by Paul Batista
“One of my other partners, the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, told me he was a wealthy Argentinean who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen and who wanted to be a silent partner in the casino. So the name Polo Grounds, LLC was used on all the documents. I was told Mr. Caliente liked to play polo. He owned polo horses.”
“But you knew that only Oscar Caliente was Polo Grounds, LLC, correct?”
“I never dealt with anyone else from Polo Grounds, LLC.”
“And you knew Mr. Caliente was a leader of the Sinaloa cartel?”
“I do now. So do you. I didn’t know that then. I had no idea at that time. I never would have spent a second with him if I knew that. But I didn’t, and I still don’t know that for sure.”
“And you know the Sinaloa cartel is the largest, most violent drug cartel in the world, right?”
“I read that in the newspapers. And it’s mentioned on some of the entries I saw under your name on a Google search. In fact, as I recall it, those were words you used.”
“How often did you meet Mr. Caliente?”
“Only once.”
“At the Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Ten minutes.”
“What did he say to you and what did you say to him?”
“We talked about the fact that he had money he wanted to invest in the casino.”
“Did you ask him where his money came from?”
“No.” Hughes icily shifted his gaze from the jury to Raquel. “Where does your money come from?”
She ignored him. “And why,” she asked, unfazed by Hughes’ hostility, which she, in fact, welcomed, “didn’t you put Mr. Caliente’s name on the bankruptcy disclosure form?”
“The form asked who the casino’s owners were. The shares had been issued to Polo Grounds, LLC. I checked with official New York State filings and saw it was a legally organized company, not just a fictitious name. So I thought at the time I was answering the question that the form asked.”
Quietly, intently, distinctly, Raquel spoke, “You knew you were lying then and you know you’re lying now, correct?”
“Forms can be ambiguous, Ms. Rematti.”
“You graduated from Stanford Law School, right?”
“I did.”
“And then you went to work as a young lawyer for Cravath, Swain & Moore, one of the oldest and fanciest law firms in the world?”
“I did. I was only there four years. I developed other interests.”
“You were in the corporate department at Cravath?”
“Yes. I was young.”
“But you knew that when forms like the bankruptcy filing used words such as who owns a company beneficially, directly, or indirectly they are looking for real information about who the real owners are?”
“If you say so.”
“No, no, Mr. Hughes,” Raquel said. “Just answer the question.”
Almost meekly, he stared at Raquel. “You’re right.”
“So, you lied?”
“I concealed.” Gordon Hughes glanced at the jurors. In that moment, he finally recognized he was rapidly losing whatever confidence and credibility and rapport he felt he might have developed with them in the last three days. The two older black women, one a cleaning lady and the other a high school English teacher, both prim, both from Harlem, both churchgoing Baptists, were no longer even glancing at him.
“Concealed?” Raquel Rematti repeated. “Doesn’t that mean lied?”
“I had, or I had at the time I signed the bankruptcy court form, a wife and five children. I saw the casino opportunity as a way to take care of my family. I regret to say I had no interest in getting into the details of where any of my investors got their money. People are entitled to use corporate or entity names.”
“Listen to me carefully, Mr. Hughes. You knew you lied on the bankruptcy form, didn’t you, when you didn’t disclose the name of Mr. Caliente?”
“You win, Ms. Rematti. I lied. Okay?”
Still without notes and still without pausing, Raquel said, “Let’s draw a circle, Mr. Hughes, on the board. Do you see that circle?”
“It’s a very good circle, Ms. Rematti.”
“Let me write on this curve the words Tumi Suitcases with $2 million from Dr. Chuang. Do you see that?”
Hughes nodded.
Judge Goldstein said, “You have to answer with words, Mr. Hughes. The court reporter can’t transcribe a nod.”
“I see it,” Hughes said.
“You testified that even though the $2 million belonged to Senator Baldesteri you didn’t hand any of it to her, correct?”
“Not directly.”
“Oh, so there is always a difference between directly and indirectly for you?”
Hughes was weakening. He shrugged.
“Words,” Judge Goldstein said, “use words.”
“You’ve been over that, Ms. Rematti,” Hughes said.
With her black Magic Marker, Raquel wrote on the smooth crescent of the circle, Oscar Caliente $500,000. “You see that, Mr. Hughes?”
“Sure.”
“How long after Dr. Chuang and the people you call his two nuns gave you the Tumi suitcases with the $2 million at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco did it take you to count out the $500,000 in hundred-dollar bills for Mr. Caliente?”
“Two, three hours—I was alone. I was told that Mr. Caliente was in a suite at the Stanford Court Hotel just a few blocks away from the Fairmont, that he knew Dr. Chuang had delivered the cash for Senator Baldesteri’s campaign, and that he wanted at least part of his casino losses returned. And that he wanted it fast. It didn’t matter to him where the cash came from.”
“What did you do when you finished counting out the money?”
“I called a man named Hugo. He was the person I needed to speak to when I had a need to reach Mr. Caliente.”
“Did you use your cell phone to call Hugo?”
“Good question, Ms. Rematti. I went to the lobby of the Fairmont and used an old-fashioned guest ground line to call Hugo.”
“What happened next?”
“Fifteen minutes later I was in the lobby with a big Tumi suitcase. Hugo came into the lobby. He recognized me. I had never seen him before. He took the suitcase.”
“And there was $500,000 in cash in the suitcase, correct?”
“Down to the dollar.”
“Were you afraid of Mr. Caliente?”
“By that time, completely afraid of him.”
“Are you still afraid of Mr. Caliente?”
“Absolutely.” Gordon Hughes paused and cracked open the cap of a bottle of Evian water. It was at that moment the only sound in the classic, wood-paneled courtroom. “You should be, too, Ms. Rematti.”
Judge Goldstein said, “That’s enough, Mr. Hughes. You were once a lawyer. You know that comment is inappropriate.”
Raquel Rematti asked, “And that leaves you with one-and-a-half million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“And where did it go?”
“In every political campaign, Ms. Rematti, from a race for county railroad commissioner in rural Texas to President of the United States, there are thousands of little mouths to be fed. And those mouths need cash. They don’t take checks or credit cards.”
“And you testified when Mr. Decker asked you questions that you told the Senator that Dr. Chuang had given you $1.5 million in cash?”
“That’s right. I saw her two nights later at a fund-raiser in Minneapolis.”
“And you testified that she told you not to report the $1.5 million to the Federal Election Commission or the IRS, correct?”
“Correct.”
“You testified she told you just to keep the cash in secure places and use it when you needed to? When the little mouths needed to be fed?”
“That’s what she instructed me.”
“And you told the jur
ors yesterday that she ordered you to give $75,000 of the cash to her?”
“Yes, she did. I did what she told me to do. She always took cash, for her own use, from campaign funds.”
“And nobody else heard this conversation, is that right?”
“I’m certain of that.”
“Are you certain of that because the conversation never happened?”
“No, Ms. Rematti.” Gordon Hughes leaned forward again toward the jury. The two elderly black women continued to gaze into the dead space in front of them. The gorgeous, impatient Latina juror was staring at the black polish on her fingernails. “No one else heard it because the Senator and I were in the shower together when I told her. There was no one else in the shower.”
Even Judge Naomi Goldstein, rigid, ossified, a woman who never once spontaneously called even a short bathroom break for herself, broke into the faintest expression of surprise when she heard Gordon Hughes’ words. She actually glanced at him and, for an evanescent moment, at the suddenly alert jurors.
Raquel Rematti had long ago learned that, like great athletes, great trial lawyers needed luck at crucial times. She had one of those moments when she heard Judge Goldstein say, “I see that it’s now almost four. As I told you, ladies and gentlemen, during jury selection, every day of trial will stop at four. I will, as I’ve told you, expect you all here at exactly nine tomorrow morning to resume. Ms. Rematti will pick up her cross-examination of the witness then. So we are suspended for the day and, as I’ve also instructed, none of the jurors is to discuss this case overnight, watch television, or listen to the radio, or look at any form of social media. No Facebook, no Twitter, not a single source of information until all of the evidence has been presented here in this courtroom and until you have finished your deliberations. Although I know it’s difficult in this day and age to resist these temptations, you all promised during jury selection to do that.”
When she spoke directly to the jurors, her voice was remarkably strong for a woman who looked ten years older than her actual seventy-five years. She was profoundly old-fashioned. She said, “I wish you all a good evening,” as she waited for the men and women of the jury to walk like schoolchildren in a single orderly file out of the jury box to the rear door reserved for them.
As she stood and waited quietly at the defense table with the very attractive fifty-five-year-old Senator standing just to her left, Raquel thought, Now what the fuck do I do with this?
It was a challenge. She loved challenges.
CHAPTER 2
ANGELINA BALDESTERI WAS not only the widow of an assassinated President but also a sitting United States Senator with the support of an incalculable but immense number of liberal suburban and urban women, blacks, Latino immigrants, labor union leaders and union members, college students, and others who wanted and expected her to run for President. And this was something the Senator, in her first meeting with Raquel Rematti, said she was going to do. “Which is why you must win this trial,” she had told Raquel. “Not only win it. But get Harrington and his puppets in the courtroom disbarred, destroyed, including, of course, Hunter Decker.”
When the indictment was announced at a press conference, Hunter Decker, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, had stood behind Ralph Harrington, the Attorney General of the United States. There were more than two hundred Assistant United States Attorneys who worked for Hunter Decker in Manhattan. Like all of the other ninety-three presidentially appointed United States Attorneys in the country, Decker, while he was a United States Attorney, never personally tried a case or was even in the courtroom for a trial. He delegated all of that work to the Assistant U.S. Attorneys. But he became the lead trial attorney for the prosecution in Senator Baldesteri’s trial. Attorney General Harrington, who enjoyed being called “General Harrington” even though he had never spent a day in the military, had directed Decker to do that because George Spellman, the Republican President of the United States, insisted on it. “Somebody’s got to stop that bitch,” Spellman had said.
Hunter Decker, forty-eight, was unfazed, even flattered. Unlike many of the country’s full-fledged United States Attorneys, most of them ambitious men and women with political connections but little or no trial experience, he had spent years as an actual trial lawyer in front of juries in complicated cases for the large law firms where he had worked. The Republican Party intensely wanted to prevent Angelina Baldesteri, the widow of a very popular and martyred Democratic President, from becoming President herself.
And, besides, Hunter Decker, who believed Senator Baldesteri was corrupt by her every instinct and, as he put it, “a walking crime wave,” was pleased with the prospect of battle with the wily Raquel Rematti.
Raquel stared at the Senator at their first meeting when Angelina spoke matter-of-factly about her insistence on the disbarment and destruction of Hunter Decker. They were alone in Raquel’s office on Park Avenue at 58th Street. It was a chilly late fall evening. “Senator,” Raquel had answered, “you know the movie Casablanca, don’t you?”
Baldesteri had many intricate qualities: the senses of humor and curiosity were two of them. She gave Raquel a faint smile and waited. Raquel had a sense of humor, too.
Raquel said, “There’s the scene where Humphrey Bogart is at a table in his nightclub, Rick’s Café, and listening to the Nazi Major Strasser and the French Prefect Captain Reynaud as they’re talking about the Nazis marching into Paris, London, and New York. Suddenly Bogart stands up and says, ‘You’ll excuse me, gentlemen, but your business is the politics of the world and mine is running a saloon.’” Raquel, her face shadowed by the dimming light in her office, had added, “Think of me as running a saloon. I have no interest in politics. You do. My business is to get you acquitted. Like Bogart just running a saloon. I’m not interested in destroying the President, Decker, or anyone else. Just running my own saloon.”
The day after that first meeting, Leon Stanski, who was the head of a super PAC named America Renewed, had called Raquel and said, “The Senator has hired you.”
“I’m glad to help,” Raquel had answered. “But does she understand this is not just hard work for me but for her as well?”
“Never, Ms. Rematti, underestimate the Senator. She’s the brightest person on the planet. And so the next question is how much money do you need as a retainer to get started?”
Without hesitating, Raquel said, “Five hundred thousand dollars. After that, one thousand and three hundred dollars an hour. I’ll email you the wiring instructions for my bank account.”
Stanski said, “No emails, Ms. Rematti. I never use emails. Just tell me now. I’ll write the wiring instructions down on an old-fashioned piece of paper. And then swallow it.”
Raquel recited the numbers of her account and her bank’s routing number. Three hours later, using the app for her Citibank account, she saw that a wire transfer for five hundred thousand dollars had been received in her business account from Alexander Isaac Greenfield of Malibu, California. Raquel put that name into Google. There was no trace of any Alexander Isaac Greenfield in Malibu or any other place in California, or any other place in the world. This surprised her. But from her years of experience she knew that there was nothing illegal or even all that unusual about a client’s payments coming from a source other than from the actual client, even if the source was anonymous. They even had the extraordinary, improbable name “third-party beneficiary” payments.
CHAPTER 3
IT WAS RAINING when Raquel Rematti and her client stepped out of the old federal courthouse at Foley Square onto the granite steps. As the former First Lady of the United States, Angelina Baldesteri had a permanent entourage of at least four Secret Service agents with her at all times. During trial days, the agents sat in the row of leather-cushioned chairs just behind the defense table. Even though no one was told who they were, it was obvious they were men and women protecting the Senator.
Two of the agents held aloft black umbrella
s as the Senator and Raquel, both wearing high-heeled shoes, walked carefully down the stately courthouse’s grand granite steps. As always, crowds of reporters swarmed as near them as they could reach. The agents, all in black suits, as was even the one taciturn woman who was part of this day’s detail, and men in the uniforms of United States Marshals carrying M-16 rifles, kept the reporters and others at least ten feet away from the two women. Most of the reporters were shouting questions. There were bright television vans on the street, with flying-saucer-shaped discs on their roofs streaming rainwater in the downpour.
The three black SUVs that always carried and accompanied Angelina were parked on the sidewalk at the foot of the magisterial courthouse steps where countless models down through the years had been photographed for the covers of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and other glossy magazines. The side door of the vehicle in the center slid open for the Senator and Raquel, as they, still protected by the black umbrellas, stepped up into the middle seats. Their driver was a woman in a uniform. The front door beside her opened and Alex Swett, a fifty-year-old Secret Service Agent who had spent almost three years with Angelina and was not only the leader of the crew but the longest-serving of the ever-changing entourage that had accompanied her since her husband was shattered by a suicide bomber in a crowd on the Avenue of the Americas, stepped into the front passenger seat. He was soaking wet. Two other agents clambered into the SUV and sat in the third row of seats behind Angelina and Raquel. Except for the driver, every one of them carried visible pistols and rifles. Raquel was never sure whether this made her feel more secure or more vulnerable.
The three SUVs sped rapidly onto Centre Street, which encircled the old concentration of granite and marble courthouses and monumental, late-nineteenth-century municipal buildings, relics of the Tammany Hall era. The vans’ police lights flashed and illuminated the wet roadway. Finally, Angelina exhaled, saying, “He’s a lying little bastard.”
These were the first words she had spoken since Gordon Hughes described the conversation in the shower.