The bus pulled into the cavernous garage beneath the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center and we were off-loaded and escorted into the building’s vertical maze of holding cells that served its twenty-four different courtrooms.
As a pro se, I was entitled to some legal niceties not afforded most of the men and women who came off the buses. I was led to a private holding cell where I could confer with my investigator and stand-in attorney — the lawyer assigned as my backup to handle the printing, filing, and in some cases fine-tuning of motions and other documents produced as part of the case. My investigator was Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski and the stand-in was my law partner, Jennifer Aronson.
Everything moves slowly in incarceration. My 4 a.m. wake-up at Twin Towers resulted in me getting to my private conference room at 8:40 a.m., a total travel distance of four blocks. I had brought one rubber-banded stack of documents with me — the motions — and was spreading them on the metal table when my team was shown in by a detention deputy at nine sharp.
Cisco and Jennifer were required to sit across the table from me. No handshakes or hugs. The meeting fell under attorney-client privilege and was private. But there was a camera in one corner of the ceiling. We would be watched, but the camera carried no audio back to the deputy who monitored it — or so it was claimed. I didn’t fully believe this, and during prior team meetings I had occasionally made a remark or issued an order designed to send the prosecution off on a wild-goose chase if they happened to be illegally listening in. I used the code word Baja in each statement to alert my team to the ruse.
I was in dark blue scrubs with lac detention stenciled across the front and back of my shirt. Like Edgar Quesada the evening before, I wore long johns underneath. I had learned quickly during my stay with the county that the early-morning bus rides and courthouse holding cells were unheated, and I dressed accordingly.
Jennifer was dressed for court in a charcoal-gray suit and cream-colored blouse. Cisco, as was his routine, was dressed for a sunset ride down the Pacific Coast Highway on his classic Harley Panhead, Cody Jinks blasting on his helmet stereo: black jeans, boots, and T-shirt. It appeared that his skin was impervious to the cold, damp air of the conference cell. That he was originally from Wisconsin might have had something to do with that.
“How’s my team this fine morning?” I said cheerily.
Although I was the one incarcerated and wearing the jailhouse scrubs, I knew it was important to keep my people engaged and not worried about my predicament. Act like a winner and you’ll become a winner — as David “Legal” Siegel, my father’s partner and the man who mentored me in the law, used to say.
“All good, boss,” Cisco said.
“How are you doing?” Jennifer asked.
“Better to be in the courthouse than the jail,” I said. “Which suit did Lorna pick out?”
Lorna Taylor was my case manager as well as my sartorial consultant. This second duty extended from when she was my wife — my second wife, in a union that lasted only a year and preceded her marriage to Cisco. Though I would not be appearing this day before a jury, I had previously secured Judge Warfield’s approval of a motion allowing me to dress in my professional clothes during all appearances in open court. My case had drawn considerable attention from the media and I didn’t want a photo of me in convict garb going viral. The world outside the courthouse was a jury pool from which twelve people would be drawn to judge me. I didn’t want them, whoever they were, to have already seen me in jailhouse blues. My carefully curated selection of European suits also added to my confidence when I stood before the court to argue my case.
“The blue Hugo Boss with pink shirt and gray tie,” Jennifer said. “The courtroom deputy has it.”
“Perfect,” I said.
Cisco rolled his eyes at my vanity. I ignored it.
“What about the time?” I asked. “You talk to the clerk?”
“Yes, the judge slotted an hour,” Jennifer said. “Will that be enough?”
“Probably not, with argument from Dana. I might have to drop something if Warfield sticks to the schedule.”
Dana was Dana Berg, the Major Crimes Unit star prosecutor assigned to convicting me and sending me off to prison for the rest of my life. Among members of the downtown defense bar, she was known as Death Row Dana because of her propensity to seek maximum penalties, or, alternately, as Iceberg because of her demeanor when it came to negotiating pleas. The fact was that her resolve couldn’t be melted and she was most often assigned cases where trial was inevitable.
And that was the situation with me. The day after my arrest, I had put out a media statement through Jennifer that forcefully denied the allegations against me and promised vindication at trial. It was most likely that statement that got the case assigned to Dana Berg.
“Then what do we drop?” Jennifer asked.
“Let’s put bail on the back burner,” I said.
“Wait, no,” Cisco said.
“What? I wanted to go with that right out of the gate,” Jennifer said. “We need to get you out of there and into unrestricted strategy sessions in an office, not a cell.”
Jennifer raised her hands to take in the space where we were sitting. I knew that they would both protest my decision on bail. But I intended to make better use of today’s time in front of the judge.
“Look, it’s not like I’m having a great time at Twin Towers,” I said. “It’s not the Ritz. But there are things that are more important to accomplish today. I want to get a full hearing on the probable-cause challenge. That’s number one. And then I want to argue the discovery issues. You ready on that, Bullocks?”
It had been a long time since I had called Jennifer by her baby-lawyer nickname. I had hired her right out of Southwestern Law School, which was housed in a former Bullock’s department store. I had wanted somebody with a working-class law degree and an underdog’s drive and fierceness. In the years since, she had proved me a genius, rising from associate counsel to whom I handed off low-money cases to full partner and trusted confidante who could hold her own and win in any courtroom in the county. I wasn’t interested in using her as a mere filer of documents. I wanted her going toe to toe with Dana Berg on the prosecution’s delays in discovery. This was the most important case of my career and I wanted her side by side with me at the defense table.
“I’m ready,” she said. “But I’m also ready to argue bail. You need to be out so you can prepare for trial without needing a bodyguard watching your back while you’re eating baloney fucking sandwiches.”
I laughed. I guessed I had complained a little too often about the Twin Towers menu.
“Look, I get that,” I said. “And I don’t mean to laugh. But I need to keep payroll going and I just don’t want to come out of this thing bankrupt and with nothing left for my daughter. Somebody’s got to pay for law school, and it’s not going to be Maggie McFierce.”
My first ex-wife and the mother of my child was a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office. Real name: Maggie McPherson. She made a comfortable living and had raised our daughter, Hayley, in a safe neighborhood in Sherman Oaks — not counting a two-year stint in Ventura County, where she went to work for the D.A. while waiting for a political fire to burn itself out down here. I had paid for private schools all the way and now Hayley was 1L at USC after graduating from Chapman in May. That carried a steep price tag that fell solely to me to pay. I had planned for it and had it covered in savings, but not if I pulled the cash and put it into a nonrefundable bond just to spring myself loose to prep for trial.