Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (4 page)

As Mike stood there at the elevator banks contemplating his next move, the lawyer came running out of his office, screaming excitedly. He showed Mike the check. Everything about it was exactly the same as the check they had just been wrangling over, except now it was for $191.

“I told you there was something wrong with this girl,” Entin said.

Mike dialed Dalia, who answered on the first ring. She was down at the car, along with her friend Kerrian Brown and her husband, the enigmatic Erik Tal. Late thirties, skinny, Israeli, with a marked receding hairline and hooded eyes that missed nothing, Erik watched Mike like a cobra to determine which way things were going to go. Mike ignored him, demanding his money back from Dalia, who surrendered it willingly. He told her to get in the car. On the long drive home, she insisted Erik had switched checks on them. All he could think of was, who leaves a $191,000 check out in the open, and why wasn’t it in her purse?

Back at home, between her intermittent crying jags, Dalia called Erik, who got on the phone with Mike. The first thing he said was, “I told her to tell you what happened.” Erik’s story—the one he had gotten from Dalia— was that she had lost the money in a dubious wire-transfer fraud. Whatever the mechanics of it, the money was gone, and she was terrified it would hasten the end of their marriage. So at his wife’s behest, and against his better judgment, Erik had agreed to loan her the money for Mike’s restitution, as a favor, to be repaid out of the money Dalia was expecting on her real estate closings. He was still willing to go forward with that loan. Only now, on account of the aggravation, it was no longer a favor. In exchange for ten points on the entire $191,000 ($19,000), Erik would loan Mike the $50,000 he still needed to pay off his restitution, once he had exhausted all the money he had on hand. (This represented approximately 23 points on his actual loan of $50,000.) At this point, Mike just wanted it over with and agreed to meet Erik the next day at his bank—the Regions Bank in the same building as Entin’s office in Fort Lauderdale.

The following day—ominously enough, April 1—Mike met with Erik and turned over the $91,000 he had given to and immediately taken back from Dalia, a cashier’s check in the amount of $30,000, and an additional $20,000 in cash. Erik in turn had his bank issue a second cashier’s check
in the amount of $191,000 made out to Michael Entin. Then, with Dalia in tow, he went upstairs to take the new check to Michael Entin. Entin asked Dalia to step outside, refusing to speak in front of her. Once they were alone, Entin presented Mike with signed documents that a lawyer had just faxed over on behalf of Erik—whom Mike had just left downstairs—to execute a lien on Mike’s house as security on the loan. (Mike had already investigated taking equity out of his house for the restitution, but his credit was so bad he couldn’t even get money out of a home he owned outright.) Entin stated he wasn’t a real estate attorney and had no experience with property law—especially where a $250,000 townhouse was meant to secure a $50,000 mortgage—and he wanted no part of it. He referred Mike to another attorney who could handle the transaction. Mike literally begged him to reconsider, by now blinded to everything but the few precious millimeters separating him from his freedom, but to no avail. Entin was washing his hands of this entire circus.

By now, Mike was out roughly $240,000—his hundred that first went to Dalia, the ninety he put in at the lawyer’s office, and the fifty he came up with to get Erik to loan him the rest—not to mention his attorney’s fees. He was tapped. Unlike his attorney, Mike didn’t have the luxury of washing his hands of this deal. This was his life. He called the new lawyer, Melissa Donoho, and hired her sight unseen, telling her he would meet her when he brought the check. And since he now had a cashier’s check made out to someone who refused to take it, he called Erik, who suggested they meet there at the Regions Bank the following day and get a new check issued under the appropriate name.

But first, at seven forty-five the next morning, Mike went out to walk the dogs as he usually did, only to arrive home to discover two Boynton Beach police officers on his front porch. They said they’d had complaints of shouting and loud noises coming from his townhouse. (Mike can’t remember, but he thinks he and Dalia may have argued about the money, and the police report by an Officer Naulty says they admitted as much.) Questioned separately from Dalia, Mike soon learned more details: someone had called the police anonymously and reported screaming and yelling coming from the apartment; it had been going on since the previous evening. The male
tenant, a suspected drug dealer, had at one point dragged a female, wearing only a bathrobe, back inside by her hair. There was currently banging coming from inside the apartment, and they feared for the occupants’ safety. Mike was petrified, since an arrest for domestic battery would automatically return him to prison. But Dalia adamantly denied all of the above, even when she was separated from Mike and encouraged by the police.

Still visibly rattled, Mike met that afternoon with Erik Tal again at his bank. There Erik explained to Mike that the teller informed him that there had been too much suspicious activity on the account involving six-figure amounts, and they were freezing his account. They tried a second account at Washington Mutual and Erik claims he was told that account had been seized for suspected fraudulent activity also. Erik told Mike to call him in a couple of days and they’d get the whole thing resolved, even if he had to hire a lawyer to figure it out. Mike called Erik later, but received no response and he never saw him again.

This, in essence, is a confidence scheme known as the Spanish Prisoner. In its original form, a Spanish nobleman is imprisoned in a castle, unable to access his sizable fortune. Funds are needed to raise a private army and rescind the ways of unrighteousness. The speaker, his private emissary, asks for a contribution to this cause, upon the resolution of which his listener will be rewarded handsomely. There are invariably further complications, and further funds are required. Often, the nobleman’s daughter, a dark-skinned beauty, encourages the mark with her private favors as a rarefied form of collateral. The con ends when the mark’s money or his patience is exhausted.

Mike wanted to believe Dalia. She was his wife, and for the longest time, he thought that earned her the benefit of the doubt. Virtually everyone he knew, from the friends he no longer saw to the lawyer who was paid to advise him, told him she was bad news, a human tornado that had picked his backyard to touch down in. Whatever this was, whatever she was doing, eventually there would be no place to go with it. All it would take on his part was the patience of Job. It was like waiting for a fever to break.

But then, incredibly, back at home an even bigger bombshell was waiting for him.

Dalia told him she was pregnant.

She had waited to tell him until she was sure, but she was a month along. Any thoughts he had entertained about selling the house and paying off his restitution would have to wait—as would any dark desires he might have harbored about leaving her. Now every moment was spent in preparation for their burgeoning family. She read baby books constantly, and tried to get him to sit and read them with her. She constantly debated possible baby names. She had regular doctor’s appointments, some of which he was scheduled to attend with her, except her doctor always seemed to reschedule at the last minute. She started taking special vitamins. Two weekends in a row, they made plans to visit Home Depot and buy supplies to paint a special mural she had designed for the baby’s room. Once he came into the living room to find her crying and cutting up her old clothes with a pair of scissors, lamenting how fat she was becoming. It was all they talked about anymore.

They also started seeing a marriage counselor—one actually named Dr. Happy—to work through their trust issues relating to the disappearance of the money, and to put that all behind them. He tried to tell her that before she ever came along, his life was a flat line, a calm and casual existence. There was no high drama, no unexpected police interrogations, no sudden and emphatic reversals of fortune. He also had been through rehab enough times that he knew how therapy worked. They couldn’t “move past” the money issue because he needed that money back. Mike even went as far as to seek counsel from Dalia’s mother—about the missing money, the weird coincidences, the pregnancy—but all her mother wanted to talk about was getting Dalia a nanny after the baby came.

At the beginning of May, Dalia tells Mike she received a phone call from Detective Hurley at the Boynton Beach Police Department, who claimed that her husband was in some kind of danger. Although the number he was calling from was that of the police station, when Mike called it back he was told there was not a Detective Hurley with the force. Then on May 27, on a morning when Dalia went to the gym with Mike (which she rarely did), they returned to the car to find a note on the windshield. It was addressed to Mike, unsigned, and it read:

Bring $40,000 9:30 AM Back To This Space and Put it under the car Behind you.

Do not Tell Anyone, Especially Your Wife. I Will Tell You all That Has Happen [sic] To You. Is happening to you and what will Happen on Friday.

Tell No One-Come Alone. Someone who will help you.

The note included a phone number with a 305 Miami area code. Dalia called the police, who came and filed a report. Mike was so shaken he couldn’t write up an official statement of what happened, so Dalia did it for him. After the police officer left, she dialed the number on the note and spoke with a woman who she told Mike threatened to kill them both if they didn’t come up with the money. Dalia and Mike were curious and they even went to the designated drop together at 9:30 a.m., but no one showed up. Later, Dalia seemed so shaken up that they briefly entertained the idea of getting an attack dog.

Since they had been together in the gym when the note was placed on their car, they began racking their brains over who might be behind this increasingly bizarre series of incidents. As a condition of his 2003 probation, Mike had agreed to cooperate and testify against the others that he was arrested with. Although he hadn’t implicated anyone directly, some of the companies he’d worked for had pretty obvious ties to organized crime. These were the sorts of people who could easily see a broad, random threat as a low-premium insurance policy.

But even this seemed far-fetched. For a guy who had been around institutional crime, amassed multiple drug habits, and served two years in state prison, he really didn’t have any enemies that he knew of. At one point, Dalia even suggested it might be his ex-wife Maria, still bitter about the divorce and having been replaced by another woman.

When Mike called and asked her, she said, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

The worst part was the paranoia. He searched the house when he got home, searched the car before he went out, and searched his gym bag when he left the gym. It was making him a nervous wreck.

On July 22, Mike had liposuction on his back and was bedridden for much of the next two weeks, in constant pain. He also had what he believed was food poisoning, and was violently ill for much of that time. The day of the lipo, Dalia informed Mike that she had a friend in Miami who was a judge, and he had recommended a lawyer who could help Mike get something called Administrative Probation, whereby he could manage all compliance issues by mail, leaving him free to travel or relocate at will. Moreover, probation would terminate altogether once he had completed full restitution to his victims. She had gone out of pocket for the retainer, and the lawyer would be calling him soon. Mike was skeptical, but figured what did he have to lose? Maybe she was trying to make amends.

The next day, the attorney, Richard, called from a Miami number and relayed a more detailed version of the information Dalia had given. He instructed Mike to write a letter to the judge explaining why he was requesting administrative probation, and to meet him outside the Miami courthouse the following day. He would be tied up in court, but would send his paralegal out to collect the copy of the letter from Mike. Dalia volunteered to write the letter for Mike, and she drove them down to Miami, where they met the paralegal on the courthouse steps and gave him the letter for the judge. Several days later, Richard called again from the courthouse (Dalia insisted they check the number) to say that everything was going according to plan. In spite of himself, Mike was starting to get psyched again. Here was his freedom, so close yet again. On the 30th, Richard called again. This time there was good news and bad news: things were proceeding smoothly, but Mike’s house presented a huge red flag for purposes of restitution. Unless he wanted them to seize it automatically, he needed to temporarily get it out of his name. When Mike told Dalia what the lawyer had said, she made an appointment to arrange for transfer of title from Mike’s name to her name. The next day, July 31, they drove to Independence Title in Delray Beach, where they had done previous business.

The lawyer, Todd Surber, charged them a hundred dollars to swap out the names, and asked them in passing, “Why are you doing this? You’re still married.”

When Mike was vague in his answer—“You know, business”—Surber thought perhaps they hadn’t understood the question. He explained that in the state of Florida, all marital assets are jointly owned. It doesn’t matter whose name you put on the title; ownership doesn’t change. In so many words, he told them the only way Dalia could do anything with the house outright was if Mike was dead.

On the morning of August 5, a Wednesday, Dalia announced that she was going to the gym. In the ten months he had known her, this was the first time he could remember her going to work out alone, but it was all he could do just to get out of bed, and he envied her. The gym was the one ritual that could clear his head, and locked up here in the house, he felt physically and spiritually ill. On her way out, she wouldn’t stop chattering. Maybe she’d pick them up some Starbucks on the way home. He didn’t care what she did, as long as he could get some rest.