A Really Good Day(57)

The couple didn’t meet in person again; all their conversations happened over the phone. For days he flirted with her, describing the life they’d have together, how he’d be the father her children needed. Then he asked her if she could help him. He wasn’t a drug dealer, he assured her. But he had an opportunity to make a single score, one that would set them up for their life together. Did she know anyone who had access to methamphetamine?

My client laughed. She was a domestic worker, a mother. She didn’t know anyone who dealt drugs. But surely she knew some who used drugs, he persisted. She lived in East L.A., a center of drug activity. Wasn’t there someone from the neighborhood who could point her in the right direction?

Day after day the couple would speak on the phone, and he’d beg her to help him find the methamphetamine. He was curiously specific about the quantity of drugs he desired. At least fifty grams, he said. She told him she had no access to drugs, she wouldn’t know whom to ask. Ask your son! he suggested. Tell him to ask around his high school. Surely, he’d be willing to do this small thing for the sake of his mother and his soon-to-be stepfather’s happiness, for the sake of his own future. Tell him to think of the house the family would move into with the money his new stepfather made from the score.

My client was torn. Not about whether she’d ask her child to search for drugs—that was out of the question. She was a fond and worried mother who hovered over her children, pushing them to complete homework she couldn’t understand so they would get good grades, go to college, and have the kind of life she could not have imagined for herself when she was their age. But she had fallen hard for the lover from Puerto Rico. She wanted him to love her, and she worried that if she didn’t help him he’d stop calling. She would find some, she told him. She would find methamphetamine.

Weeks passed, and they spoke every day. The calls were always the same. They began with talks of her beauty and his passion, and moved quickly to the drug deal, with the quantity of methamphetamine the man sought always carefully specified. No fewer than fifty grams, my client’s telephone lover would remind her. She would reassure him that she was looking for the methamphetamine. Someday soon she would find a source.

Meanwhile, she begged her boyfriend to take their relationship to the next level, to meet her in person. He would promise to meet, but not until she had the drugs. Finally, he agreed to take her to dinner, even though she’d as yet been unsuccessful in finding the methamphetamine. The truth, which he didn’t know, was that she had not even bothered to look. She knew no one who had access to drugs, nor did she want to know anyone who did.

On the evening of their first real date, she opened her door not to her lover, but to a phalanx of DEA agents. The man from Puerto Rico was not her boyfriend; he was an informant. Over the course of many weeks and long conversations about how beautiful she was and how he planned to spend the rest of his life with her, he’d set her up.

She was arrested and charged with conspiracy to deliver methamphetamine, specifically fifty grams, precisely the amount that would trigger a ten-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.

In the Criminal Code, the crime of conspiracy does not have as one of its elements the actual commission of the underlying felony; the agreement itself constitutes the crime. It was irrelevant to my client’s case that no actual drugs had been exchanged. By promising to find methamphetamine, she had conspired to traffic. Her sentence would be determined by the quantity of drugs she had agreed to provide.

The only question that remained for the jury was whether she was entrapped, tricked into conspiring to commit the crime. Central to that question was whether or not my client was predisposed to deal drugs. If she was, then the informant’s trickery was absolutely legal—no harm done. If she wasn’t, then she must be acquitted.

I had, as you can imagine, a pretty good case, made all the better by what I discovered about the informant’s long and colorful personal and professional history. After being found not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted murder of his wife, the informant had escaped from a secure psychiatric facility and made his way to Central America, where he ended up in the employ of the CIA. His job with the CIA involved transporting cocaine. The CIA referred him to the DEA, who were even more generous than the spy agency had been. Over the years, the informant, a legally insane attempted murderer, earned hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. He focused on first-time offenders, setting up one after another. These people inevitably went to jail, most of them for at least ten years. Then, in one of his cases, a large quantity of cash disappeared. The informant denied knowing anything about the lost money, but when his handlers hooked him up to a lie detector, he failed unambiguously. Their response? Not to charge him with a crime, but to move him to a different jurisdiction, where the defense attorneys would have no information about his nefarious past.

I would have found out nothing about this history but for a mistake in the discovery file the U.S. attorney was required to turn over to me. Though the documents were aggressively redacted, on one page the black pen had slipped, leaving part of a case number visible. It didn’t take me long to tease out the jurisdiction. Half a dozen phone calls later, I had everything I needed to eviscerate the informant on the witness stand. I knew I could convince a jury that his testimony was at best unreliable, at worst criminal perjury.

When I confronted the assistant U.S. attorney about the man, he just shrugged. Your client is guilty, he said. We have her on tape.