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Authors: Jennifer Ridha
Criminal That I Am
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For my mother and my father: thank you for loving me anyway
“Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, looking up at him and not Âlowering her eyes under his gaze, directed at her hair, “I am a Âcriminal woman, I am a bad woman, but I am the same as I said I was then, and I've come to tell you that I cannot change anything.”
T
OLSTOY,
A
NNA
K
ARENINA
To know your own illness is the proper remedy.
R
UMI
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
2: Meet My Co-Conspirator
CHAPTER
3: Welcome to Cowboy Country
CHAPTER
6: I'll See You in Court
CHAPTER
7: Thank You for Your Cooperation
CHAPTER
8: To Baghdad, with Angst
AUTHOR'S NOTE
T
his book has been created from court filings, transcripts and dockets, e-mails, text messages, journals, notes, newspaper articles, and, more than anything else, my individual and necessarily imperfect recollections. Many of the names have been changed. I have omitted people and events where they are not integral to the story. With the sole exception of my co-conspirator, none of the people included or omitted had any knowledge or involvement in the illegal acts described in this book. No one I've known would ever do something so stupid.
CHAPTER 1
Busted
I
can fall asleep anywhere. Airports, movie theaters, bathroom stalls. Once during law school, seated in the gallery of an overcrowded courtroom during a murder trial I was supposed to be observing, I managed to curl into the fetal position, legs pulled to my chest, head pressed against the pew. I awoke only when I felt a crude poke to the shoulder and opened my eyes to see a court guard who had but six words for me: “Wake your ass up or leave.”
I take my aptitude for sleep seriously, not only because of the pleasures it offers but also because of sleep's unparalleled ability to provide refuge from all waking hells. It therefore strikes me as odd in the wee hours of July 26, 2010, that I suddenly sit upright in bed, as though someone has just doused me with water. I look around my bedroom for the cause. There doesn't seem to be one: the clock indicates that the time is just shy of five in the morning, and even through my groggy disposition I can see that everything is accounted for, nothing is out of place. I am in a brief period between two jobsâone has concluded the week before, and the other does not begin for several more. Lacking obligations, I issue a personal sleep decree and go back to sleep.
An hour later, I hear my doorbell ring. Having already determined that there is no reason to be awake, I ignore it. Probably the mailman, I tell myself.
I suppose only moments pass before I hear the doorbell ring again. I don't stir. The doorbell rings again. And then again. Soon, the doorbell is being pressed in such rapid succession that its wail is now an uninterrupted siren from the front door.
Confused, and not a little annoyed, I slink out of bed and make my way to the living room. Once there, I realize that the cry of the doorbell is accompanied by a heavy pounding, one that causes the door to shake with each blow. This is not the mailman, I think.
No, even in my half-slumber, I know that this is clearly something much more ominous. I ask through the door, “Who is it, please?”
The pounding and ringing stop.
“It's the Department of Justice.”
I wish I could say that I'm baffled as to the reason why the Department of Justice is at my doorstep. But I will venture that most people who are visited at an unconventional hour by law enforcement have a decent idea of why they are there. I do, at least. And so, when I hear these words through the door, I feel a heavy dread run through me.
I close my eyes and press my forehead against the door in the hopes I can possibly will their presence away. This doesn't work. After a moment I clear my throat and say, “Yes?”
“Open the door.”
The man's request seems easy enough. I move my hand toward the knob, but before I turn it, a lawyerly thought passes through my brain.
“Why?” I ask.
There is a pause on the other side of the door. From the agent's silence, I deduce that this visit is not accompanied by a warrant, not one for my arrest nor one for the search of my home. This means that I don't have to open the door. I don't have to do anything at all.
The agent seems to follow my thought process. “Just open the door. I'm starting to wake up your neighbors.”
Sure enough, I hear the chain and latch of the door of my elderly neighbor, Patrick, a sweet man in precarious health who always stops to ask me how I am doing. Even after today, he will not discuss what he sees this morning. When I run into him in the hallway, he will only ask me how I am doing. “I'm fine,” I will tell him. “I'm just fine.”
Now that poor Patrick is awake, and the agents are not going any
where, the options are few. I take a deep breath. This is it, I think. This is where it all begins.
I
open the door. I see the first of two federal agents, a burly white man in his late forties. He doesn't seem happy that I have made him wait at my door. Next to him is a black woman, whose age I will not guess, in a pantsuit and glasses. I later learn that she is not on my case but has accompanied Burly Man because of a Department of Justice policy requiring male agents to visit female suspects at home with a female agent in tow. This is a good policy. The expression on Burly Man's face frightens me. Lady Agent softens things up a bit.
Even though I know why they're here, I'm still in shock. I have stepped out of my body and am watching this exchange happen to someone else. The active part of my brain has been switched off; I have only at my disposal its default settings. I'm processing everything Âmatter-of-factly, as though Burly Man is here to fix my cable, not to advise me of a criminal investigation that is being conducted in my honor.
Burly Man shows me his badge. I look at it in the hopes it provides some loophole about why he should not be standing in my foyer. I find no loophole. He places the badge back in a black leather case and then pulls from the inside pocket of his jacket a white envelope.
“I'm here to give you this letter,” he says. “And I want you to read it right now.”
I take the letter from his hand. My default settings are in charge. I don't have to read this right now, I think. And I don't want to read a letter whose contents I already know, especially not in front of Burly Man, who will probably be able to detect that I already know. I stare at the envelope, wondering if there is some way I can get out of this.
I look up at Burly Man. Read it, his eyes insist. Now.
I open the letter. It is a target letter. As I read, I imagine a faint bull's-eye appearing on my forehead.
The letter is written on stationery for the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. The letter, addressed to me, states its method of delivery as “By Hand.” The letter also says that I am a target of a federal investigation, that I should be aware that the
Office plans on presenting this investigation to a grand jury. Would I like to come in to meet with the prosecutor's office and say something for myself? Or would I prefer to be indicted? Sincerely, Some Prosecutor.
As I read the letter, I do not react to its contents. I am mindful that Burly Man is watching me closely. Lady Agent, on the other hand, appears to be somewhat disinterested. I see her looking around my apartment as though she is hoping something better will grab her attention.
I hand the letter back to Burly Man. “It's for you,” he says, as though bestowing a gift. “Keep it.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Do you have anything you'd like to say about the letter?” he asks.
“If it's all right,” I say, knowing full well that it is, “I'd prefer to speak to an attorney before I say anything.”
Burly Man's face falls. I suspect that he's hoping that in my rude awakening I don't recall this most basic precept of criminal procedure, that I've never seen an episode of
Law & Order.
But I do, and I have.
“Well, now that you've said the word âattorney' I can't ask you anything else about this.” He is disappointed.
Yes, I think. That's why I said it.
“Can we still come in?” he asks.
Shit, I think. Shit, shit, shit. I've already mustered all of the energy I have for this encounter and can feel my shock beginning to fade into crude awareness. I want Burly Man and Lady Agent to go away so I can fall apart in peace. But I also don't think it would serve me well to push them away.
“Yes, of course,” I hear myself say.
Burly Man takes a seat on the sofa in the living room. As he sits down, I notice a large diet root beer stain near his feet on the cream-Âcolored rug. The stain has been there for quite some time, only addressed in previous weeks by my stepping over it. For a fleeting moment I hear my mother's voice admonishing me to always have my home ready for company. But I don't think she ever had this situation in mind, and to think about her at all in this moment is too much, and so I just say, “Sorry about the soda stain.” And then, a terrible lie: “I didn't get a chance to clean it yesterday.”
“No problem,” Burly Man says.
Lady Agent doesn't sit down. She is casually making her way around my living room, eyeing its contents. Because I don't yet know that she is there only as a matter of protocol, I take her saunter around my apartment to be a casual collection of information about her suspect.
You have nothing to hide, I assure myself, although I wish I did not have my DVD collection of
The Wire
featured so prominently next to my television set.
Burly Man says that he does not want to ask me any questions that I would prefer to answer with a lawyer. But I can tell that he wants to know if I plan to admit or deny the allegations in the letter.
Burly Man names my co-conspirator. “You did represent him in his criminal case?”
It's common knowledgeâa matter of public record, in factâthat I helped represent my co-conspirator in his legal case. Since Burly Man wants some kind of answer from me, to give him this one seems fairly harmless.
“Yes,” I say. “I did.”
“And you had a romantic relationship with him?”
I swallow. This is considerably less harmless. The answer is also yes, depending on one's definition of a romantic relationship, but something I've shared with virtually no one.
Lady Agent interrupts. She is considering the wall adjacent to my television set. “Did you take these?”
She is pointing to photographs of children in rural Ghana that I took on vacation years earlier. Though I don't understand how these could possibly relate to my crimes, hers is a decidedly easier question to answer.
“Yes, I did.”
“They're beautiful pictures,” she says, still studying them. I am puzzled, but flattered that Lady Agent thinks much of my photography.
Burly Man's face shows a flicker of annoyance. “I was asking youâ”
I interrupt because I don't want to hear him repeat the question. “I guess I can tell you that,” I say. “Yes.” I add, because it's true, “After the case was over.”
Burly Man seems satisfied to have gotten somewhere with me. “Well, I suppose that isn't against the law.”
I glance over at Lady Agent. She is now examining my bookcase. She doesn't appear to be listening to my confession.
Burly Man is looking at me as though I should say something more. I know that he'll find out soon enough, so I gesture toward a small Âcarry-on suitcase located near my front door. “Actually, I just got back last night from visiting him.” It's not necessary for me to add that I Âvisited him at a federal correctional facility, because this is the only place my co-conspirator can be visited.
“Yes,” Burly Man says. “We know.”
I feel a chill run up my spine. If Burly Man knows something as benign as this, he has been keeping very close track of me. He has possibly seen my credit card receipts; my flight records; he probably knows the name of the bed-and-breakfast I stayed at in the town where the correctional facility is located; he has almost certainly read my e-mails and has been listening to my phone conversations. He has perhaps looked at my bank accounts, my medical records, my comings and goings.
Over the coming months, I will learn that much of this is true. Now, sitting in my living room alongside two federal agents, only one fact resonates: not only does Burly Man know what I've done, he has also expended considerable resources in uncovering it.
The implications of what is happening swirl in my head. I forget that Burly Man is sitting on my sofa. “You seem very calm,” he tells me.
I look at Burly Man but say nothing. On the inside, I am in emotional free fall.
Then, I hear this: “Oh, my goodness, is this your cat? She's adorable!”
Lady Agent has caught sight of my cat, a fluffy white Himalayan. She likes to climb on humans, particularly males, usually resting in and around their crotch region. I think it may have something to do with pheromones and warmth. I usually remember to warn men of her advances before they sit down. Today, however, this has slipped my mind.
While Burly Man and I have been discussing my imminent demise, my cat has made her way into the living room. She has summarily dismissed Lady Agent's overtures and is sauntering over to Burly Man with her eye on the prize.
I pull myself away from my inner turmoil. “I'm sorry. She's very friendly,” I say as she rubs against Burly Man's legs. I don't tell Burly Man to watch his crotch, as this seems inappropriate.
“Actually, I like cats,” Burly Man says as he reaches down to pet her. “I have two of my own.”
Burly Man does not strike me as someone who would have cats. Dobermans, maybe, or a pair of cobras. But cats? All the same, I see that Burly Man has a small smile as he strokes my cat's back. She is elated at the display of affection.
I try to imagine Burly Man at his home with his cats, putting down cat food, cleaning up litter. They curl up with him while he watches TV and drinks a beer. He strokes the tops of their heads, they close their eyes with contentment. I have to leave early, he tells them this morning. I have to go bang on someone's door and wake her up and make her read a letter and ruin her life. I'll be home soon.
My cat has had enough foreplay and is ready to go all the way. I see her poised to jump on Burly Man's lap and quickly grab her. She's not taking this well and is squirming so she can get down and return to pursuing her target.
I can't take much more of this, so I stand up.
Burly Man stands up, too. Because he is at eye level, my cat stops squirming. “Well,” he says not unkindly, “I will tell them at the office that you were cooperative with us.”
It's an odd segue but I take it. I say what I think to be the magic words, or as much magic that can be conjured in such a hopeless situation. “Please tell them that as soon as I consult with an attorney, I will answer their questions.”
This will keep Burly Man away from my door. It is also very likely my only way out.
Burly Man is visibly relieved to hear this. I have just made his life much easier. He throws me a bone. “Hopefully this can all be explained,” he says.
