Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam

“Like a real-life story by James M. Cain,
Poison Candy
has a beautiful dame who’s full of venom and a trusting mug who’s too blinded by her charms to know she’s taking him for all he’s worth—or that she’s planning to kill him. Told from the perspective of tough-talking woman prosecutor Elizabeth Parker and veteran crime writer Mark Ebner, this tale of greed and manipulation in Palm Beach County is impossible to put down. What’s most fascinating about Dalia Dippolito, the story’s would-be murderer, is her steadfast denial of reality, even as she appears on reality TV. Add to this the fame-hungry Florida cops who filmed their investigation for the TV show
Cops
—in a video that went viral, of course—and you have a perfect crime for our time.”

—Nancy Jo Sales,
Vanity Fair
, author of
The Bling Ring

“Start with a South Florida trifecta of cash, cocaine, and call girls. Throw in Nancy Grace, street gangs, and even a cop reality show. Then top it off with an absorbing courtroom drama starring the beautiful aspiring black widow. A great read—and it’s all true.”

—Roy Black, senior partner at Black, Srebnick,
Kornspan & Stumpf, P.A. and legal commentator

“Poison Candy
gives us a comprehensive look inside the investigation into Dalia Dippolito’s plot to kill her husband, peppered with insights that can only be told by an insider. Elizabeth Parker presented a compelling case at trial and now gives us all the juicy tidbits banned from the courtroom.
Poison Candy
proves the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. This is a must-read for true-crime aficionados.”

—Beth Karas, legal analyst and former correspondent for Court TV’s
In Session

“Not even Hollywood could come up with a character as evil and calculating as Dalia Dippolito! That her real-life sociopathic crimes are dissected here by the prosecutor who finally took her down is icing on this true crime cake. For anyone who wants to truly understand how diabolical criminals operate—and get away with what they do—
Poison Candy
is a must-read. I couldn’t put it down!”

—Diane Dimond, investigative crime reporter and author

“
Poison Candy
is an essential read. Destined to become a true crime classic.”

—Mandy Stadtmiller,
XOJane.com

“Millions of television viewers have watched the videotaped Boynton Beach, Florida police undercover operation that caught Dalia Dippolito attempting to hire a hit man to kill her husband. Thousands more have seen the viral video that flashed through the Internet showing her hysterical sobbing at learning from a detective that her husband had been ‘killed.’ Still more saw the video of her later learning that her husband, in fact, was alive. Now, Elizabeth Parker, the prosecutor who convicted Dalia Dippolito, tells the behind-the-scenes story of what really happened behind the femme fatale sting and subsequent trial. One of Florida’s most skilled and experienced criminal trial attorneys, she unfolds little-known details of the case in a narrative that is rich with the insights of a veteran litigator and is very hard to put down. Elizabeth Parker and coauthor Mark Ebner have produced a captivating account of one of Florida’s most notorious cases.”

—Bob Butterworth, former Florida Attorney General

“The only thing more riveting than having experienced this already legendary Florida crime saga in real time is reliving it via Parker and Ebner’s page-turner. Who needs fiction when you can devour
Poison Candy
?”

—Billy Corben, director of
Cocaine Cowboys, The U, and Raw Deal: A Question of Consent

Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Parker and Mark Ebner

Cover and interior photos copyright © The Palm Beach
Post/ZUMAPress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

BenBella Books, Inc.
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Suite #530
Dallas, TX 75231
www.benbellabooks.com

Send feedback to
[email protected]

First e-book edition: February 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Parker, Elizabeth, 1972–

Poison candy : the murderous Madam: inside Dalia Dippolito’s plot to kill / by Elizabeth Parker and Mark Ebner.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-939529-02-2 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-939529-03-9 (electronic)

1. Murder—Florida. 2. Murderers—Florida. 3. Dippolito, Dalia. 4. Wives—Florida. 5. Conspiracy—Florida. 6. Marital conflic—Florida. I. Ebner, Mark C. II. Title.

HV6533.F6P37 2014

364.152´3092—dc23

2013036896

Distributed by Perseus Distribution
www.perseusdistribution.com

To place orders through Perseus Distribution:
Tel: 800-343-4499
Fax: 800-351-5073
E-mail:
[email protected]

To my parents, Edwin and Donna Parker, for their unconditional love and never-ending support.

Foreword

Prologue

CHAPTER 1      On the House

CHAPTER 2      The Spanish Prisoner

CHAPTER 3      Whatcha Gonna Do

CHAPTER 4      Gun Club

CHAPTER 5      Burn Notice

CHAPTER 6      Inextricably Intertwined

CHAPTER 7      The Three Ps

CHAPTER 8      Reap the Whirlwind

CHAPTER 9      Tacks in the Carpet

CHAPTER 10    Delilah

CHAPTER 11    Dinosaurs

CHAPTER 12    Bane of Society

CHAPTER 13    Chasing Chickens

CHAPTER 14    A Tangled Web

CHAPTER 15    Nothing of Nothing Is Nothing

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

T
rial lawyers often write books about the high-profile cases they have handled in court, especially those which captivated the press and the public. Most but not all of such books are about cases that the author won. Unfortunately, editors who want a book to flow smoothly and read easily have a say in its ultimate structure, which usually causes many of the nuts and bolts of preparing and trying a case to be eliminated.

Elizabeth Parker served in the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor for thirteen years. Like many of those who can legitimately call themselves “trial lawyers,” she gained and honed her skills on the battlefront; there are no graduate schools that truly produce capable courtroom warriors. To achieve that status, one has to “. . . grow, like Topsy . . .” Ms. Parker has plainly proven herself to be such a warrior. Indeed, careful scrutiny of her new offering,
Poison Candy
, about the sordid and bewildering journey of a sociopathic sexual acrobat named Dalia Dippolito, illuminates a lawyer who apparently fought off any demands for shortcuts or editorial expediency, thus delivering an excellent account of the investigation, pretrial preparation, and courtroom trial of the culprit.

Ms. Parker, painfully aware of the flights of fancy offered by the plethora of immensely popular TV crime detection shows, attempts to lead her readers away from the valley of the shadow of fiction (like getting DNA test results in minutes) and into the green pastures of what really happens when an attempted assassination is afoot and the cops and prosecutors are alert enough to grab control of the caper while it is still in the “attempted” phase. The detail set forth in the police work done and the subsequent preparation and prosecution of the case is meticulous. These are rare qualities in books
of this genre, and much to be admired by those who would like the public to have a better understanding of what
really
goes on in a serious criminal case.

This is not to suggest that this book is dull or in any way mired down in detail. It has more than its share of bizarre twists and machinations. Mike Dippolito, an ex-convict serving out twenty-eight years of probation for some “confidence-man” crimes, considers himself to be a bit of a clever fellow. He is actually driven more by gullibility than guile. The mastermind in this sorry play is a twenty-eight-year-old woman of Peruvian-Egyptian descent, Dalia, who began her sex-for-money career as an “escort” at nineteen, and apparently honed her skills in sexual dexterity to a highly effective level. It is fascinating to see her victim, Mike, tumble for her various acts over and over again, forcing himself to digest lie after lie without vomiting.

If I were teaching law on more than a single-lecture basis, I would require that my students read this book. Not just those who were aspiring to become litigators, but law students generally. The truth is, by the time trial lawyers get to take over a case, it is often fouled beyond recognition by lawyers who got the case originally, knew little or nothing about the realities of litigation, blew one opportunity after another to gather or preserve critical evidence, and have thus inflicted mortal wounds on the viability of the case. They remain steadfastly ignorant as to what should be done in the legal emergency room when a case is new, because they plan on negotiating a settlement of some sort and thus avoiding the division of fees with a certified courtroom gunslinger.

Elizabeth Parker is a gunslinger, and it is fortunate for “fair trial” considerations that the “hired gun” for the defense is a trial lawyer of high skill and long experience, Mike Salnick. He is a resourceful and formidable adversary for any prosecutor, and almost opens a crack in the door that leads to the chamber of reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, his client has soiled every escape route with her conduct, emails, text messages, and legally taped statements to police. Parker is offering no quarter, and Salnick must take the case to the wire. He cannot put Dalia on the witness stand, where she would have been shredded by Parker. Parker’s case preparation was pervasively well managed. Her skills at cross-examination are well documented
by transcript segments of the defense case where she dismantles a number of witnesses.

I regularly enjoy courtroom fiction masterfully orchestrated by the likes of Scott Turow, John Grisham, David Baldacci, and other authors of well-deserved stature. But for a hard-scrabble look at the way criminal cases really work, this book gets high marks. Read it.

F. Lee Bailey

F. Lee Bailey is one of the nation’s foremost defense lawyers,
as well as a successful businessman, author, and lecturer. His
phenomenally successful career as a trial lawyer has been
highlighted by such well-known cases as that of Dr. Samuel Sheppard,
The Boston Strangler, OJ Simpson, and the heiress Patricia Hearst.

T
here’s a reason they call it Florida.

Discovered in 1513 by the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the patron saint of perpetual youth, who allegedly came there seeking its fabled rejuvenating waters, it was christened “La Florida” or “Flowery Land” for its exotic vegetation and boundless verdure. Today, though, it represents a narrow corridor between the people of North America, drawn to its warmth and facile money—the newly wed and the nearly dead—and the people of Central and South America, coveting unlimited opportunity or safe harbor—seeds and spores blown in on a wild wind. The cultural collision that occurs along this unintended isthmus produces a strain of humanity that can best be described as florid—an exotic mélange of hothouse flowers and preening psychopaths and gold-plated warriors and vulgarians of every stripe, channeled into a giant cocktail shaker and agitated to a high froth. Criminals and visionaries who appear interchangeable. Beauty for the harvesting. Human orchids.

Those who set out to tell its tales are often accused of hyperbole, of gilding the lily to marshal its perfumes and colors and violent sensations for dramatic effect. But really, we’re stenographers at best. No one could improve on the rich cast of characters routinely on public display— especially in the crime blotters and the tabloid record.

That’s certainly the case in the sinuous public saga of Dalia Dippolito, a dusky immigrant beauty whose Egyptian Muslim father and Peruvian Catholic mother settled in the mecca of South Florida to provide their children with the best chance at a bright future. Dalia took that chance and gambled it as high as the table stakes would go: becoming an escort
by at least age nineteen, parlaying those skills into work as a part-time madam, and sharpening her talons for the first easy score she could sink them into.

That score came along in 2009, when she was twenty-eight, in the form of Mike Dippolito, a good-natured, hapless ex-con with a war chest of cash and a nagging weakness for cocaine and call girls, both of which had been a problem for him in the past. In a six-month span, Dalia moved in with him, convinced him to divorce his wife, married him, got her name on the deed to his townhouse, embezzled his money (again and again and again, in breathtaking ways), worked overtime with a small army of abettors to get his probation revoked, gaslighted him into believing that hoods and gangsters were out to get him, messed with his mind, announced herself pregnant with his child—and when all of that couldn’t get him locked up and out of her life, she paid someone to have him killed.

I was the lead prosecutor in that case, and I ultimately secured a conviction in the two-week trial in West Palm Beach—one week on, one week off while the judge attended to other business, and another week to complete testimony. In the nearly two years beforehand, I was in a privileged position to observe all of the players in sometimes painful detail. Together, they were the envy of any pulp novel.

There was the Husband, designated victim and my lead witness, a South Philly hustler and would-be bruiser with a soft creamy center, like Rocky Balboa with tribal tattoos, able to attend what would have been his funeral, like Tom Sawyer, due to the unlikely intervention of a shady character with criminal connections.

The Good Samaritan Boyfriend, a West Bank–born gun-toting baller and professional card counter with a would-be check-cashing/convenience store empire—not a terrorist, but he played one on TV—who only intervened when he finally realized his sex-for-barter good-time girl was just crazy enough to dispatch her husband and leave him the designated fall guy.

Her
Other
Other Boyfriend (
O
OB), a bicoastal mall contractor living in New York and a clueless patsy who enabled Dalia’s endless scams in order to hasten their own promised life together. Somehow, he didn’t get the memo on women who kill, and the men who volunteer as their victims.

The Stonecold Killer (ScoldK) from the notorious local Buck Wild Gang who saw this tiny spitfire as a loose cannon and liability and severed his business relations with her, only to be convicted on gun charges in a racketeering trial in the next courtroom over.

The calls-’em-as-he-sees-’em Brooklyn-born Career Cop (CC), who criticized his superiors’ decision to put trial evidence on the Internet and allow a
COPS
crew to tag along, whose run-ins with Internal Affairs provided a pretext for the inevitable appeal.

The respected defense counsel who failed to recognize the crucial distinction between a lion tamer and lunch.

And that’s before we even get to the fake Haitian hit man.

I had a full plate to deal with.

Although I was born in Boston in 1972 and lived in Rochester, New York, until I was six, I grew up in Miami. I attended Westminster, a private Christian high school, and I witnessed firsthand how
Miami Vice
managed to capture South Florida’s nascent cocaine culture, in turn giving the city its brand and identity for the eighties and beyond. Watching
Charlie’s Angels
as a young girl had instilled in me a deep longing to become a cop, even if its name and premise—a disembodied male voice exercises undue influence over beautiful starlets, who inexplicably do his bidding—was probably closer to the Manson girls than to
Matlock
.

I attended college in Auburn, Alabama, where I received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology with a minor in criminology, with the idea of becoming a counselor of abused children, since I hated predators of any kind. But I didn’t really like the subjectivity of psychology, where both the diagnosis and treatment often depended on the interpretation of the clinician; I favored the hard boundaries of the legal system over the loose protocols of trial and error. While in college, I interned in the Child Support Enforcement Unit of the Lee County District Attorney’s office in Opelika, Alabama, and spent every free hour watching courtroom trials. By the time I was gearing up for a master’s in social work, jurisprudence was burning in
my blood, and I attended law school at Loyola University in New Orleans instead. I interned as a law clerk under longtime hard-nosed District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., whom I looked up to and considered a mentor. I assisted homicide unit prosecutors in trial, often sitting beside them at the attorney’s table. In the summers, I interned in the juvenile division of the State Attorney’s office in Miami-Dade County. When I graduated law school, even though Miami-Dade seemed a shoo-in, I applied for a job at the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office on the advice of Jeb Bush, who had taken an interest in my career, and who considered that office the best in the state. That’s where I stayed for the next thirteen years.

Palm Beach County is a study in extremes: It houses a large population of seasonal migrant workers, many of them from Mexico, Guatemala, or Haiti, which is among the poorest populations in Florida, if not in the nation. Yet just forty miles to the east is Palm Beach proper, where some of the wealthiest (and most notorious) people in the world live or have had houses: Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Bernie Madoff, Conrad Black, Bill Koch, John Lennon, and the Kennedys, to name a few. (The Kennedy estate was the site of the infamous William Kennedy Smith rape case in 1991, in which he was ultimately acquitted.)

I started out in the Misdemeanor Division, where I spent two years (a few months of that in the Domestic Violence Unit); graduated to the Felony Division; then to the Traffic Homicide Unit; and finally up the chain to administrate and oversee the Misdemeanor Division and the Domestic Violence Unit as a Chief Assistant State Attorney reporting directly to the elected State Attorney, Michael McAuliffe. As far back as New Orleans, the homicide prosecutors I worked with had called me Little Dog because I was so tenacious as a law clerk and intern. Once I graduated, passed the Florida Bar, and began trying cases of my own in Palm Beach County, I was known as a pit bull—someone who latched onto the jugular, set my jaw, and never let go. I could process a lot of information quickly and retain it, and I became known as someone who could dismantle an expert witness brutally and succinctly in cross-examination. Things like DUI Manslaughter had blood and forensic toxicology issues, or accident reconstruction that employed complicated math and physics, each of which came with its own
expert opinion, and I quickly became the first line of defense against their often cryptic conclusions. I went on to train new prosecutors in how to try DUI cases all over the state of Florida.

When you pass the Florida Bar and are sworn in as an Assistant State Attorney, you also receive a badge in a black case to signify that you are a law enforcement officer. I learned early on the importance of working closely with cops, and spent much time in the field with them—visiting crime scenes, intuiting defense arguments and counterarguments, and following any loose thread wherever it seemed to lead. I took pride in seeing myself as an investigative prosecutor, and although I enjoy the pitched battle of litigation, my favorite part is immersing myself in the infinite detail of the investigation. It was not uncommon for me as a rookie prosecutor to call officers on the midnight shift and meet them to prepare for trial or visit some key location in the case. I also did police ride-alongs, participating in countywide enforcement operations. By the time I became a Chief Assistant Attorney, one of three under the State Attorney, I was routinely assigned any case with high visibility or that was being tried in the media—from cops charged with DUI, Stalking, or Domestic Battery to those that caught the attention of the cable news scourges.

I first took notice of Dalia Dippolito while watching the
Nancy Grace
show. I was at home when the crime-scene video exploded on-screen, showing a police officer dramatically revealing the details of a contract murder; the distraught widow collapsing in grief, as if on cue; her insistent demands to see the body; her disoriented concern not for her husband, or even her valuables, but for her two dogs still inside. Not only did this seem an apparent breach of protocol—video evidence leaked to a news outlet, obviously by someone inside the department—but the video itself seemed off: no one seemed to be behaving normally. Or rather, everyone seemed to behave exactly the way they thought they should if they were watching themselves on television.

Because of the nature of the crime—a wife hiring a hit man to kill her husband—the case came to the Domestic Violence Unit I supervised, and because of its high-profile nature, elected State Attorney Michael McAuliffe and I agreed that I would handle it. And as we soon learned, almost nothing
we saw in that first video was as it seemed. The murder had, in fact, been staged. The police were actually the perpetrators, having created a fake crime scene to prolong the illusion that a crime had been committed. The bereaved widow was really the criminal mastermind, and she had swept the house of valuables before vacating the premises. Her appearance in the video—at this exact time and place—was designed to be her alibi, and her performance had been perfected to convince anyone watching (the cops, prosecutors, an unsuspecting world) of her innocence. And the video had been shot not by TV news crews, but by the Boynton Beach Police Department itself, which meant that the cameras
in the video
had been staged as well. And they were—by the TV show
COPS
. Before I ever saw it, in fact before it ever made it to TV, the video had gone viral online, garnering over 300,000 views by the time of the trial.

Perhaps it puts South Florida in some kind of context to note that, until that moment, this seemed like just another case. Granted, it was crazy, but we see so much crazy stuff down here, especially in domestic violence cases, that eventually nothing seems shocking. I’ve seen cases come through the office in which an abusive boyfriend with a history of killing animals, whose father went to prison for murder, smashed his girlfriend in the face with a steam iron and then forced her into a bathtub full of water, threatening to electrocute her with a hair dryer. Another guy pushed his pregnant girlfriend into the Intracoastal Waterway, knowing she couldn’t swim, and then dived in after her and tried to drown her. A jealous boyfriend beat a woman with an electrical cord, doused her with kerosene, tried to set her on fire, and finally raped her on a bed where their four-year-old child lay sleeping next to them. It sounds like worst-case scenarios selected for TV crime dramas, and yet it was relentless. Attempted murder-for-hire may be exotic, but in a large state prosecutor’s office, it’s certainly not the worst thing we’d see on any given day.

Dalia Dippolito, however, is another story.

You would have to search long and hard for someone as cunning, calculating, determined, devious, infinitely cynical, and unremittingly apathetic toward the moral consequences of her actions and the suffering of her victims as Dalia Dippolito. The term
sociopath
is overused, but having
spent some time observing humanity at its worst and most desperate, I think if there’s a textbook candidate out there, it’s her. There are many people who, at the lowest moment of their life—driven by some spasm of emotion they’re powerless to stop, having sunk to behavior they’d never have thought themselves capable of—will do reprehensible, vicious things. But many of them, the day after, will regret it. As far as I can tell, Dalia was incapable of that kind of empathy. Kindness equaled weakness, and weakness was meant to be exploited.