by Paul Levine
“Your medical specialty isn’t the problem.” Fatigue was overtaking me, the last few ounces of fuel draining from my tank. “You can’t be an impartial expert witness. You love Kip as if he were your son. You’re engaged to his lawyer. Maybe we’ll even be married by the time of trial.”
“Really?” she asked. “Have we set a date I don’t know about?”
I plowed ahead, despite my clanging headache. I wanted to be in bed, curled up with Melissa, welcoming sleep or something even sweeter in her warm embrace. “If you testify, the prosecutor will attack you on bias. It’s what I did when Dr. Eisenberg testified for his brother-in-law in a Bar proceeding.”
“It won’t be a problem if you hang a lantern on the relationship first,” Kip said.
“Do tell,” I growled, growing more irritated by the moment.
“Make the case that Melissa knows me way better than some quack who’s testifying for money and has spent maybe two hours with me.”
“So now you’re a lawyer!” I snapped. “First an eGames wunderkind. Then a poker player using someone else’s credit card. Then an imposter, a cheater, raking in the dough, handing your ass to the government out of your own damn naivete and arrogance. So, sure, tell me how to keep you out of prison for the next thirty years!”
Kip’s mouth opened, his face reddened, and his eyes moistened. He looked as if I’d just slapped him across the face, which, of course, I’d never done. I’d never spanked him, never shoved him, never touched him in anger.
“Jake! What the hell!” Melissa got to her feet. “That’s not you.” She turned to Kip. “Your uncle has moments of irrationality that manifest themselves as anger and rage. It must be shocking to you, but please don’t take it personally. His mechanism for impulse control is on the blink, and his damaged brain cells are acting out. That’s the only way I know how to describe it.”
“It’s okay,” he stammered, his voice fluttering.
“I’m sorry, Kip,” I said, calming down. “Really, really sorry.”
“I know,” he whispered.
“Let’s call it a night,” Melissa said.
I took a long, slow pull on the tequila and turned to Melissa with another mea culpa. “Maybe I was too quick to dismiss what Kip suggested. Your testifying might work. It would be something novel, that’s for sure. We’ll talk about it when we set up our war room, by which I mean the kitchen table covered with files.”
We gathered our drinking glasses. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a mockingbird was whistling. It was not unpleasant. The moist night air carried the scent of jasmine. We headed inside, shutting out the nighttime sounds and smells.
Maybe Ray Pincher had been right, I thought, as I rinsed the dishes. Maybe representing my nephew would be a disaster. A surgeon doesn’t operate on a loved one. And a surgeon with migraine headaches, memory problems, and outbursts of anger might just remove the wrong kidney or stab the patient in the heart with his scalpel. Or maybe just keel over in closing argument, blood vessels bursting in his brain.
Still, I was not willing to trust Kip’s fate to another lawyer. I had a stake in the boy’s future that no one else could match. If I lost and Kip went to prison, a part of me would die. Life would drain out of me every day that he would be incarcerated. Given my age and medical condition, would I ever see him outside a prison visitors’ room? And just how could Kip, this sweet and soft kid, survive life in a concrete cell? Day after day, year after year, locked in a cage and surrounded by brutality. He would snap like a green twig, and I would be a broken man.
While Kip’s freedom was at stake, so was my life. Game over for Kip would be game over for me. And while we don’t ask lawyers to fall on their swords for their clients, well, I’m the guy willing to do it. If there’s blood on the courtroom floor, let it be mine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Wild Kip Lassiter and the Unwritten Law
Nine months later . . .
Actors feel it during endless rehearsals. Football players feel it in August scrimmages. And lawyers feel it during the seemingly endless pretrial process.
C’mon, let’s raise the curtain, play the game, try the damn case!
That’s how I felt one day before we would select a jury. It was March, and with a cooling breeze coming in from the northeast, kite surfers skipped over the waves just off South Beach. I used to be a windsurfer, but at my weight, I needed gale force winds for the board to plane, so I could hop the chop off Virginia Key.
These days, I was sailing a desk, or, more precisely, the kitchen table, preparing for Kip’s trial. The table, the chairs, the floor, and the counters were overflowing with files. Nearly all the other criminal cases stemming from the scandal were over. Parents, coaches, and administrators pled guilty and got stern lectures, fines, and either short sentences—in one case, two weeks—or probation, called “supervised release” in federal court.
Most of the early news coverage had focused on the wealthy parents who happily paid Ringle for his magic elixir of college admission. Then the coverage shifted to examining universities for their ethically shaky practices of admitting students whose families make substantial donations. Now, the spotlights glared on my nephew.
The Miami Herald ran a series of stories describing Kip as the “mastermind’s partner” and “young wizard” and “cheater extraordinaire” and “brainiac co-conspirator.” Occasionally, the word “alleged” popped up.
The stories overflowed with the frisson of readers’ delight. Oh, the comeuppance of such a brilliant young man! Online comments expressed readers’ joy that their children weren’t “too smart for their own good.” For some people, schadenfreude is the most pleasure they’ll ever experience.
Through the months of trial prep, I tried to keep Kip’s spirits up by expressing optimism about the case.
“The government has the burden of proof.”
“The jury will hate Max Ringle and like you.”
“The reasonable doubt standard is our ace in the hole.”
But, in truth, I knew the government could prove each charge simply by playing its recordings and having Ringle identify Kip as the young man on the tapes. The prospect of losing fueled my nightmares and jolted me awake in cold sweats. It would take creative lawyering, government screw-ups, and a large dose of luck for us to win.
Max Ringle had pled guilty and was as free as the mockingbird whistling in my bottlebrush tree. He would be sentenced after Kip’s trial. He had already scored major federal brownie points for acknowledging his crimes, expressing remorse, and forfeiting millions in assets. His biggest ass-smooch, of course, was cooperating with the feds, making cases against dozens of defendants, including his co-conspirator boy genius. Ringle had pledged that, whatever his prison sentence, he would spend each day helping other inmates further their education, and, upon release, devote the rest of his life to community service. What a guy!
At Kip’s trial, Ringle would be the star witness, the Big Eye tuna, and I was the sushi chef. If I didn’t slice him into bite-size pieces, we would have no chance. I had to show Ringle to be a despicable human being. I am not the best trial lawyer in town. I am not even the best within one block of the intersection of Flagler Street and Miami Avenue. But I am a fearsome cross-examiner, and I had readied myself with sharpened knives for the son of a bitch.
I deputized Melissa as my chief medical consultant and expert witness. Now, with show time a day away, I sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of black coffee and poring over transcripts of recorded conversations for the umpteenth time. Just after 7 a.m., Melissa padded into the kitchen, wearing a silk sarong with an Asian-inspired print.
“How long have you been up?” she asked.
“Not that long. I wanted to read the wiretaps one more time. I guess I’m hoping Kip would say something different.”
“How much coffee?” she asked in full physician mode.
“Only two cups. Maybe three.”
“I’ll slice some mangoes. Yogurt and
toast okay?”
“Fine.” Before she could ask how I was feeling, I answered, “Pretty good. No morning headache.”
That was basically true, pretty good being entirely subjective, and the headache began last night, not this morning. I hadn’t told her about the occasional bouts of blurry vision and maybe just a bit of confusion. She hadn’t noticed when I missed the exit on I-95 the other night when we were going to dinner in Wynwood. Why make her worry?
The warmth of my feelings for Melissa had only increased with time. So incredibly supportive. So there for me and for Kip, too. How damn lucky was I? If I had to choose between never getting C.T.E. or never meeting Melissa, well, give me my lover. I’ll deal with my damaged brain.
She expertly sliced open a ripe mango, then twisted the pit until it popped out of the fruit. “Any new ideas?”
“Shuffling old ones. It’s the part of the game I love, playing poker with ideas, hoping I don’t draw a joker after the government deals its hand.”
Kip, sleepy-eyed, walked into the kitchen wearing shorts that were actually cut-off jeans—and, according to him, were called “jorts.” Once his apartment building had been staked out by the news media, he’d taken up residence in his childhood bedroom.
He looked at my bowl of yogurt and fruit and asked, “Did you know mangoes are related to poison ivy?”
“I’m a lifelong Floridian.” I took a bite of the toast. “Of course I know that. Related to cashews, too.”
He fished a grapefruit out of the fridge and cut it in half. “Did you see the latest on Shari?”
“You mean the girl whose life you turned to shit?”
Kip laughed. It had become a running joke. In the last several months, Shari Ringle had prospered as a social media influencer. Her father, a guy with his finger on the pulse of our shallow society, correctly ascertained that infamy was more profitable than fame. His PR firm got Shari a sponsored podcast, “Alt-Skool,” where she shared career solutions for kids who eschew college. Her Instagram account had exploded from about a hundred thousand followers to more than nine million, and she’d gotten her own cosmetics line, branded with the slogan “Cover-up is no crime.”
“I saw online that she’s getting a reality show,” I said. “I’ll ask her about all her deals when she testifies for the government. Same with those twin brothers.”
Teague Hallinan, one of the twin nitwits, had been bounced from Wake Forest, but was enjoying success as a hip-hop artist. He launched his new career with the songs, “Git Woke, Wake” and “Git Woke, Not Work.” Brother Niles wrote the lyrics, which featured a remarkable number of one-syllable words.
I poured myself another cup of coffee and a fresh one for Melissa. “I’m looking forward to questioning several wealthy parents and, of course, their kids.”
Melissa thought it over a moment. “So, you intend to distract the jury by drawing attention to the conduct of others.”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Especially Ringle. The government’s recordings will bolster his credibility. But I can still attack his character. The trick is to make the jury hate Ringle more than they hate Kip. Same with the rich parents who are getting slaps on the wrist, and their spoiled rotten kids who are profiting from their notoriety. I’ll appeal to the jurors’ sense of fairness, as opposed to the letter of the law.”
“And you can do that? Ethically, I mean?”
“I can ever-so-gently nudge the jurors away from the law and toward justice. It’s called . . .”
“Jury nullification,” Kip chimed in. “But if Uncle Jake asks them to go against the judge’s instructions, he’ll get thrown in jail for contempt.”
“As my pal Steve Solomon says, a lawyer who’s afraid of jail is like a surgeon who’s afraid of blood. Still, I’d rather stay in the courtroom and not miss the fun. The jury can do whatever it wants. I just have to walk a tightrope to get them there.”
“Does this ever work?” Melissa asked, skepticism in her voice.
“Wild Bill Hickok,” Kip said, spearing a piece of his grapefruit.
“Good one, Kip,” I said.
Melissa waited for an explanation.
“Hickok got into a dispute in a poker game,” I explained, “then killed the other card player in a patently illegal gunfight. Despite the evidence, the jurors acquitted. They said they decided the case on the unwritten law of a fair fight.”
“The unwritten law,” Melissa repeated. “It sounds so iffy and vague.”
“I make my living in the iffy and the vague, the gray shadows of black letter law. And that’s what I plan to do for Wild Kip Lassiter.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Cut the Crap, Kip
Melissa Gold . . .
Melissa was worried.
Worried about Kip, of course. Every day and every night. But worried, too, about Jake. He tried to hide his worsening symptoms. She hadn’t said a word when he sailed past the exit on I-95 the other night. And she could tell he was in pain from the way he scrunched his eyes when a migraine shot through his skull. Not that he would admit he was hurting. Or occasionally dizzy. She’d seen him stagger a step in the kitchen the other night, and no tequila had been involved.
One positive note, though, Jake’s focus on Kip’s case invigorated him. He was on leave of absence from his job with the state Bar, and now that he had a case that mattered to him, he was more upbeat. At first, that seemed odd to her because Kip was in such enormous jeopardy. In medical school, she had learned that stress is a negative force, but now she wondered if there might be a positive spin-off. Preparing for the high-wire act of a federal criminal trial carried with it dizzying levels of tension and anxiety. To perform under those conditions required focus and drive, and the resulting work was bringing Jake a sense of purpose and satisfaction.
Still, she could not help but wonder if he was experiencing even more severe symptoms that he was keeping under wraps. There had been one PET scan since Kip’s indictment. A small increase in total quantity of tau proteins, statistically insignificant, though she would have preferred a decrease. She continued to administer the experimental AY-70 cocktail that she hoped would begin to show results. Periodically, she checked with researchers at Boston University and UCLA. So far, no one had made inroads.
Now, the evening before the beginning of the trial, Jake was in the kitchen, his war room, scribbling notes. She sat in an Adirondack chair on the back porch as Kip lay in the hammock slung between two palm trees. The air was thankfully free of the soggy humidity that would soon settle in for the six-month summer.
“Let’s go over the eGames one more time,” she said, opening her notebook. She had been preparing for weeks to testify about Kip’s proclivity for fantasy role-playing and the effect of eGames on adolescent brains.
“Again?” Kip protested.
“When you were younger, you played eGames for how long each day?”
“Some days, every waking hour,” Kip replied.
“When you went into therapy and tried to stop, what happened?”
He reached a bare foot out of the hammock to push off the ground and started swinging. “Like I told you before, I went cold turkey and felt like I had the flu. Sluggish and no energy. And dreams! Crazy dreams about the games. Pretty much the same thing with playing poker. When I quit, I was a big slug.”
“Withdrawal syndrome. Cravings for that rush.”
“Yeah. ‘Cravings.’ That’s a good word. That’s what I’ll say on the stand.”
“Kip, I’m not trying to coach you. Just tell the truth.”
His hands were locked behind his head, and he was looking straight up, not making eye contact. The hammock swung like a metronome, ropes squeaking. “Sure, sure. I know that.”
“Jake said that Max Ringle had eGame consoles in his house, and he limited your playing time to three hours every other day.”
“And then not at all a week before I took the exams.”
Melissa looked up from her notebook. “How did you fe
el in those days leading up to the test when you weren’t allowed to play?”
“Cravings for the rush. Then, when I was an imposter showing my credentials to get into the test, it was like I was someone else.”
“Of course. You were Niles or Teague or whoever’s test you were taking.”
He stopped swinging, sat up, and looked at her. “No, more like Duke Nukem in Time to Kill.”
“An eGame character?”
“Like Duke says, ‘It’s time to kick ass or chew bubblegum, and I’m all out of gum.’”
“Cute,” she deadpanned.
“You know what I think was happening?”
“What, Kip?”
“It’s like Max was giving me heroin, then cut me off, and said, ‘Go rob that drug dealer’ and you can have more. I think he was messing with my adolescent brain and distorting my sense of reality.”
She stood, descended the porch steps, grabbed the hammock and stopped it from swinging.
“Whoa!” he yelped.
“Cut the crap, Kip.”
“What? What did I do?”
“You’ve gone through my files, haven’t you? You’ve read the research papers. ‘EGames and the Adolescent Brain.’ ‘Gaming and the Lost Sense of Reality.’ Now you’re tailoring your testimony to the science.”
He looked down at the tops of his bare feet. “Maybe I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Three Faces of Lionel Speidel
Federal judges are phantoms.
You never see them or their courtrooms on television, and they almost never give interviews. While our state trials have been televised since the Ted Bundy case forty years ago, the federal courthouse remains a monastic sanctuary, hidden from prying eyes and cameras.
Federal judges are kings and queens.
They are appointed for life. No messy elections, no grubbing for lawyers’ campaign contributions. They sit on thrones above the lowly members of their kingdom and are served by a royal retinue of law clerks, judicial assistants, court clerks, jury clerks, courtroom deputies, administrators, and, for all I know, court jesters.
