Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (17 page)

Salnick was scoring points, but they were coming at a price. He used Mike’s drug history to festoon more lies on his tainted legacy:

SALNICK: You certainly didn’t run in and tell your probation officer that when you got out of prison you were using drugs again, did you?

MIKE: No.

SALNICK: You certainly didn’t go in and say, “I’ve got a drug problem, I need a little help,” did you?

MIKE: No.

SALNICK: What did you use when you were on probation?

MIKE: I did cocaine.

SALNICK: And you just didn’t get caught, is that correct?

MIKE: Yes.

Salnick spent the better part of an hour meticulously detailing Mike’s income during the months he was on probation, from January 2008 until August 2009, always contrasting his $2,800 in declared income with the much larger sums that were porously flowing in and out of his bank
account—income and expenditures that Mike deemed “a lot of frivolous spending and nonsense.” He ran through a litany of the five separate lawyers Mike has hired to guide him through his legal morass—pointing them out in the courtroom as he went. He detailed tanning salons and fashionable restaurants as possibly fraudulent expenses, itemized the money Mike lavished on luxury sports cars, and noted that he once threatened suicide in order to get insurance to pay for another stint in rehab—one more in a lifetime full of lies.

Almost four hours into his cross-examination, Salnick finally reached the topic of Erik Tal, and with it a possible motive for Mike’s behavior.

SALNICK: You testified that this fella Erik Tal got involved in this matter when you were at the attorney’s office, Mr. Entin, attempting to pay off your probation, right?

MIKE: Yes.

SALNICK: And according to you, after your wife had somehow lost the $100,000, Mr. Tal was someone that you were going to utilize to come up with the full 191?

MIKE: That was presented to me, yes.

SALNICK: And you told me just a little while ago you had never met Mr. Tal before.

MIKE: Before that, no.

SALNICK: And at some point, you went to the safety deposit box when your wife was questioning you about money or something and you got an additional $90,000 in cash?

MIKE: Yes.

SALNICK: Let me ask you this: let’s put ourselves in the month that you were at Mr. Entin’s office. And you’re in a situation now where you’re hoping that that $100,000 will come around, and your wife was supposed to get $91,000. This was before you went to your safe
deposit box. How much cash did you have in your safe deposit box at
that
time?

They haggled over how much money Mike could put his hands on at any one time, and finally settled on Salnick’s hypothetical 160. The longer Salnick belabored following the money, the more it seemed like he was trying to intentionally confuse the jury. After a while, it started to sound a little bit like “Who’s on First?”

SALNICK: You still had a significant amount in there, right?

MIKE: I guess if I took ninety, that left me . . . yeah.

SALNICK: And that’s all in cash, right? All in green? No cashier’s checks?

MIKE: No—cash.

SALNICK: All right. And you gave that money to your wife, but then you say your wife gave it back to you?

MIKE: No, you’re way off on the story.

SALNICK: I’m way off.

MIKE: You’re one day to the next to the next. You’re back and forth.

SALNICK: All right. At some point your wife gives it back to you, right? When you give it to her?

MIKE: The $90,000? Yes.

SALNICK: That’s before Mr. Tal, right?

MIKE: That’s when I meet Mr. Tal.

SALNICK: All right. And when you met Mr. Tal, you gave him the $90,000?

MIKE: No.

SALNICK: What do you give him?

MIKE: I meet Mr. Tal and I get my ninety that I just gave my wife that day back.

SALNICK: From your wife?

MIKE: Yeah. Mr. Tal had it; she gets it.

SALNICK: No, wait, wait—did Tal give it to you or did your wife give it to you?

MIKE: She grabbed it from Mr. Tal.

SALNICK: All right. And where’s all that going on?

MIKE: The parking lot of my lawyer’s office.

SALNICK: And after she gets it from Mr. Tal, you say, she gets it from you?

MIKE: Yes.

SALNICK: Okay. Why didn’t you just give that to the attorney?

MIKE: Because it wasn’t the full amount.

SALNICK: If you had $160,000 in your safe deposit box, why didn’t you just give that to the attorney?

MIKE: I should have.

SALNICK: Okay, I understand. But why didn’t you, Mr. Dippolito?

MIKE: Because I was getting a check the next day for the full amount.

SALNICK: But you had almost exactly the full amount in your own cash, didn’t you, sir?

MIKE: Almost.

Salnick took off his glasses here to emphasize his point, but he’s nearsighted, and he looked momentarily at sea.

SALNICK: Isn’t it because you really didn’t want to pay back the res titution that you didn’t give them your own money?

MIKE: Absolutely not.

SALNICK: Well, you talked a little bit about hoping to negotiate the amount, didn’t you?

MIKE: That’s how I went into it thinking.

SALNICK: Thinking that maybe you could pay a little bit less to some of these victims, is that right?

MIKE: That was my rationale at the time, yes . . .

SALNICK: From January 2008 up to August 2009, when MAD Media [Mike’s online marketing company, which stood for Michael A. Dippolito] was making all this money, why didn’t you pay back your restitution then?

MIKE: Because like I said, I had made arrangements to have it paid. Why would I go lose another hundred-some thousand dollars on top of it?

SALNICK: Well, wait a minute. You had all of ’08, before you ever met Dalia Dippolito, to pay that restitution back, didn’t you?

MIKE: I was saving money.

SALNICK: You were saving money. Money you didn’t want to give to the victims, right?

MIKE: Saving money so I could give it to the victims.

SALNICK: That’s why you cashed checks and put them in your safe deposit box, right?

MIKE: Well, that’s part of it, yeah.

SALNICK: That’s why you got the Porsche, and that’s why you got the trappings to the Porsche?

MIKE: What’s the question?

SALNICK: Well, that was the question.

MIKE: That’s why I got the Porsche?

SALNICK: That’s why you got the Porsche, because you wanted to pay restitution?

At this point, they were just bickering, so I objected to the line of questioning as argumentative, which Judge Colbath sustained. Salnick repeated the question more calmly.

SALNICK: Is that why you got the Porsche?

COLBATH: I just sustained that objection.

SALNICK: I thought it was just the argumentative nature. I’m sorry, Judge.

He repeated the question, articulating it carefully so as to appear overly courteous. This just came off as mocking, and the courtroom laughed.

SALNICK: No, I’m being serious.

COLBATH: And I was, too.

Colbath was not amused. It looked like Salnick might have just over-played his hand.

SALNICK: Okay. Understood. Thank you. I’m sorry . . . You were saving money supposedly to pay restitution, right?

MIKE: Yes.

Salnick quickly tried to divert the testimony back onto more solid ground, returning to the subject of Mike’s expenditures with money he could have used to repay his victims—a $20,000 condo for his mother, with full furnishings—but getting him to admit he bought his mom an apartment is probably not the best assault you could mount on a witness’s character. Very quickly, the judge moved for a recess and we broke for the day. The damage had been done.

The next morning, Salnick returned to the topic of Erik Tal, contrasting the approximately $140,000 Mike allegedly lost to Tal with the fact that he never filed a lawsuit or reported Tal’s actions to the police. Mike claimed he accepted Dalia’s word that Tal was legitimately trying to correct the problem, and considered any talk of a lawsuit premature with a trial pending. But then, as if on cue, we interrupted Salnick’s cross-examination to hear the testimony of Michael Entin, Mike’s probation attorney, who was unavailable to testify any other time.

Entin is a former prosecutor and has been a criminal defense attorney for thirty-three years, so he knows his way around a courtroom. He made it clear early in his testimony that he would not be here had his client not signed a waiver to the attorney-client privilege, and he spoke carefully and exactly throughout. He explained that nowhere was it stipulated that Mike pay his restitution according to his ability to do so, and that in fact it would be an “issue of futility” if he tried to get off probation without the full $191,000 available, since he would lose whatever leverage he had. Because the lead investigator, the original district attorney, and Mike’s probation officer had all agreed not to oppose termination of his probation if restitution was paid in full, it was essential he place the entire amount in Entin’s trust account before proceeding further.

ENTIN: My concern at the initial meeting was that the money had to be clean money, which would not be tainted by any type of—it’s called “nebbia” [Italian for fog or mist], but basically that the money could be shown to be from legitimate sources if it was questioned. I explained to him I wasn’t going to launder money to pay these people back, and that the money had to come from lawful means.

By Entin’s account, as the issue with Dalia’s wire transfer stretched into days and then weeks, despite daily calls from his secretary and no documents to support her evolving claims, he doubted the money had ever been sent, and he had already decided on severing the relationship by the time they showed up at his Fort Lauderdale office with the checks.

PARKER: Why did you do that?

ENTIN: Why did I terminate my relationship with him?

PARKER: Yes.

ENTIN: That’s a big answer but I’ll tell you. There were several issues. Number one is I was retained to do something which is a very simple task. It would take normally four or five hours of my legal time to complete the whole process. Get the papers, talk to the people, do the motion, and go to court and get the money. It turned out that this thing dragged on for months. There was always a reason the money wasn’t showing. There was always an argument between them as to why the money wasn’t there. There was never any conclusion to the fact the money was getting there. And then what happened was there became a collateral representation where I started to assist him with no additional fees, which became very time-consuming, where he told me on several occasions there were drugs he thought planted or found in his vehicle, which needed attention, because he was on probation and he didn’t want to violate probation. So what started out being four or five hours of work became twenty or thirty hours of work, and I just didn’t like the case anymore. I just wanted to get out.

The drama with the cashier’s checks merely validated his instincts. Two days later, Mike called to say he was on his way down with a legitimate check that would fix everything. When collateral documents arrived by fax from an attorney named Richard Blake representing someone named Erik Tal, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

ENTIN: I am exclusively a criminal attorney. I have no knowledge of civil law. Anything civil,
I
would go to a lawyer. I get a fax, which suggests I have some legal ability to review mortgage documents and balloon notes and something of that nature, and it was sent to me for my review as an attorney, for validation for them to sign.

He immediately fired off a letter to this effect to “whoever Richard Blake is” and gave Mike the number of another lawyer “who had more time and patience for this.”

“I wasn’t going to have any part of it,” Entin said.

On cross-examination, Salnick made the point of acknowledging that he and Entin had taken the bar together thirty-two years ago, and there appeared to be an easy rapport between them—not uncommon in a small fishpond like South Florida. Salnick successfully laid in some of the foundation for why Mike needed Dalia to front the restitution process for him.

SALNICK: And even if the full amount were not paid, if the state or the prosecutor or probation were to learn that he contributed money to this, they might have the right to try and take it.

ENTIN: That would open up a can of worms on that issue, yes.

SALNICK: All right, then it was probably a smart thing for Mike Dippolito to stay out of providing money, is that correct?

ENTIN: Yes.

SALNICK: Would you ever, as an experienced criminal defense lawyer, encourage Mike Dippolito to write checks to his wife so she could cash them or put them in her bank account for him to use as restitution?

ENTIN: No.

SALNICK: Why not?

ENTIN: (long pause) I don’t know, I just wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t sound right.

SALNICK: Doesn’t pass the smell test.

ENTIN: Yeah, it doesn’t pass the smell test.

During cross, speaking of Mike, Salnick asked Entin, “Did he seem pretty smart to you?” to which Entin replied, “Yes.”

In my redirect, I took direct aim at this assertion, pausing for effect, even if it meant winging my chief witness in the process. From there, we got pretty thick in the weeds.

PARKER: Mr. Entin, is Mike Dippolito one of the smartest clients that you’ve ever had?

SALNICK: Objection! I don’t see how that’s relevant at all.

COLBATH: I think it’s fair in redirect, given your questions. Overruled.

ENTIN: No.

PARKER: What is your opinion about his knowledge of the system and what was going on in his life in 2009?

SALNICK: Objection. You’re asking a question on a question—I guess that’s a compound question—and I’m not sure if it’s relevant or . . . relevant.

COLBATH: Overruled.

ENTIN: (grinning) Can you break that down for me?

PARKER: Well, I don’t know. What is your opinion about his ability to understand what was going on in his life back in 2009?

SALNICK: That calls for a lot of speculation.

COLBATH: I’ll sustain.

PARKER: Well, how about the other question I asked—can I ask that one again?