Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (23 page)

“Oh well,” said the Judge. “What can you do?”

For his part, Mohamed called me afterward to explain his changing his mind again, but I told him that henceforth, I could only communicate with him through his attorney. Given that he had testified under protest, and that his appearance before the jury was now officially complete, I guess it should come as no surprise that he hadn’t alerted us he was back.

Delilah. From the Hebrew word meaning
weak, poor, or displaced
.

She was the lover who laid Samson low, and who betrayed the secret of his strength to the lords of the Philistines for 1,100 pieces of silver, fifty times the haul of Judas. Who left him blinded, alone, and in chains.

“English is Dalia and Arabic is Delilah,” states Mohamed. “She told me her father is Egyptian, so I figured I got her—you know, Egypt. It’s an Egyptian name: Delilah.”

I asked Mike how he felt about Mohamed, who knowingly pocketed the proceeds from a luxury vehicle bought with Mike’s stolen money, but who probably saved his life on more than one occasion, and whether they had spoken since.

“I don’t feel the obligation to reach out to him,” Mike said. “He benefited plenty—he got some of my money. Let’s leave it at that.” He quoted himself from one of his later TV appearances: “‘He banged my wife, so we’re even.’ The guy doesn’t get a Citizen Medal, but he did do the right thing.”

A
t the beginning of the second week, after we got the business with Mohamed sorted out, I called Jim Eddy to the stand. Sergeant Eddy was a member of the Lantana Police Department who also served with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Task Force, where he was an authority on the Buck Wild gang. Prior to Sergeant Eddy taking the stand, Salnick had been successful in getting the court to prohibit him from discussing would-be hit man Larry Coe’s specific crimes, so I used him merely to confirm Larry’s cell phone number, which I was able to prove Dalia called thirteen separate times on April 2, three days before her arrest. (Only two of the calls connected, for less than two minutes apiece.)

While not going into the details, Eddy was comfortable on the stand referring to Larry and his crew as killers. He also informed the jury that Larry was currently on trial in the adjacent courtroom as one of five Buck Wild members charged with racketeering, conspiracy, and related crimes under the RICO (Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization) Act. These included Larry’s younger brother Quamaine Falana, an honor student who received fifteen years for conspiracy to commit racketeering and grand theft. Larry was acquitted of all racketeering charges, but sentenced to twenty-five years on a related gun charge—Possession of a Firearm by a Convicted Felon—due to his violent past. Palm Beach County Prosecutors Greg Kridos, Cheryl Caracuzzo, and I compared notes, including the contents of Coe’s cell phone. Cheryl and I have been friends for years, and she kept joking about offering Dalia a deal to testify.

On cross, Salnick established that the Metro PCS cell phone Larry used was actually registered in a woman’s name—a seed of doubt I successfully countered on redirect: he posted the number on MySpace to promote his burgeoning rap career, tapes of which were on sale at Urban Wear, the Riviera Beach store owned by Mohamed’s cousin. Whether predominantly from the worlds of incipient hip-hop or Gold Coast criminal affinity, contacts in Larry’s cell phone included the following: Boogie, Brain Crip, Bug, C-clip, Chew, Chops, Clete, Creep, Dent, Doy, Drako, Easy, Face, Fat Boy, Flake, Fluff, G, Gangster, Gangsta Face, Gboi, Hen, Honkey, Ja, Joc, K-cool, Lil Bit, Lil John, Lil Larry, Lil Q, Lil Taye, Lip, Lock, Lo Lo Lo Lo, Maut, Nard, Nay, Nelly, Niq Niq, Nookie, Noz, Puma, Ram, Raylo, R.J., Saucey, Scoobie, Ski, Skittles, Stew, Tatoo, Tootie, Trap, and Yella.

Next to the stand were three cops: Detective Asim “Ace” Brown, Sergeant John Bonafair, and Officer Carlos Reinhold. Ace Brown fielded Mohamed’s phone call that set the whole case in motion, but he also became one of my trusted investigators. Under oath, he confirmed Mohamed’s actions on the day he contacted police and continuing through his initial interviews, and he explained the particulars of the standard Confidential Informant contract. Since Detective Brown specialized in financial crime investigations, I had him speak to further details of the Cayman wire transfer and those subsequent financial transactions involving Erik Tal, including that the money deposited in Tal’s bank account was soon after wired to Israel. On cross-examination, Salnick focused on a fifteen-minute discrepancy in the times Brown listed for the first Mohamed phone call in his official reports, and hammered him on his initial impression that Mohamed’s information was “sketchy” and that he was unable to identify the victim’s full name. He also tried to get Detective Brown to admit to promising Mohamed anonymity, which he wouldn’t.

Sergeant John Bonafair headed the surveillance teams at both the Mobil station with Mohamed and Dalia and the CVS with Dalia and “hit man” Widy Jean. Deep-voiced and sporting a goatee, he testified that he and Detective Sheridan chose Widy Jean for the role of the hit man because he was able to braid his hair (everyone else sported a military cut). He testified that although informants are generally told when recording devices are
placed in their vehicles or on their person, here notification on the upgrade to video somehow slipped through the cracks. On cross, Salnick once again had a witness reiterate that the Chili’s meeting between Mohamed and Dalia just prior to her meeting with the hit man should have been recorded.

Lead detective on the surveillance equipment was Officer Carlos Reinhold, responsible for placing the surreptitious video feed in the backseat of Mohamed’s car. Throughout an eight-year career, he estimated he had placed electronics in the field probably 200 times. As to alerting Mohamed to the technology onboard, he said, “We don’t like to get too specific. We try to keep our trade secrets.” He explained a discrepancy in the time code for the CVS surveillance tape as due to the fact that the batteries are removed from the Unitel recording device after every use. On cross, Salnick seemed most interested in his interaction with the
COPS
crew at the staged crime scene, which was minimal.

Next I called Boynton Beach PD Public Information Officer Stephanie Slater. Her background was as a newspaper reporter, so her efforts to secure the department some decent press made perfect sense to me. According to her testimony, their involvement with
COPS
began in September 2008 when she contacted Bryan Collins, a producer for the syndicated series, at the behest of Chief Matthew Immler. (Immler appeared on
Nancy Grace
to discuss this case after Dalia’s arrest.)
COPS
had recently done ride-alongs with the Palm Beach County and Martin County Sheriff’s Offices, and at Slater’s invitation, they spent a week in April 2009 riding with Boynton Beach patrol officers to test the waters. When that went smoothly, Collins requested eight weeks with the BBPD beginning on August 11.
COPS
later moved their start date up a week, and on August 4, 2009, producer Jimmy Langley (nephew of series creator John Langley) and Miami-based cameraman Chris Flores showed up at the station to start prepping. As confirmed in an e-mail,
COPS
agreed not to air footage related to any case prior to its disposition in a court of law (a standard policy designed as much to shield them from liability as to ingratiate them with local police departments). Sometime during the day of August 4, Sergeant Paul Sheridan, head of the Major Cases unit, approached Slater with the brainstorm that
COPS
film the Dalia Dippolito staged crime scene the following morning, despite the
fact
COPS
focuses almost entirely on patrol officers and random events, not on detectives during an open, active investigation. All parties agreed that the actual crime in question—Solicitation to Commit First-Degree Murder—had already been committed, during Dalia’s meeting with CI Mohamed Shihadeh on August 1 when money changed hands. Since anything else was gravy, they felt there was no real harm in commemorating some superlative police work on tape. From there, things moved very fast.

PARKER: After your conversation with Sergeant Sheridan on August 4 of 2009, what if anything did you do next?

SLATER: Well, as soon as he had said it, I thought it was a great idea, and went up the chain of command to the lieutenant of the detective bureau, then to the major and then to the chief, and then we had conversations about what the parameters would be.

COPS
agreed that on the morning of the bust, after they filmed Mike being notified of what was happening, they would be cordoned behind police barricades as if they were members of the regular press, in order not to alert the suspect.

I also asked Slater why she posted the scene to YouTube.

SLATER: That was posted. A discussion was had, and we realized that it was going to be on a public street, and on a public street there is no expectation of privacy. Anyone could have filmed that video. It just so happened that the police department did, and we decided that someone else could have posted it on there, so we were going to take the proactive approach and post it on there ourselves, and explain the entire case in the process.

Immediately following Slater I called Detective Frank Ranzie to the stand. Ranzie was born and raised in Brooklyn, and the borough’s brash manner had never entirely left him, even down here in our sun-blasted paradise. He’s physically ripped (that’s him in the video telling Dalia her husband has been killed) and tightly wound, with an almost comical propensity
to speak his mind. He’s on the cusp of fifty and coming up on thirty years in law enforcement, but unlike a lot of other cops his age who see the past through a halcyon glow, he wears his slights like battle scars, and makes no secret of having outlived his era.

“I drove a cab,” he says today. “I got robbed at gunpoint, took a really bad beating within an inch of my life. Almost got stabbed by a group of guys who set me up. And there wasn’t a cop around when I needed one. Sounds cliché, I know.” When a buddy got a job as a New York City transit cop, Ranzie took the test and aced it. Very quickly, he was pipelined straight into the Police Academy and then worked as an NYPD Housing cop. Four years later, when a colleague took a job in Boynton Beach and was asked to recruit some of his friends, Ranzie came south for a two-week vacation and never left.

Ranzie was the first guy Ace Brown called when he originally fielded the call from Mohamed. He sat in on that first interview and called Sergeant Sheridan to alert him to the situation. And since Mohamed didn’t have a full name for the suspect, and therefore no way to identify the victim, Ranzie spent hours that first night driving him around Boynton Beach in the hopes he would recognize “Delilah’s” residence. He claimed it was the first time in twenty-six years someone had walked in the door to interrupt a murder. Although Ranzie believes Mohamed’s story—“he just had no other purpose in coming to us”—he also doesn’t find him without fault.

“My vibe was this,” says Ranzie. “Not only was Dalia in a relationship with this person, for some reason she believed Mike Dippolito was worth, I don’t know, a gazillion dollars and had all this stuff that she could somehow acquire. And I believe the boyfriend, the informant, somehow thought that somewhere down the road he would be the beneficiary of all this luxury when she gets rid of this guy. Initially, it was just leave the guy, get rid of the guy, have him sent back up the river. But when it got to where she was saying ‘Do you love me?’ kind of stuff—‘pull the trigger’—he’s thinking ‘Whoa, there’s limits on this. I enjoy the luxury, I enjoyed the free Range Rover, and hey, it would be nice to live in that house. But I don’t want to go to jail for murder.’ I think that was the block that hit his conscience. Despite him being an unsavory character in a lot of ways, he’s not a murderer.”

Ranzie was there the next day at the Mobil station when Mohamed met with Dalia—he was pumping gas the whole time at one of the islands—and I used him to introduce the surveillance tape into evidence and play it in court. He was also on the stakeout in the CVS parking lot the day that Dalia met with her “hit man,” doing standard surveillance as well as countersurveillance. “For all we know, she has two guys in a car following her in because she’s going to rip or kill this guy,” he says. “You have to prepare for it all.” And he planned and executed staging the crime scene, where he was the point man on interacting with the suspect. This allowed me to finally play the crime scene video for the jury, as well as a second view of Dalia’s reaction taken from Ranzie’s lapel cam, where it’s easier to see she’s not crying real tears.

On Tuesday, August 4, the day before Dalia was to be arrested, Ranzie was informed that
COPS
would be filming at the Dippolito crime scene. It is safe to say that he was less than enthusiastic about the plan.

PARKER: How did you fit the
COPS
film crew into your operational plan?

RANZIE: Well, unwillingly. I’d like to use that word. But I fit them in to just the staged crime scene portion, because we felt that at that point, as we mentioned earlier, the actual crime—the solicitation to murder—that’s already happened. I didn’t want
COPS
to be part of any of the case at all, but I don’t have that authority, and so I fit them in to act like the press and stay behind a cordoned-off area at the staged crime scene.

At the end of direct, in quick succession, I asked him whether he was trying to become a celebrity (“Absolutely not”), launch an acting career (“No”), mount a publicity stunt on behalf of the Boynton Beach Police Department (“No”), or trying to help Mike, Dalia, or Mohamed get their own reality show (all “No”). On cross, Salnick tried to score a few familiar points—getting Ranzie to admit that releasing the crime scene video could have an impact on the trial (over my objections); questioning why Mohamed wasn’t wired for audio (which would have precluded the dead air
at the Chili’s meet); digging into whether Ranzie fully explained Mohamed’s obligations as a PI (or worse, lied to him); and, mainly, successfully underscoring his reservations about the
COPS
contamination, PR onslaught, and anything else that could lay the groundwork for believing manufactured reality had suddenly gained precedence over the quotidian.

SALNICK: And the powers above you wanted this to be on
COPS
, didn’t they?

RANZIE: Yes.

SALNICK: And you certainly weren’t happy about that, were you?

RANZIE: No, I actually spoke in that meeting and said I don’t think it’s a good idea.

SALNICK: But you, I don’t want to say nobody paid attention to you, but . . .

RANZIE: You can say that.

SALNICK: Did anyone pay attention to you?

RANZIE: No.

Salnick spent extra time on the inherently theatrical nature of the crime scene, how Dalia’s reaction to the word “killed” almost seemed to jump the gun, as if she were anticipating it, and Ranzie’s prior assessment of her performance as “an Academy Award–winning act of grief.”

SALNICK: She was faking it, wasn’t she?

RANZIE: That’s my belief.

SALNICK: And the television show
COPS
is filming this.

RANZIE: Yes.

SALNICK: Through the equipment you have on.

RANZIE: The audio is from the equipment I have on, but they are filming it from the van that was depicted.