We both restrained ourselves, but the line had been drawn and I made it clear to him that he better not cross it. Out on the street I told him, “You may be the law, but in the courtroom your ass is mine.”
He later went to the upper brass at the public defender’s office to tell them about the incident and to complain about me. The next day I was called in to see my boss, Rory Stein, the man who hired me. I was sure I was in big trouble. He called me into his office and showed me the complaint. As I began to shrink in my chair, Rory smiled at me and said, “Now that’s the way we teach our lawyers to fight for our clients!” That was the mentality in the public defender’s office. We fought for those who couldn’t fight for themselves.
I know this may sound extreme, but this is the state of mind required for one to do defense work effectively. Imagine yourself in trouble, fighting for your life in a system that cares more about those who are rich and guilty than those who are poor and innocent. Who do you want representing you, a fighter or someone who’ll fold at the first hint of pressure?
About a year before Casey’s case went to trial, I went to trial in Miami on another murder case. I was helping Michael Walsh, a good friend of mine, by assisting him with the forensics and ran into that same cop who was now a high-ranking homicide detective. Though it was thirteen years after our confrontation, Tapanes and I recognized each other instantly. We shook hands and even hugged. That afternoon we had lunch together and laughed about our fight. Being more mature, we both could see that each of us was just doing his job, and doing it well.
Many people think that defense lawyers and police officers are natural enemies, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a good defense lawyer always makes a police officer better.
I can’t tell you how many times I have finished a cross-examination of a police officer and left the courtroom with a good friendship. I’ve built really good relationships with many police officers through my years of working in the law. I have the utmost respect for what they do. They put their lives on the line for all of us and they get paid very little to do so.
It’s those police officers who violate the law and who trample over individual rights who really get to me. Those are the officers I go after as hard as I can, and unfortunately in the Anthony case, because of the high-profile nature of the case, the police always had their guard up. And I have to say that too often the officers in this case crossed the line—or at least danced on it.
I can never fully express how valuable my time at the public defender’s office was. My training attorney was Rick DeMaria, and not a day went by that he did not teach me something. Rick sat and watched each and every one of my trials, and every time I would win a case, he would bring me back to earth with a long list of the things that I had done wrong.
He told me, “Be careful. Don’t get too high and don’t get too low. You will learn far more from your failures than your successes.” He was right. Rick was always right. I would remember his words of wisdom for my battles to come.
After I had passed the bar, and toward the end of my first year after graduating from law school, I went through the character and fitness part of the Florida Bar, a long, drawn-out process where they go into your background and turn over every stone.
One of the people they contacted was my ex-wife.
Unbeknownst to me, she wrote a letter and accused me of being in arrears in my child support. She wrote, “He only pays me two hundred dollars a month. He needs to be paying me more now that he’s a lawyer.” She also noted that I was driving “a fancy car.”
I went for my informal hearing, sure this was going to be no big deal. I figured the topic would be my credit, because they were asking me about my finances. I didn’t hire a lawyer to come with me—I didn’t think I needed one. Later I found out that everyone went with a lawyer—except me.
The hearing was like the Spanish Inquisition. That’s when I found out what my ex-wife had said. They wanted me to admit I hadn’t paid her, but it wasn’t true, so I didn’t.
It would have been very easy for me to have said, “I was poor. I didn’t have money. I wasn’t paying her, but I’m paying her now, and we’re working it out.” And I would have gotten my license immediately. But stupid or not, I felt the truth was more important so I said, “It’s not true. I did pay her, but I paid her in cash mostly and occasionally with money orders. We had always had a great relationship, but it wasn’t until I became a lawyer that she started wanting more money. I told her, ‘I’m not a rich lawyer. I just graduated. Give me a little time. I’m a public defender.’ And I told her, ‘I have over $100,000 in student loans. Give me a little time.’”
That’s when we started having problems. The people in charge of the hearing started thinking, Is he lying? Because if he’s lying, he doesn’t have the character to be a lawyer.
There was more: I had defaulted on a membership to a Bally’s Total Fitness and had a car note of $300 a month for my Mazda Miata. If I had been driving a cheaper car, I could have paid off Bally’s. And while I was in law school, I had gone on a study abroad program in Europe instead of working over the summer to pay Bally’s and some other bills. And I had bounced a couple of checks, including one at a local Publix supermarket.
That was the “informal” hearing. When the formal hearing came around, this time I brought a lawyer with me. I had three judges testify on my behalf. They said, “Jose’s in my courtroom every day. He’s always honest. He practices as well as any lawyer I’ve seen and he has the character and fitness to be a member of the Florida Bar.”
After each judge testified, the three judges on the panel would say, “Thank you. No questions.” But when it came to the witnesses who were testifying against me, I got a grilling.
Two days later, the panel denied me admission. I had to wait two years before I could reapply.
I was devastated. Denied admission to the bar, I lost my certification, so I could no longer try cases in the public defender’s office. They liked me, so they kept me on as an investigator, but I was crushed—I felt like a major league ballplayer who was no longer allowed to play the game he loves. I had the door slammed in my face and there was nothing I could do about it.
All I wanted to do was try cases. That was my purpose in life. I felt a deep sadness every day for what turned out to be the eight years I wasn’t allowed in court. Every day I thought about how unfair this was. Every day I pined for my job. Because of my love for the law, I never gave up in my quest to get my license.
My whole world was the law. Everybody I associated with was a lawyer. I had built all these friendships in the legal community and I was winning case after case in court. I was really building a name for myself. And then I got my block knocked off. There were times when I refused to see my friends because they would ask me, “What’s happening with the bar? When are you getting in?”
It was tough for me not to be able to practice. I was devastated the whole time. Those eight years were really tough on me psychologically and financially. I lived from paycheck to paycheck, didn’t make much money, and was miserable much of the time. I saw my classmates who graduated with me go on and become successful. I was happy for them, but it was tough for me to have to sit back and not be able to practice.
I guess I could have taken my degrees and done something else, but that wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to defend the accused in court.
I felt that what happened to me was completely unjust. Ultimately, I was able to overcome it. As a result, I have known what it was like to experience injustice—not to the extent of some of my clients, but enough to make me a better lawyer for it. But until I was able to get admitted to the bar and resume my career as a defense lawyer, those eight years were by far the worst years of my life. The words don’t come close to explaining the black hole that the rejection by the panel put me in. In a way I was a dead man walking. In order to reapply, I had to show the panel that I was rehabilitated, that I was no longer financiall
y irresponsible, and that I respected the rights of others. To do that, I had to do community service, and working in the public defender’s office wasn’t sufficient to satisfy the judges.
I began by helping to raise money for homeless kids. I worked with domestic violence organizations in Miami, including one organization that was building a domestic-violence hotline.
You never know how one event in your life can impact another, but a friend of mine told me about a little girl in Colombia who was born with a major birth defect. She lacked bones from her knees down to her ankles so she had to walk on her knees. She lived in a dirt shack, and I thought to myself, This is so sad. I should get involved and raise money for her to have an operation. At the same time, I would use this work as my community service for the bar.
I flew to Barranquilla, Colombia, and met the girl. I wanted to videotape her so I could come back to the United States and start my fund-raising campaign so I contacted one of the local news stations, which agreed to do the filming for me. For the station it was a personal-interest story because an American was going to Colombia to try to raise money for prosthetic legs to help this little girl who couldn’t walk.
The head of the TV station and I went out to dinner. While there we ran into one of his former anchors, Lorena Velasquez. We met, and she was stunningly beautiful, smart, sassy, and interesting. I was smitten. Within five minutes I turned to a friend who had accompanied me on the trip and laughingly said, “Whatever you do, don’t let me marry this woman.”
For a while, Lorena and I maintained a long-distance relationship, but at my suggestion she eventually moved to Miami, and after several months, we got married. Shortly thereafter, I felt stagnant working as an investigator for the public defender’s office. When I finally quit, I went to work for LexisNexis, training lawyers how to do legal research online. My job was to go to law firms and courthouses in a support role. The company had an opening in Orlando, and I felt it was time to get out of Miami. Nothing was happening in my life there, and a change of scenery would be good for me.
Meanwhile, I reapplied for the bar, and the process wasn’t any easier the second time around. This time the panel wanted to know why I had to use my overdraft protection so often. I explained to them that my job at LexisNexis required me to travel, and that I didn’t get my money back from the company until my return, so my only choice was to spend the money knowing I had to use my overdraft protection to pay for it. My boss even wrote a letter explaining it to them.
They said they didn’t believe me, so I had to go to the effort of showing them maps of where I traveled. I was then asked for a photo of my car’s odometer. They wanted me to prove I wasn’t lying to them. My car’s odometer showed them what they needed to know. They put me through a ringer, and after I testified, shortly after my move to Orlando, they agreed to accept me into the Florida Bar.
Then I was told, “By the way, two weeks ago, your bar exam results expired. You’re going to have to take the bar over again.”
I was so upset. I thought, Couldn’t they have made their decision two weeks earlier? But meetings are scheduled once a month, and this was just dumb (bad) luck. So after being out of law school for seven years, I had to study for the bar again. I passed it and was accepted by the Florida Bar. (How many lawyers can say they passed the bar twice?)
I immediately opened an office in downtown Orlando. I had another small office in Miami and started representing Hispanic clients. Within three months, I had a very busy law practice. Being bilingual in Orlando proved to be very helpful to my career because there aren’t as many bilingual lawyers in Orlando as there are in Miami.
I then took a risk and moved my practice from Orlando to Kissimmee, a small town where I could be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. I found my office next to the Osceola County Jail, and I hired two lawyers to work for me. I began trying cases again, doing the thing I really was meant to do. I caught quite a few big cases. I represented a woman accused of kidnapping an infant and got it thrown out. I represented a cop who was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and got that thrown out. I was the lawyer for a kid in a vehicular manslaughter case and got him six months. Word started getting around the Hispanic community that I was an effective lawyer. So, as things turned out, the result of the worst thing that ever happened to me—not being accepted into the bar—ended up as the best thing that ever happened to me. If they had admitted me to the bar, I would not have met my wife, I would not have my son, and I would have never have moved to Orlando and started a thriving practice. Lorena and I vacationed in Europe. I had a nice cash flow and a wonderful wife. We were doing great, but then the phone rang—changing everything that was before and everything thereafter.
CHAPTER 5
CASEY COMES HOME—AGAIN AND AGAIN
WHILE WAITING FOR LEONARD PADILLA to get Casey out of jail, I was constantly going to the Anthony home, getting tips about where Caylee might be, when one day Cindy called me at my office.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “It’s a huge emergency.”
“Okay, not a problem,” I said.
“I need you to get a message to Casey for me,” she said. “Nothing could be more important than this.”
I was thinking, Okay, now we’re on to something. Finally something has broken, and Cindy is going to tell me, and I’ll be able to talk to Casey, and we’re going to get down to some serious business.
Cindy had been on TV almost every day and had become a celebrity of sorts. We needed to meet where no one would see us.
“Why don’t you meet me outside the jail?” I said. “There’s a church on the corner across the street.”
We drove around the back of the church and met in the parking lot.
Cindy said to me conspiratorially, “I got a call from this man. He’s from Maryland. It’s extremely important that you ask Casey the following.” (She had written it down and was reading from the piece of paper.) She said, “Tell her I want to plant a rose bush for Caylee’s birthday. I want to plant an ecstasy blue rose bush. I want her to tell me where to put the bush in the backyard so I can plant it in the exact spot for Caylee.”
As she was reading this, I was thinking, Oh my God. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. This wasn’t long after Casey told me about “timer55.” I was thinking to myself, That poor girl. This is whom she has for a mother.
Cindy made me swear up and down that I would read this to Casey, and I agreed. When I read it to her, she had this look on her face like, What the fuck? Casey said to me, “Stick the bush in the middle of the grass. I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
When I told Cindy later that the words meant nothing to Casey, she looked so dejected.
The night before we were to go get Casey out of jail, I was at the Anthony home. It was around midnight, and I was sitting in the living room with George, Cindy, and Lee, and we were talking about what was going on with Casey.
“Why would she be hiding Caylee?” Cindy wondered.
Cindy never believed for a second that Caylee was dead. George kept quiet, and Lee went along with whatever Cindy was saying.
Cindy said to me, “Sometimes Casey and I would argue. She could be hardheaded. And maybe she just resents me.”
“What do you mean, Cindy?” I asked.
“After Caylee was born,” she said, “they had to stitch up Casey, and the nurses gave the baby to me first, and she never forgave me for that. She was always angry and she would throw that in my face.”
That can be upsetting, but that’s no reason for her to be this extreme, I thought to myself.
I said to her, “I hate to say this, Cindy, but it would have to be something much deeper, a scar much deeper than that. I’m not saying this happened, George, but take for example if you were sexually abusing her. That would be something where she would be afraid and not want to have you around the child. If that happened, I could see a mother going to these extremes.”
I wasn’t
accusing him. I was just throwing it out as a hypothetical about why a mother might act the way Casey was acting.
As soon as I said that, there was a deafening silence in the room. No one moved. Everyone stayed very quiet. It was so impactful that I immediately noticed it. I thought, Waaaaiiit a minute here. I parked that in the back of my mind, and I would return to it later, but I will never forget the day I said that and the reaction I got. They all sat there very quietly. It was just very weird.
The next day we got Casey out of jail.
Prior to Casey’s bond being posted, I met with jail officials and asked them, “Can you help me with some security?”
“No,” they said, “no one gets special treatment. We had Governor [Jeb] Bush’s daughter once, and she didn’t get any special treatment. So you’re not getting any special treatment either.”
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Padilla brought with him his security detail to help keep the press away from her. I had represented a heroin dealer who didn’t have the money to pay me but who gave me his old Dodge Durango SUV instead. It was black and had tinted windows. While the air-conditioner was broken, it looked like the president’s security vehicle.
We pulled in. It was a rainy day, and in front of me was a scene like you wouldn’t believe. Helicopters were flying overhead, and reporters and cameramen were everywhere. I couldn’t believe the crowd that had assembled. We pulled in. A few of Padilla’s associates were driving cars both in front of and behind my SUV. They had walkie-talkies; it looked like we had done this a million times before. We looked like the presidential motorcade, but I quickly found out I hadn’t done enough.
My plan was to get Casey, put her under my umbrella, walk straight to the Durango, and go.
Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story Page 9
