How to Get Away With Murder in America (9 page)

Albert was being held at Metro Corrections, a federal jail near the zoo. Next to the CIA’s legal department, his most potent ally was his wife, Lourdes. A twenty-four-year-old, born in New York of Puerto Rican descent, she had met Albert during his previous stay in jail, when, fresh out of the Army and studying criminology in community college, she interviewed him for a class project. She fell in love after Albert persuaded her that he was a “successful Latino businessman targeted by racist cops.”

Albert was single at the time—Jenny Cartaia had fled after his 1986 arrest—and Lourdes stepped into the void. Cops called Lourdes “Albert’s legs on the street.” There seemed to be nothing she wouldn’t do for him. To beat the jail phone-monitoring system—all inmate calls were recorded except those to attorneys—she took a receptionist job at a law firm. Albert submitted her firm’s number as that of his attorney, so when he phoned her, the recorders were switched off. Lourdes then used three-way calling to connect him to whomever he wanted to speak to.

OCS detectives got wind of the scam when they discovered that Albert was making menacing calls to a witness, and they obtained a warrant to record all of his calls. One of their first surprises was learning that Albert’s lawyer traveled to Washington to meet with Ricky and his CIA attorney to coordinate defense strategies. “The CIA wouldn’t cooperate with us, but they would with Albert,” says Fisten. “It bordered on obstruction.”

Fisten was a frequent topic of Albert’s discussions. After the OCS interviewed Ricky in Washington, Albert—under the mistaken impression that Fisten had led the interview—railed against him: 

Albert’s belief that Fisten was the sole author of his legal woes was misguided. Fisten was the OCS’s “lead homicide investigator,” but other detectives produced the bulk of its work. Fisten generated fewer than a quarter of its reports. Nevertheless, Albert’s lawyer, Fred Schwartz, began attacking Fisten in federal court, branding him a “mad dog detective” who fabricated evidence. In press conferences he coined the nickname that angers Fisten to this day, “Detective Fiction.”

Childish as they were, the schoolyard taunts zinged at Fisten gradually yielded results. Fisten’s character and the notion that he manufactured evidence would enter a state prosecutor’s analysis of the Teriaca murder case.

Prior to the Teriaca case, Fisten had been an investigator in some thirty murder prosecutions undertaken by the Dade County state attorney’s office. After the Tabraue case, which yielded federal and state convictions, the top Dade County prosecutor at the time, Janet Reno, wrote a commendation letter in which she stated, “The convictions we won were brought largely through the efforts of Fisten.”

In early 1991, Fisten began presenting evidence for the Teriaca case to a team of state attorneys known for aggressive murder prosecutions. By August they believed they had enough evidence to charge Albert and Erra with murder and Carlos Redondo and Ricky as accessories. Fearing that Albert might be released from his RICO charges, should the judge then reviewing his immunity deal rule to uphold it, they obtained an arrest warrant for him first.

Around that time, an MDPD lieutenant pulled Fisten aside and told him that Abe Leaser, the chief of felony prosecutions and a close ally of Reno’s, was complaining about him. Fisten explains, “Leaser was unhappy that I was dating a secretary in his office.”

Fisten’s marriage had started crumbling a couple of years earlier, a casualty of long hours spent on policework and, Fisten admits, “a poor attention span when it comes to marital vows.” He was one of a group of investigators who practically lived at the OCS’s undercover apartment office. Fisten and his partner Velez spent so much time there, he says, “our neighbors assumed Mel and I were a homosexual couple.”

“The case took over everybody’s life, says MDPD detective Al Morciego, one of the youngest members of the OCS. “We were always going.” At times their office apartment took on the mood of a frat house. Two detectives and, allegedly, an FBI agent nearly came to blows when one of them, as a practical joke, booby-trapped the toilet. Shifts often ended at the nearest cop bar. Velez’s marriage was the first to break up. “It killed him,” says Fisten. “But he was a perfectionist about our work.” Hinman’s and then Fisten’s marriages were next. Fisten, however, was the only one to move in with a secretary from the state attorney’s office for whom, it turned out, Abe Leaser seemed to have special feelings.

To homicide detectives, Leaser was all-powerful. He determined which murders to prosecute and who would get assigned to them. Tall, unsmiling, and gaunt, he spoke in a funereal baritone that made a request for cream in his coffee sound like a closing argument at a war crimes trial. Behind his back, people referred to him as “Lurch,” after the butler in
The
Addams Family
.

Shortly after Fisten heard of Leaser’s complaints about him, the chief prosecutor assigned the case to himself and immediately began questioning the OCS’s evidence. “Leaser was a weird guy,” Fisten says. “But I didn’t believe he’d wreck a case over funny feelings he had about me being with a secretary.”

When I phoned Leaser, who retired in 2009, he told me, “I didn’t have anything personal with that Metro homicide detective. I thought he was a dirty cop.” I didn’t ask Leaser about Fisten’s relationship with a woman in his office, but he brought it up. “I used to see him hanging around with one of the secretaries in my office,” Leaser said. “I happened to know that this detective was married. This man was a liar.”

Leaser’s indignation at Fisten’s sexual comportment—still raw when we spoke—was somewhat baffling, given his role in a 1990 episode that local papers had dubbed “the Zipper Incident.” It happened in a meeting with opposing lawyers in a felony case. During a break, Leaser reportedly approached a female public defender, unzipped his trousers, and told her, “This is for your benefit.” Leaser passed this off as a joke gone wrong, and after a quick suspension Reno reinstated him. Fairly or unfairly, his reputation was cemented, earning him a new nickname: “Zipper Man.”

“I was being called out for leaving my wife by the Zipper Man,” says Fisten. “I believed his personal attacks on me were a smokescreen.”

In the fall of 1991, OCS detectives transcribed a jail phone conversation in which Albert appeared to dictate a message for Lourdes to deliver to Leaser:

Investigators also found other apparent references Albert made about bribing Leaser. Confidential information from the state attorney’s office was leaked to Albert’s attorney. Later, a call emerged in which Albert’s attorney told Albert he was meeting Leaser in order to “dirty up Fisten.”

When I asked Leaser about the matter, he said, “If allegations had been raised they would have been looking at my hemorrhoids. No such thing happened. I was never investigated.”

Former OCS investigators say they did present a memo outlining their concerns and shared incriminating tapes with a senior federal prosecutor, Bill Keefer, who declined to comment about it when I asked him, citing confidentiality rules. According to Morciego, someone in the MDPD apparently warned Leaser about the OCS’s effort to have him investigated. Albert ceased talking about bribes on the phone, Morciego says, and “the trail went cold.”

Days after some OCS investigators allege that Leaser was warned, he sent a memo to MDPD supervisors stating that he had grave concerns about Fisten’s credibility. Because Fisten had a clean record inside and was on assignment to a federal task force, there was little the department could do, but he was transferred out of Homicide. The move had no impact on his work at the OCS, but it stripped him of his “homicide detective” title within the MDPD.

In his conversations with Lourdes, Albert increasingly spoke of spiritual matters. By late 1991, he would pray with her and end his calls with the affirmation “There’s a miracle every day.” At the end of the year, he reaped a bounty of them. The same day Fisten was drummed out of Homicide, Southern District judge Jose Gonzales issued a ruling upholding Albert’s immunity, writing:

Gonzales’s opinion detailed legal errors in the agreement and noted Dexter Lehtinen’s role in negotiating it. Days after Gonzales issued his opinion, Lehtinen resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. His departure came a few weeks before he was to begin what should have been the pinnacle of his career, leading the prosecution of Noriega. Instead, Lehtinen defended himself from allegations that he had cut a deal with Albert to advance his wife’s political career. The Justice Department never found evidence that he had committed any wrongdoing, and Lehtinen later blamed his downfall, in going after his wife’s top political opponent, on his being “too aggressive a crime fighter.” His wife, Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen, now chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Lehtinen would spend much of the next twenty years representing Indian gaming interests. His brush with the Great Corrupter had left him in the ash heap.

“You really didn’t see how powerful Albert was until you locked him up,” says Fisten. “From a jail out by the zoo, he turned the whole government in on itself.”

Although the RICO charges against Albert were dismissed, federal prosecutors indicted him for perjury—based on his grand jury testimony—and he remained in jail.

Albert’s judicial grace in the RICO case did not extend to his co-defendant Bobby Erra. In March 1992, Erra pleaded guilty to a RICO conspiracy charge predicated on narcotics trafficking, money laundering, extortion, and attempted homicide. He was ordered to forfeit some $88 million and agreed to serve eleven years in prison (of which he would serve seven). “We had roadblock after roadblock thrown at us,” says Ed Hinman. “But we got the arrogant asshole.”

“To Leaser I was a bad cop,” says Fisten. “But my work was good enough for Bobby Erra and his attorney Roy Black.”

Erra’s guilty plea boosted the investigators’ confidence in the Teriaca prosecution. The murder case drew from the same body of evidence—many of the same witnesses and wiretaps—that underpinned the RICO case. In addition, the OCS was working to indict Albert for the murder of Armando Mirabal in Los Angeles and to bring indictments of Albert, Ricky, and Erra in the murder of Steven Grabow in Colorado. “Albert had his prayers,” says Fisten. “We had ours.”

Shortly after Erra pleaded guilty, Jon Roberts was captured after five years on the run from indictments related to his work for the Medellín cartel. Roberts was offered a reduced sentence in exchange for his cooperation against Colombian narco-traffickers. During a debriefing with federal agents, Roberts surprised them by offering information on the murders of Richard Schwartz and Gary Teriaca.

The federal agents handling Roberts had no connection with the OCS investigation and could not evaluate his claims, but—concerned that his claim to knowledge of those murders would open him to state murder charges and thus complicate his cooperation with them—they arranged for his attorney to contact Abe Leaser and negotiate state immunity in exchange for his cooperation. Leaser instructed Roberts’s attorney to send a proffer of evidence he was prepared to give.

In August 1992, Roberts’s attorney met him at a Sarasota detention facility, some two hundred miles from Miami. Roberts’s arrest had been kept secret. Neither he nor his attorney had had any contact with the OCS. But the proffer statement Roberts dictated almost perfectly mirrored evidence the OCS had already gathered about the Teriaca and Schwartz murders—though Roberts added significant new details, notably identifying Ricky as the shooter in the Schwartz murder.

After Hinman and Fisten met with him weeks later, Fisten concluded, “Roberts gave us Ricky in the Schwartz murder. The CIA could shove this one up their ass. We had their guy.”

There was one problem, though. By the time the OCS became aware of Roberts’s potential testimony, Leaser had already thrown out the Teriaca murder prosecution. His timing was odd. Leaser prepared a thirty-five-page memo recommending that the Teriaca case be dismissed and sent it to his boss, Janet Reno, two days before Roberts’s proffer arrived. “We could never say why Leaser timed things the way he did,” says Fisten. “But it looked funny. Why dump a prosecution before you find out what a new witness has to say?”

Prosecutorial memos in Dade County were veiled under a priestly sort of secrecy, intended to shield decisions from political interference. A by-product of this secrecy was that Leaser had considerable leeway in interpreting the facts of the OCS case in the memo he sent to Reno. In it, Fisten’s name appears eleven times, the only investigator named more than once. Leaser—echoing Albert’s defense strategy—makes him a centerpiece of the case and its alleged flaws. He warns that one must take care to distinguish between “facts in the Fisten materials” and “actual facts.” Throughout the memo he attributes evidence to Fisten that other investigators collected. When I shared the memo with McGruff, he said, “It’s like reading about a different case than the one I worked on. The facts are off. He focuses on details that are irrelevant. It’s strange.”

At points, the memo is absurd. In his analysis of the recording in which Albert and his cohort seem to speak about killing “that guy who lived at Bal Harbour,” Leaser suggests that they might have been talking about a “bear hug.” Or if they had been referring to a murder in Bal Harbour, who’s to say it was Teriaca’s? As Leaser explains, “many people live or lived in Bal Harbour, which also has numerous hotels.”

Leaser offers what might be one of the oddest closing arguments a prosecutor has ever advanced: “Fred Schwartz, who represents San Pedro, has forwarded a polygraph examination of his client showing his lack of involvement or knowledge of this incident.” A Los Angeles criminal defense attorney with whom I shared the memo said, “It could be the law is different in Florida. But in California if a prosecutor cited exculpatory results of a defense-administered lie detector test as reason to dismiss a case, we would generally call that insane.”

But the Zipper Man had the last word. The Teriaca murder case was dead.

Leaser still stands by the memo and rejects any suggestion that he was unduly influenced by Albert. Fisten says, “The tapes we had of Albert talking about bribes were not proof that Leaser was corrupt. But on the tapes the words are the words. And the actions Leaser took are consistent with the words.”