The Cartel Lawyer

by Dave Daren

  The app informed me that the food would be there in twenty minutes, which wasn’t enough time to really delve into more research, but I could call my mother and check in with her. I muted the TV and then stood so I could pace while I talked to my mama.

  “Mi hijo,” the Cuban matriarch said in a sleepy voice. “Is everything okay? How did court go today?”

  “It could’ve been better,” I told her, and a shiver ran up my spine as I remembered the scowl on Osvaldo’s face. “But I’ll figure it out.”

  “I know you will,” she replied.

  She grunted, and I heard the creak of her mattress as she climbed out of bed. Her shuffling footsteps filled the silence that followed a large yawn. She had worked a short shift earlier in the day, against heavy protests from myself and her best friend, and I knew she had to be exhausted.

  “I should let you get back to sleep,” I said as I swallowed the queasiness that surfaced when I thought about her upcoming treatments.

  “No, no,” the Cuban mama protested. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “Food is on its way,” I responded.

  “Not more of that fast food,” she scolded, and the last traces of sleepiness fell away from her voice as she focused on my health instead of her own. “Mi hijo, that is not good for you. They put too much salt and fat. You’ll have a heart attack like your Tio.”

  “He was in his forties when that happened,” I reminded her while I continued to pace my tiny studio apartment. “And I work out.”

  “How many meals have you eaten out this week?” she asked, and I could almost picture her hands on her hips as she glared toward my apartment.

  “I’ll go grocery shopping tomorrow,” I promised.

  If I didn’t have Camilo released soon, though, it wouldn’t matter if I had fresh food in the fridge or not. I’d be dinner myself for some alligator or massive python in the Everglades.

  “I can go for you,” my mother said as she brought me out of my dark thoughts.

  “I can shop for my own food,” I said.

  “Yes, but you’ll get all the wrong things,” she huffed. “All you’ll have is that sweet creamer and protein bars.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time to cook,” I reminded her.

  “Fine,” the Cuban mama countered, and I realized that I’d walked right into her trap. “Then I’ll cook you some meals and bring them over for your freezer.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but if she didn’t prep my food for the next few weeks, then she’d just clean her house from top to bottom as she worried about her treatments and money.

  “Alright,” I sighed. “But don’t make too much, please. I plan to come visit you on the weekends.”

  “Okay,” my mother conceded with barely contained excitement. “I’ll just make some arroz con pollo. Maybe some plantains.”

  “That sounds fantastic,” I responded.

  “Of course it does,” she preened.

  The doorbell rang, and I paused mid-step to stare at the door as I wondered if Osvaldo had changed his mind and sent Alvaro. When the chime echoed through the room again I remembered that I had food on the way, and shook myself out of my momentary panic.

  “My dinner is here,” I said as I walked toward my door.

  “Okay, mi hijo,” my mother said. “I’ll talk to you later. Make sure you get some sleep.”

  “You too,” I replied before I ended the call and stuffed my cell phone into the pocket of my workout shorts.

  The delivery man had AirPods in his ears which he didn’t even bother to remove as he handed me the food. He bobbed his head the entire time and then went on his way without a word while the smell of tortilla chips and chimichanga filled the air around me.

  I trotted over to the couch with a smile on my face as I thought about stuffing myself with the delicious Tex-Mex. My stomach growled as I sat down on the old leather couch and ripped open the tightly tied plastic bag to pull out the styrofoam containers that held my dinner. The chips were freshly fried, the salsa had perfect chunks of tomatoes, onion, and jalapenos, and my chimichanga was still crispy. It was enough to make a grown man swoon, especially one that hadn’t eaten a real meal for most of the day.

  I slurped and moaned with each perfect bite of seasoned beef, cool sour cream, and tart onion. Too soon, I’d devoured everything down to the last bit of cilantro. I leaned back on my couch with my hand over my stomach as I watched the last few minutes of the episode that was on, and then cleaned up the containers, plastic bags, and the stale bag of Fritos.

  I tossed everything into the trash, and even though the bin was almost empty, I still crushed the styrofoam boxes to make sure it would last a few more days. Though if I kept up my current schedule, it would probably be at least another week before I needed to make a run to the trash chute.

  The rest of my apartment was spotless, the laundry was done, and I’d dusted when I’d come home the day before. Cleaning when I was upset was a habit I’d learned from my mother, but there was nothing left for me to clean, so it was time to dive into more research on the Everson Juvenile Detention Center.

  Despite what the website said, and the claims of the supposed personal testimonials, I knew that the facility couldn’t be that perfect. Even if it was one of the best, there would be plenty of complaints from parents and teens alike. There was no way that they could please everyone, and like any Amazon vendor would tell you, there’s always someone who hates the product. And then there was the fact that the accounts were just a little too polished to be believable, especially to anyone who’d been to a juvie center before.

  The outdated posters in the teen’s rooms bothered me more than the flawless testimonials. The company should have more recent photos on their website, and the fact that they used the old ones was a major red flag that made me think there was something they wanted to hide.

  Another Google search of the center showed that it was recommended in a few blogs, though the glowing reviews could have been bought. One link I clicked on was an entire first page filled with paid blog posts that raved about the facilities and the results that they received, and links to quick blurbs about different juvie centers in the Miami area.

  It wasn’t until I was halfway down the second page of results that I found a website that looked promising. The summary said it was a petition to close the facility, and though it could simply be a page created by a disgruntled teen who’d been sentenced to a long stint, at least it offered something besides happy, smiley faces.

  When I clicked through, I was greeted with a black header and bright red capital letters. ‘Close Everson Now!’ screamed at me from the page, and I was convinced that the site had indeed been created by an unhappy inhabitant.

  But just beneath the header were pictures of the facility taken at odd angles. Each one revealed that the rooms that the teens were kept in were more like cells from a maximum security prison. They managed to squeeze four beds into each room by having twin bunk beds to the left and right of the barred doors. The bathroom was a filthy toilet and a small sink that offered no privacy for the young men that would use it.

  I clicked through the pictures of the cafeteria, all of them taken at low angles, like someone had snapped them from underneath a table when the guards were distracted. There were a couple of blurry shots that showed the food the center served consisted of soggy vegetables from a can, fruits so old that they’d lost all their color, mystery stew that even my old elementary school wouldn’t have served, and rolls that looked like small stones.

  It was a nightmare, like something that I would see on Dateline, or one of my courtroom dramas where the cops or lawyers would try to shut it down. Of course, the pictures could be doctored or taken from somewhere else and attributed to the Everson Juvenile Center by an angry parent or teen, and I had to remind myself to view them with that in mind.

  But if the pictures were real, then I needed to get Camilo out of there fast. Whether Osvaldo threatened me or not, I couldn’t have a cli
ent in such a terrible facility, especially not a fourteen year old boy. I couldn’t believe that the judge would send them there, and I hoped that if it really was that awful, that the old magistrate would change his sentence.

  I left the pictures behind to explore the rest of the website for more concrete evidence than blurry, questionable photos that would be thrown out in court. There was a link to a page called ‘Personal Stories’, so I followed that, and found most of them were rants from teens that confirmed the place was unsafe, but it was hard to tell how much was accurate and how much was exaggeration.

  There was one story from a mother that captured my attention, though, and I read it twice just to make sure I’d understood. Her son had been sent to Everson’s when he was fifteen after he’d been arrested for theft.

  The boy had stolen some milk and cereal because he’d been hungry and didn’t have any money to buy food. His mother had been at her second job at the time, and she hadn’t realized that she had forgotten to leave him money as she usually did. The boy and the mother were known at the market, and the owner had let them run a tab in the past when money was tight. But the store had been bought by a mega corporation that frowned on such things, and the son had been told that if he couldn’t pay, he couldn’t take the items from the store.

  For the simple act of trying to eat, the young teen had been sentenced to the max sentence of two years even though it was his first offense.

  The mother claimed that her son had been kind and sweet when he’d gone there, but that when he’d come back two years later, he was a completely different person. He had scars on his back and one long gash across his face, and he’d lost the innocence he’d once had.

  The boy had joined a gang while he was in juvie, and when he was released he’d become a dealer for the group. He’d been arrested a few more times before he’d been killed in a driveby.

  I searched the post for the judge’s name, sure that the woman wouldn’t forget the name of the man who’d sentenced her son to such a long stint just for being hungry. After all, she had raged against the injustice of the sentence, a penalty imposed despite the prosecutor’s recommendation of community service.

  The story sounded so familiar that I wasn’t surprised when I saw the name Travis Williams near the end of her post. She said that she’d tried to change the man’s mind, but that she hadn’t been able to get an appointment with him, and she couldn’t afford a lawyer for the appeals process.

  Still, it was the word of a grieving mother against an officer of the court. She might have exaggerated the details of the story to make her son sound more like a victim. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a mother would go to such lengths, but the similarities with the harsh sentence and minor crimes were too much to ignore.

  I saved the website to my favorites so I could reference it later, and then pulled up the county records page. The boy’s case was a little harder to find, but after a little math to figure out what year his first offense had occurred, I finally found it.

  It had happened almost ten years ago, and the indictment charged the young teen with stealing milk and cereal just like his mother had described, though she’d left out the part where he’d stolen candy the week before. The record showed that the prosecutor had asked for community service, but Judge Travis Williams had ignored the request. Instead, the judge had sentenced the young man to two years at Everson Juvenile Center.

  Judge Williams was hardly the harshest judge I’d heard about, but what was unusual was who received the long sentences. Most judges who dealt with juveniles, and even adults, wouldn’t impose the maximum unless there was an increasingly violent rap sheet that made it clear the perp wasn’t going to reform. But Williams had sentenced juveniles with no prior record or records with only minor offenses to full terms. It ran counter to everything I knew about the justice system, and I couldn’t figure out why Williams had suddenly become such a hard ass on the bench.

  A quick search of public records showed that the judge had been on the bench for almost thirty years. He’d convicted and released thousands of people over the course of his career, so it would be a daunting task to discover any pattern. But I focused on the juvenile cases that found their way to his desk since his record with teens would be what could help my client most, and that helped to narrow it down to a few hundred.

  I stared at the long list of names on my computer screen and decided it was time for some caffeine. I stood and stretched for a moment to work out the kinks, and then I turned the coffee machine on. It was going to be a long night of reading and note taking, and I wasn’t even sure that I was on to anything. Once I had a fresh cup of sweetened joe, I snagged a pad of paper and pen out of my briefcase, and then settled in.

  The judge had been appointed when he was in his early thirties, an impressive feat to be sure. Before that, he’d been a defense attorney like me, though he’d worked with one of the large firms straight out of law school rather than mucking about in the Public Defender’s Office.

  His first few years he’d been relatively fair with his juvie convictions, and the results matched up with what the other judges were doing. But about fifteen years ago he’d started to hand down longer sentences.

  At first, the extended sentences had been for young offenders who had appeared in his courtroom more than once. But it was common for judges to become jaded when they saw the same person in their courtroom again and again, so that didn’t raise any red flags.

  It was when I started to review the cases from the last ten years that a pattern began to appear. I almost missed it since the longer stints were dispersed among shorter ones. But when I looked at the tally sheet, it was clear that Judge Travis Williams had begun to send young teens to the Everson Juvenile Detention Center for the maximum sentence regardless of their record or the recommendation of the prosecutor.

  The cases spanned race, backgrounds, and criminal histories. The only thing that they all had in common was that they’d come before Judge Williams, and they had all ended up at Everson’s. It was a private facility, which meant they made their money by headcount, and the longer a teen stayed, the more money they made.

  If the judge was being paid off, then it would explain why he would send so many kids to the center. He was smart about it, though, since he’d sentenced enough teens to other facilities so that he wouldn’t seem biased, and it was common for judges to prefer one or two centers.

  But if Williams was receiving kickbacks from the company that ran Everson’s, then I also needed to understand why some kids managed to escape detention. Armed with a list of those who’d escaped from Williams’ courtroom with only a minimum sentence, I started to poke around in the backgrounds of the kids.

  It took some digging, but I finally found my connection. Each of the teens that had been released were from prominent families that would be able to help the judge with more than just a bit of campaign money. The old magistrate had made powerful allies with deep ties in the political community and even more with strong businesses that could give the judge a nice retirement fund.

  By the time I read through the last case it was well past midnight, and my head spun with the information that I’d found. There was a pattern, but it was so well-hidden that it was unlikely anyone would find it unless they knew exactly what they were looking for. But at the same time the corruption was so brazen that I was really shocked, and I concluded that this was a man who believed himself to be untouchable.

  A plan started to take shape, but it would take longer than a few days to carry it out, and I needed to get Camilo out of the Everson Juvenile Center before something happened to him. That required an appeal, and I had more than enough to file the paperwork. It was all superficial still, but I’d won a release with less.

  I fleshed out the document I’d begun hours before, careful to avoid any outright accusations, but including enough statistics to make a CPA happy. When I was satisfied, I went to the statewide filing system and uploaded my appeal.<
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  As soon as it was done, I stood and brought my empty coffee mug into the kitchen to rinse it out. My head spun with all of the information I had picked up, and I felt like there was so much of it that I couldn’t make sense of it. But nothing helped me think more than a run, so I grabbed my keys, wallet, cell phone, and headphones before I stuffed my feet into my old running sneakers.

  The streets were almost empty of traffic when I jogged out of my building. It was nearly two a.m., so I would have most of the city to myself, a fact that I relished. I did a couple of quick stretches, and I realized there was a man across the street. He leaned against the building directly opposite of mine as he smoked a cigarette, a fact I could see only by the glow of the cigarette tip and the plume of smoke that surrounded his face. At first, he seemed to be looking at the stars, but as I pulled out my phone to set my music, I felt his eyes move toward me.

  I nodded once as I started down the street, but I could feel his eyes boring holes into my head. I tried to ignore the jab of terror that pulsed through me, and when I reached the corner, I did a quick check over my shoulder. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw that the man hadn’t followed me, and I darted around the corner before he could change his mind.

  But I’d barely made the halfway point on the next block when I realized that there was a car slowly following me down the block. It followed me along my usual route, always just behind me, no matter what I did. I decided to cut my run short, and I started to sprint for home. The SUV picked up its pace then, and as it drove past, the passenger’s side window rolled down. I glanced toward the car even though my brain was screaming at me to duck and cover, and I looked directly into the face of the SUV driver from the other night. My heart jumped into my throat as we made eye contact, but at least he didn’t pull out a gun.