Golden (43 page)

“No, sir,” Levine said flatly, finally offering that he was confused by what Duffy had meant by “adult life.”

Duffy pressed by asking about Levine's first crimes, and Levine said he thought he was in his early thirties when he had started. But that seemed to be a reference to the activity in the case. What about drugs? Duffy asked whether Levine thought using illegal drugs was a crime, and after Levine agreed, he agreed with the lawyer that he had, in fact, been a criminal his entire adult life. It had seemed like a labored point, but Duffy wanted the jury to have an absolutely clear view of the kind of person who was accusing his client. It wasn't going to take much to make Levine look like a scattered man with a sometimes limited grasp of what was going on around him.

Levine had spent months preparing to testify, meeting with prosecutors dozens of times, and he was having trouble telling Duffy which years the tapes even covered. After first answering that the tapes were from early 2004, Levine agreed they actually started in late 2002. And he agreed there had been some that the jury didn't hear, including one when Levine had been caught on the phone asking a man Levine did drugs with whether the man had bought some.

“And he was one of the drug buddies that would go to these hotel rooms, where you'd have these drug binges, is that right?” Duffy asked.

“Yes, sir,” Levine answered. The narcotics had come up again, but Levine disagreed that his years of using could have had any kind of adverse impact on his ability to remember things. The two men continued their back and forth discussion for the jury, with each speaking with the kind of forced cordiality that made it clear they didn't much care for each other. Almost every answer about Levine's past was answered by Levine with a passive-aggressive bent. Even seemingly straightforward questions from Duffy were met with veiled and less-veiled sarcasm from the witness stand. Duffy asked, for example, what Levine thought a bagman was, using the Chicago term for someone who carries cash bribes between two parties or otherwise acts as a go-between passing money from an illegal deal.

“My definition of a bagman is a homeless person,” Levine said. “But that is not what you are referring to, and therefore, sir, I'm perfectly willing to use your definition.”

Levine finally relented that a total of three people had acted as bagmen for him, including his partner Dr. Weinstein. But Duffy quickly pointed out that Levine had forgotten to list a fourth: Vrdolyak, who was the one who collected money on a fixed deal for the sale of the Scholl building.

“You forgot, is that right?” Duffy asked.

“Yes, sir,” Levine said again.

“Even though you don't have a memory problem?”

Duffy then listed all of the people he knew Levine had been involved in crimes with, much of it public corruption. Tannenbaum and Loren were among them. They had been a part of crimes that had been committed years earlier, with Duffy's point being that Levine hadn't needed Rezko's help to pull them off. Levine hadn't needed Rezko to learn how to take a bribe, pay one, get a kickback, extort someone, or lie, he agreed. Rezko hadn't been needed to teach Levine how to be a corrupt board member or to be a conman. The capable Levine had done all of that on his own. And through much of it, Levine had been a serious substance abuser. Cocaine. Crystal meth. LSD. Special K. Quaaludes. Had Duffy forgotten any?

“I believe you missed ketamine,” Levine said. And just like that, Duffy had him again. Special K is ketamine, right? Levine reluctantly agreed, realizing his mistake. Duffy asked whether Levine had just forgotten the drug's street name, and Levine said he apparently had.

“Does Special K affect your memory?” Duffy asked.

“It's possible,” Levine answered, as spectators in the courtroom tried to suppress a few chuckles. The odd Levine was proving to be a fairly easy witness for the smart Duffy to chop away at. Many lawyer-witness exchanges— even in heated criminal trials—can be fairly predictable. Most of the time, both the lawyer and the witness have a pretty good idea of what's going to be covered. The witness has been prepared by whichever side calls them, and both the defense and the prosecution know all of the essential facts. Rarely does the questioning look like what happens on your average TV courtroom drama, where every witness gets crossed up in some unscripted moment that scores significant points for one side or the other. But that's what was happening to Levine, over and over again. Every few minutes he would stumble over something basic. It was Duffy's goal to make him seem incredibly conniving with a healthy dose of space cadet, and the message was getting across. Even after being tagged with the Special K flub, Levine continued to dig in his heels and open himself up. He disagreed that there would be a “smorgasbord” of drugs at his hotel parties, leaving Duffy to rattle off the long list of substances that would be on the table in his rented rooms.

Levine also testified that he did not recall ever having one of his drug binges on a Saturday. That's because he wanted to be home on the weekends to deceive his family into thinking everything was OK with him. Once again, Levine was playing into Duffy's hands. The lawyer had a copy of a credit card receipt of Levine's showing a charge at the Purple Hotel on Saturday, November 2, 2002. That was the very day Levine had told the jury he first met Rezko at the dinner party at Massuda's home. Duffy was insinuating that not only was Levine again either lying to the jury or forgetting something, it was possible he was drug addled that evening after spending the day using and didn't have clear recall of the events at the dinner. Levine said he had no memory of a drug binge earlier that day.

“Well, you would agree with me, Mr. Levine, just based upon the first fifteen minutes of my cross-examination, that your memory fails you at times, doesn't it?” Duffy said.

Duffy then turned to 2004 and specifically to the supposed meeting Rezko and Levine had in Chicago on April 14 at the Standard Club. Levine had talked about explaining a number of insider deals to his new political patron, including taking money in the form of bogus finder's fees from firms that got TRS investment capital. Levine agreed with Duffy that he had been the one to set those up, not Rezko, and that none of those ideas had been
consummated with anyone getting any illicit funds. That was because the FBI had come to his home a little more than a month later, Levine agreed. If not for the agents, Levine could have pulled the deals off with or without Rezko. In fact, Duffy said, the only thing Levine needed Rezko for was to try to dodge a long prison term. Levine was getting a sentence of five and a half years and agreed that probably wouldn't be happening without Levine bringing forward information that would put someone like Rezko on the hook. The government was building a case that led to Rezko and beyond, to the man who was really responsible for his power. That was Rod Blagojevich, and everyone knew it. Duffy wanted to plant the thought in jurors' minds that Levine, the druggie weasel, would do anything to try to help himself. That included constructing a case against Rezko, the government target. It was Levine who sat before the jury as a convicted felon.

Levine said he was confident the jury knew he was a felon, whether someone had told them or he had read them information from his plea agreement. Again, Duffy saw an opening. He asked whether Levine remembered looking at his plea agreement while he was on the stand, and Levine said he was sure he had. Well, that would mean the plea agreement was in a large cart of government exhibits in the courtroom. Levine agreed that it should be there, so Duffy told the judge he wanted to ask Niewoehner to retrieve it for him.

“Your honor, we'll stipulate that there is no such exhibit,” answered Niewoehner, who knew the agreement was not a trial exhibit and that Levine hadn't looked at it during his testimony. The prosecutor had a look on his face that suggested he might want to jump off a tall building—or, preferably, to shove Levine off one.

Levine hadn't agreed at first to cooperate with the government after the FBI dropped in on him just as some of his corrupt schemes were about to bloom. Like any true cunning conman, he had tried to keep his cool at first. He had taken a step back and tried to get a handle on what his position was and what his possible options could be. He was quickly recorded by agents calling Weinstein after the visit and telling him that the government was interested in a “big fish”—and that was Rezko. Duffy tried to point out that it was only after prosecutors found and interviewed one of his “drug buddies” that Levine finally decided to be a flipper. In addition to that, he had
the realization that if he were charged with everything the government had on him, he would most likely spend the rest of his days in prison and then die there by himself. Levine must have been imagining a world that would start with the embarrassing exposure of his secret life and end with solitary death behind bars.

What would most people say to avoid such a fate? Maybe the answer was just about anything, or at least exactly what the prosecutors wanted him to say. That was Duffy's aim anyway, to embed that idea in the minds of the jury. At best, Levine was a drug-influenced serial liar and crook who spent most of his time deciding how to fleece people. At worst, he was all of those things while now being cornered and desperate. You couldn't trust him before, and you definitely couldn't trust him now.

And even in the face of that kind of pressure, Levine still hadn't been completely honest with prosecutors. At first he had failed to disclose his dealings with Vrdolyak. He hadn't reported the kickback he was due from the Smithfield Properties sale, maybe because he was holding out hope that he could somehow still receive it. Levine still had half of a $1.5 million bribe out there uncollected, and true to his nature, he thought he could outsmart the US attorney's office even that late in the game. It was a foolish last-ditch effort to keep Vrdolyak out of trouble, a friend who was holding $750,000 for him. The government was aware of it anyway, and Levine's first substantial interview with prosecutors had stopped after it became clear Levine was holding back.

But under lengthy cross-examination by Duffy, Levine tried to be steadfast about what he thought was happening to him, repeatedly resisting the idea that he was just a tool for prosecutors.

“I don't know if I'm hurting them or helping them,” he testified. “What I do know is that what I'm saying, in the confines of this courtroom, is the truth. And if the truth helps the government, then it aids them. And if the truth does not help the government, then it does not aid them. That is why I'm here, sir.”

Levine said he knew his plea agreement was a benefit to him, but he denied being obsessed with his ultimate penalty or even that he had been part of the actual negotiations between his lawyer and prosecutors about what his final time in prison was going to be. He remembered being interviewed for the first time in early 2006, in an out-of-the-way secret location. It was a nearly empty government building in the West Loop. He had agreed to wear a wire for the government, attempting to catch both Vrdolyak and
former Chicago alderman William Singer—who was lobbying for Smith-field—in discussions of their schemes. He went to meetings with a battery pack strapped to the small of his back and a recording device sewn into the tailoring of his clothes. He had gotten little of much use and once told investigators that his device had failed as he talked to Singer.

Meanwhile he continued to give prosecutors as much information as he could, eventually being interviewed forty-one times. Sometimes he told agents and prosecutors that he wanted to go home and think about the details of what they were asking him, returning at their next session with notes about the things he could recall. In ten of those interviews, Levine had been asked for details of his meeting with Rezko at the Standard Club. All of it had led to Levine pleading guilty in his own criminal case and then testifying against Rezko, a man who at one point had been about as close an insider to Blagojevich as a person could be. Kelly, one of the governor's best friends, may have shared a deeper connection. But for a time, almost nothing of importance had happened inside the administration without Rezko knowing about it. Levine had laid bare some of the inner workings of corruption in Illinois, even if he did have those pesky memory problems.

As he testified, he revealed to Duffy that he couldn't even recall for the jury the day he had pleaded guilty in federal court.

“Can you tell them the month you pled guilty?” Duffy asked.

“No, sir,” Levine said, with the same glassy, lizard-like calm he kept throughout his days on the stand.

Duffy paused for second and decided to go ahead and swing for the fences. “Can you tell them the year you pled guilty?”

“No, sir,” came the answer again.

“Have you pled guilty?” Duffy said, teasingly.

“Yes, sir.”