by Bill Mason
It sounded too good to be true, and I wondered out loud why the hell Damore hadn’t thought of that.
“Speaking of him,” Ray said, “the county can’t get any help from him, because he’s been your attorney and there’s privilege there.”
“He wasn’t my attorney when he was prosecuting me.”
“Doesn’t matter. You guys had all kinds of conversations, and if anyone in the D.A.’s office even says hello to him over a cup of coffee, we’ll scream bloody murder all the way to the Supreme Court.”
“But he can’t do his job without talking to the D.A.,” I observed.
“No shit,” Ray said, laughing and stubbing his cigarette out right on the tabletop. “But how’s that our fucking problem?”
I was liking this better all the time, but there was still the small matter of getting my plea bargain overturned. Ray and Fred had some interesting ideas on how to go about that.
This would probably be a good time to tell you a little more about these two larger-than-life characters, two of the best criminal defense attorneys I’d ever met or even heard of.
From all of the stories I’d heard about Ray Sandstrom, it was a wonder that he was still alive and had his law license when he came into my life. He was older than his partner, probably in his late fifties, but looked even older because of a lifetime of heavy drinking, smoking and Lord only knew what else.
As I’ve said, Ray was the most antiauthoritarian, antiestablishment human being I’d ever met on this side of the bars. He hated cops, judges, wardens and just about anybody else in a position to exercise authority over other people. He believed that nobody who had the power to control somebody else’s life did so without somehow asserting himself as superior and enjoying, however subconsciously, the subtle humility he was inflicting. As far as Ray’s methods were concerned, his philosophy seemed to be that you used whatever worked. Period.
A classic example of that occurred on the first day of a trial in which Ray was defending an armed robber. He walked into the courtroom and spotted the only piece of physical evidence, a handgun, lying on the prosecution table with a property tag dangling from it. Ray opened his briefcase and set it on the floor next to the table, and casually brushed the gun off and into the bag when nobody was looking. After exchanging a few pleasantries with the assistant district attorney (think of a cobra telling a bunny rabbit, “Have a nice day”), Ray slipped the gun to the defendant’s wife, who then left the courtroom. Ray sat down at the defense table and calmly began preparing his notes, taking little notice as the prosecutors discovered their evidence was missing and went nuts trying to find it. When they couldn’t, Ray made a motion for the charges to be dropped, and that was the end of that. It was vintage Ray, and if his name hadn’t been dirt in the D.A.’s office beforehand, it sure was afterward, even though there was no proof he’d taken the gun.
A womanizer who hated women, Ray was on his eighth wife—at least I thought they were married—an outrageous flirt named Lollie, and it was beyond me why she married him in the first place and why she stayed. Maybe it was all the money he had, hard currency he’d gotten as fees from drug dealers and had stashed away in dozens of hiding places all over the city. He sure didn’t spend a lot of time with her. If he wasn’t in court, the last place anybody would ever think to look for him was his office. He loved boating, fishing and flying airplanes but was forever fighting the FAA over his pilot’s license; they claimed his eyesight was failing, which it was, but he refused to admit it, including to himself. He refused to wear a tie in court, which got him into endless trouble with judges, who also didn’t much like all the gold jewelry he liked to drape himself with, either.
I never saw Ray actually read a single document or open a case file, but once he got into court, you’d swear he’d memorized every line of every piece of paper that had ever been filed in the case at hand. Cross-examination was his specialty; he’d start off in a slow, thick southern drawl that was barely understandable and practically put witnesses to sleep, then pounce after he’d used their inattention to trick them into inconsistencies that seemed innocuous until he strung them together and made them seem like purposeful lies.
Fred Haddad, who’d started out as Ray’s protégé, although he would never admit it, was even more brilliant than his onetime mentor. His raw brainpower was almost frightening, and he was always a dozen steps ahead of anybody else in the room, instantly seeing implications it would take others hours to come around to. This was all the more amazing because Fred was a heavy-duty drinker who practically needed a beer before he even got out of bed, which wasn’t always in the morning. Though he was happy-go-lucky and gregarious among friends and family, his cheerful Middle Eastern face would go dark and menacing as soon as he stepped into a courtroom.
He loved cars with blacked-out windows and always owned several at a time, and he wore even more gold jewelry than Ray. He genuinely liked women but had a lot of trouble hanging on to one, because by eight o’clock most evenings he could barely talk. (His relationship with my parole officer set some kind of endurance record for him.) I think if he hadn’t worked so hard on pickling his brain, he might have won a Nobel Prize or been a senator. Fred’s standard courtroom tactic was to pepper witnesses with a barrage of questions, confusingly out of sequence so the witness couldn’t stick to a cohesive story and kept getting tripped up on details. Unlike his victim, Fred could follow the various threads at once and then play them back to the jury, in the correct order, so that glaring inconsistencies jumped out all over the place. When the prosecution attempted to rehabilitate the witness during redirect, Fred would look on happily as the poor guy attempted to recant half his statements and still maintain some kind of credibility.
Ray and Fred loved drug-smuggling cases. Prosecutors were rabid about getting convictions, which made for some very intense battles, and clients would always come in with huge amounts of cash to pay for their defense. Ray and Fred were fiercely competitive with each other as well, and fought all the time, but I think they genuinely loved each other. Unfortunately for me and some of their clients, their inherent combativeness sometimes got in the way of their legal judgment; if I thought the Fort Lauderdale police had it in for me before, they were practically ready to kill me once these two waded into the fray. Before it was over, my little feud with the cops would escalate into a full-scale vendetta in which any notions of justice and fair play were but distant memories. I fully shared the blame, of course.
I’m not certain how I came to be so attached to this strange pair, and have given it a lot of thought. In retrospect I’m dumbfounded that such a deep friendship could have developed among us. They were outrageous, flamboyant and totally crazy, which was the complete antithesis of my personality. I’d spent a lifetime staying quiet, keeping to myself, never bragging to anybody about the things I’d done, barely even mentioning them to anybody else except, once in a rare while, Bill Welling. My tack with law enforcement was not to become a pain in their collective asses but to stay as invisible as possible. I didn’t hate the police, never rubbed my successes in their faces and only fought them when I felt I needed to in order to defend myself. Even when I was in the thick of my drawn-out tussle with Joe Gerwens and the Fort Lauderdale police, all I really wanted out of it was to be left alone, to get out from under the gun and to do only what I felt was necessary to show them I couldn’t be trifled with. I wasn’t out to make them mad or show them up.
Slowly, though, I found myself drawn into Ray and Fred’s style of doing things. They fought so hard for me, even seeming to compete with each other to win my approval, that I unwittingly became as outrageous as they were. With the benefit of hindsight I can trace exactly how I changed during that period from a secretive, self-contained loner into a publicly contemptuous smart-ass too goddamned dumb to see all the harm I was causing myself and those close to me.
If there was ever a situation that did more damage to my marriage, I don’t know what it was. The crimes I’d
committed and the trauma of getting shot had been bad enough, but this period beat them all in driving Barbara away from me. Maybe it was the booze, which was a constant companion to my lawyers and me, or maybe it was temporary insanity on my part, but I look back at those years and wonder not just how I made it but how I’m still alive and not lying in some alley shotgunned to death by the TAC Squad or some other unit of Broward County law enforcement.
After the exhilarating flurry of creative ideas during our first meeting, the gloomy fog of the real-world legal process quickly descended on us. Often over the next few months I’d feel like a POW who thought he’d made good his escape but was quickly recaptured; sometimes it’s better not to have had that little taste of sunlight at all.
It started off well enough. Ray and Fred demanded and got a hearing in front of Judge Robert Tyson to contest the deal I’d made with Damore that had led to my twenty-year suspended sentence for the Ramada nonsense. They subpoenaed my first lawyer, Howard Zeidwig, whom they had too much contempt for to even bother disliking, and got him to testify about how he’d pressured me into taking a deal whose implications I didn’t fully understand. By the time they got through with him, he might as well have admitted that he’d pointed a flamethrower at me and threatened to incinerate me if I didn’t give in. Ray ticked down a list of about fifty pieces of legal trivia and, one at a time, asked Zeidwig if he’d explained it to me. The answer most of the time was, of course, no, generally because it wouldn’t have made any difference, but Ray’s feeling was that the sheer number of such “lapses” would carry weight with the court.
They also subpoenaed all the cops who were at the Ramada bust, and others who’d had a hand in setting up the surveillance but weren’t even there. They did a pretty good job of humiliating them and clearly demonstrating what a weak case it was, implying that I’d been arrested mainly so the police would have something to show for their misguided efforts.
Our very best shot to prove we’d been misled had to do with this Jean Tierney character from Connecticut, the woman who was supposedly registered in the room I was caught in. Then-prosecutor Damore had told us that she was planning to come back to Florida and testify that her suitcase had been ransacked. Ray argued that this was complete bullshit (using more legal terms than that, but the same sentiment). He also told the court that Mrs. Tierney had informed Damore that in fact her suitcase hadn’t been touched. “The plea bargain proposed by Mr. Damore,” Ray concluded, “was a reasonable deal only if it was true that Mrs. Tierney had really been robbed and only if she was really planning to come back and testify. And neither of those things was true!” What he couldn’t say, without admitting that I’d searched the room, was that there hadn’t been any suitcase in there at all.
My guys were good, but so was the assistant state attorney, William Dimitrouleas, a real straight arrow who had replaced Dave Damore on my case. Heavyset and studious-looking, Dimitrouleas was a career prosecutor with no ambition to go into private practice. He genuinely felt he was providing an invaluable public service to the citizens of Broward County, and, to be candid, he was. (He would eventually be appointed a U.S. district judge by President Clinton.) He didn’t rise to Ray’s bait and make an attempt to retry the original case in front of Tyson, but stuck to showing that everything the police had done was appropriate and lawful. Whenever Fred would try to demonstrate that the police had exercised bad judgment and been overzealous in their pursuit of me, Dimitrouleas would calmly reply that even if that were true, it was irrelevant. If Zeidwig and I had wanted to go down that road, we should have done it at trial. Instead, we willingly accepted the deal offered by Dave Damore, so how could I now claim that justice hadn’t been served?
It wasn’t much of a surprise that Judge Tyson agreed with Dimitrouleas. After nearly a week of testimony and argument, Tyson didn’t even bother to leave the room to go off and consider what he’d heard, but made his decision on the spot—or, more likely, had made it days before—and declared that we had no case. “Testimony by three police officers yesterday,” he said, “that Mrs. Tierney said her luggage had been disturbed outweighs a purported later comment to Mr. Damore, by phone, that it had not.” He put special emphasis on by phone. “Also weighing against the defendant is his de facto admission of guilt when he agreed to the plea bargain.”
I thought Ray would go for the judge’s throat when he heard that last remark, a piece of reasoning that would have made Kafka envious, but Fred held him back, reminding him that we still had to go through an appeal process and didn’t want to hurt our case by behaving badly.
We immediately filed an appeal with the Fourth District in Palm Beach, but by that time I’d already been in custody for five months and was not handling it well.
Barb came to see me as often as permitted and was also at every hearing. I could see that she was sinking as rapidly as I was, as much from the uncertainty of everything as from the absence of her husband and the kids’ father. It was impossible to predict the result of each legal maneuver, and afterward things weren’t any more clear than they’d been before. Neither of us had any idea if I’d be out in a week or if I’d spend the rest of my life inside, and the awful toll of being in that kind of limbo is impossible to put into words. Worst of all, I had no one else I could blame. Sure, the police had overdone it and were pressuring the D.A.’s office to keep putting the screws to me, but even in my bitterest moments I couldn’t pin it all on them. It wasn’t like they’d picked out an ordinary citizen at random. I was a criminal, and their failure to catch me actually committing a real crime had embarrassed them on more than one occasion, as had my confessions to a slew of highly visible burglaries they’d been unable to solve. While it was true that the charges they were holding me on really were bullshit from a legal point of view, it was equally true that had I never broken the law in the first place, I might have been on the same bowling team as Police Chief Joe Gerwens rather than top dog on his official shit list.
Never was that driven home to me more than when Barb came to visit. She was drawn and haggard and could barely meet my eyes. Sometimes her hands shook, and she’d put them in her lap so I wouldn’t see. She was holding it together for the sake of the kids, trying to create some semblance of normalcy at home.
Barb had taken over the job of renting out the Lighthouse Point house. On one of her visits she reported this terribly strange occurrence: two people who’d rented the place, paid in cash and then disappeared. What was going on and what was she supposed to do now?
“They were drug smugglers,” I said across the table that separated us. “They only wanted the house to bring in a single shipment.”
She looked at me with her mouth hanging open. “How do you know that?” she finally managed to say, and I explained how it had happened to me several times. That threw her for a loop, and it took me a while to convince her I hadn’t done it on purpose. I didn’t bother to mention that I’d spoken to the police about it on several occasions.
“So what do I do now?” she asked.
“Rent it again.”
“But those people paid for three months in advance. What if they come back?”
I assured her they wouldn’t. She rented it again, and damned if the same thing didn’t happen. Despite the very helpful money it was putting into our bank account, Barb said she didn’t have the stomach for it and wanted to sell the place. I didn’t argue.
Until I’d been thrown in jail with nothing but time on my hands, I’d never really stopped to consider the impact my self-indulgent ways were having on those close to me. The kids were confused and fatherless; Barb was torn up inside and getting worse; my mother and aunt were anxiety-ridden. . . . As quiet as I’d tried to be about the shadowy part of my life, several other lives were now being affected by it, drawn into my predicament to the point where their own lives were being put on hold.
One interesting thing I learned in jail: Rarely does a member of an inmate’s family weigh the crime, weigh the time and d
etermine that the loved one is getting just what he deserves. No matter what you did to get yourself there, everybody in your family hurts for you. Helpless, afraid and in pain, they feel that you’re completely at the mercy of a dark, shadowy system peopled with dark, shadowy custodians. They spend sleepless nights worrying about what “they” are doing to you when nobody is looking and what an agony it must be to be locked up. When they sit down to a nice meal or go to a movie or just read the paper with a cup of coffee, the fact that you can’t do those things nags at them, and they feel guilty, even though it’s not their fault. It doesn’t much matter to them why you’re inside. They hurt for you, regardless.
I was and still am deeply ashamed about this period, about the awful impact it had on people who hadn’t done anything wrong. Even if I’d kept on pulling the occasional score—in retrospect I’m not sure I had the ability to stop doing that—there was no reason for me to have taken on Gerwens and the entire Fort Lauderdale police force. My arrogance and outsized self-confidence prevented me from realizing that you don’t fuck with real power, with people who have state authority, vast resources, licensed guns and an institutionalized hatred of outlaws like me and everything we represent. I should have been smart enough to realize I would be set up, because Gerwens and his trigger-happy minions weren’t going to be satisfied until I was either under a life sentence or dead. And whether their resolve affected innocent people or not wasn’t their problem.
I actually had it better inside than most of the other prisoners. When I’d first been locked up in that same jail for those seventy-seven days two years before, I’d gotten along well with the guards and never given anybody a hard time. They remembered that and routinely afforded me privileges, such as phone calls, that other inmates had to beg for. It seems like a small thing, but I was locked up twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do but write long, rambling letters to Barb and add up how many years I would get if convicted of all charges (it was 104), and little things could make a difference.