“Pressley, come on, man,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. I thought we had an understanding. You told me to watch my back. Why are you doing this?”
I was leaning forward as far as the seat belt and the cuff lock between my legs would allow me. I saw a slight smile crack across his face and I realized he had played me. He wasn’t a sympathizer. He was one of them.
“Who put you up to this, Pressley?” I demanded. “Was it Berg? Who?”
Again, only silence from my abductor. Pressley pulled the car into an open work bay covered with a corrugated and rusted metal roof. He then hit the release on the rear door locks and got out of the car.
I tracked him as he walked around the front of the car. But he stopped there and looked back at me through the windshield. I was puzzled. Was he going to pull me out, or what?
The rear door across from me opened and I turned to see Special Agent Dawn Ruth slide onto the plastic seat next to me.
“Agent Ruth,” I blurted out. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Calm down, Haller,” she said. “I’m here to talk.”
I turned and looked through the windshield again at Pressley. I realized I had read him completely wrong just now.
“And I should ask you the same question,” Ruth said. “What the fuck is going on?”
I looked back at her, regaining some of my composure and cool.
“You know what’s going on,” I said. “What do you want?”
“First of all, this conversation didn’t happen,” she said. “If at any time you try to say it did, I will have four agents ready to alibi me and you will look like a liar.”
“Fine. What exactly is the conversation?”
“Your judge is out of control. Ordering me to appear to testify? That’s not going to happen.”
“Fine, don’t show up. Then you can read about it in the Times. But if you ask me, that’s no way to keep an investigation under wraps.”
“And you think testifying in open court is?”
“Look, if you cooperate, we can choreograph your testimony. We can protect what you need to protect. But I need to get on the record that Sam Scales was an informant and Louis Opparizio found out and had him whacked.”
“Even if that’s not what happened?”
I looked at her for a long moment before responding.
“If that’s not what happened, then what did?” I finally asked.
“Think about it,” she said. “If Opparizio thought Sam was an informant, would he still go on running the scam at BioGreen? Or would he have killed Sam and closed up shop?”
“Okay, so you’re saying the scam’s been ongoing—even after Sam got killed. So the bureau’s operation is also ongoing.”
I tried to put it together but couldn’t.
“Why was Sam killed?” I asked.
“You probably knew him better than anybody,” Ruth said. “Why do you think?”
It clicked.
“He was running his own scam,” I said. “On the bureau and Opparizio. What was it?”
Ruth hesitated. She was steeped in a culture that never gave away secrets. But now was the time—in a conversation that would and could be denied.
“He was running a skim,” Ruth said. “We found out after he was dead. He secretly started his own oil distro company. Incorporated, registered with the government. He was running tankers back and forth to the port, but half the subsidies were going to him.”
I nodded. The story was easy to pick up from there.
“Opparizio found out and had to whack him,” I said. “He didn’t want an investigation to come to BioGreen and he saw an opportunity to settle a score with me.”
“And I’m not going to testify to any of this,” she said.
“There’s no reason not to. Opparizio is dead, in case you didn’t hear.”
“You think Opparizio was in charge of this? You think he was the target? He was running one operation. We’re watching six refineries in four states. Ongoing operations. Opparizio wasn’t giving the orders, he was following them. And that’s why it was easy for them to decide he had to go. His freelancing vendetta with you showed poor business judgment and that’s not tolerated by these people. At all. You think he snuck off to Arizona to avoid a subpoena? Don’t be silly. He was hiding from them, not you.”
“You were watching him too?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Through the windshield I could see Pressley pacing in front of the car. I had a feeling that we were on a clock. This was an unsanctioned stop.
“Does he work for you, too?” I asked. “Pressley? Or do you have something on him?”
“Don’t worry about him,” Ruth said.
My thoughts returned to my own situation.
“So, what am I supposed to do?” I said. “Sacrifice myself? Take a conviction so your case goes on? That’s crazy. You’re crazy if you think I’ll do that.”
“We had hoped that our investigation would be at the arrest phase before your case even made it to court,” she said. “We would then square it. But that didn’t happen—you refused to delay the case. A lot of things that were supposed to happen didn’t.”
“No fucking kidding. Let me ask you one thing. Were you watching when they killed Sam? Did you guys just let it happen—to protect your case?”
“We would never let something like that happen. Especially just to protect a case. They grabbed him inside the refinery. We had nobody else inside. We didn’t know he was dead until the LAPD ran his prints after finding his body in your trunk.”
Through the windshield, I saw Pressley start signaling to Ruth. He pointed to his watch and then twirled a finger in the air. He was telling her to wrap it up. When we were crossing the 101 earlier, he had used the cruiser’s radio to report that he was moving his prisoner to Twin Towers. It wouldn’t be long before they noticed we had not arrived.
“So, why didn’t you just go to the LAPD or the D.A.’s Office and lay this all out?” I asked. “You could have told them just to back off of me, and none of this would have happened.”
“That would have been a little difficult to do with Sam being found in your trunk in your garage and the media storm that followed,” Ruth said. “This whole thing has been an unavoidable clusterfuck from the start.”
“And you ended up with a guilty conscience. That’s why you slipped the Ventura arrest report under my door.”
“I’m not saying I did that.”
“You don’t have to. But thank you.”
Ruth opened her door.
“So, what happens tomorrow?” I asked.
She looked back at me.
“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s out of my hands, that’s for sure.”
She exited and closed the door, then walked off to the rear and I didn’t bother to turn to watch her go. Pressley quickly got in behind the wheel. He backed out of the work bay and headed out of the yard the way we had come in.
“Sorry, Pressley,” I said. “I panicked before and read you wrong.”
“Not the first time that’s been done,” he said.
“You an agent or just working with them?”
“Think I’d tell you?”
“Probably not.”
“So, if anything comes up at the Towers about us being late, I’m going to say I pulled over because you were getting sick.”
I nodded.
“I’ll back that up,” I said.
“They won’t even ask you,” he said.
We were back on Vignes Street. Through the windshield I could see Twin Towers up ahead.
51
Thursday, February 27
In the morning they woke me early and put me in the escort cruiser before eight o’clock. No one at the jail told me why.
“Pressley, you know why I’m going over so early?” I asked. “Court won’t even be open for an hour.”
“Not a clue,” Pressley said. “They just told me to get you there.”
“Any fallout from the little detour home last night?”
“What detour?”
I nodded and looked out the window. I hoped that whatever this was, Maggie McPherson had been alerted.
When we got to the courthouse, I was passed off to a runner who took me into the lockdown elevator and used a key to operate it. That was when I began to fill in the blanks. I was usually taken to the ninth floor, where Judge Warfield’s courtroom was located. The runner turned the key next to the button for the eighteenth floor. Every trial lawyer in the city knew that the main District Attorney’s Office was located on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building.
Off the elevator I was ushered into a locked interview room that I assumed was used to interview criminal suspects when they agreed to cooperate. It was not a good practice to let agreements like that sit. People change their minds—both criminal suspects and lawyers. If somebody facing a tough charge or a tough sentence makes the quiet offer in court to provide substantial assistance to authorities, you don’t set up an appointment for the next day. You take them upstairs and extract whatever information there is to extract. And it happened in the room that I was now sitting in.
Handcuffed to a waist chain and still in my blues, I sat in the room alone for fifteen minutes before I started staring up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling and yelling that I wanted to see my lawyer.
This drew no response for another five minutes and then the door opened and the runner was there. He escorted me down a hall and through a door. I entered what looked like a boardroom—most likely where policy was set and prosecutors and supervisors discussed big cases. Ten tall-back chairs stood around a large oval table, and most of them were occupied. I was led to an open seat next to Maggie McPherson. I either recognized most of the people gathered around the table or could guess who they were. On one side sat Dana Berg, along with her bow-tied second, as well as John “Big John” Kelly, the District Attorney, and Matthew Scallan, who I knew to be Berg’s boss and head of the Major Crimes Unit. In that capacity he had also formerly been Maggie’s boss until they moved her to the Environmental Protection Unit.
Lined up across the table from the state prosecutors were the feds. I saw Agent Ruth and her partner, Rick Aiello, along with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, Wilson Corbett, and another man whom I did not recognize but assumed was a midlevel prosecutor most likely overseeing the BioGreen investigation.
“Mr. Haller, welcome,” Kelly said. “How are you today?”
I looked at Maggie before answering and she gave a slight shake of her head. It was enough for me to understand that she did not know what this was about either.
“I just spent another night in your wonderful accommodations at Twin Towers,” I said. “How do you think I feel, Big John?”
Kelly nodded like he knew that would be my response.
“Well, we think we have some good news for you, then,” Kelly said. “If we can come to an agreement on some things here, we’re going to drop the case against you. You could sleep in your own bed tonight. How would that be?”
I took a scan of the faces in the room, beginning with Maggie’s. She looked surprised. Dana Berg looked mortified, and Rick Aiello looked the way he did the last time I had seen him on my front porch: angry.
“Dismissed?” I asked. “A jury has been sworn in. Jeopardy has attached.”
Kelly nodded.
“Correct,” he said. “You cannot be retried under the double jeopardy clause. No do-overs. It’s done. Over.”
“And what are the things we would have to come to an agreement on?” I asked.
“I’ll let Mr. Corbett take that one,” Kelly said.
I knew little about Corbett other than that he’d had no experience as a prosecutor before being appointed U.S. Attorney by the current president.
“We have a situation,” he said. “We have an ongoing investigation that reaches far deeper than you know. It doesn’t end with Louis Opparizio. But to expose even a small part of it in a court case would imperil the larger case. We need you to agree to be silent until the larger case is completed and adjudicated.”
“And when will that be?” Maggie asked.
“We don’t know,” Corbett said. “It is ongoing. That is all I can tell you.”
“So, how would this work?” I asked. “Charges are just dropped without explanation?”
Kelly took back the floor. I was staring at Dana Berg as he spoke.
“We would move to dismiss the charges as contrary to the public interest,” he said. “We will state that the District Attorney’s Office has come into information and evidence that casts grave doubt on the validity and justice of our case. What that information and evidence is will remain confidential as part of an ongoing investigation.”
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all you say? What about her? What does Dana say? She’s been calling me a murderer for four months.”
“We want to draw as little attention to this as possible,” Kelly said. “We can’t grandstand this and still protect the federal investigation.”
Berg was staring down at the table in front of her. I could tell she was not down with this plan. She was a true believer in her case until the end.
“So, that’s the deal?” I said. “Charges dropped but I can never say why, and you people never say you were wrong?”
No one responded.
“You think you’re making an accommodation,” I said. “You think this is a deal where you let a murderer walk for the greater good.”
“We’re not passing judgment,” Kelly said. “We know you have information that could be detrimental to the greater good should it come out.”
I pointed to Dana Berg.
“She is,” I said. “She passed judgment when she put me in jail. She thinks I killed Sam Scales. You all do.”
“You don’t know what I think, Haller,” Berg said.
“I pass,” I said.
“What?” Kelly said.
Maggie put her hand on my arm to try to stop me.
“I said, I pass,” I responded. “Take me down to court. I’ll take my chances with the jury. I get a not-guilty from them, and I’m clean and clear. And I can tell the whole world how I was set up right under the FBI’s nose and then railroaded by the D.A.’s Office. I like that deal better.”
I used my legs to start pushing my chair back and turned to look for the deputy who had brought me in.
“What do you want, Haller?” Corbett asked.
I looked back at him.
“What do I want?” I said. “I want my innocence back. I want it said that your new information and evidence clearly exonerates me of this charge. I want either you, Big John, or Dana to say that. First in a motion to the court, then to the judge in open court, and then I want it at the press conference on the courthouse steps. If you can’t give me that, then I’ll get it from the jury and we have nothing to talk about.”
Kelly looked across the table at his federal counterpart. I saw the nod and the transmission of approval.
“I think we can accommodate that,” Kelly said.
Berg leaned back abruptly as though she had been slapped across the face.
“Good,” I said. “Because that’s not all.”
“Jesus Christ,” Aiello said.
“I want two more things,” I said, ignoring Aiello and looking directly at Kelly. “I want no backlash on my co-counsel. She goes back to work for you after this. No pay cut, no job change.”
“That was already going to be the case,” Kelly said. “Maggie is one of our best and—”
“Great,” I said. “Then it won’t be a problem for you to put it in writing.”
“Michael,” Maggie said. “I don’t—”
“No, I want it in writing,” I said. “I want all of this in writing.”
Kelly slowly nodded.
“You’ll get it in writing,” he said. “What’s the second thing?”
“Wel
l, I think we made a convincing case in court that Officer Roy Milton was waiting for me that night four months ago,” I said. “His story about the missing license plate is bullshit. I was framed for this, and then I was beaten and nearly killed while my name and reputation were repeatedly dragged through the mud. The LAPD will never investigate this, but you have a Public Integrity Unit. I will be filing a complaint and I don’t want it mothballed. I want it investigated to a conclusion. This could not have gone down without inside help, and Milton is the starting point. I’m sure there is a link somewhere to Opparizio—I’d start with his lawyers—and I want to know what that link is.”
“We’ll open a file,” Kelly said. “We’ll investigate in good faith.”
“Then I think we’re good,” I said.
Berg shook her head at my list of demands. Maggie saw me focusing on Berg and put her hand on my arm again, hoping to hold me back. But it was my moment and I couldn’t let it pass.
“Dana, I know you’ll never believe this was a frame,” I said. “A lot of people won’t. But maybe someday when the feds run this investigation out to the end, they’ll take the time to show you where you and the LAPD went wrong.”
For the first time, Berg turned and looked at me.
“Fuck you, Haller,” she said. “You are scum and no deal you make will ever change that. I’ll see you in the courtroom. I want to get this over with as soon as possible.”
She got up from her seat then and left the room. There was a long silence. I spent most of it with my attention on Agent Ruth. I wanted to help her but I didn’t want to throw her under the bus for having helped me.
“Are we finished here?” Corbett asked, putting his hands on the arms of his chair and pausing before pushing himself up.
“I have something for the agents,” I said.
“We don’t want anything from you,” Aiello said.
The Law of Innocence Page 35
