Breach of Trust

30

“The problem is that it’s not a federal offense to get around competitive-bidding statutes.” Special Agent Lee Tucker looked comfortable in his white button-down shirt, blue jeans, and loafers. He had a wiry frame, a bad complexion, deep-set eyes, a grassy mop of dirty-blond hair. A tin of Skoal tobacco rested in his front shirt pocket. “Or to contribute money to the governor.”

“And there’s plausible deniability,” said Chris Moody. These two people would be my contacts, Tucker, the handling agent from the FBI, and Moody, the assistant U.S. attorney. We were sitting in Moody’s office in the federal building, the following day.

The problem, they were explaining, was that to prosecute the things Cimino and the PCB were doing, prosecutors had to show a quid pro quo-that people were buying their way into these state contracts, that the awarding of the state job was directly and intentionally tied to the campaign contribution. Was it suspicious that a company landed a lucrative contract with the state, only to turn around the following week and give the governor twenty-five or fifty thousand? Sure. Red flags everywhere. But illegal? Only if you could read minds, or if you could get them on tape admitting that there was a direct relationship between the two. And that was very, very hard to do.

“Cimino’s no idiot,” said Tucker. “You guys at the PCB-you can’t even call him on the phone. Or email or fax or text him. Everything’s in person. Right?”

I nodded. Cimino was avoiding all the ways that the feds like to catch people these days. The wire-fraud statute-committing any kind of fraud by way of telephone or electronic communication-was their bread-and-butter nowadays. It was how the feds were able to grab any number of state crimes or other wrongdoing and get federal jurisdiction.

“Christ, he’s not even a state employee.” Tucker shook his head. “He does everything out of a private office. A guy who’s not even on the state payroll is directing traffic.”

“Then what’s his angle here?” I asked. “He must be getting a cut somehow.”

“Oh, yeah.” Tucker nodded. In one fell swoop, he scooped tobacco out of the tin in his pocket and deposited it inside his cheek. It seemed to cheer him up. “He has all kinds of companies set up for consulting, things like that. Some company gets a big fat contract from the state, you can bet that company will suddenly hire one of Cimino’s companies for some bogus consulting work. It adds up quick. He could make over a million a year this way.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “On paper, all of those side contracts with Cimino’s companies are legit. Actual work is performed. Grossly overpaid work, but work nonetheless.”

I could see from their expressions that I’d hit the nail on the head. That would be the smart way to play it. If Cimino were shaking down contract bidders to shoot some consulting work his way, he’d make sure that the contracts held up to superficial scrutiny-that he provided at least some minimal consulting work, albeit for an exorbitant fee.

“Look, we think Cimino is all over the place in the Snow administration,” Tucker said. “We think he has a say in almost every significant decision they make. But it’s hard to prove.”

That explained why they needed me. The tapes they played for me were probably enough to warrant an indictment against Cimino. But they wanted to play the string out. They were expecting, hoping that they could put a lot more on Cimino. And they were betting that I could deliver it.

“He sees you as a potential asset,” Tucker told me. “You’re not just the everyday lawyer they get. You have a lot more experience. You come from a major law firm. And most of all, you got Hector out of a huge jam. You navigated Almundo through the very same kind of stuff these guys are doing, and Hector never spent a day in prison. You’re valuable.”

Tucker only seemed to realize after the fact that Hector’s prosecutor was sitting in the room while he glorified Hector’s acquittal. I like the impolitic, bull-in-a-china-shop types myself. Tucker might not be so bad to work with.

“You heard Greg Connolly on the tape,” Moody added. “He said you could be ‘useful.’ These guys like to keep their circle small and tight, but you could penetrate it, Kolarich. We’re counting on your well-earned reputation as a bullshit artist.”

I didn’t get the sense that Moody meant it as a compliment. But that didn’t make him wrong. If there is one thing I learned when Talia died, it’s that I am my father’s son-I can become another person altogether. I can pretend. I can smile at you and keep my hand steady while I am doing somersaults internally.

I was, in many ways, the perfect person for this job.

And then, over the space of a handful of days, it all came together. Chris Moody and I met with the state supreme court’s Division of Attorney Discipline-DAD-to get their blessing for my undercover role as a corrupt lawyer, a necessary protection given that I was going to be breaking laws right and left and didn’t want to lose my law license for doing so. For Moody’s part, he didn’t want my cross-examination at trial to begin with an assault on my professional ethics. And even more fundamentally, Moody needed to be sure that my testimony would be admissible. The first thing any defense attorney would do is try to exclude every recording made by me as a flagrant breach of the attorney-client privilege. We wanted to be sure that my role was clearly defined, limited as much as possible to committing fraudulent acts with Charlie Cimino, Greg Connolly, etc.-which would allow us to invoke the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.

“Well, Kolarich, I guess you’re out of excuses,” said Moody, his way of telling me the supreme court had signed off on my undercover role.

And he was right. The federal government and I had agreed that I’d cooperate with them without an immunity deal, and the state supreme court had given the green light. The idea hit me as if it were a fresh notion, despite having dominated my thoughts for the last four days: I was actually going to do this. I was going to be a snitch for the federal government.