Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (14 page)

In Dalia’s case, she had a tendency to become inextricably intertwined with everyone and everything around her.

T
he easiest way to define your defendant is to define your victim. If a jury can put itself in the victim’s place, then a prosecutor has a much better chance at conviction. But if the victim is a lowlife, a scumbag—“no angel,” as the prosecution often tries to spin it—then the defendant just moved a whole lot closer toward grabbing the brass ring of reasonable doubt. I knew this and Defense Attorney Michael Salnick knew this (the fourth Mike in Dalia’s inner circle, for those keeping score). So before I settled on a courtroom strategy, I needed to meet with Mike Dippolito and see what I was dealing with. Plus, I knew firsthand that anyone who heard Mike’s story was alternately mystified about the money and outraged by how he had been treated.

I met with Mike Dippolito at the State Attorney’s Office within days of getting the case. All I knew about him on paper was that he was a convicted felon, a shyster, and a con artist who was still on probation and owed roughly $200,000 in restitution for money he had taken in some sort of boiler-room foreign-exchange fraud. All of this represented baggage, the last thing you want in a key witness, much less a victim. Mike had done two years in state prison—it wasn’t really enough money for the Feds to take an interest in—and I didn’t pull his case file ahead of time, in the interest of seeing him through fresh eyes, as a jury would.

I walked downstairs to find a stocky, spiky-haired Philly-born Italian whose tight T-shirt accentuated a muscular frame and the tribal tattoos entwined on his biceps. Rather than ask a lot of pointed questions to see how
he would stand up under pressure, I just had him tell me his story, start to finish. Some parts, I had him tell me two or three times, slightly reframing my question so I could see how his answers lined up. My goal was to catch him in a lie, or at least to highlight the inconsistencies. As a prosecutor, I naturally assume everyone is lying to me; that may seem cynical, but it saves me a lot of time. Everyone has secrets, and I would prefer not to discover his on the witness stand.

I told him the best way he could help me was to be completely truthful, regardless of what he thought the consequences might be. I said, “Listen, I invited you here to speak to me but now that you are here I’m basically forcing you to give me all of this information. So I promise not to use it against you. I’m not going to turn around and report it to your probation officer.” There is no prosecutor-witness privilege analogous to the attorney-client privilege, but since I was acting as Mike’s advocate in the service of justice, I had to pretend for the moment that there was. I knew from his police statement how he and Dalia had met, and I was encouraged that he volunteered this fact himself. After hearing Mike’s story (and confirming it from the court record), I understood that his crime was neither smart nor complex: he basically sold foreign currency by phone to credulous investors and then pocketed the money. Fraud implies a certain level of ingenuity and cunning to which his crimes failed to rise. As long as stupidity continues to be legal, about the best you could call it was theft enhanced by sheer audacity. His explanation—by no means a justification or excuse—was that he was so high he basically didn’t care. The bank account he used was in his name; he never changed his phone number. It was like the first half of a Ponzi scheme: take everyone’s money, but forget to pay some people back.

Opening up did not come naturally to Mike. He had the opposite of the con man’s easygoing confidence and glib delivery. Here was a guy whose parents were both drug addicts, the grandparents who raised him were functioning alcoholics, he took his first drink at the age of eight, and most of his longtime friends were from recovery groups. The legal system, of which I was his latest appointed contact, had sentenced him to court-ordered supervision for three
decades
, a punishment that would not have seemed out of place in
Les Miserables
, and a succession of lawyers had taken his
money with precious little to show in return. Now the woman who had methodically made herself his true love and soul mate had tried to have him killed. This is not a life trajectory that engenders trust. Not to mention that testifying honestly could send him back to prison. And since he was on probation out of Broward County, one county over from the State Attorney’s office in Palm Beach County, I had no say on how they handled it. All I could do was document the theft of the restitution money and bring it to their attention.

For the record, I can tell you that hearing his story for the first time, I was no less baffled than any other law enforcement professional who was convinced they’d heard it all. He had to tell me three times, and I still had him write it down so I could pass it along to the detectives for their report. But I discovered fairly early on that as unbelievable as his story seemed, the parts that I could verify all checked out. Other police departments weighed in to confirm his version of the events in Manalapan, West Palm Beach, and Palm Beach Gardens, and all the forensic information I could marshal, either about Dalia’s circumstances or his own, matched the story he told me.

The other insight I gleaned from speaking with Mike in person was that he was a creature of habit—literally. You don’t experience long-term drug addiction without accepting the primacy of routine. Often, the solution is to lose the drugs and focus on habit. When I met him, Mike was ten years sober, minus a few bumps in the road, and he regimented his life in excruciating detail: up at four thirty, to the gym by five, work out for exactly an hour. It was this obsessive nature that Dalia exploited, and which she later characterized to anyone who would listen as Mike’s controlling, threatening nature. By putting guardrails on his day, Mike lessened the chances that he would inadvertently pitch headlong into shadow, where most of his troubles awaited. The only problem is, once you’re outside your comfort zone—say, if your wife goes out of town and you wander onto an escort site with an evening to kill, or if the old obsession becomes a new one, like getting off probation—it clouds your reason and dismantles your judgment. All I had to do was listen to that jailhouse call where Dalia tried to manipulate Mike into taking her side against the police and, ultimately, himself. Their whole history was in that phone call, as was his before he ever met her. Mike was a
runaway train, something Dalia could have spotted before they ever left the station, as well as the perfect victim on whom to practice her dark magic.

She probably thought he had more money than he did, the way he spent it like a drunken sailor, but that just meant she was operating on a shorter time line. She’d have to have sex with him and make him believe it, but that wasn’t a problem: her real estate license aside, having sex for money was the only job she’d ever had. I think her path was laid out for her the moment she first laid eyes on him—a few months’ work, topple the dominoes, divorce him while he’s in prison, and she’d have his house, his cars, his bank account, and the bragging rights on a game brilliantly played. It would be the easiest money she ever made.

Later on, when we were e-mailing about some court documents, Mike wrote, “Liz, I know you are doing a lot of work for me. Thanks. Just please get this girl what she should get. She killed me without killing me, with all the probation on me still, and fighting me for [my] house and just basically playing mind games with me for our whole marriage.”

Like most people in my position, I consider myself a pretty good judge of character. I started out as a victims’ advocate. Watching the way Mike laid it all out, his hangdog, blindsided delivery adding to the accretion of outrage that even the casual listener couldn’t help but share with him, I thought we were going to do fine. I told him, “You will have good days and bad days throughout this process. Just try to focus on the positive and rest assured I am doing everything that I can to hold her accountable and bring her to justice.”

Realizing the kind of impression he would make on the jury, I made the somewhat controversial decision to lead with Mike as my opening witness. To everyone else, Mike looked exactly as he had to me at first—like someone we needed to distance ourselves from. But that’s exactly what I was doing. This showed that we had nothing to hide. Mike’s history was a matter of public record, and Salnick was a resourceful, capable adversary; it was coming into evidence with my blessing or without it. Mike takes full responsibility for what he’s done and has paid his debt to society—or is trying to, if he could get his money back. I had spent enough time with him to know that he could take it. I explained to him that it was better to
get the information out on direct examination and then to get hammered on cross-examination, and he got a little taste of what it would be like going up against Salnick in the deposition. He understood what he was up against. With so much of the case on surveillance video, Salnick’s only real shot was to beat on Mike Dippolito for fifteen rounds and hope a cut opened up and his credibility leaked out. And the longer Salnick kept Mike in the hot seat, the more he helped my case, since the greater risk he ran was looking like a bully. In my experience, that’s the one thing a jury will not tolerate.

The trial date was set for April 25, 2011. As with all trials, both the prosecution and the defense filed pretrial motions for the judge to rule on, so we could know what would be admissible as evidence and what would not. The judge assigned to the case was Judge Jeffrey Colbath. I had practiced in front of him in 1999 as a relatively new Assistant State Attorney in Domestic Violence Court, and in my experience he was scrupulously fair. He’s known for his sense of humor, and usually opens each day of court with a word of the day or “this day in history” reading, but I’ve seen him put attorneys in their place when need be. He’s also not afraid to hand out a tough sentence.

In addition to the State’s Motion to Introduce Evidence of Prior Bad Acts as Inextricably Intertwined Evidence described in the last chapter, I filed a Motion in Limine to prevent the defense from making mention of certain topics in the presence of the jury without first obtaining permission from the court. This was a complicated case, in that it had a lot of moving parts and a lot of information the jury had to hold in its head at one time. Any red herring or rogue elephant thrown into the mix could quickly derail the proceedings. So I put a lot of work into it ahead of time to make sure there were no issues that would unfairly prejudice the jurors against the State. I didn’t want the defense bringing up any issues that were irrelevant or immaterial to the case. The guiding principle was “you can’t unring the bell.”

The hours of depositions Salnick took gave me a pretty good indication of the issues he might try to focus on in the trial, so I tried to plan accordingly. I sought to bar any discussion of events surrounding several waivers Dalia signed to appear in an episode of
COPS
, which apparently
figured into the defense strategy, or of a related investigation into Sergeant Paul Sheridan by Internal Affairs on his part in obtaining Dalia’s signature for the producers. My position was that anything Dalia did after her arrest had no bearing on her guilt or innocence. I sought to exclude any mention of Mike’s prior drug use unless they could show it could have altered his memory and perception of events. (Although I brought it up during Mike’s testimony, this allowed me to control how the subject was introduced.) I asked that there be no mention of Mike soliciting prostitutes in the past, even though he had admitted to as much with Dalia. I sought to prevent any claims that the defendant suffered from Battered Woman Syndrome, since as provided by the Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure, the name of no such expert witness had been provided by the defense thirty days prior to trial.

I wanted there to be no allegations that Mike had laundered money, that the money earmarked for his restitution came from illegal means, or that he had any obligation to pay the entire amount of restitution if he had the means to do so. I asked that there be no mention of any paternity suit filed against Mike. (A week after those initial surveillance tapes were released to the media, one of Mike’s former lovers resurfaced with an eleven-year-old son she claimed was Mike’s. After paternity tests proved conclusive, he accepted this unintended consequence of fame and now pays child support.)

I requested there be no mention of Dalia’s mental health (outside of an insanity plea, which she had not alleged and which at any rate would require an expert witness), her age (which could incite sympathy), any penalty that she could receive if convicted (ditto), her lack of prior arrests, her claims of innocence, proof of prior good conduct, any self-serving hearsay statements made by the defendant to any person—especially the testimony of Michael Stanley regarding alleged statements made by the defendant, since his entire testimony was inadmissible pursuant to the rules of evidence— and any statements by the defendant that would indicate remorse (not that I was aware of any).

I also wanted to preclude mention of any prior plea offer or conversations regarding a possible settlement in the case. Salnick had approached me early on and suggested that his client shouldn’t do more than a year. I
didn’t laugh in his face exactly, but I did indicate we weren’t interested in a plea bargain. Then, in Mike’s deposition, when Salnick asked him what he wanted to happen in this case, Mike said, “[I]f she fixed my mess, they could let her go. I’m fine with that . . . I don’t care if they send Dalia on a trip to Vegas and let her go. All that does nothing for me. I wouldn’t gain nothing by it.” When Salnick sought to follow up, I said in an e-mail that if Dalia were to accept responsibility for her actions, pay Mike back the money she stole from him, relinquish any rights that she has in the house, and grant him a divorce, I would bring that information to the State Attorney. But until such time as the money was in Salnick’s trust account (and I wasn’t holding my breath), the whole thing was speculative. I didn’t want him bringing this up at trial to persuade the jury that Mike didn’t care whether Dalia was convicted or not. In a hearing several weeks before the trial started, Salnick asked the judge if he would entertain what is known as a pre-plea inquiry. This is where a defendant asks the court to commit to what sentence they would receive if they were to plead guilty to the crime. Both sides proffer what they believe the evidence would show at trial, and the defendant presents any mitigating information. A lot of judges won’t do it because they don’t want to be in the business of negotiating with the defendant. Of course, Dalia could just have pled guilty and received the sentence she was due, but she chose not to do that. Judge Colbath refused to entertain a pre-plea inquiry.