Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (25 page)

And when I brought up the
COPS
waiver, he didn’t shrink from the subject in the slightest:

PARKER: After she signed her Miranda rights, you put a piece of paper in front of her and ask her to sign it—do you remember that?

SHERIDAN: I sure do.

PARKER: What was that piece of paper for?

SHERIDAN: It was a waiver to appear on the television show
COPS
.

PARKER: Why did you put that card in front of her on that day and ask her to sign it?

SHERIDAN: It was given to me by a member of Langley Productions and they asked me to [have her] sign it so they could videotape her.

PARKER: Was this something that you have ever done in an interview before?

SHERIDAN: No.

PARKER: Would you ever do it again?

SHERIDAN: No.

PARKER: Did you tell her what the piece of paper was, that it was a waiver for the TV show
COPS
?

SHERIDAN: No.

PARKER: Why not?

SHERIDAN: I made a mistake.

On cross, Sheridan admitted that, by making it seem like standard police procedure, he was essentially lying to her. Salnick seemed most interested in belaboring Mohamed’s instructions that they couldn’t wire him in the standard way, since in a parked car, Dalia often went directly for his crotch.

SALNICK: If a CI were to tell you, with your thirty-three years of experience, I don’t want to be wired in a certain way because every time I get near the suspect we have oral sex, would you have tolerated that?

SHERIDAN: Would I have tolerated that?

SALNICK: Would you say to the CI, “Okay, we will wire you a different way so that if you have oral sex, she won’t find the wire”?

SHERIDAN: (laughs) That’s an open-ended question. I would first tell him not to have oral sex and then second, I would wire him a different way.

SALNICK: So basically, if the informant is working for you, you’re gonna say, “Look, pal, your personal life has to be dealt with later. You are working for the police.”

SHERIDAN: Absolutely.

And over the course of ten questions, Sheridan repeatedly admitted that it was his decision not to record the conversation at Chili’s, that his suspect and CI were essentially off the grid for thirty to forty-five minutes, that his subordinates (Ranzie, Moreno, and others) had expressed reservations, and that the evidentiary and exculpatory value of their conversation was now lost.

SALNICK: You made the decision, nevertheless, to go forward.

SHERIDAN: Yes.

SALNICK: It would have been good to have that recorded.

SHERIDAN: Correct.

After Sheridan, I put on John Yorganjian (with Laura doing the direct), the custodian of records for jail calls—now deceased—just to put Dalia’s jailhouse calls into evidence. After Mike and Randa both identified Dalia’s voice on her respective calls to them, Yorganjian fulfilled what we call the business records predicate, which documents how the calls were collected and stored, so that we were free to play them in court. Laura also questioned both Midian Diaz and Al Martinez, who followed Dalia to the gym and then back home to the waiting crime scene. This was designed to establish a time line and confirm Dalia’s movements. Their testimony was brief and almost identical, and Salnick mounted no cross-examination.

Faux hit man Widy Jean took the stand next, now sporting a close-cropped haircut. A former member of the Community Action Team unit specializing in crimes related to narcotics, prostitution, and gambling, as well as of the BBPD SWAT team, Jean left the force briefly to start a business venture in Georgia, but was now back working as a regular patrol
officer. I walked him through his involvement in the Dalia Dippolito case. He initially asked her to bring $3,000 and the keys to her house to their first meeting—the latter a last-minute strategic ploy to test the limits of her trust and credulity. He verified that the videotape of him was authentic and accurate, as were the brief recorded phone calls before and after. At first, he found Dalia nervous and somewhat flighty—cryptic when discussing the crime, loath to use the overt phrasings he did. But soon enough she settled down, and almost immediately began to press her advantage where money was concerned.

PARKER: Tell us about your conversation with her.

WIDY JEAN: We talked, initially, and I told her that I was a professional and about what I’d be doing. I told her about the amount of money I spent to get here, and I told her the amount of money I was gonna need, and I explained to her—at one point she told me that she didn’t bring any money with her. She was going to pay me at the back end, meaning when it’s all done. And we discussed different plans. She brought up the idea that her husband was going to go to the bank to take out $10,000, and I could kill her husband when he walks out of the bank. I can take that money. I told her I would check into it to see if that would work. If it didn’t work, I’d call her the next day to tell her that the plan wouldn’t work. And also, at the end, I gave her multiple opportunities to change her mind or get out of it. I asked her if she was sure about that, because I told her my experience as a hit man—I’d dealt with people who weren’t sure and changed their mind. And I told her, if I leave here she wouldn’t be able to get in contact with me, so this was the time to change her mind. And she told me she was 5,000 percent sure she wanted it done, and she wasn’t going to change her mind.

Dalia gave him the address of Mike’s bank in Boca Raton and the times he would be there. Since she failed to meet her financial obligation at their
first meeting, she readily agreed to up his fee to $7,000 (plus the $1,200 she had advanced to purchase the weapon) if she could pay it on the back end. I walked him through the subsequent phone calls and his cameo appearance at the police station in handcuffs.

On cross, as he did with other key players in this case, Salnick got Widy Jean to admit he was essentially an actor asked to play a role in this drama. He never knew the identity of the Confidential Informant beforehand, nor realized who Mohamed was when he approached their car during the meeting with Dalia. (Dalia identified him only as her cousin.) He admitted this was his first time working undercover in the guise of a hit man. Through his questions, Salnick also emphasized that money was never exchanged between him and Dalia, nor between him and Mohamed except in the abstract (Dalia was told her $1,200 was spent on a gun with which to commit the crime). At one point, Salnick appeared to be closing in on a contradiction with Jean’s earlier deposition, only to have it snatched from him at the last second.

SALNICK: Do you ever remember that you told me that you had to get the guy a gun?

WIDY JEAN: No.

SALNICK: Okay, would it refresh your recollection to look at the deposition?

WIDY JEAN: Yes.

Salnick approached the witness and read the sentence: “I said the reason why I need more money is I have to get the guy a gun.”

WIDY JEAN: No, it’s mistranslated. I wanted to get it to buy a gun.

SALNICK: You wanted to buy a gun. Okay, so the court reporter may have taken it down wrong.

WIDY JEAN: Yes.

It’s worth noting that according to Mike in his police statement, he planned to withdraw money from the Boca Raton Bank of America on the
morning of August 5 to pay a business contact for the marketing leads that were the basis of his online business, just as he did every week. But certainly not the $10,000 Dalia promised the hit man—“hard, hard cash,” as she put it, delivering her carny spiel. Mike couldn’t have withdrawn $10,000 if he’d wanted to—it would have automatically triggered a notice to the IRS. It was “a few thousand dollars” at most, which he planned to drop off on his way to the orthodontist. This means that Dalia was actually scamming her hit man just like she scammed everybody else—even the hapless Sergio for a measly $500. The police had rejected Boca as outside the BBPD’s jurisdiction. But what if they hadn’t? What was Dalia’s fallback when the savage killer she was convinced was going to murder her husband suddenly discovered she was seven grand short, and came looking for the balance?

Who cares?

No risk, no reward.

O
ne phrase that I always emphasize when teaching new prosecutors is: “The physical evidence doesn’t lie.” Dalia’s life was so compartmentalized, the selves she presented to the marks and victims that substituted for friends and colleagues so circumscribed, that it took tiny beads of provable fact to physically stitch them together. Entering the final phase of my case, I called to the stand Detective Pete McGovern, a forensic computer expert. Although he carries the rank of Detective, he is technically a digital forensics investigator with the Special Investigations Division of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. His exploration of Dalia’s HP Pavilion Slimline hard drive turned up a number of interesting items.

On March 23, 2009, someone using Dalia’s password-protected computer (“BellaBella”) did a Google search for Cayman National Bank and the current time in the Cayman Islands. This was in the thick of the confusion surrounding Dalia’s wire transfer, and exactly halfway between the drug searches in Manalapan (March 16) and CityPlace (March 29). The counterfeit wire transfer receipt from a Cayman Islands bank discovered in her safety deposit box (filled out by hand, a violation of standard banking protocol and a dead giveaway) was dated March 3 and faxed to her friend Kerrian Brown from Cayman National Bank on March 23, after Dalia’s phone records indicate she called the bank several times earlier that day. Had Dalia bothered to look at her bank statement, she would have seen that she deposited the last $47,000 from Mike on March 4, the day after she allegedly had the money wired.

On April 27, 2009, there was a Google search done on Dalia’s computer for the Palm Beach Shooting Center, which offers a full-service indoor shooting range and basic handgun classes by appointment. That search lasted five minutes.

April 27 was less than a month after Dalia had approached Larry Coe and members of the Buck Wild gang as potential hired assassins, and the thirteen separate calls she placed to his number on April 2. It was also at the high point of tensions between Dalia and Mike, and around the same time she announced she was pregnant. As he was a convicted felon, the terms of Mike’s probation clearly stated that he could not own or touch a firearm, and any trip to a commercial shooting range, which was tightly regulated, would mean an automatic revocation of his probation. Even if it were legal, he had no interest in having a gun in the house, and states he never heard Dalia express an interest in learning to shoot. A second search was conducted on June 5, 2009, this time lasting four minutes.

On August 3, 2009, at 3:46 p.m., two days before Dalia’s arrest and Mike’s intended demise, with Mike debilitated on the couch in the other room from his liposuction surgery and the aftereffects of what would turn out to be antifreeze poisoning, Dalia’s computer shows a Google search for “funeral homes in Boynton Beach,” lasting sixteen minutes. Included in these searches was a general Google search that contained several local funeral homes and crematoriums and included tips on how to have a meaningful memorial service. This comes an hour after Dalia spoke with Widy Jean, her presumed hit man, to set up a face-to-face meeting two hours later. The searches began five minutes after she hung up the phone with Mohamed and ended a minute before she called Michael Stanley. Seven minutes later, she called the hit man to check on his progress. Again, Mike denied conducting such a search on Dalia’s computer.

On cross, Salnick sought to dampen what appeared to be irrefutable and damaging evidence by claiming that spouses often shared their computer passwords (although probably not spouses who intended to kill their significant other).

Finally, I put on Detective Alex Moreno. He was the lead investigator and a mainstay of the Major Case Squad, as well as my ticket to get all the
remaining material into evidence so that it would be fresh in the jury’s mind. During roughly two and a half days of testimony, he systematically walked the jury through the entire investigation, including the video and audio elements that had taken on a secondary life of their own on the Internet. In judicial parlance, this is known as “publishing the evidence.” We worked on his testimony for hours in the days and weeks leading up to the trial. I depended on him to tell the story of the evidence—“evidence doesn’t lie”—and so I wanted to fashion that into a seamless narrative, despite its complexity and potential confusion.

One part we wanted to handle carefully was the steamy texts between Dalia and Michael Stanley, which were strategic to the case and demonstrated Dalia’s character, and her apparently limitless ability to manipulate the men around her to do her bidding, no matter how ill-considered her demands. Detective Moreno didn’t want to read them into the record, and he didn’t think he could get through it in court without seriously jeopardizing his composure. A line like “you are my unicorn” comes from some part of the spirit beyond the reach of self-consciousness; it would take an actor of considerable talents to sell it. I can’t even tell you what it means with any real confidence—“you are rare, exotic, magical,” probably. But in the context of unbridled sex and proximate death, Stanley’s breathless sincerity and cloying desperation made the unintended listener more than a little queasy. Moreno opted for a flat monotone, sans inflection, but there was no way it wasn’t going to be awkward. When he was on the stand, he even tried to substitute “Laugh Out Loud” for “LOL,” and Salnick objected, forcing him to go back and read it verbatim—“L-O-L,” excruciatingly slowly. I was unprepared for just how ridiculous the whole thing sounded; I repeatedly had to look away or down at my notebook on the podium to ask my questions. It probably seemed like I was embarrassed and regretted being brought into this intimate exchange—all true—but I was also trying my best not to laugh, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop.

Moreno recounted how he became involved in the case when Sergeant Ranzie called him the morning of August 1 and he jumped on the moving train of Mohamed’s murder-for-hire revelations. He told how he quickly got up to speed, taking over as Mohamed’s handler after Detective Asim
Brown had signed him up as a Confidential Informant. This segued into the first phone call between Mohamed and Dalia setting up the strategy meeting between them, followed in quick succession by a second phone call and then surveillance video of the meeting at the Mobil station where Dalia gives him the $1,200. Her physical presence allowed police to run her plates, ascertaining the identity of both the suspect and the victim, and to obtain a photo of Dalia from the driver’s license database with her address and identifying information. Next, we played a series of phone calls between Dalia and Mohamed made on the morning of August 3, setting up the meeting with the alleged hit man. In one call, Dalia pulled over on I-95 and exited her vehicle out of fear someone might have bugged the car. On instructions from Detective Moreno, Mohamed successfully dissuaded Dalia from coming to his house, which was not wired for audio surveillance. In another, she appeared angry with Mohamed over the fact that the hit man had asked for a key to her house, as she was afraid she would be robbed. We also played several calls between Dalia and Officer Widy Jean in the role of the hit man, as well as the surveillance video of their meeting in the CVS parking lot. Finally, we played a follow-up phone call from Officer Jean giving Dalia instructions for the morning of the hit.

Moreno recalled attending the operational planning meeting for the staging of the crime scene conducted by Sergeant Frank Ranzie (the same meeting where they learned that
COPS
would be filming). He notified the victim alongside Sergeant Sheridan, drove Mike to the station, debriefed him on the state of affairs (including playing him snippets of the surveil-lance tapes), and questioned Dalia along with Detective Anderson after Sheridan had exhausted his efforts to extract a confession. At that point, we played the videotape of the interview, as well as a brief video of Dalia being escorted from the police station on her way to County Jail.

Then began the portion of his testimony on the investigation proper— gathering the available evidence, securing search warrants and subpoenas, assembling bank and phone records, obtaining the contents of Dalia’s safety deposit box, and executing a search warrant on her mother’s house, all of which opened up new avenues of exploration. Once a clearer pattern had emerged, Moreno conducted more detailed interviews with both
Mohamed and Mike Dippolito. He confirmed their stories with the Land Rover dealership, Mike’s probation officer, investigating officers from the various jurisdictions, Officer Wilson as an early observer of Dalia’s intentions, etc. Dalia’s phone records revealed the presence of spoof calls, multiple cell phones, Michael Stanley, and his calls to the IRS, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Department of Corrections, and the rest. Her real estate license gave a clearer picture of her employment history. Her text history colored in Michael Stanley, the sexting established his motive, and Dalia’s moonlighting as an escort (even though we didn’t mention it at trial) left little doubt she was the one pulling the strings. Moreno’s testimony ended with playing Dalia’s jailhouse calls to her mother and to Mike for the jury. These included an especially damning incidental comment made when Randa mistook “Mike” for Mike Dippolito instead of Mike Stanley:

DALIA: He doesn’t want to come here? Mike?

RANDA: Mike who? Which Mike?

DALIA: He’s not going to come here?

RANDA: Why would he go, Dalia? Why would he go? You were trying to kill him.

On cross, Salnick emphasized the number of times Mohamed was in contact with Dalia after July 31 outside of police control—there were an astounding seventy-five calls within the span of six days, Mohamed’s entire career undercover. Then, while arguing for the inclusion of Mike’s bank records before 2009, which I opposed as irrelevant, Salnick inadvertently led the discussion into a cul-de-sac that articulated what many of us had been wondering since the trial began:

JUDGE COLBATH: How is it that this evidence [Mike’s 2008 bank records] falls into that category [evidence that might “impeach him, which goes to the heart of the case”]?

SALNICK: Because the jury has to decide as part of their fact-finding process here if they want to believe Mr. Dippolito or not. If they
don’t believe Mr. Dippolito, and they think that—yeah, he could have put his wife up to this, and this was partly his idea—they have the right to look at everything that he’s been cross-examined on.

JUDGE COLBATH: That’s what’s been mysterious to me: Where is there any evidence thus far . . . Let’s say the State didn’t put Mr. Dippolito on, or let’s say that everything that came out of his mouth is a lie: Where is
he
pointing the finger at your client? What testimony? I mean, he was kept in the dark about this whole thing until . . . Where is there evidence [he] orchestrated any of this?

SALNICK: That’s for the jury to decide, Judge.

JUDGE COLBATH: No, no, no—I’m asking
you
: What evidence do you have that Mr. Dippolito had anything to do with her arrest?

SALNICK: He doesn’t have to say the magic words “We’re involved in a reality television program.”

JUDGE COLBATH: You’ve got to tell me the evidence upon which you want to offer this in. It’s wishful thinking.

SALNICK: It’s not wishful thinking. The evidence deals with his credibility.

JUDGE COLBATH: Let’s say he’s the most incredible person in the world!

SALNICK: I think that the defense has the right to argue to the jury that he is as
in
-credible as he is, and therefore we can’t believe what he says. And one of the things that he clearly said was, he didn’t know anything about a reality TV plot. He didn’t know anything about reality TV. And I use that term “reality” generically—whether it’s viral YouTube or reality TV, he told the jury he had nothing to do with that.

JUDGE COLBATH: Well, where is the evidence right now? Now, maybe something is going to come out in your [cross] that will change the complexion of this, but where is the evidence right now that he did have some knowledge of reality TV?

SALNICK: Judge, that evidence is going to come out in the defense’s case.

JUDGE COLBATH: Well, that may be true, but right now I don’t see it.

At this point, I tried to jump in, which the Judge addressed with his typical wit:

PARKER: Judge, may I put something on the record?

JUDGE COLBATH: If you’d like to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, go ahead.

PARKER: No, I just wanted to point out one other thing: Mr. Salnick said the reason he wants to put these records in is so that he can basically backdoor that Mike Dippolito was money laundering. And that’s exactly why these records are inadmissible—to prove that Mike Dippolito is committing another bad act, or something like that. That is not admissible.

Salnick continued to try to chip away at both Mike’s and Mohamed’s credibility, as my two key witnesses. He cited instances from the phone records where Dalia spoke with Mike either before or after she spoke with Mohamed, to insinuate the men knew each other. He hammered home Mohamed’s preventive measures regarding Dalia discovering the wire—the one they wanted to hide in his pants—a subject Salnick couldn’t seem to get enough of. And he focused on the
COPS
cameraman hovering outside the interview-room door once Dalia had effectively been taken into custody— like a gunman on the grassy knoll, this random figure that redefined the actions of everyone around him.

On the subject of Dalia and Michael Stanley’s infamous electronic flirting—“sexting,” as he couldn’t stop reminding the court—Salnick tried to defuse the topic with humor.

SALNICK: What’s sexting? Did you ever hear of sexting? Do you know what that is?

MORENO: Yes.

SALNICK: What is that, Detective?

MORENO: Um, pretty much what I read yesterday.

Salnick laughs.

SALNICK: Okay, sexual conversation between two people, is that right?

MORENO: Yes.

SALNICK: All right, if it’s sexual conversation between two people and they’re adults, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?

MORENO: No.

SALNICK: It’s not a crime, is it?

MORENO: No.

SALNICK: Those things were steamy, weren’t they? Are they steamy to you?

MORENO: I wouldn’t say that, no.