Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (22 page)

I told them … let things cool off and let her deal with her problems her own way. I told them I already had an officer involved, so if you guys do anything to that house or do anything relevant to her, you guys will get caught and will be in trouble. And I think they backed off.

She later apologized to him for trying to go behind his back in hiring them.

Mohamed traveled to Israel with his daughter during early summer, returning June 20. By the time Dalia tried to steal his gun at the Mobil station on July 31, he’d had enough. He believed that by approaching the police, he might scare her straight—wave her off of a course of action that could prove cataclysmic. But he never intended for her to be arrested. He only agreed to wear a wire after they convinced him he might be implicated if she actually went through with it. Outside of two phone calls, he never knew police were listening to his conversations, or that they were being recorded, and certainly not that he was being videotaped.

“My whole point was to try to help her and get her out of the trouble she was in,” he said. “I didn’t know it was going to get to this point or any fake crime scene or anything that they did. Like, I just really wanted to help her at that time. I don’t know if she was really feared [afraid] from the people she showed the house to or she wanted her husband killed. So I figured maybe the officer can help her. I didn’t think it was going to get this far.”

If Salnick’s cross-examination of Mike could be boiled down to the sentence “Mike Dippolito is a liar,” then his cross of Mohamed could be summed up in the question: “Are you high?” Mohamed’s grasp of detail and his general concept of time were elastic at best, and Salnick was looking to exploit every inconsistency he could find in Mohamed’s testimony. This is from Salnick’s opening statement:

The evidence will show that Mr. Shihadeh will be asked about a number of things he claims to have knowledge of. You’ll notice inconsistencies in his statements. You will hear him contradict himself. And in some instances, he says he has a photographic memory, and then he’ll tell you only what he chooses to remember. He gets dates, times, and places wrong, and then tries to explain it away with excuses. The evidence will show that Mr. Shihadeh’s memory of significant events is not good.

Yeah, tell me about it.

The difference between depositions and trial testimony in general is that the first is expansive and the second is constrictive. Much of the material that
surfaces in a deposition is inadmissible because the goal is to get the witness talking and keep him talking. In a criminal deposition, an attorney wants to lock a witness for the prosecution into a particular version of events—the more detailed the better. Then, on the stand, corral his answers in ways that seem to contradict his initial version—get him confused, intimidate him, screw up his memory—all in order to challenge his credibility. That was the entirety of Salnick’s strategy with Mohamed. In Mohamed’s deposition, there was a prolonged section at the end that sounded like a personality test out of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
:

Do you think you’re good at influencing people? … Are you modest? … Are you cautious? … If somebody dared you to do something, would you do it? … Do you get embarrassed when you’re complimented? … Do people tell you you’re a good person? … Can you talk your way out of anything? … Do you like to be the center of attention?

And on and on. This would not have been out of place in a film like
The Master
or in a sidewalk personality inventory administered by the volunteers at the Scientology Center. In fact, Salnick was trying to peg Mohamed as a narcissist and borderline personality—presumably to cast him in some nefarious role in the reality TV conspiracy defense he must have been formulating at the time. He seems to have abandoned that strategy by the time he got to trial. Here, he was only interested in documenting Mohamed’s lapses of memory.

SALNICK: Do you have a bad memory, sir?

MOHAMED: No, I don’t have a bad memory, but so much happened to me during the past two years.

And later on:

SALNICK: But you did tell me previously that you’re the kind of person that has a great memory, is that correct?

MOHAMED: Yes, when it comes to things that I want to remember.

Mohamed routinely consumed a quantity of prescription Xanax to treat his anxiety, an admission I got on the record up front; there are tapes of phone calls he made to Dalia that are virtually incoherent. Detective Moreno told me that on one occasion, he was standing next to him supervising one of these calls when Mohamed fell asleep in the middle of the conversation. By pinpointing Mohamed’s confusion over dates and times, nit-picking every time he misspoke in now four separate attempts to recount his experiences, and attempting to put him at odds with the police over whether or not he was a willing witness, Salnick hoped to push him over into the red zone, make him angry or frustrated enough to render him unsympathetic to a jury, or if Salnick got really lucky, provoke him to walk out on these proceedings and refuse to participate in the case.

“So it’s your testimony that you didn’t lie to the police,” Salnick asks at one point, “they didn’t ask the question the right way. Is that what it is?”

Salnick found disparities in the date Mohamed first met Dalia (between 1999 and 2001), how long they initially dated (between fourteen months and four years), what month they reconnected (February, March, or three weeks before her arrest—i.e., July), and where they first met (Palm Beach Gardens Mall, adjacent to the mall, on the plaza, etc.).

SALNICK: So if you told me in your deposition that you only heard from her three weeks before, that would have been a mistake, right?

MOHAMED: I probably misunderstood your question.

SALNICK: You probably weren’t listening to my question.

MOHAMED: Misunderstood your question.

And he spent an inordinate amount of time on whether Mohamed was driving the Range Rover or the Lexus when Dalia tried to steal his gun, since he returned the former the day after Dalia offered it as an incentive to Larry Coe (whom Mohamed calls “a really bad person who lives in Riviera Beach”) to kill her husband, contributing a finite time line to the events as he described them. Under Salnick’s ceaseless probing, Mohamed is uncertain whether the gun incident took place in the Range Rover or the Lexus,
outside his cousin’s Urban Wear store or the Mobil station, whether it was serious or a joke, six weeks or six days before she was arrested, whether he left the car to talk to his cousin or for Red Bull and cigarettes, and whether there were people around or they were alone.

And by the way, if Mohamed felt so strongly about Dalia’s threatened actions that he would squander a friendship and affection of a decade’s standing to go to the police, why is it that he couldn’t understand the simplest instructions in the agreement he signed with them?

SALNICK: You’re a smart man, aren’t you?

MOHAMED: Yes.

SALNICK: Owned a lot of businesses?

MOHAMED: Uh-huh.

SALNICK: Owned a lot of cars.

MOHAMED: Uh-huh.

SALNICK: Did the police speak a different language that you didn’t understand?

On redirect, I tried to make sense of all of this. On the table in front of him, I placed Mohamed’s 225-page February 3, 2011, deposition; the 25-page transcript of his first July 31, 2009, police interview; and a second police interview, conducted August 10, a week after Dalia’s arrest, which clocked in at 20 pages. Lining them up there in front of him like a three-dimensional bar graph, it was easy to demonstrate how the deposition would have been far more detailed than the police statements, which were by necessity both broad and rushed. His disagreements with the BBPD aside over his having to testify, I easily established that he sat for both his deposition and perpetuated testimony, answering every question asked of him, even at personal risk, and in the latter case, traveling from California at his own expense to do so. I got him to freely admit the discrepancies in dates and times, which he attributed to the passage of almost two years. Beyond that, I could peg the date that Dalia tried to steal his gun to the day
of his first police interview (which it inspired), his travel abroad to his cell phone records, and I was able to explain the uncertainty surrounding the gun incident by proving it was actually two separate incidents:

PARKER: Now, the day that she took the gun from your glove compartment—if I remember correctly, she went to her car to bring the gun back to you after you questioned her about it. Is that right?

MOHAMED: There was a time before that, where, you know … killing her husband was not serious. I didn’t think it was serious at all. It was before the poison or anything. She was like, well, you have a gun here, you know—use it. Let me take it. I took it back and I put it back in the glove compartment. That’s where I got confused. I said, “Don’t put your fingers on a gun.” And the time at the gas station, when I left the car and I came back and the gun wasn’t there, that’s when I told her to give it to me. And then she went to the car and got it.

It was apparent that none of his confusion was intentional—he had never set out to deceive the police, the defense in his deposition, or the court here today. I also let him go on at length about how the police manipulated him into wearing a wire. His reluctance in testifying added weight to the substance of his testimony: here was someone who came forward to prevent a murder, and any actions by the defense attorney to obscure that fact now looked merely threadbare and somewhat churlish. I thought at the end of the day, he came off both likeable and credible.

Salnick took one more bite at the apple in recross:

SALNICK: You’re a college-educated person?

MOHAMED: Yes.

SALNICK: You have a diploma, I think you told me the last we got together?

MOHAMED: Yes.
(I objected here as beyond the scope.)

SALNICK: You understand English? You don’t have any problems speaking English, do you?

MOHAMED: No.

SALNICK: You know what the truth is, is that correct?

MOHAMED: Yes.

SALNICK: Okay, I’m done.

The following week we were in recess. Early Thursday morning, I got a call from Fred Laurie, my co-counsel Laura’s husband, who is an officer with the Boca Raton Police Department. He woke me up, and the first words out of his mouth were, “I have Mohamed.”

I said, “My Mohamed?” My Mohamed, according to ICE, the government organization tasked with knowing these things, was in Jordan for the duration of the trial. I had just spent an enormous amount of money to perpetuate his testimony and broadcast it for the jury. Certainly not my Mohamed.

“Yes. Mohammed Shihadeh. I have him right now. He’s under arrest for DUI, and he asked for you.” Fred knew we had just entered his testimony into evidence, and without saying as much was obviously concerned that Mohamed’s arrest would create headaches for us.

He couldn’t change the facts of the case, but he could give me a heads up. At the time of his arrest, Mohamed had over ninety Xanax in his possession. He was booked for DUI, but it could have been for trafficking if he hadn’t had a valid prescription. I assumed he had just arrived from overseas and had his prescription refilled.

The next morning on my way into the office, I notified Salnick, who didn’t seem overly concerned, although I did some research anyway in anticipation of this becoming an issue. Remarkably, there was no case law pertaining to this specific issue, which came down to Dalia’s Sixth Amendment rights: whether she would have the opportunity to confront
and cross-examine her accuser. What I discovered was that, as long as those opportunities had been afforded her—and they certainly were during Mohamed’s perpetuated testimony—then I couldn’t be held responsible if a witness lied to me about his whereabouts. I told Salnick I was willing to bring Mohamed back to testify in court if that’s what he wanted, but he assured me that was not what they wanted.

When I finally viewed the police report, I discovered that Mohamed had been staying at a hotel in Boca Raton. Late at night, he drove to a gas station across the street to get some food for himself and his girlfriend and her son. In the parking lot, he struck up a conversation with a shirtless guy in a pickup truck about the hip-hop CD he was playing. Mohamed offered to buy it from him for ten dollars, and they got into his rented white Saturn 4-door SUV. Mohamed gave him a $20 bill and set his wallet in the cup holder. The man said he’d have to get change from his girlfriend, who was waiting in the truck. When the truck took off in a hurry, Mohamed realized his wallet was missing, containing $4,500. Mohamed set off in hot pursuit and got involved in a minor accident, which he left the scene of to continue the chase. When he flagged down a passing police officer for assistance, the officer noticed his glassy eyes, slurred speech, and lethargic manner and detained him. Officer Fred Laurie was called in to conduct a DUI investigation, which ultimately led to Mohamed’s arrest. The entire incident—transient hip-hop, robbery, high-speed/half-block pursuit, hitand-run, and potential drug bust—seemed like just another one of those only-in-Florida stories or some wild bar tale. But knowing Mohamed’s prodigious Xanax intake and the fact that he used to make Dalia mix tapes made the whole thing sound bizarre yet entirely plausible.

I followed up with Fred, and Mohamed’s whole story checked out on surveillance video and in witness statements. The detectives assigned to the case were able to run the license plate of the pickup and tracked it to a local residence. The man confessed and showed them where he had buried the wallet in the backyard, minus a small amount of cash. The following Monday when we resumed the trial, I asked the judge if we could approach to discuss the matter. I informed him of Mohamed’s status, that my co-counsel’s husband was the arresting officer, and that I had notified Salnick
as soon as I learned of Mohamed’s return. Salnick said he understood that Mohamed was “done, finished, history” as far as my case went, and that his client had no objections to using the prerecorded testimony as his sole testimony. Dalia confirmed that in the sidebar. We agreed that if Dalia testified and I needed to bring Mohamed in for rebuttal, we would discuss the parameters of Salnick’s cross, which would certainly include details of his return and arrest. I told Judge Colbath I certainly hadn’t seen this one coming.