Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (12 page)

And sure enough, about a month later, the media aired the “news” about my hugging Casey in jail, and rumors started flying that I was having an affair with her.

Geraldo, who’s been in the business for forty years, saw it coming from a mile away.

When the “news” hit the airwaves, I felt helpless. First of all, I’m a legal professional, and I would never allow myself to be put in a position where I had a relationship like that with a client. Not only that, but I am married to a Hispanic woman, and if the accusation had been true, Lorena Baez would have turned into Lorena Bobbitt. It was a ridiculous charge, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I told my wife about the story, and she became a little angry, but it was short-lived. In the end she knew better.

But it wasn’t fun having to tell her about the charges. Trying to prove that something isn’t true is not a fun situation at all. And then professors at the college Lorena was attending started asking her about it. In the middle of one class, a professor called her out and said, “Oh, I hear your husband’s having an affair with Casey Anthony.” It really bothered her and hurt her tremendously.

People today still bring it up. I was never concerned, because I knew it wasn’t true. But having to deal with the bullshit of it all really infuriated me.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that in this case I had to battle not only the media but also the prosecution, the cops, and the judge. There were times, as you will see, that the crush of the opposition almost became too much to bear.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the rookie lawyer everyone said I was. My background, as unconventional as it was, had given me the tools to defend Casey in this case.

Growing up in New York City and Miami, I was raised by my mother, who moved around quite a bit to find work. I have three much older sisters on my mother’s side from another marriage. I have four brothers on my father’s side from another marriage. I was the only child of my parents, who split when I was four years old.

My sisters raised me while my mother worked two or three jobs. My mother worked in a nursery and in factories. She cleaned houses, taking whatever jobs she could get. Eventually my sisters went off on their own, and it was just my mother and me. I had no strong male figure in my life and, at age fifteen, I started to become rebellious. A couple times I moved out and went to live with one of my sisters. At the age of sixteen I dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. At age seventeen I met a girl and got her pregnant. She was sixteen.

I was on the road to nowhere, but then I heard the heartbeat of my daughter Christina. She would save me and put me on the path that led me to where I am today. I know I would not be a lawyer today if it were not for the motivation of becoming a father. My sole mission in life was to one day have my daughter say to me, “Dad, I am proud of you.” That day came while I was representing Casey. Christina was getting her degree in public relations from the University of Florida when I asked her to come down and help me with all of the media requests that were coming in. It was the summer and she needed experience and what better experience could she have than a national high-profile case? One day she came over to me and said, “Dad, I am proud of you. You are standing by this girl when no one else will. I truly admire that.” That was it. I felt my life’s goal had been accomplished right then and there, and it made all that I was about to suffer worth it. It would also give me the strength to forge ahead.

I didn’t want my child to be raised in a single-parent home, so I married her mother. I then joined the U.S. Navy at seventeen. My wife and daughter came with me, first to boot camp in San Diego, then to Meridian, Mississippi, for school, and then to Norfolk, Virginia, where I was stationed. While I was in the navy I got my GED and started college at Tidewater Community College. After I got out of the navy, I was able to take advantage of the GI Bill to go to Miami Dade Community College.

We got divorced after six years of marriage, but I continued to stay in my Christina’s life. I transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee and, after two years, I graduated and moved to Miami to go to law school.

Originally I had wanted to enter federal law enforcement. My dream job was to serve in the United States Secret Service. I had studied criminology at Florida State and while I was there, I filled out my application and went through the hiring process. But at this point I was engaged to a woman who was going to law school, so I decided to see if I, too, could get in. I figured I could make a bigger difference as a lawyer than as a law enforcement officer.

I was accepted into St. Thomas University School of Law. It was very difficult because I had to work full time in order to pay my child support. Mostly I worked as a security guard or in loss prevention in stores—and it was tough because, under American Bar Association guidelines, I wasn’t supposed to work more than twenty hours a week. I can admit it now—sometimes I went over because I needed so badly to make money.

I lived in a boarding house in Miami. We had some very colorful characters renting rooms, including a single mother who worked as a prostitute, two mechanics who worked on their cars in the front yard, and another guy who I’m not quite sure what he did.

I drove a jalopy. When I parked in the law school parking lot, smoke would come out the exhaust; I would be parked next to a Mercedes or a BMW.

The first year of law school is difficult enough for a student with no other responsibilities, but I managed to make it through. That first summer I was going to do my internship at the state attorney’s office in Miami. I was excited, but that first day on the job I felt that something wasn’t quite right. I didn’t enjoy it. It was a dry, angry environment.

The next day I walked across the street to the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office and I never left. I loved it. I got to work with clients and got to be around people. The public defender’s office was about helping people, working with real people and real problems, being the light of hope for people who had no hope. I fell in love with it.

I was around great lawyers and great people while I was there. I learned so much that I didn’t want to go to law school anymore. I just wanted to be there. The second and third years of law school aren’t nearly as hard as the first, and I was able to graduate, despite spending most of my time at the public defender’s office. I was a C student, but it didn’t matter to me because all I wanted was to be in the courtroom. That was my passion. It’s what thrilled me and kept me in law school. The other classes, like contracts and torts, didn’t do anything for me, but the advocacy of a jury trial really hooked me. The O. J. Simpson case aired during the middle of my second year; I watched it every day and was fascinated by the case. Johnnie Cochran, Barry Scheck, F. Lee Bailey, Dr. Henry Lee—these guys were like rock stars to me.

The law school library had videodiscs, like records, from the Harvard Law School trial advocacy center. The discs contained video of students conducting trials. It was from those tapes that I learned about evidence objections. I was always impressed by Harvard, and I am proud to say that this past year I was invited to be a faculty member of the same program.

By the time I graduated from law school, I had ten jury trials under my belt. I could practice under a certified legal internship as long as I had a licensed attorney by my side. I was able to pick a jury, make opening statements, cross-examine witnesses, and go through the entire trial. I learned so much and have to give credit to these fine lawyers who helped develop me as a criminal defense lawyer.

I was so excited when the public defender’s office hired me. The office allowed me to start right away. Fresh out of law school, I was given one hundred and fifty cases, and that first year I tried twenty-four of them. I was in court every week. Most of the cases were minor issues like battery, domestic violence, resisting arrest, or cases where the defendants didn’t plead out.

Out of the thirty-four cases I tried (including ten while in law school), I lost three, and two of those were reversed on appeal. I had a very high success rate. The Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office has a stellar reputation for developing great lawyers, among them Roy Black, Michael Haggard, and Jack Denaro. All I ever wanted was to be the next great lawyer to come from that office.

One of the most important traits I learned, one that I carry with me to this day, is the mentality of a fearless warrior. We were taught to fear no one—not the cops, not the judge, and certainly not the prosecutor. A couple of months after I graduated from law school, I had a heated cross-examination that involved Leonel Tapanes, a Miami police officer. The next day Tapanes confronted me in the courtroom, and we nearly came to blows. He thought—as most police officers do—that I would bow to his authority, and when I didn’t, he held it against me. There we stood, nose to nose, about to get into a fistfight in the courtroom.

We both restrained ourselves, but the line had been drawn and I made it clear to him that he better not cross it. Out on the street I told him, “You may be the law, but in the courtroom your ass is mine.”

He later went to the upper brass at the public defender’s office to tell them about the incident and to complain about me. The next day I was called in to see my boss, Rory Stein, the man who hired me. I was sure I was in big trouble. He called me into his office and showed me the complaint. As I began to shrink in my chair, Rory smiled at me and said, “Now that’s the way we teach our lawyers to fight for our clients!” That was the mentality in the public defender’s office. We fought for those who couldn’t fight for themselves.

I know this may sound extreme, but this is the state of mind required for one to do defense work effectively. Imagine yourself in trouble, fighting for your life in a system that cares more about those who are rich and guilty than those who are poor and innocent. Who do you want representing you, a fighter or someone who’ll fold at the first hint of pressure?

About a year before Casey’s case went to trial, I went to trial in Miami on another murder case. I was helping Michael Walsh, a good friend of mine, by assisting him with the forensics and ran into that same cop who was now a high-ranking homicide detective. Though it was thirteen years after our confrontation, Tapanes and I recognized each other instantly. We shook hands and even hugged. That afternoon we had lunch together and laughed about our fight. Being more mature, we both could see that each of us was just doing his job, and doing it well.

Many people think that defense lawyers and police officers are natural enemies, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a good defense lawyer always makes a police officer better.

I can’t tell you how many times I have finished a cross-examination of a police officer and left the courtroom with a good friendship. I’ve built really good relationships with many police officers through my years of working in the law. I have the utmost respect for what they do. They put their lives on the line for all of us and they get paid very little to do so.

It’s those police officers who violate the law and who trample over individual rights who really get to me. Those are the officers I go after as hard as I can, and unfortunately in the Anthony case, because of the high-profile nature of the case, the police always had their guard up. And I have to say that too often the officers in this case crossed the line—or at least danced on it.

I can never fully express how valuable my time at the public defender’s office was. My training attorney was Rick DeMaria, and not a day went by that he did not teach me something. Rick sat and watched each and every one of my trials, and every time I would win a case, he would bring me back to earth with a long list of the things that I had done wrong.

He told me, “Be careful. Don’t get too high and don’t get too low. You will learn far more from your failures than your successes.” He was right. Rick was
always
right. I would remember his words of wisdom for my battles to come.

After I had passed the bar, and toward the end of my first year after graduating from law school, I went through the character and fitness part of the Florida Bar, a long, drawn-out process where they go into your background and turn over every stone.

One of the people they contacted was my ex-wife.

Unbeknownst to me, she wrote a letter and accused me of being in arrears in my child support. She wrote, “He only pays me two hundred dollars a month. He needs to be paying me more now that he’s a lawyer.” She also noted that I was driving “a fancy car.”

I went for my informal hearing, sure this was going to be no big deal. I figured the topic would be my credit, because they were asking me about my finances. I didn’t hire a lawyer to come with me—I didn’t think I needed one. Later I found out that everyone went with a lawyer—except me.

The hearing was like the Spanish Inquisition. That’s when I found out what my ex-wife had said. They wanted me to admit I hadn’t paid her, but it wasn’t true, so I didn’t.

It would have been very easy for me to have said, “I was poor. I didn’t have money. I wasn’t paying her, but I’m paying her now, and we’re working it out.” And I would have gotten my license immediately. But stupid or not, I felt the truth was more important so I said, “It’s not true. I did pay her, but I paid her in cash mostly and occasionally with money orders. We had always had a great relationship, but it wasn’t until I became a lawyer that she started wanting more money. I told her, ‘I’m not a rich lawyer. I just graduated. Give me a little time. I’m a public defender.’ And I told her, ‘I have over $100,000 in student loans. Give me a little time.’”

That’s when we started having problems. The people in charge of the hearing started thinking,
Is he lying? Because if he’s lying, he doesn’t have the character to be a lawyer.

There was more: I had defaulted on a membership to a Bally’s Total Fitness and had a car note of $300 a month for my Mazda Miata. If I had been driving a cheaper car, I could have paid off Bally’s. And while I was in law school, I had gone on a study abroad program in Europe instead of working over the summer to pay Bally’s and some other bills. And I had bounced a couple of checks, including one at a local Publix supermarket.