It had been a year since Lorraine had received that crippling call from DJ at the police station. Now, in June 2009, she had come to the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, a handsome new building hugging the revived harbor, to hear her son’s fate. She’d spoken with his court-appointed lawyer several times over the past year, while DJ had been held in a federal lockup facility an hour’s ride away, in Plymouth. The lawyer, Pete Horstmann, initially thought DJ’s best legal strategy would be to demonstrate that he had gotten into Chris’s Honda without knowing what his buddy intended to do. But as new evidence came to light, and as DJ refused to pin everything on his friend, both DJ and Chris decided to plead guilty in the Village Bank case, and Chris also admitted to his earlier robberies.
DJ hoped his plea would result in reduced prison time, but Horstmann cautioned both him and his mother to be realistic. When it came to guilty pleas, judges usually gave the prison time that government prosecutors recommended, and on rare occasions they actually gave more. Horstmann mentioned a previous client who had pleaded guilty to armed bank robbery, only to receive an unusually stiff sentence. The judge in that case happened to be the same man who would now decide DJ’s punishment.
Lorraine sat in the courtroom gallery with her sister at her side. Staring at the defendant’s table in front of her, she was pleased to see her son looking more like himself. DJ had used his year in jail to get clean and return muscle to his frame. He wore an off-white, long-sleeve thermal top and green, loose-fitting pants. He had grown a goatee and wore his light brown hair high and tight, combed forward on top. There was a long scar on the left side of his forehead. Lorraine had seen it during one of her visits to Plymouth. She knew the official explanation was that he’d fallen out of his bed. She also knew enough about the Darwinian ways of prisons to realize that there was often a sizable gap between official explanations and the real story.
During the long hearing343, the lawyers for DJ and Chris jousted with the assistant U.S. attorney and the probation officer over how to count the “points,” under the complex federal sentencing guidelines, to determine the defendants’ prison terms. Judge Wolf seemed impatient. He pounced to correct the lawyers for slight errors. Repeatedly, he puffed up his cheeks and then exhaled dramatically. Talk dragged on over how to count certain previous offenses, such as DJ’s arrests in Louisiana and Texas. When all the quibbling was done, Wolf announced his reading of the range of sentence lengths called for under the guidelines344. For Chris, the range was between 151 and 181 months. For DJ, it was between thirty-seven and forty-six months. Lorraine was relieved to hear the ceiling for her son was four years. Still, four years was far too long for her boy to be away.
Wolf explained to DJ and Chris that it was their right to address the court before they were sentenced, but they were not required to do so. DJ’s lawyer, in fact, had strongly discouraged him from speaking. Horstmann explained to DJ that, in his experience, a defendant seldom did himself any favors by addressing the court and actually ran the risk of saying something that might unintentionally tick off the judge.
As she looked on, Lorraine had no idea what her son was going to do. The answer came soon enough. When the judge asked DJ and Chris if they were interested in speaking, both of them nodded yes. Chris went first.
“People told me I should write a letter,” he said, his thick Boston accent rendering that last word as lettah. “But I don’t forget, every waking day, the embarrassment I caused my family.” As sobs came from his relatives in the gallery, Chris began to cry himself, lifting his white T-shirt up from his stomach to wipe away the tears. When he was finished, the court was completely still.
Before DJ spoke, his lawyer rose to address Wolf on his behalf. He knew the veteran judge had seen an endless parade of defendants file through his courtroom over the years, blaming all manner of bad behavior on their addiction to drugs. As Horstmann had explained it to Lorraine, however, he felt that, for perhaps the first time in his career, he had in DJ a client who wasn’t simply a drug addict but someone with a legitimate, compelling reason for his addiction. He also suspected that DJ’s trauma in the tunnel was so wrenching and unusual that it might appeal both to the judge’s heart and to his intellectual curiosity. That DJ had never sought to use the tunnel horror to his advantage—in fact, Horstmann had found out about it only after DJ decided to plead guilty—reinforced in the lawyer’s mind his client’s genuineness and almost naivete.
“This is a person with a painful addiction,” Horstmann told the judge, “and an addiction that seemed to emerge after an incredibly traumatic experience.” He briefly explained the tunnel accident, building on the detailed reference letter he had submitted to the judge from John Prescott, one of DJ’s lawyers in the tunnel case.
Horstmann told the judge how DJ had used drugs to try to run from the nightmares that had haunted him ever since the accident, and how the financial settlement he’d received had allowed him to fund a very long, drug-fueled run. Despite having hit bottom, and having made some inexcusable decisions, Horstmann said, DJ was a good man. “I like my client,” he said. “He’s a fighter. He was able to carry his friend’s body eight miles under Boston Harbor.”
Lorraine watched as Horstmann sat down and DJ stood up. Her son began by demonstrating the manners that had always served him well in life. He apologized first to his mother, “who worked so hard to raise me and my brother on her own.” But he didn’t stop there, apologizing to the court and to the Village Bank. He made it clear that Chris hadn’t coerced him into getting involved in the robbery. “Coercion was the drug,” he said.
“My drug addiction is strong, but it doesn’t justify my actions,” he continued, breaking down. “I’m a grown man.” After steadying himself, he asked the judge to consider their state of mind. “We weren’t driving to the bank to get cash so we could get high and have a good time,” he said. “We were going so we could get cash and not be sick, so we could create the impression for our families that we were responsible people in control of our lives.”
Lorraine’s eyes welled up.
As he listened to DJ, Judge Wolf once again puffed up his cheeks and exhaled before tipping his head to the right and then to the left. After DJ sat down, the judge paused to reflect. Then, a few minutes after four o’clock, he was ready to speak. First the judge addressed Chris. Although Chris had admitted to multiple robberies, the judge said, the government would have had difficulty proving his involvement in those earlier holdups without Chris’s confession. He sentenced Chris to eighty-four months in jail. Looks of relief cascaded over the faces of Chris’s relatives. They were still trying to do the math in their heads, but they knew this sentence was much lighter than what they had expected.
Lorraine whispered, “How many years is eighty-four months?” and someone whispered back, “Seven.”
Then Wolf turned to DJ, telling him he had clearly played only a supporting role by driving the getaway car. “Mr. Gillis, I sentence you to eighteen months in custody,” the judge said, adding a recommendation that DJ spend at least three months in an inpatient drug treatment facility upon his release345.
343 (Chapter 15, note 15)
During the long hearing: I attended this sentencing hearing, so these observations were gathered firsthand. I drew some details about Chris Politis’s role from his statements in court as well as from those made by others about him; also from court documents and extensive interviews with DJ. As of this writing, Chris remains incarcerated.
344 (Chapter 15, note 16)
sentence lengths called for under the guidelines:
345 (Chapter 15, note 17)
an inpatient drug treatment facility upon his release: