Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (32 page)

Dalia Dippolito waits for the jury’s verdict.

There is no change in Dalia’s demeanor as she is led from the courtroom.

When he was asked by a reporter as he was exiting the courthouse if he was satisfied with the verdict, Mike replied, using Dalia’s own infamous words, “I’m 5,000 percent satisfied.”

What I never said during the entirety of the trial, but what I fervently believe, is that Dalia is a sociopath. I truly believe she has no soul. She doesn’t care whom she hurts, and she’ll use anyone and anything to save herself. That allows her to stop at nothing to accomplish the goals she has put forth. “When I say I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it.” And Mike was the perfect victim. As a woman, it pains me to say this, but Dalia was the kind of woman who gives women a bad name. She takes the tricks and feminine wiles we all use, the flirtation and sex appeal, the stroking and massaging of the male ego, and she field-strips and armor-plates them for open warfare. The ruthlessness with which she juggled these men, ordering them into battle and sometimes certain death—it takes someone a breed apart. Some of the law-enforcement witnesses told me they thought she was flirting with them in the courtroom during their testimony or on breaks during the trial. What could she hope to gain at that point? Was it for practice? Or was she still cataloging her assets and playing the percentages? She’s poison candy—something found in a fairy tale, the province of witches or ogres or evil wizards. She’s our greatest childhood fear—a predatory adult, that dark presence waiting for us beyond the protective vale of youth.

The criminal justice system is predicated on the notion that justice must be served: that good should ultimately win out and evil must be vanquished—both as a deterrent, as Judge Colbath noted, and simply to maintain the cosmic balance. But maybe there’s another reason. Maybe jurisprudence is a permanent quest to identify the face of evil, to show it free of shadow, so that we can recognize it when we see it in the supermarket or in the tabloids or across the breakfast table. If so, then Dalia Dippolito is a pretty good candidate to be its poster child.

Dr. Stephen Alexander, a Palm Beach–based clinical and forensic psychologist, discussed Dalia’s case with me when I was trying to learn what made her tick. Many of his observations were echoed by others throughout the trial.

“Let’s assume Dalia has a sociopathic personality disorder with strong narcissistic features,” says Dr. Alexander. “The antisocial sociopath—we all recognize them: they lie, cheat, steal, and everyone wants to stay away from them. Prisons are full of these guys. Politics is full of these guys. Captains of industry are these guys. They are particularly ruthless. No particular remorse. Dalia has primary narcissism: just like a child—‘Mine! Mine!’—a temper tantrum–throwing three-year-old. Dalia never matured past that point. She did amass a wealth of experience and a sense of exquisite entitlement. She had vengeful thinking and fantastic planning. Her fragrant lies run the risk of charming people on the stand. She could have made the jury afraid of her. There are two basic categories of the above—bullies and victims—and she is not going to be the latter because of her sense of entitlement. She’s been socialized, she’s attractive, and she has learned to manipulate through her guile and access to sex. ‘Guys are going to get you anyway, so I might as well make money off it.’ There is no shame in it—strippers, or in Dalia’s case, the escort business. And it was that enterprising part of her nature that impressed Mike.”

Like shapes in a jigsaw puzzle or the symbiosis found in nature, Dalia and Mike were character types who needed each other to thrive—at least until their resources were depleted. If Dalia had no friends, only interchangeable “plug-ins,” ranked by expediency, then Mike was a necessary host for her to feed on. So for her to function, his dominant character profile was as important as hers—what Dr. Alexander terms “a rare form of gullibility.”

“He’s a hustler,” says Alexander. “There was an affinity for Dalia, in that she was just like him—only if he’s a five, she’s a ten-point-ten. He thought he was pretty good at spotting people, being the huckster, the pitchman—you know, you can’t con a con man. Well, yeah you can; all you need is a better con man. He had what I call ‘the strip club mentality’: they always want to go to the strip bar in the nice Mercedes, rain money, and be the big shot. Being able to get a limo to take us down to the Marlins-Phillies game. The boring he can tolerate for a little while, but he needs a little flash, a little panache.
The Big Book of AA
says, ‘Children of chaos, we have defiantly played with every brand of fire.’ Here’s a guy who is always pulled to things
that are injurious to him. So he’s attracted to women that are flashy as well. He’s used to meeting girls who are looking for a guy who’s basically a vibrator with a wallet, or their umbilical cord is looking for a place to plug in. He understands that and is perfectly capable of dealing with that type of situation. But he was completely defenseless against Dalia Dippolito because he doesn’t have the capacity to perform a fully accurate self-appraisal. He thinks he’s a little smarter, shrewder, more capable than he actually is, and those are the people that Dalia can spot in a bar and control him like you cannot imagine.

“She is impervious to shame and guilt, and prone to rage and retribution. Dalia knows that everyone works on stereotypes. She studied other women, and she thought one thing about other people:
idiots
. Dalia’s life was a perfection of her art of manipulation and deception, so by the time she met Mike, she was skilled—a master. There is no core to Dalia, just layers. She transitioned from being the unpleasant emotional three-year-old to being extraordinarily dangerous. When she can make people trust her, she can get everything from them—and the freedom to go elsewhere for more. She knows how to lead him on and then be coy enough. Is she letting him in on her little secrets? No, she’s reeling his ass in like a bass. About taking his townhouse, she thinks, ‘I’m your wife—I’ll take from you what can otherwise be attached for restitution.’ Mike wants to do the right thing, but not at extreme sacrifice to himself. He has that all-in personality. He’s given up the wife, broken the vow of loyalty, and Dalia is asking him to go all in. She is seductive, angry, petulant . . . and ‘
pregnant!
’ And he wants to be a white-picket-fence guy now, so she will exploit that desire with her lies.

“Dalia was masterful on that videotape [of her interrogation]: she lies, and then lies some more. If you’re in trouble, stop the conversation, redirect and deflect. You never stop talking. The greatest defense you have is the smoke screen. This is an art that Dalia has practiced and mastered her entire life. From men, she steals integrity, honor, and a sense of decency—every time. She’s never too tired to have uproarious sex. She is an absolute animal in bed. She’s just playing roles. To Dalia, objects and people are the exact same thing. Whatever she gives you, she is always getting far more. Mike gets depleted. When that occurs, she ceases to be adoring. She becomes
critical and hateful. Eventually she hates him; she has no use for him. She despises him now. He’s run out of gas and she must destroy him. This is the narcissistic rage of a parasite: incapable of generating anything from themselves, they are now capable of doing anything because you have failed to supply their needs. And they will continue to wreak a path of destruction of this type and intensity. Dalia is incurable. She has no moral compass.”

“She can’t admit that she’s guilty,” says Mike today. “In her mind, she’s still not guilty.”

Mike still has prospective groupies who recognize him at Starbucks. He has “8-5-09” tattooed underneath his bicep, as a memento mori to remind him of his journey on the road of excess—and that point at which, if he’d traveled any further, he couldn’t have realistically made it back. He’s had about as near a near-death experience as one could have and still discuss it calmly. He remains fairly even-keeled about the sentence Dalia drew, even if the friends who have made their way back to him in the new post-Dalia part of his life are far less forgiving.

“I’m not violent,” he says. “If we had to go in shotguns blazing, I’m no good. I don’t think I could do it. People always say, ‘Why didn’t you kill your wife?’ If I was my friends, I would have killed that bitch, but I’m not them. I’m not that person.”

He recalls the last time he spoke to her: at their final divorce proceedings a few months after the trial, which was supposed to be a pro forma proceeding but quickly devolved into another walk of shame, public spectacle, and press field day.

“They didn’t tell me that she was going to be there—which was another mistake, because they all assume I’m cool as a cucumber,” he says. “How do they know I’m not going to snap out at the divorce hearing? And they’re all there chuckling and giggling like it was funny. I should have said something to the judge. What part of this is funny? I have to stand next to this broad. But when I was walking out, I looked at her and said, ‘Good luck.’ And she was like an airhead, she goes [in a sing-songy voice], ‘Oh, you, too!’ I was thinking, ‘What the fuck did they do to this girl, because she is not in reality right now.’ I was saying fuck you to her without really saying it: Good
luck to you, good luck in prison. And she was all happy and giggly.” (As of October 2011, Mike and Dalia are officially divorced.)

He remembers the moment, many months into their marriage, when he was sitting there looking at her, listening to her run her incessant game, and it suddenly became clear to him: I can see you now. You’re not a smart businesswoman. You don’t finish anything you start. You’re just full of nonsense. She could not have invented a more perfect fall guy. And yet, when he allows his mind to roam back over their ten months together, that completely derailed any momentum of the forty years leading up to them, he still can’t help but think about the sex.

“Dalia, right at the end—I’d be in my office and she’d come in and say, ‘You want a blow job?’ I’d be like, ‘No . . .’ Looking back Mike recalls in the last couple of weeks, near the end, she was offering him new and kinky sexual experiences that she had previously forbidden. “Toward the end, when I called her out a few times, it was the whole smoke-and-mirrors thing. She’d say, ‘You don’t even want to have sex with me anymore?’ and I’d be, ‘No, I’m good.’ I got bigger things than that. I don’t need to fuck you right now. You
already
fucked me. But still . . . I hate to say it, but I’d go another round out of principle.”

He suggests, only half-jokingly, that they do a reality show together.

“
Me and Dalia: The Reconciliation
. . . You put a little money in front of her, she’d do it,” he says. She’s been sentenced to twenty years in a spotlight trial. She has her own Facebook page. The Son of Sam laws dictate she can’t directly profit off the case, only her notoriety, and she has already announced plans to write a cookbook. Except very quickly, he imagines, they would come up against the same dramatic deficit that scuttles most outsiders’ forays into the easy money of show business, including even the imaginary one in Dalia’s defense team’s dreamworld.

“What would they do?” he asks. “Follow us to the mall? Follow us to Bal Harbour? What’s that going to be about? . . . She wanted to be on TV doing something. But she doesn’t understand—it would have been different if she was really selling real estate and had something going on. The reality show could have been me doing my thing and her running the whores around.
What would it be otherwise? Her watching me work? There’s no premise. There’s no crazy kid. There’s nothing there.”

Once during the period leading up to the trial, when we were e-mailing about some court documents, Mike wrote to me: “Know what’s funny? I could have landed with any girl in the world and had a decent future with them, and I landed with one who has no appreciation for anything or anyone in the world. I told my mom I won the reverse lottery.” In retrospect, for the money he spent, he could have gotten a new escort every night since and still come out ahead.

“Look, if she was real, it would have been perfect,” he says. “But she wasn’t real. My therapist spoke to me about ‘duality’: I know what I want to think, but you also have to look at what the reality is. When it first happened and I was alone at my house for the first couple of weeks, I’m expecting to see her come down the steps and walk around the corner. This happened so fast that I didn’t have time to process it. It was just so . . . different. It’s hard to explain. I went from having, I thought, a really exciting, fast future to almost being broke now, divorced, and by myself. With a snap of a finger, I find myself in the complete opposite world from where I thought I was heading. So in the beginning, my normal reaction was to look around and think, ‘Where’s she at?’ And then I’d go, ‘Oh, that’s right. She tried to kill me. She’s not here.’ ”

B
ut, of course, that wasn’t the end of it.

Because, as we’ve seen, there was still room under the bus for more bodies.

On July 13, 2011, three weeks after sentencing, Salnick filed a notice of appeal, and on September 13, 2011, Dalia was released on a $500,000 bond and house arrest, pending appeal. In August 2012, Dalia discharged Michael Salnick as her attorney.

On September 24, 2011,
COPS
finally aired their long-awaited Dalia Dippolito episode, titled “Smooth Criminal,” as the third episode of their twenty-fourth season. To commemorate the event, Sergeant Ranzie appeared as a guest on a live Internet broadcast called “Boynton Beach Police Live Chat” with Public Information Officer Stephanie Slater, in which she noted from the Internet chatter, “Lots of you are saying this was your favorite
COPS
episode ever.” In answer to the question, “What’s the most exciting part of your career?” Ranzie gave the following answer: “I don’t know, but I’ve got to say, this has got to be on the top of the list, right here. Being part of this case was awesome, and being part of the
COPS
TV show was unbelievable. So to finish out the end of my career like this, I’m ecstatic.” Those familiar with his testimony in the Dippolito trial, particularly his honest opinions on actions taken by the Boynton Beach Police Department to promote the case, may have had reason to doubt his enthusiasm.

A year later, on October 1, 2012, an article in the
Palm Beach Post
reported that Sergeant Frank Ranzie, who had set up the Dalia Dippolito fake crime scene, informed her of her husband’s fake death, and was there to catch her when she fake-collapsed into his arms, was reported to be under investigation for “images that might be child pornography,” which were discovered on his department-issued laptop computer. According to the
article, during a routine service check, he told the police computer tech he thought his teenage son might have downloaded porn onto the hard drive. The tech in turn informed department higher-ups, triggering an automatic investigation. As the attendant media commotion once again played out in the public sphere, it was quickly determined that it wasn’t “kiddie porn” (a staple of the early headlines), just normal garden-variety porn. Once Internal Affairs determined there was no criminal activity, it became a departmental matter due to the computer being official police property. Ranzie was not so lucky in clearing his name of the inaccurate kiddie-porn allegations: he was removed as a coach from his son’s soccer team, restricted from visiting his son’s school, and called a pedophile, child molester, child pornographer, and good candidate for lynching on the Internet.

On October 29, 2012, citing the
Palm Beach Post
article, Dalia filed a handwritten, notarized affidavit stating that she was “shocked” by these revelations and a number of others that had been dredged up by zealous reporters from Ranzie’s colorful career: a brief 2003 suspension when he visited a strip club while on duty, a second suspension after he counseled two undercover female officers posing as prostitutes to have a couple of drinks to steady their nerves, and a 2001 accusation of sexually molesting a teenage girl and witness tampering—charges that were dropped when prosecutors determined the girl was lying, and the case was expunged from the official record. The fact that Michael Salnick had represented Sergeant Ranzie in the 2001 incident that had been brought up in light of the new allegation compelled Dalia to report these allegations to the court.

“Right away,” she writes in a breathless prose, “I got in contact with my attorney because I couldn’t believe that Mr. Salnick had represented Sgt. Frank Ranzie prior to taking my case and did not inform me or the Court . . . I never would have let Michael Salnick represent me if I had known he had previously represented Sgt. Ranzie because of the conflict of interest.”

Salnick had dutifully informed me within days of representing Dalia of his involvement in the Ranzie matter of a decade prior, and he maintains that he informed his client soon after her arrest, before signing on as her attorney. A memo dated August 27, 2009, from Salnick’s file says that Dalia understood that any arrests or accusations from Ranzie’s past would not be
admissible in court, and that she had no issue with it and still wished him to represent her. The memo also states that Salnick told Sergeant Ranzie the same thing, and that he would share nothing with Dalia that was covered by attorney-client privilege. Prior to taking Ranzie’s deposition, the three of us discussed the issue once again so that there could be no appearance of impropriety. It makes no sense that Salnick would openly and candidly discuss with me his prior representation of Sergeant Ranzie, yet fail to notify his client.

In November 2012, Julian Santana, the ex-boyfriend and combat veteran who wrote a letter to the court claiming Dalia had nursed him back to health after being wounded in battle—
Officer
Julian Santana, it turns out—was dismissed from the West Palm Beach Police Department. Among his investigations he was found to have been visiting Dalia, a convicted felon, while she was in custody in the Palm Beach County Jail. An arbitrator ruled against his reinstatement on September 4, 2013.

On January 16, 2013, Dalia’s new attorneys filed a Motion for Stay to suspend the appellate proceedings and to relinquish jurisdiction to the trial court. Concurrent with this, they filed a Renewed Motion for New Trial in which they claimed that Salnick’s refusal to inform his client of his previous representation of Sergeant Ranzie—and failure to secure a written waiver from her regarding this conflict—violated her Sixth Amendment right to counsel unencumbered by conflict of interest, which they held out as tantamount to “fraud on the court.” Their reasoning is that any such allegations concerning Ranzie (which were inadmissible, as the Salnick memo patiently explains) would certainly damage his credibility on the witness stand, thus increasing the defendant’s advantage. The only reason Mr. Salnick would not have done so, they suggested, was out of misplaced loyalty and residual obligation to his former client, to the detriment of Dalia Dippolito.

“Any capable defense attorney would have tried to introduce evidence of Sergeant Ranzie’s misconduct by whatever creative theory he or she might muster,” their motion reads. The Stay and Motion to Relinquish Jurisdiction was denied by the Fourth District Court of Appeal.

On April 12, 2013, Dalia’s attorneys finally filed an appeal on Dalia’s behalf, citing four issues that Salnick had flagged earlier: the court’s refusal
to conduct individual, sequestered voir dire, resulting in a tainted jury; the perpetuation of Mohamed’s testimony, even though he was secretly back in the country; evidence of prior bad acts, inextricably intertwined, which should not have appeared at trial; and improper comments by the State, particularly in closing arguments.

Sergeant Ranzie was fired by the Boynton Beach Police Department on May 15, 2013, based on the allegations of having accessed Internet pornography on his department-issued laptop computer. (There was never any proof in the internal affairs investigation that Ranzie was the one behind his computer and responsible for the pornographic images that were accessed on his computer or that they occurred while he was on duty.) Ranzie is currently fighting to get his job back with the help of the Police Benevolent Association.

Before he was fired, Ranzie had this to say about Salnick and this latest appellate strategy:

I understand that it’s a dog-and-pony show for these lawyers to try and suggest that, because I had a past relationship with Mike Salnick, that I would somehow work
with
him. But I wouldn’t try to help his clients—at all. I’m trying to put them in jail. I’m working with the prosecution. And I did nothing or said nothing to allude to giving her an out on anything, because she didn’t have an out. She was guilty. We had her dead to rights. So I think it’s a bunch of nonsense, these type of appeals processes. Knock yourself out.

On July 31, 2011, I ended my thirteen-year career as a prosecutor at the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office. I opened my own law practice on September 1, 2011, in West Palm Beach, representing individuals who have been accused of a crime, and passionately advocating for the rights of victims of crime. I currently teach on behalf of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence to law enforcement officers in the State of Florida on domestic violence investigations. Ironically, my first client was referred to me by Michael Salnick.

Mike Dippolito is trying to move on with his life. He is still on probation until the year 2032. His divorce was finalized in October 2011; he got his house back, but not his money. I currently represent him, and we are working toward trying to get the victims in his original case paid their restitution in full, and hopefully to lessen the length of his probation. He still has days where he can’t believe the extent to which his life has been turned upside down.

Mohamed moved to Ohio for a while and then returned to the Middle East, where he currently resides. Michael Stanley probably dodged a bullet, and seems to be lying low.

And Dalia is still out there, free from institutional incarceration—plotting her next move, playing the percentages, awaiting appeal. Alone in the darkness. Eyes wide open. Missing nothing.

This case and its repercussions will no doubt continue for some time.