by Paul Batista
Hugo had kissed her passionately after the fourth of the elegant dinners they had over the next several nights. From the first moment at the first dinner, she had wanted to kiss him and let him know he could readily have everything her body could give him. Each time they had dinner he knew it would have been a simple step, when he took it, to bring her back to his apartment. Instead, each time, he had one of his security men drive her to the Bronx after he gave her five or six of those plastic bags with white powder.
Within five minutes of first walking through the door of his apartment, Lydia Guzman had simply taken off all her clothes, leading him to an opulent room that was obviously his bedroom. There was a platform bed. As he undressed, Hugo also lit the fragrant candles spread around the room. All over the room the air was soon suffused with a soft glow.
Hugo was a prodigious lover. He began by kneeling between her legs and softening and stimulating her with his tongue for at least ten minutes. He touched against each soft surface. He entered her only when she pulled gently on his shoulders, saying, “I want you in me.” He seemed to hold his erection for hours, and she shuddered and came time after time. How, she wondered, was she going to keep him?
During their first night in the apartment, Hugo whispered, “Lydia, amor, I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“What does it matter?” she whispered, playfully.
“It doesn’t,” he said.
“I’m a hair stylist. I work in a salon on the Grand Concourse.”
“Why, amor, are you always free for dinner? For being with me?”
“I come and go to the salon as I please, whenever I get called. I either say yes or I say no.”
“It’s great,” Hugo said. “All that freedom.”
“Right now I’m wasting my days in some courthouse listening to bullshit.”
“You mean you’re on a jury?”
“Yes. I’m in the room, but my head is off the reservation.”
“Drug trial? Lots of those in Manhattan.”
“That I’d enjoy. Might learn something useful.”
“So what kind of trial?”
“Some Senator. A woman. Baldestrana? Baldi? I don’t know. Some Italian name.”
“Lydia, that woman is one of the Senators from New York. And her husband was once the President of the United States.”
“Who gives a fuck? It’s also costing me money. I get sixty bucks a day for jury service. That’s not even close to what I get for cutting and coloring hair for an afternoon.”
Hugo asked, “Can I tell you something?”
“About the trial?”
“Yeah.”
“The dried-up old bitch who’s the judge says every time she opens her mouth that nobody is supposed to talk about the trial, read the newspapers, look at Google, or even go on Facebook.”
“That shit, forcing you off Facebook, must drive you crazy.”
“For sure. Besides, I really don’t care. I wish I could wear my earbuds during the trial and listen to music.”
“There’s something,” Hugo finally said, “I could figure out for you to do.”
“I tried everything I could to get off that jury.”
“This is different. I want you to stay on it.” He lapsed into silence, stroking her breasts as she, luxuriant, lay beside him. “I’ll give you $100,000 in cash if you stay on the jury. And say she’s innocent. Pure and simple. No matter if everybody else on the jury tells you, or screams at you, that she’s guilty as shit, you say she’s innocent, not guilty. No matter how many times they have you vote, you check the box that says not guilty.”
“Come on, man, what crazy talk is that shit?”
“Nothing crazy about it.”
“How come?” Lydia asked.
“You all have to agree she’s guilty. If one of you, just one, says not guilty, she walks.”
“Why do you care?” Lydia asked.
“I don’t. The people I work for care.”
“Does she know about this?”
“You mean the Senator?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Sweetheart, don’t ask too many questions.”
“Well, I do have another question. What if other people think she’s not guilty so it turns out you didn’t need me? Do I still get the money?”
“Sure you do. You’re my mama. I keep my promises. When we have dinner two nights from now, bring a big pocketbook, and I’ll put fifty of the $100,000 in it. Then we come back here and fuck. Like sealing the deal.”
“What about the other fifty?”
“Hey, amor, I work for smart people. The other fifty is insurance. They deliver, through me, when you deliver. All you need to deliver is that no vote.”
“You have any more coke for me?”
“All you want.”
“Do you have anything else for me right now?”
“Anything you want.”
CHAPTER 14
HUNTER DECKER WAS a meticulously dressed lawyer. His suits were expensive, unlike those of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who worked for him. This was because Hunter was to the manor born, the heir to the fortune that his family had amassed during more than one hundred and fifty years of constructing massive farm equipment that was used around the world, including the vast farmlands of the Soviet Union when there had been a Soviet Union.
In a windowless beige conference room in the austere brick building that housed the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Decker listened quietly as two Special Agents of the FBI, Joe Giordano and Neil Curnin, told him something that he simply didn’t believe. Raquel Rematti, they said, was involved with a group of people who were making arrangements to pay $100,000 and give unlimited quantities of cocaine to a juror in the trial of Angelina Baldesteri so that the juror would never vote for conviction. Every high school civics student in America knew, or should know, that a person could only be convicted if every juror agreed that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. “Even a stupid Puerto Rican cokehead knows that or can learn it,” Giordano said.
Hunter Decker’s skepticism of Special Agents Giordano and Curnin was deep-seated. In two trials over the last three years, they had given testimony that, Hunter believed after the defense cross-examination, was not true. Since he had no solid proof of that, he had done nothing. Both defendants were convicted because of the weight of the other evidence against them. Giordano’s and Curnin’s testimony, even if not true, made no difference to the outcome of the trials. Privately, Decker was unsettled by his suspicions of the recklessness of these two rogue men, yet he had no credible evidence that they were liars or benefited tangibly by what they did. Decker actively disliked them without revealing it. He enjoyed challenging them, and doing so from a position of noblesse oblige.
“These,” Decker said, “are serious claims. Raquel Rematti is a legend. She’s been watched hundreds of times by people like you for anything that would take her out of the game. The CIA, Homeland Security, the IRS, the NSA, local cops, the Secret Service—every spook in America waiting to get her. Even the FBI.” He stared at them. “And now you two are sitting there like sixth-grade parochial school boys with something that sounds like make-believe about a well-regarded priest. Or, to put it so you’ll really get it, pure bullshit.”
On the opposite side of Decker’s desk, Giordano and Curnin stared at him. They hated him, but his old wealth and his position made him untouchable. “Our job,” Giordano said, “is to find out information for guys like you. What you do with it is your business. Take it or leave it. Up to you.”
“You gentlemen have lied to me before.”
His voice almost sibilant, Giordano said, “What the fuck you talkin’ about? You’ve said this to us before. I’m kind of sick of it by now, you know. Do something about it if you believe it. You can get our asses transferred whenever you want. You just can’t fire us, and you know that.”
“What you’ve told me about Rematti isn’t information.
Words become information when facts support them. I may not like Rematti—she represents the wrong people and does it too well and, worse yet, she likes it—but I’m not doing a thing to bring her down unless and until you give me facts.”
“The juror,” Curnin said, “is a junkie. Lydia Guzman. She’s also a talker. Suddenly she has enough coke that she’s not just a buyer but a dealer, although small scale so far. She told one of her girlfriends—someone the DEA has had under surveillance for months because of the girlfriend’s connection with a new ambitious dealer who is too stupid to know that Oscar Caliente’s people will soon get around to putting him into the East River without an inflatable tube, he’s a drowning dead rat—that she has a new boyfriend. Hugo Salazar. Hugo is the guy Angelina Baldesteri is talking to in Exhibit 673.”
“You don’t need to remind me who Salazar is,” Decker said. “I’m listening.”
“It turns out that the juror’s girlfriend is smart,” Curnin said. “Since she knows the DEA is on to her, she’s feeding info to us, thinking she’ll get a deal or protection for cooperation. Particularly if she can deliver something as big as this. She told the DEA that Lydia Guzman has said that Hugo is giving mucho dinero and la coke if Lydia does something special for Angelina Baldesteri. Now what else in the world can Lydia Guzman do for Senator Angelina Baldesteri except never ever vote for a conviction? She’s sure as hell not going to color her hair for her.”
Hunter Decker leaned back in his swivel chair. “And who used the magic words Raquel Rematti in talking about cash and coke and a junkie juror?”
Giordano spoke out. “No one. But you don’t think a Senator is handing money, or arranging to hand money, through a trusted loyalist, to a member of the Sinaloa cartel like Salazar to give to a junkie to get a get-out-of-jail-free card? Think it through. Who among all the people Baldesteri knows would know Salazar well enough to pull this off? Only Rematti, Salazar’s onetime lawyer. And Salazar, when he was Rematti’s client named at the time Juan Suarez, was also the object of her affection. It all fits.”
Decker stared at them and finally said, “Maybe in your minds it all fits together. But you haven’t yet made the sale to me, fellas. You need a wiretap or pictures or something else for me to feel, see, or touch before I’m about to tell a judge or anybody else that a lawyer with Rematti’s stature is carrying bags of cash and coke or is part of a plan to buy an acquittal.”
“What do you mean,” Giordano asked, “by ‘stature’? Rematti has been a pain in the ass to us for years. She’s kept dirty politicians, stock fraudsters, Mafioso, revolutionaries, Arabs, subversives, all kinds of scum, on the streets and out of jail for a long time.”
“And then,” Curnin added, “she’s had the balls to make a celebrity out of herself because of this dirty work. Television shows, teaching at frickin’ law schools. Now getting a TV star for a live-in boyfriend. Christ, she even played a movie role in a Pacino movie. And what was the name of the character she played? Raquel Rematti.”
Decker leaned forward, saying, “You know what? That’s her job, gentlemen. It’s not your job to chase a vendetta the FBI has against her. You need to do a hell of a lot more work than you’ve done before I can act on any of this. But I’m interested. I can’t go to Goldstein with any of this. And I can’t get any other judge or magistrate to issue a wiretap or search warrant for Rematti on the basis of a single thing you’ve told me. That’s my job—to be responsible.”
“Are you protecting Rematti?” Giordano asked. “Is there something special between you and her? She’s one good-looking woman.”
Decker said, “I’m not going to throw you out of this room for saying that. If you two actually do real work and come to me with real evidence, I’ll bring down Jesus Christ, Raquel Rematti, or Pope Francis, or Donald Trump. I can’t tell you how to do your jobs. I can tell you to do your jobs before you take up any more of my time.”
CHAPTER 15
FURIOUS, ANGELINA BALDESTERI wrote on a yellow legal pad for Raquel Rematti, “Get this bitch. She’s a liar. Ask her if she ever fucked Spellman. The President.” With her pen she twice underlined the words Spellman, President, Fucked.
As usual, Raquel knew very little before a witness took the stand for the Government about what the witness would say on direct examination. There were never any pretrial depositions in federal criminal cases where she could herself examine a witness for a preview of the testimony. Some witnesses were never even brought in front of the grand jury before a trial and as a result there was no existing written record of what they had said; they were a dangerous tabula rasa. And when the Government prosecutors, as sometimes happened, were forced by a particular judge to provide a last-minute list of their potential witnesses and mention next to each name “probable information,” that information had been honed to the very fine skill of cryptic descriptions. In the case of Georgina Draper, the meaningless description was for “relevant transactions.”
As usual, when the prosecutor’s direct examination was over—and Hunter Decker was a quick, deft examiner who almost never meandered—Naomi Goldstein yet again directed the terse words “cross-examination” to Raquel. As Raquel had learned, it was pointless to ask for even a short bathroom break.
“Ms. Draper,” Raquel started, “let me ask you a simple question: You remember, don’t you, saying that in the seven months you worked in Senator Baldesteri’s office you saw the man some have called Robert Calvaro hand several big manila envelopes to the Senator?”
“I certainly did.”
“But you never saw what was in them?”
“No.”
“The Senator never told you, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Robert Calvaro never told you, correct?”
“Correct.”
“You never spoke to Robert Calvaro?”
“Never. My job was to be the polite liaison with her constituents. He wasn’t a constituent. As far as I knew, his job was to help build a war chest for her presidential campaign.”
“How often did you see Robert Calvaro with the Senator?”
“Seven or eight times.”
“How did you even know the man’s name was Robert Calvaro?”
“That’s what the Senator called him. So everyone did.”
“You were never introduced to him by the Senator?”
“No.”
“Did he always carry an envelope?”
“Not always. He sometimes had a leather valise.”
“What happened when this man visited?”
“He went straight into her office. He never had to wait.”
“The Senator’s chambers are large, right?”
“Very. There are separate offices in the suite for her aides, interns, press secretary. And, of course, the Senator had her own room. Huge, an inner sanctum. All Senators do.”
“Did you have an office?”
“No. There was a big central area with desks. Her interns—and she had many of them; she seems to like having people around most of the time—sat at those desks. I had one. I was the oldest.”
“Is it fair to say that when this man visited, whether he had an envelope or a valise, there were always numerous people around?”
“That’s fair to say.”
“Did you ever hear her call him Robert?”
“Yes, I heard her use the name Robert.”
“Did you ever hear her use the name Oscar?”
“Never.”
“Did she ever call him Mr. Caliente?”
“No.”
“What happened when he arrived?”
“As I said, they always went directly into her office and she closed the door. And that was unusual.”
“Why so?”
“Even when other Senators visited, she left that door open. She’s generally open to view, receptive, nothing hidden, transparent, as she always liked to repeat. Except where Robert was concerned.”
“How long would he stay in there?
”
“It varied. Five minutes sometimes. Other times, an hour or more.”
“When he left, did he ever carry anything?”
“Usually the envelopes. But they were folded, empty, unlike when he arrived. They were full when he arrived.”
“At one point, Ms. Draper, you worked on the campaign staff for President Spellman, isn’t that right, when he was running for President?”
There was no change in Draper’s expression. And there was no change in Raquel Rematti’s.
“I did. Years ago, it was his first, unsuccessful campaign. I’ve been in Washington a long time. I’ve never been married, I have no political views, I’m comfortable with all kinds of politicians. I’m a professional. It doesn’t matter to me whether I work in a Democrat’s office or a Republican’s.”
“How much did President Spellman pay you?”
Standing, Hunter Decker said, “Objection.”
For the first time in the trial, Naomi Goldstein looked puzzled. “Do you mean, Ms. Rematti, now or years ago?”
“At any time,” Raquel answered.
There was the slightest semblance of surprise, or even disdain, in Judge Goldstein’s expression. “Objection sustained.”
“When,” Raquel asked, “did you leave Senator Baldesteri’s staff?”
“Six months ago, seven perhaps. Do you want to know why?”
“Unfortunately, Ms. Draper, I get to ask the questions,” Raquel said. “I ask, you answer.”
Naomi Goldstein, in an exasperated whisper, said into her microphone, “No, Ms. Rematti, I get to make the rules. The witness can continue with her answer.”
“Judge, I did not ask why. I asked when.”
Goldstein said, “The witness can continue her answer.”