The Gods of Guilt

Closing Argument

The Gloria Dayton case is long over. Six months later, its ripples on the surface of my life still move with a current all their own. The trial ended, of course, when Lankford pulled his backup gun and took his own life in front of the jury. Judge Leggoe declared a mistrial, and the case went no further than Department 120. Unsurprisingly, the District Attorney’s Office chose to dismiss all charges against Andre La Cosse, citing the “likelihood” of his innocence and other extenuating circumstances. Of course, no one at the DA’s Office or the LAPD admitted they flat out got it wrong from the start.

After his release, Andre was transferred to Cedars-Sinai, where he was treated by the best of the best, underwent more surgeries, and recuperated for six weeks in state-of-the-art medical surroundings. I sent every invoice that came from a doctor or the hospital to Damon Kennedy at the DA’s Office. I never heard back.

When Andre finally left the hospital, he walked with a cane, and he likely always will. Grateful for the outcome of the criminal case, he agreed to allow me to handle a civil claim against the city and county, seeking damages for his wrongful arrest and incarceration and the physical and mental harm to him that resulted. Neither of the defendant governments wanted to go anywhere near a courtroom with the case, and we negotiated a settlement. I started by demanding a million dollars for every stab wound my client suffered but ultimately we settled for $2.4 million on top of all the medical bills.

My cut amounted to the biggest single paycheck in the history of Michael Haller & Associates. I gave bonuses to everyone on the defense team and sent a check for a hundred thousand to Earl Briggs’s mother. I thought it was the least I could do.

That still left me more than enough for a three-week Hawaii vacation with Kendall and to buy a pair of Lincoln Town Cars. One was to use immediately, one to save for the years ahead. They were both low-mileage 2011 models, the last production year of the luxury model’s thirty-year run.

For a while after the trial, I couldn’t catch a break in the public relations department. I was once again vilified in the media and the courthouses, this time as the guy who went after a witness so hard and viciously that he killed himself on the stand. But eventually my reputation was saved by a three-part series that ran in the Times in September under the headline “The Trials of an Innocent Man.” The stories exhaustively detailed the trial, the attack, and the ongoing rehabilitation and recovery of Andre La Cosse. I came out looking pretty good in the stories as the lawyer who believed in his client’s innocence and did what he had to do to win his freedom.

The articles went a long way toward securing the financial settlement with the city and county. They went even further with my daughter. After reading the newspaper series, she tentatively opened communication with me again. We talk and text a couple times a week now and I have driven out to Ventura to watch her ride in equestrian competitions.

Where the articles didn’t help me was with the California bar. An investigator with the professional ethics unit opened a file on me shortly after publication of part two in the Times. That report interviewed the doctors who treated Andre after the stabbing and raised serious questions about whether Andre could have possibly been conscious and of clear mind when he supposedly signed the waiver of appearance I had brought to his bedside at County/USC. The bar investigation is ongoing but I’m not worried. Andre came through with a notarized statement attesting to my legal acumen and recounting how he knowingly signed the document in question.

My other one-time client Hector Arrande Moya was both a winner and loser in the course of the year. Sly Fulgoni Jr., with tutoring from me as well as from his father, won the habeas case, and Moya’s life sentence was vacated by the U.S. District Court. But upon his release from the prison in Victorville, he was immediately taken into custody by immigration officials and deported as an undesirable to Mexico.

Meanwhile, the fate and whereabouts of James Marco officially remain a mystery. He left the courthouse that day in June, slipping out in the confusion and alarm immediately following the Lankford suicide. He has not been seen since, and his face now graces Wanted posters in the same federal building where he once worked. He is the subject of wide-ranging investigations by the FBI and his own DEA. According to unnamed sources quoted in the Times series, the crimes and corruption of the ICE team he headed for over a decade run deep, and a federal grand jury will be hearing evidence well into next year. The unnamed sources said Marco was believed to have sided with one faction in a long-running war within the Sinaloa cartel and had been doing that faction’s bidding in Southern California. It was even suggested that the effort to put Hector Moya in prison for life came on orders from Marco’s bosses in Mexico.

Among the other things the grand jury is probing, according to the Times, is an alleged relationship between Marco and the female attorney who represented Patrick Sewell, the man charged with attacking Andre in the courthouse transportation center.

The U.S. Marshal’s Office is primarily focusing its search for Marco in southern Mexico, where it is believed he may have escaped to with the aid of the cartel leaders who long ago corrupted him. But I am pretty sure they will never find him. Hector Moya told me once about how his enemies disappear, never to be found. Two weeks ago I received an e-mail from an address unknown to me but with a subject line that simply said Saludos Del Fuego. I opened the e-mail to find an embedded video and nothing else. It was only fifteen seconds long, but the video provided a lifetime’s worth of horror. It depicts a man hanging by his neck from a tree. He is obviously dead, his badly beaten face swollen and bloody, his skin and clothes burned black in places.

I am pretty sure the dead man is Marco. I forwarded the video to the deputy marshal heading the search for him. Once it is authenticated, I expect there to be an announcement that Marco is believed dead, though it is unlikely they will ever find a body.

I have deleted the video from my computer but it will never be erased from my mind. I have no doubt that it came from Moya and no doubt that he wanted me to know what became of Marco. When I think about the rogue agent’s fate, I remember the night in June at the loft when I was surrounded by my team and raised a glass to justice for Gloria Dayton and Earl Briggs. Some forms of justice are more horrible than others. But in this case I think justice has been rightly served.

Officially, Gloria Dayton’s murder remains open because no one has been or will ever be convicted of the crime. The memory of Glory Days now resides in a city’s consciousness as she takes her place in the pantheon of public victims.

In the meantime, not so much attention has been paid to Earl Briggs. His case remains open and the subject of the grand jury’s ongoing investigations. But I mourn him more than Gloria or any other. I often think of the miles we rode together, the ground we covered on the road and in life.

Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside. Earl Briggs sits on my jury, Gloria Dayton, too. They are there with Katie and Sandy, my mother, my father, and soon Legal Siegel as well. Those I have loved and those I have hurt. Those who bless me and those who haunt me. My gods of guilt. Every day I carry on and I carry them close. Every day I step into the well before them and I argue my case.