A Criminal Defense

Chapter 26

Got a lead for you,” Navarro told Donnally over the telephone just after he’d returned to Hamlin’s desk. “A court clerk just called me. A couple of months ago, one of the victims in a case confronted Hamlin outside of court after a not guilty verdict. Threatened to kill him. Wasn’t the kind of thing she’d ever seen happen before. Victims break down and cry in their seats when the crook goes free, they don’t run to the hallway to issue threats. It was People v. Thule. Got lots of local press coverage.”

Donnally located the case on his list, found the closed file in a cabinet in the conference room, and brought it back into the office. According to the SFPD summary sheet, Thule was a mall owner who hired Gordon amp; Sons Construction to replace a steel pedestrian bridge from the second floor of a parking garage to the shopping area. The structure collapsed a year later, on the day before Easter, killing two shoppers, one of whom was pregnant, and injuring four others. The cause of the collapse was faulty Chinese steel used by the construction company.

John Gordon told the police and OSHA, and testified at the grand jury, that Thule had directed him to purchase all the steel from a particular U.S. importer. He produced letters to support his claim. The defendant, Thule, refused all law enforcement interviews and pled the Fifth at the grand jury.

The DA charged Thule with three counts of manslaughter for the two adult victims and the fetus.

Donnally found two private investigators’ invoices in the file. One did all but one interview. That one was done by Frank Lange, among the most well-known private investigators in the city. He was one of a very few that politicians, business leaders, and the wealthy hired when the truth was against them. Donnally had never seen him and had no reason to pay attention to him during his cop years since Lange had never been hired to work on the defense side of any of Donnally’s cases.

According to news clippings in the file, Lange had testified in Thule’s trial that he’d confronted Gordon with what Lange claimed were the true versions of the same letters, ones from Thule, not directing the contractor to buy the Chinese steel, but warning him against using it. Lange also testified that faced with this evidence, Gordon had admitted forging the ones that allegedly incriminated Thule.

Interviews of the jurors after the trial showed three of the jurors believed Lange, and those three convinced the rest that Lange’s testimony provided sufficient reasonable doubt for a not guilty verdict.

Donnally placed the investigators’ invoices side by side on the desk blotter.

The investigator who did most of the work charged a hundred dollars an hour and billed a total of twelve thousand dollars.

Lange billed at a flat rate of fifteen thousand dollars-for one interview and one hour of testimony.

Donnally called Jackson into the office to ask her about the connection between Lange and Hamlin.

“Mark and Lange go way back,” Jackson said. “They started out at about the same time. I guess you could say that they grew up together in the business. Because of how much Frank charges, for the last ten years Mark only used him for the make-or-break interviews.”

“Like the Thule case.”

Jackson nodded. “He specializes in impeaching witnesses and victims, and jurors love him. Maybe because he seems like an ordinary guy, one of them. Somebody you’d go to have pizza with and complain to about your wife. I went to watch him a couple of times. Comes across kinda mousy. Yes-sirring and no-sirring the DA and the judge. The prosecutor gets aggressive with him and the jurors feel like they’re under attack, too. But when he got back here after testifying in court, he wasn’t that way at all. They’d come in swaggering and hoot it up like they’d bluffed their way to winning the World Series of Poker. High-fiving like juveniles.”

“You ever see any proof he perjured himself?”

Jackson smiled and gazed at Donnally as though at a child who’d selected the correct square peg, but couldn’t quite fit it into the hole.

“I can see you don’t get it yet,” Jackson said. “Around here there was no such thing as proof, no such thing as facts. There were only differing opinions. That was the fundamental principle of life in this office. It could’ve been etched in wood and nailed above the door. ‘Abandon Truth All Ye Who Enter Here.’ ”

“Which means you never checked.”

“There was never anything to check. What was I going to check it against? I wasn’t there when the crime was committed or when the witness or victim said what they said. No way for me to know what really happened.”

To Donnally she sounded like too many of the cops he’d served with. Whenever internal affairs accused an officer of beating a suspect-even when the officer’s baton was painted with blood and the suspect was lying in intensive care-nearly every officer in the department would go coward and say the same thing: “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

But that didn’t prevent those same officers from arresting burglars when they didn’t witness the burglary, or murderers when they didn’t witness the murder, or child molesters even when the molestation took place a generation earlier in a school classroom or in a priest’s office of a church that had long since been torn down.

It reminded Donnally of a history professor he had at UCLA, an old guy who claimed that since history is just a form of memory and had to be expressed in words whose meanings change over time, there was no such thing as historical truth.

Donnally had liked the professor, had even been invited to his house for dinner, but was glad the man had decided to become a teacher rather than a doer-or a filmmaker like his father, a man who’d combined French cinematic theory with American war movies to create an Academy Award-winning career of mindless violence and historical mythology.

One idea Donnally took with him from college when he moved up to San Francisco was that an offense report was a kind of history that was either as true as the Holocaust or as false as one of his father’s movies. And he swore his would always be the former, even if some of those around him specialized in the latter.

Donnally rose from his chair. “I’m going to do my best to find out what the truth is.”

Jackson stared at him for a moment, then said, “Take your best shot.”

Donnally recognized the sarcasm in her voice, but also heard an undertone of longing, suggesting she meant it.

He walked with Jackson to the outer office, then drove south toward the Gordon amp; Sons headquarters near the San Francisco International Airport.

The ride down Highway 101, called the Central Freeway where it wasn’t central, the Bayshore Freeway long before it came close to the bay, and the James Lick when people weren’t sure what to call it, was less like driving than being swept along. Maybe it was because the freeway was a gateway from the constraints of the city to the liberation of possibility. A hop over the hills, a skip along San Francisco Bay, and then a launch from the San Francisco Airport into the sky.

Donnally felt the surge of motion on takeoff like everyone else, but didn’t like the feeling of being wrenched from the earth. He’d fly places if he had to, but preferred having his tires on the ground and the steering wheel in his grip and the speedometer arrow fixed at a speed that kept him in control.

As he transitioned from the freeway to the frontage road just north of the airport, he knew the chances were small that John Gordon would talk to him. The judge had suspended the victims’ civil suit against Gordon and Thule until the criminal trial was over since the defendants had Fifth Amendment rights. It was as though the judge had said to Gordon, You have the right to remain silent and if you’re smart, you’ll use it.

Even some of the witnesses who worked for Gordon and for Thule would also have refused to testify in the civil case until they were certain the DA wouldn’t expand the indictment to include them in a broader conspiracy.

Donnally pulled into a guest parking space in front of the two-story administration building. Gordon’s secretary directed him out to the football field-sized yard in the back where he found Gordon talking to a hard-hatted worker. Gordon sent the young man into the warehouse, then turned toward Donnally, who concluded from Gordon’s ruddy and wind-beaten face and hard eyes that he’d built the business. He was Gordon himself, the father, not one of the sons.

Donnally told him about the threats to Hamlin and asked him whether any of the victims had also threatened him.

“My lawyer’s gonna shit his pants when he finds out I talked to you,” Gordon said. “But what happened, happened. I never should’ve used that steel. Never did before that contract and never did afterwards.”

“What about that PI, Lange?”

“Sure I talked to him.” Gordon jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward his office, as if to say that was where he’d been interviewed. “He’s a lying son of a bitch. I told him the same thing I told everyone else. The victims knew it. They had no beef with me about that. They blamed me for the steel, but not for torpedoing the case against Thule.”

The concussive engine roar from a plane rising off the airport runway vibrated the metal roof and sides of the warehouse as it skimmed the bay. Donnally waited until it faded, then asked, “Why did Thule want to use steel from that particular importer?”

“My guess? And he can sue me for saying it if he wants to, but I think it must’ve been some kind of kickback scheme. I paid about five hundred thousand dollars for steel that would’ve cost seven-fifty if it had been manufactured over here. The wholesaler could kick back a hundred to Thule and still clean up. That kind of thing happens all the time, all across the country.”

Donnally knew that if Gordon had made a tape of his interview with Lange, he would have given it to the DA, so he didn’t ask.

“You have any proof of a kickback?” Donnally asked.

Gordon shook his head. “These guys are smart. Maybe they did it offshore. That way there wouldn’t be a paper trail.”

It was clear to Donnally that Gordon had thought about pursuing that theory, maybe had even suggested it to the district attorney, but there was no way a local DA’s office could pursue an international financial investigation. And with Gordon’s testimony, they probably didn’t think they’d need it to get a conviction. But the DA hadn’t counted on Frank Lange bending the jury away from the truth.

“Aren’t you going to ask me if I killed Hamlin?”

“No. You strike me as a guy who takes responsibility for what he does and lets the world go its own way.”

Gordon looked out toward the bay for a moment, then said, “I’m my father’s son. That’s the lesson he learned in World War II and the one I learned in Vietnam.” He pointed toward the warehouse and the office building. “I built a good business, but I’m not sure I’ve been a very good citizen.”

“Like maybe you should’ve at least punched Hamlin out?”

Gordon nodded. “I should’ve done it when one of the victims was yelling at him outside of court after the verdict.”

“You think that victim later did it himself, or worse?”

“Not a chance. The guy was in a wheelchair. He was never gonna walk again. No way he could’ve lassoed Hamlin and hung him up out there.”

Gordon paused in thought and he gazed out toward the bay.

“Anyway,” he finally said, moving his gaze to Donnally, “if anybody was gonna get hit, it would’ve been that scumbag investigator.”