A Case of Redemption (8 page)

“I understand,” he replied calmly.

“Good. So in light of that, is there anything you want to tell me that's different from the facts you provided when Erica was in the room?”

“No. It happened exactly like I just told you with her here.”

And I believed him. Not a little bit, either. Completely and totally—the same way Nina believed Legally Dead.

N
ina and I arrived at the Wall Street heliport by six, and just like Matt Brooks had said, we were inside the Borgata less than an hour later.

There were ten or so poker tables on the main floor of the Borgata. Each was populated mainly by senior citizens who looked as if they had to borrow money to make the minimum bet. A far cry from the high rollers I imagined Brooks counted as his crowd.

“Is there a more private area for poker?” I asked a scantily clad cocktail waitress who was passing by with a tray full of drinks.

“Straight through those doors are the no-limit games,” she said without stopping.

I had expected the high-roller area to look different from where the schnooks play, but it didn't. The carpeting was the same, and the dealers were all still wearing cheesy gold vests and red bow ties. The cocktail waitresses looked older, likely a result of a system that rewarded seniority, but they were just as scantily dressed as the younger women on the main floor. Even the gamblers seemed pretty much the same: out-of-shape men wearing tracksuits, interspersed with old ladies. Casino Royale, it was not.

Amid this crowd, Matt Brooks was easy to spot. He was in the back of the room, sitting at one of the no-limit tables, attired in his trademark dark, double-breasted suit, tie, and matching pocket square. He was playing blackjack, which surprised me a bit because he'd told us to meet him at the poker tables, but he was also playing all five spots on the table, which seemed consistent with everything I'd read about him.

Even at first glance, it was obvious that Matt Brooks was the big dog in every sense of the term. It wasn't his size—even though he was seated, I could tell he was an inch or two under six feet tall—but there was something about the way he carried himself that left no doubt he was the man in charge of every interaction in which he engaged. He could fairly be described as handsome, with a swarthy complexion, strong jaw, and eyes that suggested a sharp intelligence resided behind them.

Brooks's rags-to-riches tale was something of legend. The official history on Capital Punishment's website had it that Brooks and a guy named Ronald Johnson, whom everyone referred to as Rojo, were childhood friends from West Philadelphia. Rojo was the first act that Brooks signed, and they were fifty-fifty partners in the business. Fast-forward ten years, and just as Capital Punishment was hitting the big time, Rojo was found dead in his hotel room, likely of a drug overdose, although there were conspiracy theorists online who claimed everything from a government plot to silence his music to Brooks killing him to acquire the business.

After Rojo's death, Brooks expanded Capital Punishment, signing more mainstream acts, like Roxanne, as well as diversifying into other businesses: a clothing line, video games, and more recently, movies. Capital Punishment was now something of a juggernaut, and likely to get even bigger, as an IPO was rumored to be just around the corner.

“Mr. Brooks,” I said, “I'm Dan Sorensen. This is my partner, Nina Harrington.”

Brooks lifted his eyes from his cards. He glanced fleetingly at me, and then his gaze went up and down Nina's entire body.

I had extended my hand, but he didn't take it. For a moment, I assumed it was because he didn't recognize who I was.

“We spoke earlier today,” I went on. “We're counsel for Legally Dead.”

He laughed. “Don't let the gray hair fool you, Dan. I'm not senile.
In fact, I'm thinking maybe you have a bit of Alzheimer's, because I distinctly recall telling you to call me Matt, didn't I?”

He said this with the broadest of smiles, as if he were teasing a longtime friend. He grabbed my hand with a confident grip and pumped it.

“It's great to meet you, Dan. And you, too, Nina.” Then, with a sweep of his arm, Brooks said, “Care to sit in for a few hands?”

I looked at the little plaque in the corner of the table. It read: “Minimum Bet—$1,000.”

“It's a little rich for me, I'm afraid.”

“Oneil,” Brooks said, turning to the dealer, a thirty-something man who wore a name tag that said he was from Ocho Rios, Jamaica, “deal my friend in a hand, and I'll play the other four.”

Brooks placed a single yellow chip into the small box in front of the stool on the end, which presumably was for me, because he then organized two neatly formed stacks, five yellow chips high, in each of the other four boxes. My quick math indicated that he had forty thousand dollars riding on this hand. Forty-one, if you counted the hand he was staking for me.

Oneil dealt all five hands. He was showing a six up, which gave me a little lift because, even with my limited knowledge of blackjack, I knew he'd have to hit sixteen. I was holding eighteen.

Brooks studied his cards like a general reviewing battle plans. He didn't make a commitment on any of his hands until he had seemingly decided what to do on all of them. Then, in rapid-fire succession, he said, “Split the eights and hit them both,” and as each one turned into an eighteen, he gestured with his hand, holding it flat, palm down, which must have meant he didn't want any more cards, because then he said, “Double down,” and pushed another ten grand into the box next to the two-card eleven. Oneil pulled the next card out of the shoe, which was a ten of clubs, giving Brooks a three-card twenty-one, but Brooks didn't let out even a hint of a smile. Then he repeated the hand signal to hold over his last two hands, an eighteen and a two-queen twenty.

“Sir?” Oneil said to me.

“No, I'm good,” I said.

“You need to use a hand signal, sir. If you want to decline another card, then hold your hand over them.”

I mimicked the motion I'd seen Brooks perform, glancing over to Brooks to confirm if I was doing it correctly. He paid me no heed, however, and instead seemed transfixed by Oneil's cards, as if he could change them through the sheer power of his concentration.

Oneil turned over his hole card. The jack of hearts, which gave him sixteen.

“Dealer hits,” Oneil said, and then he flipped over a deuce. “Eighteen.”

In a swift movement, Oneil clicked a stack of yellow chips against Brooks's two eighteens and my own, and then paid out on Brooks's two winning hands.

“You'd already counted that one in your pocket, didn't you?” Brooks said to me, chuckling. “But that's the thing about life, isn't it?”

“What is?”

“Nothing's ever for certain.”

“I suppose that's right,” I said.

“Mind if we take a break,” Brooks said to Oneil, without the inflection of a question. “Keep the table clear, will ya.”

“Whatever you want, Mr. Brooks,” Oneil answered.

Brooks got up and led us to another blackjack table nearby. This one was empty.

As we sat down, I looked up at the ceiling. Brooks must have been reading my mind, because he said, “Don't worry. Even though they record everything, it's video only. They won't know what we're saying. That's why you need to use hand signals when you're playing.”

“Thank you for meeting with us,” I said, “and, of course, thank you for the ride.”

“Like I said, whatever I can do to help. I really appreciate that you two are willing to take on L.D.” He shook his head. “I mean, talk
about getting killed in the press. It's like the presumption of innocence just doesn't apply if you're a black man or a rapper, and unfortunately for L.D., he's both.”

I nodded along with Brooks's comments on the racial insensitivity of our judicial system. He shook his head ruefully. “And I got to be honest with you, I feel like part of his situation is my fault, because I was the guy who told him to include ‘A-Rod' on the album. You know, if he hadn't, he might not be in this mess. Or at least it wouldn't be so bad.”

“Can I take that to mean that you believe he's innocent?”

Brooks grimaced slightly, followed by a subtle shrug. “How can anyone really know if someone harbors that kind of rage? So I can't tell you that. But what I can tell you is that I've always liked L.D., and the public doesn't really know the real man, if you catch my drift.”

I looked over at Nina to see if she understood. The blank look on her face told me that she didn't.

“I'm not sure that we do,” I said.

He let out a deep sigh, suggesting he was worried this might be a problem. But then he said nothing more, waiting for us to ask him directly.

Nina did the honors. “We've met with L.D., and he's explained his side of things. There was nothing he said that caused us to think he wasn't being candid.”

Brooks seemed startled by the sound of her voice. When he turned to her, he gave her a particularly wolfish smile, and then said, “Maybe you didn't ask the right questions.”

I looked at Nina, who didn't betray any reaction. When I met Brooks's eyes again, I didn't get the leer he'd just given Nina, but a contemptuous grin that belied his claim of liking L.D.

“Did you ask to see his scars?” Brooks asked.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“The scars from when he was shot four times and left for legally dead?”

“No, we didn't. Why?”

“Because there aren't any,” Brooks said with a satisfied smile. “The thing is, when I met the man, his name was . . .” Brooks's pupils rolled back in his head, as if he was searching for the information in his brain. “Calvin . . . Mayberry, I think? Definitely Calvin Something-or-Other. Anyway, he was this suburban kid from outside Boston. His mother was a schoolteacher. I can't remember what his father did, but they were regular middle-class folks. Now, the kid could rap, but I told him, in this business it's as much about the backstory as it is the rhymes. And that was especially true for L.D. because his raps were hard-core, about gangs, thug life. Real throwback stuff to Tupac and Biggie, which was great, but I couldn't sell Calvin from the Boston suburbs doing that. So we did a whole character creation. Calvin Something-or-Other ceased to exist, and in his place came Nelson Patterson, more famously known as Legally Dead.”

Brooks seemed far from finished, and I was content to let him talk for as long as he wanted before asking any questions, but the shock of what he was telling us was too much for Nina not to jump in. “Are you saying that everything about him is a lie?”

Brooks laughed. “I hate to break it to you, but the tooth fairy ain't real, either.”

“With all due respect,” I said, “every newspaper reporter and blogger is digging into L.D.'s past, and nobody's come up with this. Wouldn't there be people from his Boston past running to
TMZ
or the
National Enquirer
with the real story?”

“You don't know me, Dan, so you're going to have to take this on faith, but when I do something that I don't want people to find out about, then they don't find out about it. Simple as that. His parents are dead, and he told me he didn't have any family, so who's going to put it together? Besides, what possible reason would I have to lie to you? If L.D.'s real life goes public, it's not going to help my brand any.”

“Then why tell us at all?” Nina said, making it clear that she was not buying Brooks's story, despite the logic he had just laid out.

Brooks smiled at her, a patronizing gesture that I was sure was not lost on her. “Because I know L.D. won't. He thinks once it gets out that he isn't who he says he is, that he's not some guy who was shot four times in a drug deal and left for legally dead, he's finished in this business. And the thing is, that may well be true, but he's got to see the bigger picture here. He's twenty-five years old. He's got his whole life ahead of him, and there was never any guarantee that he was going to make it in this business anyway.”

I'd said this very thing to more clients than I could remember. Perhaps because the truly worst-case scenario in a criminal prosecution is beyond what most people can envision, they fixate on lesser ramifications, like losing their jobs. Those with the most to lose financially are often the worst offenders. I must have gone over this with Darrius Macy a half-dozen times, telling him that if he never got another endorsement deal again, but stayed out of jail, it would be a great result.

“We'll talk to him about that,” I said, trying to make it sound as if I had no concern L.D. would tell us the truth, despite the fact it seemed like that ship had already sailed. “Another thing we wanted to raise with you was that L.D. said he hasn't received any of his royalties from the label.”

“That's right,” Brooks said, as if it ended the matter.

“Why not? He's earned them, right?”

“Look, as I'm sure you know, we're heading toward an IPO, and Roxanne's murder has already depressed our value. Last thing we need now is to pay L.D. for bragging about killing her.”

Brooks shrugged, suggesting that this was his cross to bear, only making $5 billion rather than $10 billion. The hypocrisy that Capital Punishment was all too happy to profit off the song, so long as L.D. didn't get his share, didn't seem to matter much. It reminded me of a line from
The Godfather
—it wasn't personal, this was strictly business.

I was sure Brooks knew there was no legal basis to withhold L.D.'s royalties, but like the old saying goes, he with the gold makes the
rules, and if Brooks wasn't going to pay L.D. his royalties, then we weren't going to get paid. After the trial, L.D. could sue and, after a year or so of delays by Brooks's legal team, there'd be some type of settlement, most likely involving the payment of a fraction of what was actually owed.