Breach of Trust

31

The next morning, I met Special Agent Lee Tucker in an “employees only” lounge at a hotel that was midway between my office and Charlie Cimino’s. Tucker was dressed pretty much the same as I’d last seen him, a white button-down under a blue sport coat and blue jeans. I’d told him I typically wore a suit when I went to work, and he said that would work fine, so that’s what I was wearing.

Tucker looked at his watch. “You’re late,” he said. “It’s almost eight-thirty. Okay.” He sized me up. “How you doing?”

How was I doing? I was about to wear a wire for the federal government. These guys were sinking their hooks in me and threatening me and my best friend if I didn’t play ball. Whether his question was small talk or sincere, it deserved a sincere response.

“Fuck you,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment. He was appraising me, the entire situation. What kind of a witness would I be? I didn’t doubt my importance to the operation. A lawyer could take them places they couldn’t otherwise infiltrate. He had two choices: Come on strong, with continued threats, or go easy. I figured he’d choose the latter.

Tucker opened his palm and showed me the recording device, which looked like one of those pagers people used to wear, before everyone had cell phones, only it was even thinner; it was about the size of three AA batteries strapped together with black tape. “This is an F-Bird,” he said. “Put it inside your suit pocket.”

It was even lighter than the weight of three batteries. I dropped it inside my suit pocket and didn’t even know it was there.

“This is audio only?” I asked.

He nodded. “A simple recording device. No eyes. No transmission signal.”

I didn’t know what that meant.

“I won’t be listening in, real time,” he explained. “It’s not transmitting any signal to me. I won’t know what’s said until you bring it back when you’re done.”

“And then you’ll grade my performance.”

“Don’t think of it as a performance, Jason. Just be yourself. Act like the recorder isn’t even there.”

I shot him a look.

“I’m serious. If you think about it, it’ll make you edgy. Just relax. Don’t force the conversation. Let him come to you. It might take a long time, Jason. That’s okay.”

“How do I turn it on?”

“You don’t.”

“How do I turn it off?”

“You don’t. We do those things. We start letting CI’s turn those things on and off-”

“Right.” The government couldn’t trust the cooperator to turn the recorder on and off; it would lead to claims of selective editing by defense lawyers at trial: You turned it off when my client said something that exonerated him; you turned it on, out of context, to capture something damning. It made sense. Better to have the thing running all the time.

Tucker looked at his watch again. “Now you better get going. And next time we’re supposed to meet at eight, make it eight you show up.”

Tucker was worried about my showing up late to the meeting with Cimino, but that was already my intention. I’d been late every time I’d visited him, and I didn’t want to stray from character.

I arrived at his posh offices at a quarter past nine. One of the supermodel receptionists made me wait a good twenty minutes before she showed me back. As I followed behind her, I thought that Tucker should regret not wiring me for video.

Cimino, as always, was pacing in his airplane hangar of an office and talking on the phone. He pointed to a chair when I walked in, and I planted myself. The tiny recorder felt like a hundred pounds in my jacket pocket. I felt like a siren was going off. Every word that he and I were about to say would become part of a record. It was like having your mother in the room with you.

“When I say I’m tired of excuses, do you think I’m speaking another fucking language?” he said, as always abusing whoever was on the other end of the call. “What’s this thing you have with tardiness? I say eight-thirty, you be here at eight-thirty.”

It took me a minute to realize that he had segued from rebuking some poor building contractor to scolding me. He snapped his fingers at me. “Hey, am I talking to you?”

“Are you?”

“Yeah, I’m-okay, listen, Arthur. Are you listening? No … more. . excuses. Get it done by the end of the week or I find someone else.” He tore off his earpiece and sat down behind his desk. “And you,” he said. “You’re very aggravating, kid, you know that? People say you’re fucking smart, but you can’t tell time so good, can you?”

I had a few responses in mind, but none of them seemed appropriate.

“And I tell you to do something, you fucking do it. Are you working for me or are you working for me?”

He was referring, I thought, to my refusal to write that memo disqualifying the two bidders on the prison contract, but he hadn’t said so explicitly. I was hoping he’d elaborate. I’d love to have Charlie Cimino admit, on tape, that he’d had someone doctor the memo I had written.

I handed him the document I’d worked on yesterday at the state office. It was a memo on the prison contract with the conclusion Cimino wanted, but written by me.

He looked at it for two seconds. “What’s this?” he asked.

“That,” I said, “is a memorandum I wrote yesterday, detailing why the two bidders who beat out Higgins Sanitation for the prison contract were not ‘responsible’ bidders, and therefore Higgins should get the contract.”

“We already have one-”

“Yeah, you already had one, whoever wrote it. Who did write it, by the way?”

Cimino just stared at me, looking annoyed. Strike two for me. He wasn’t going to help me out. Listening to this tape later, Tucker and Chris Moody would probably have a nice chuckle as I flailed away.

“Well, whoever did it-it was crap,” I said. “It wasn’t convincing. You want to disqualify the bidders, that is how you do it. That’s the memo you want.”

He stared a hole through me for a while. I admit it occurred to me, a flash of panic-he knows-but there was nothing I could do but sit still, and eventually his eyes moved down to the document. He read it over, skipping to the good part. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, this is better.” He looked up at me. “This looks better.”

“Jack Hauser came by the other day,” I said. “I signed him up on a lawsuit with the city.”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowing. “Yeah?”

“I think maybe you and I have had a communication breakdown,” I said.

We were dancing around it. I couldn’t imagine another way to do it. I couldn’t rush in here and be direct. I had to let him know that we were on the same page without saying so explicitly. And he needed to see that there was a reason for my sudden change of heart, a reason why my stubborn refusal to do what he wanted was suddenly replaced with eager compliance. That reason was his referral of Hauser Construction to my law office. A guy like Cimino, I figured, would willingly believe that I’d want in, that I’d do what he asked, if there were sweeteners involved. It’s how he operated, so it was psychologically soothing for him to believe it motivated others, too. He’d sent me that legal business to get me on board, and I was telling him that it had worked.

“Yeah?” he said. He was being noncommittal, which was smart of him.

I pointed to the document. “There are a couple of companies there that might not be so happy, losing out on that prison contract. They might sue. They might make a lot of noise. They might talk to other people. Reporters. Politicians. Maybe-shit, maybe law enforcement. People will want to know, what’s the reason?”

He was stoic, listening to me. “You telling me something I don’t know?”

“No, I think you know. But that other memo-the one bearing my name, that I didn’t write-that memo’s garbage. It wouldn’t hold up. Look,” I said, leaning forward, “if an action of the PCB comes under scrutiny of any kind, you need to be able to say you relied on advice of counsel. But the advice of counsel has to be somewhat convincing, Charlie. That other memo-it wasn’t persuasive. I think this one I prepared, on the other hand, is.”

He looked back down at the memo, but he wasn’t reading it. He was thinking.

“You need an advocate,” I said. “Someone who argues for a living. Someone who can take facts that smell like shit and convince everyone they’re perfume. Or at least, someone who can muddy up the water enough to make our position plausible.”

He made a thoughtful noise. “And I suppose that’s you?”

“Ask Hector Almundo if that’s me.”

Judging from the taped conversations the feds had played for me, these guys already seemed to have a favorable opinion of my skills. It was probably why I had lasted this long on the job, despite my stubbornness-Hector, and what I had done for him.

“Or not,” I said. “I don’t care. But I’m not a transactional lawyer, Charlie. You want someone who will read a thirty-page document and robotically apply the law-honestly, you don’t want me. I’m not interested. But the good stuff-where you need someone to make an argument, a convincing one-I’m your man.”

He slowly nodded his head.

“And I still have a full-service law firm,” I said. “Open for business, if the occasional customer wants to drop by. I’m always grateful for new clients.”

His expression seemed to soften. This, I thought, was making sense to him. I was presenting the world in exactly the way he, himself, viewed it. And I was being as tactful as I could. I wasn’t using words like “fraud” and “collusion.” But I was telling him, in so many words, that I now understood the rules, and I liked the game.

Cimino reached into a candy dish on his desk and threw a couple of jelly beans into his mouth. He cupped a few more, like he was guessing their weight, and considered me. “What was it with Hector?” he asked. “How’d you pull that off?”

“Plausible deniability,” I said, without hesitation. “But with Hector, it was tougher, because the feds had him on tape. We had to work after-the-fact. We had to dissect every sentence uttered by him and by Espinoza and show that Hector didn’t take Espinoza seriously. The jury thought it was plausible.”

He kept nodding his head. I thought it was nervous energy more than agreement.

“Now, hypothetically, if I have the luxury of counseling a client beforehand, not after the other shoe has dropped,” I said, “it’s easier. I make a convincing case for a particular position, and all the client has to do is say, ‘Okay, I accept your advice.’ The client can always utter the three magical words-‘advice of counsel’-and me, I can just say that I stand by my legal reasoning. That’s the great thing about the law, right? There’s no concrete answer. It’s all about opinions.”

“It’s all bullshit, if you ask me.”

I didn’t respond to that. I wasn’t going to convince Charlie Cimino that he should respect the legal profession, much less the law itself.

“Okay. Well.” I got out of my chair. “If this is the last time we talk, then-that Hauser Construction case? Thank you. I hadn’t expected that. I think I understand the world a little better now. If you want me for the-for the more complicated issues, let’s say, I’ll be around.”

Cimino was still playing with the jelly beans in his hand when I showed myself out. I got into the elevator and waited for the doors to close. Then I let out a long exhale, what felt like twenty minutes’ worth of breath.