Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (11 page)

Strickland denied my motion without even a hearing.

O
NE DAY
I
GOT A CALL
from one of my paralegals.

“There’s a guy who says he wants to bond Casey out,” he said.

“Really?”

“He says he’s a bounty hunter. He says he has a show on the National Geographic Channel, and he’s willing to post Casey’s bond.”

The man’s name was Leonard Padilla, and when I checked him out, I found out he did have a reality show on the National Geographic Channel. When he arrived in Orlando, he was met at the airport by dozens of cameras. He stood and talked with a toothpick in his mouth, telling the reporters how he was going to get Casey out, and how he believed that Caylee was still alive, and that as soon as Casey got out, he was going to give her a beer and get her to relax and tell him where Caylee was.

I didn’t get to meet Padilla until the next day, when he came into my office. He had his entourage with him, including a guy who followed him around with a camcorder. As soon as he walked in the door, I told him, “He’s going to have to turn the camera off, because I’m not getting involved in what you’re doing.” He obliged.

Leonard came into my office, and I found him to be a funny, entertaining guy. He was like a character in professional wrestling. He was a cowboy—wore a cowboy hat—and with a Mexican accent, he would say, “I’m in ‘Or-lon-do,’” yet would pronounce his name “Pa-dill-ah” without the Mexican accent, where it should have been “Pa-dee-yah.”

So here was this Mexican guy from Sacramento, California, with a Southern accent and a cowboy hat, but he had $50,000 in hand—apparently his nephew was a bail bondsman—and he’s a bounty hunter with a reality show. He told me he wanted to be the next Duane “Dog” Chapman, the bounty hunter who had a popular show on A&E, and that he was trying to renew his show.

I could see that the reason he was agreeing to post the bond was mostly for the publicity. My first impulse was to tell him to get lost, but I had a client in jail who needed $50,000 to bond out, as well as $450,000 in collateral, and she had no way to post it. I would have been shirking my duty if I had sent him on his way. Even though I felt this wasn’t the ideal situation, I took advantage of it.

I realized I would have to deal with this guy. I said to myself,
So long as he gets her out of jail and I can protect her from him, this shouldn’t be a problem. He’ll get his publicity, and Casey’ll get out.

We both discussed that. I told him, “I’m not going to put my client’s safety or her future in your hands.”

“Why don’t you sign me up as an investigator?” he asked.

I didn’t trust him enough to do that.

“No, no, none of that,” I said. “I don’t want to be affiliated with you in any shape or form.”

I had him sign a confidentiality agreement.

Padilla said the only condition he would put on the deal would be to have a woman on his own security team in the Anthony house in case Casey tried to run.

“No problem,” I said.

I made him sign a written agreement to these rules, some which he would later ignore. I told him, “You can’t talk to her and you can’t question her.” He agreed. Padilla put up the money and the collateral, and Casey got her release.

CHAPTER 4

ROOKIE LAWYER

P
UTTING UP WITH THE CRAZINESS of the media was almost as difficult as trying to keep up with the shenanigans of the prosecution and the police. It wasn’t long before the media trucks were lined up in such numbers outside my office on Simpson Road in Kissimmee that they were taking up every space in my ten-car parking lot. My other clients were reluctant to come to my office because the media outlets were filming everyone walking in my door and putting them on the news.

Finally I put my foot down. Enough was enough. I gave them all trespass warnings and told them if they didn’t park across the street in the school lot, I was going to call the police. They were incensed about that, but they complied.

By law they could park across the street, and while that was still too close, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I’d pull up in my car to go to my office, and they’d film that. And at night, when I left, they filmed that too. They would shout, “Here he comes!” and the cameras would start to roll.

There must have been ten different news outlets, and each of them would call my office incessantly. Finally I said, “I’ll work with you, but stop calling. I’ll make a brief statement, give you what you need, and you can go away or at least stop bothering me.”

I’d walk across the street, and they’d film me crossing the street. I would be standing there, waiting for cars to pass, looking both ways, and then I’d jog across the street, and they’d film it and put it on TV. Why couldn’t they just wait for me to get there? I could only conclude that they wanted me to look bad.

I told myself,
You have to stop this too
. It was all a learning experience for me. I’d get in my car, and they’d film me backing out with my license plate number in sight, and I’d have to stop and say, “Listen, I will talk to you, but please don’t film me driving away in my car. I’d like a little privacy.”

They’d say, “No problem,” but the next time I was backing out, again they’d start filming. I soon realized that the word of the media people meant absolutely nothing.

I would give them a statement, and they would take what I said and spin it around and make it into whatever it was they wanted to say. The perfect example of this came much later in the case when the state decided to make this a death penalty case. When I was asked whether Casey was informed, I told them, “Casey knows the forces that she’s up against.” The lead story that night began, “Jose Baez says there are forces against Casey,” implying supernatural forces. I would just shake my head. It was the theater of the absurd. It took me awhile to understand that I wasn’t just a lawyer. I was an important cast member of their reality show. And then they started digging into my background. And that
really
started to bother me.

I hadn’t said a word about my past, but they soon found that I had graduated from St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami in 1997 but wasn’t admitted to the bar until 2005. They insinuated that, because I had failed the bar for eight years, I must be stupid because it took me so long to pass it. Their story became,
Here is this stupid Hispanic kid who’s only been a lawyer for three years and couldn’t pass the bar for eight years. And his office is in a strip mall.

The other sobriquet they would throw at me was “Kissimmee lawyer.” As in
Jose Baez, Kissimmee lawyer
, an insult they’d toss off in a condescending way to show that because my office wasn’t in sophisticated Orlando but rather in hayseed Kissimmee I was some kind of country, hillbilly lawyer.

Another way the media described me was to call me a “rookie lawyer” as in
Casey Anthony’s rookie lawyer
. Because I had only been a member of the bar for three years, many of the so-called “legal experts” were saying, “He’s over his head. He doesn’t have the experience. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Before long
everything
I did was second-guessed.

“That was a stupid motion.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Early on, one of my tactics with the state and law enforcement was to demand information. I’d file ten motions at a time rather than make one motion to ask for ten different things. I did this on purpose in an attempt to get them riled up. They would drag their feet, and I wanted the judge to make them send things to me more quickly.

When I started doing that, I heard the public criticism immediately, that I either didn’t know what I was doing or that I had somehow botched a motion. One time the media accused me of forgetting the court’s jurisdiction. I thought,
Whaaaaat? What are they talking about?
They would accuse me of not knowing what I was talking about.

The public may have been convinced that I was an idiot, but I let it all roll off my back. When I had worked in the public defender’s office in Miami, my boss was Rick DeMaria.

“Experience is always good, but it is secondary to being skilled and prepared,” he would say. “One can be a bad lawyer for a long, long time.”

I won a lot of cases working in the public defender’s office because I had good trial skills, and no one outworked me. If you’re prepared by working hard, it trumps experience every time.

One time when I was leaving the jail, I gave Casey a hug. A female guard came over and barked at me, “Get away from her. You can’t touch an inmate.”

“What?”

It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. I’ve hugged innumerable male inmates, and no one said a word. This had nothing to do with jail policy, I knew. Rather it was their simmering prejudice against Casey.

It really angered me when she said that.

“What are you implying here?” I asked.

“We’re not implying anything,” she said. “You just can’t have physical contact with an inmate.”

I said, “You know, she’s a human being, and if I want to shake her hand, or hug her, I will.”

“Then we’ll put her behind the glass partition, and that way you won’t have any physical contact with her.”

“I’ll file a motion in court,” I said, “and we’ll see about that.” Then I thought to myself,
Let it go. Assholes will be assholes. It’s not that important.

But someone from corrections leaked the incident to the media, and the story was exaggerated to say that Casey and I were hugging and that we had to be separated from our embrace. Later a jail spokesperson came out and said the report wasn’t true, but that was never picked up by the media. Making things worse, other media outlets picked up the original report and made up their own version of “the day Jose Baez hugged Casey Anthony.”

I should have known what was coming next. Geraldo Rivera had warned me, but I didn’t believe him.

I found Geraldo to be a really down-to-earth person. While I recognized he had a job to do, he also recognized the same about me, and we never tried to overstep our boundaries with each other professionally. It was the beginning of a true friendship.

Geraldo had covered the O. J. Simpson case and had done battle with defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, who has always been one of my heroes. Geraldo would tell me some of the mistakes that Cochran made, warning me not to make the same mistakes.

“Be careful what you do personally,” he said. There was an instance when Cochran confided in a former girlfriend, telling her that he was sure to win the case if he could get one black person on the jury. When the former girlfriend told the media, it became headlines. There were also reports of him having had a mistress.

“Be careful who you trust,” he warned me. “Watch yourself. Don’t fall into the same traps.”

Geraldo was part of the media that made Cochran’s life difficult, and I asked him why, because the issues he had revealed had nothing to do with the case.

“When you’re in these high-profile cases,” he said, “it’s a blood sport. And no one will have mercy on you.” I always remembered Geraldo’s words when dealing with the media, even though in the end I was plenty bloodied.

About a month before the headlines aired about my hugging Casey, I was in New York hiring a DNA expert when Geraldo invited Lorena and me to go sailing on his boat. We were sitting together on the boat, and Geraldo said to me, “You know, you have a really beautiful wife.”

“Yeah, I think so too,” I said.

“What you should do is take her around town in Orlando and be seen with her publicly,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I really want to keep my family out of this.” I had seen how vicious the media could be, and the last thing I wanted to do was expose my family to it.

“No. Listen, and listen carefully,” Geraldo said. “If you don’t do that, before you know it, they’re going to accuse you of having an affair with Casey.”

“What?” I said. “An affair with Casey? You’re nuts.” And I laughed him off.