back onto the table—“back you go for the whole stretch.”
I couldn’t believe this and was unable to say anything for the moment as it all bounced around in my head. She let me have the time, and then said, “Just between you and me, pissing off Joe Gerwens and the TAC guys wasn’t your smartest move.”
That was the last thing I wanted to hear from someone who was in a position to know, because it let me give full rein to a thought that had been nagging at me for the last two days and which I’d tried hard to suppress.
The TAC Squad was composed of a bunch of very gung-ho, publicity-loving macho cops with a reputation for always getting their man. What they didn’t add to that quaint expression was “dead or alive.” Shortly after my first arrest they’d been following two suspects along a beach and ended up shotgunning them both to death. They claimed the suspects had tried to run, but since there were no witnesses and the suspects were dead, there was no one to dispute it. There was little in the way of public outcry about their itchy trigger fingers because there was so much crime in the area that the citizens were in no mood to concern themselves with the rights of suspects. It seems that, for many people, civil rights are a luxury you indulge in only when they’re not necessary. As soon as things get tough and people really need protection from overzealous law enforcement, the citizenry tends to get a little complacent. Someone once said that a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who just got arrested. How true.
A few minutes before Cheryl had come in, Damore was telling me about how the police report said my car had been found across the street from where I’d really parked it. I’d automatically assumed they’d falsified the report, but now something else occurred to me: What if they’d moved the car to the lot across the street? And why would they do that?
I don’t remember if Joe Gerwens actually headed the TAC Squad or was just a higher-up within it, but either way it wasn’t good. He’d been at the Ramada when I was busted and was one of the people we’d subpoenaed for deposition. Since he was a prominent and well-respected member of the force who’d carry a lot of weight at trial, we’d given him a particularly tough grilling, pressing him on discrepancies no matter how inconsequential and not letting him get away with anything. I knew he’d been nursing a hard-on for me ever since, and now I couldn’t help wondering if they’d moved my car, because the lot across the street was much more secluded than where I’d parked. If I’d walked down a less busy street, or if those two police cars hadn’t run into each other and startled everybody in sight, including me, was it possible that I’d have been gunned down just like those two guys on the beach? And that it would have been a planned execution?
That was just one of the scenarios I entertained as I sat alone in a cell, where I was to spend quite a bit of time because I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. I worked hard at not letting on how I was feeling, but inside I was tearing myself to pieces. Barb could see it easily and was giving my lawyer Librium to smuggle in to me during our visits, but it wasn’t doing much good. Now, I suspect that a lot of people will think I deserved what was happening to me because of all the scores I’d gotten away with and how I’d screwed the police into giving me a free ride on a few, but this was way out of proportion. Murderers, pushers, child pornographers and wife beaters were getting light sentences or being let go altogether, while I’d never laid a hand on anybody, but because I’d opened my mouth and gotten the wrong people angry, I was facing a lifetime in a cell for something I didn’t do. Whether you agree with that assessment or not, that was how I felt, and I was falling further apart with each passing day.
I spent the next month drowning in my own fears and leaving the management of my case to Damore. I was beginning to wonder whether this former prosecutor had too many friends in too many places for him to risk getting really aggressive and creative on my behalf. He would never do anything sneaky or wildly clever, because those kinds of tactics by their very nature would embarrass the other side, and he had to work with those people on a daily basis, on a lot more cases than just mine. In that pulp mill of a system, one hand washed the other, and the trading of favors was the fuel that powered the efficient resolution of cases. (“In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.”) I could easily see things going south in a hurry and decided that, with what I was facing, there wasn’t much downside to painting outside the lines a little. The last thing I needed right now was a respected and well-behaved navigator of the system. What I needed was Godzilla.
“You happen to know a lawyer named Ray Sandstrom?” Cheryl asked, out of absolutely nowhere.
As shocked as I was by that question, I held any outward expression of it in check. This was my P.O. I was talking to, not my friend, but why would my P.O. ask me that question? The only thing that came to mind was that Sandstrom was in some kind of trouble and the police, knowing I’d met with him a few times, were trying to link me to him. But there was no denying that I knew who he was; he was a legend and everybody knew who he was. “Heard of him. Why?”
She stood up and grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair. “You know that guy I’m seeing?”
“The lawyer? Frank?” Cheryl had never gotten us together or even mentioned his last name.
She shook her head. “Not Frank. Fred. Fred Haddad.”
That sounded awfully familiar. “How come I seem to—?”
“He and Ray Sandstrom are partners.”
Good ol’ Godzilla. Shows up just when you need him the most.
12
The Ballad of Ray and Fred
WHEN YOUR own parole officer, who, after all, is working for the people who put you in jail, suggests that you change attorneys and then actually recommends one, and when the one she refers you to is her boyfriend’s partner, that is not advice you take lightly. Cheryl knew the system inside and out, knew all the players in it, and she knew me. From the interaction I’d had with Ray Sandstrom, and that incredible courtroom strategy he’d concocted before his client Steven Simonson wrecked it by copping a plea, I had a feeling he’d want to take on my case, and I also had a feeling Cheryl had run the idea by him before she suggested I call him.
Ray and Fred showed up at the jail and I could hear them throwing their weight around when I was still two cell blocks away from the private rooms where lawyers could meet with inmates. If a guard took more than ten seconds to get a gate opened, Ray would start accusing him of harassment, hindering the legal process and interfering with his client’s civil rights. Having to open his briefcase for inspection made him even angrier, and he’d threaten to file affidavits the whole time they rummaged through his papers, while Fred shouted that they were violating lawyer-client privilege. Hard to believe, but the guards were actually intimidated by these displays, because they knew that these two attorneys weren’t above really lodging formal complaints.
Fred Haddad and Ray Sandstrom.
At this first meeting they brought along a bombshell of a secretary who didn’t seem to have anything of substance to do. I think they were just taunting the guards, trying to throw off their concentration, maybe daring them to pat her down. After we sat down, I started to tell them what Damore had done so far, but they waved it away. “We read all the papers,” Fred said. “That rate, you’ll e
nd up serving twenty-five years of your twenty-year sentence. We gotta do something different.”
“But they got me on parole violation,” I said. I didn’t understand what they could do about that other than what Damore had been doing, which was to request more hearings and try to out-argue the prosecutor over whether violating me was reasonable. The standard the county had to meet to keep a convicted person inside wasn’t nearly as strict as getting the conviction itself. “Doesn’t that mean they can pretty much lock me up at will?”
Ray lit up a cigarette and flicked the spent match at a “No Smoking” sign on the wall. “Yeah, it does. So what we gotta do, we gotta get your original conviction thrown out. Once we do that, your probation doesn’t exist anymore and we can get you the hell out of this shit hole.”
“Thrown out? How can you do that?” After all, I’d agreed to the deal.
“By showing that the deal was bullshit from the very beginning. Bad faith, deception, you name it. We demand a jury trial on the original charges, and while that’s pending, you’re not on probation anymore. You’re back to being innocent until proven guilty, and we’ll get you out on bond.”
Fred explained that a full-scale trial was really our only chance. “If you’re already convicted and the only question on the table is how you get punished, the state has enormous power, because you’re no longer an innocent citizen. You’re officially guilty, and most of your rights fly out the window. But when they’re trying to convict you, you have every constitutional protection under the sun. You can confront your accusers, cross-examine their witnesses, and instead of this vague set of bullshit criteria for violating your parole, they have to prove you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“We get a new trial,” Ray said, “there’s no way they can make that case. Their evidence sucks, their witnesses suck. . . .”