Breach of Trust

27

I didn’t even try to sleep that night. I did laps around my townhouse, pacing everywhere, even taking a long walk outside in the below-freezing temps. Throughout it, I kept telling myself that I should be afraid. Afraid of prison. Afraid of losing my law license. But I wasn’t. With each passing hour, I only grew angrier. Angry at myself, for dipping a toe into that cesspool and then being surprised when it came out dirty. But most of all, angry at Charlie Cimino. He had given me instructions to do things I shouldn’t do, and when I refused, he’d doctored documents and misrepresented my words.

The federal government wasn’t flying blind here; this was no bluff. Clearly, they’d placed eavesdropping devices in Greg Connolly’s office and on someone’s phone-either his or Charlie Cimino’s. They were Title III intercepts, meaning the government was intercepting these conversations without the knowledge of any of the participants. That’s hard to do. It’s an easier task when one of the parties to the conversation consents to wearing a wire, but when the feds want to eavesdrop without anyone’s knowledge, they have to go under Title III and get the approval of the chief federal judge as well as the top levels at the Department of Justice. They have to clear about ten different hurdles. They have to already have a pretty solid case.

And I was their gift-wrapped package, the insect that walked right into the spiderweb.

Maybe you’ll be the one guy at the table who walks. Those words from Christopher Moody, more than anything else he’d said or shown me, were the essence of my problem. The evidence he had on me, at this point, wasn’t that great. And if he really thought I was dirty, he would have waited for more. He could have waited weeks, months, to catch me deeper in the soup. But he didn’t do that, because he knew I wasn’t part of this thing. Maybe he even knew I was on the verge of quitting, after getting a sniff of the stench. Maybe that’s why he was here tonight, before I got out. He was scooping me up before I left the sandbox.

But none of that changed the fact that he had a basis for charging me, and that I would be one of several defendants sitting at the defense table, when the prosecution tried a multiple-defendant case featuring scumbags like Charlie Cimino and Gregory Connolly. I’d be part of the conspiracy. And I’d be trying, probably in vain, to separate myself from these other pieces of garbage, trying to persuade the jury not to flush me down the toilet with the lot of them. By the time the jury got down to me on the verdict form, they’d be so disgusted that they’d just check “guilty” and hand the slip to the bailiff.

The one guy at the table who walks. It was possible, sure. But guilt by association is a cliche for a reason. It happens all the time, which is why the prosecution likes to try defendants together in these cases. And this is to say nothing of the very real possibility that some of these assholes would plead out and, in exchange for a lenient sentence, point the fingers at everyone they could. Cimino surely would swear that I advised him on how to evade the public-bidding requirements for the bus contract. He and Connolly and Patrick Lemke would be happy to swear that I wrote up a memo disqualifying the obviously qualified bidders who beat out Higgins Sanitation, and they would probably throw in a little bonus fabrication-like how I demanded getting outside legal work from Higgins’s partner, Jack Hauser, in exchange. I would tell the jury that I had no idea that Jack Hauser came to me as part of a kickback, but after hearing months of testimony about sordid dealings from the likes of Charlie Cimino and Greg Connolly, would a disgusted jury believe me?

Advice of counsel. It’s what all of them would say. We’re not lawyers; we relied on Kolarich to tell us what to do.

And even if I did manage to beat the rap, I was looking at a good twelve, eighteen months under the federal spotlight, my reputation ruined, my career shattered. People don’t equate “not guilty” with “innocent.” The burn heals with time, but it leaves a real nasty scar that I would wear forever. I would just be the guy who got away with it.

And then, for the kicker, there was Shauna. Would Chris Moody go after her, just to hook me in? I had no doubt that he would. When the government wants you, they get you, whatever it takes. She would get hauled in for questioning, her one-person law firm hit with a federal subpoena, and I couldn’t rule out the possibility of an indictment. All because she gave an office down the hall to an old friend, and I just happened to invite her to that meeting with Jack Hauser.

I couldn’t let that happen. I just couldn’t.

Moody had me, and we both knew it.