The Rooster Bar (26 page)

T
o avoid the halls of justice they once haunted, the defendants used a service elevator connected to a rear entrance that few lawyers knew about. But Phil did, and he led his boys through a maze of short hallways lined with offices for judges, secretaries, and law clerks. Mark and Todd wore coats and ties, certain that they would get themselves photographed for a newspaper or two, and they spoke to no one and tried to avoid eye contact with the few familiar faces.

At 9:50, they emerged from the back and entered the courtroom of the Honorable Abraham Abbott, Division 6, General Sessions Court. Eager to see who the curious were, both defendants quickly scanned the audience. There were about thirty spectators, a bit more than normal for a first appearance calendar. They took their seats at the defense table with their backs to the crowd as their lawyer stepped over to chat with the prosecutor. Judge Abbott was on the bench, going through some paperwork. From nowhere cute Hadley Caviness popped over and leaned down between them.

“Just here for a little immoral support, boys,” she whispered.

“Thanks,” Mark said.

“We thought about calling you last night,” Todd said.

“I was busy,” she said.

“What about tonight?”

“Sorry, already got a date.”

“What's the rap on Ms. Reedy?” Mark asked, nodding at the other table.

“Totally incompetent,” Hadley said with a smile. “And too stupid to know it. A real bitch, though.”

“Any newspapers here?” Todd asked.

“The
Post
is left side, fourth row, guy in a tan jacket. Don't know about anybody else. Gotta run. Don't lose my phone number and call me when you get out.” She disappeared as quickly as she had materialized.

“Get out? As in jail?” Mark whispered.

“I love that little slut,” Todd mumbled.

A door opened on the far right side and three inmates in orange jumpsuits were led in chained together. Three young black men, fresh from the mean streets of D.C., and likely headed to prison for years. If not already gang members, they would join one soon enough and band together for protection. During their brief careers as criminal defense lawyers, Mark and Todd had heard enough stories about the horrors of prison.

A clerk called the names of Frazier and Lucero. They stood, walked to the bench with Phil, and looked up and into the unsmiling face of Judge Abbott. His first words were “Can't say that I recognize either of you, though I'm told you've been here before.”

Indeed they had been, but they gave no thought to uttering a word.

He continued, “Mr. Mark Frazier, you are charged with violating Section 54B of the D.C. criminal code, the unauthorized practice of law. How do you wish to plead?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor.”

“And, Mr. Lucero, for the same charges?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor.”

“And there is a third defendant, a Ms. Zola Maal, also known as Zola Parker, which I assume is her professional name. Where is Ms. Maal?” He was staring at Mark, who shrugged as if he had no clue. Sarrano said, “Well, Your Honor, it seems as though she has left the country. Her family has been deported back to Africa; I'm told she might have gone there to assist them. I don't represent her.”

Judge Abbott said, “Very well, a strange case gets even stranger. Your cases will be referred to the grand jury for consideration. If indicted, you will be notified of the date for your arraignment. But I'm sure you know the drill. Any questions, Mr. Sarrano?”

“No, Your Honor.”

Mills Reedy had wedged herself into the picture. She said, “Your Honor, I would request that bail be set for these two defendants.”

Phil grunted in frustration, and Judge Abbott looked surprised. “Why?” he asked.

She said, “Well, evidently these defendants use different identities, and that could mean they are a flight risk. Posting a bond will ensure their return to court when directed.”

Abbott said, “Mr. Sarrano?”

“Not necessary, Your Honor. My clients were arrested last Friday and told to show up this morning at 10:00. They hired me and we arrived fifteen minutes early. Tell them when to be here and I'll have them here.”

Like hell you will, Todd thought. Take a good look, Abe buddy, because you'll never see me again.

A flight risk, Mark thought. How about a phantomlike disappearance from the face of the earth? If you think I'll voluntarily subject myself to a life in prison, then you're crazy.

Ms. Reedy said, “Their co-defendant has already skipped the country, Your Honor. They have assumed false identities.”

The judge said, “I really see no need for bail at this point. Mr. Sarrano, can your clients agree to remain in the District until their cases are presented to the grand jury?”

Phil looked at Mark, who shrugged and said, “Sure, but I need to go see my mother in Dover. I guess she can wait, though.”

Todd added, “And my grandmother is quite ill up in Baltimore, but I guess she can wait. Whatever the court wants.” The lying was so easy.

Sarrano said, “These guys are not going anywhere, Your Honor. Bail for them is a needless expense.”

Old Abe looked frustrated and said, “Agreed. I don't see the need for it.”

Ms. Reedy pressed on: “Well, Your Honor, could we at least make them surrender their passports?”

Mark laughed and said, “We don't have passports, Your Honor. We're just a couple of broke former law students.” His real passport was in a hip pocket, just itching to be used. In an hour, he would purchase a fake passport just in case.

His Honor raised a hand to silence him. “No bail. I'll see you two in a month or so.”

“Thanks, Judge,” Sarrano said.

As they backed away from the bench, Darrell Cromley walked through the bar holding some paperwork. Loudly, he said, “Sorry to interrupt things, Judge, but I need to serve process on these two. This is a copy of the lawsuit I've filed on behalf of my client Ramon Taper.”

Sarrano said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“I'm suing your clients,” Cromley said, enjoying the attention. Mark and Todd took copies of the summons and lawsuit as they retreated to the defense table. Judge Abbott seemed to be amused. From the front row, another gentleman stood and announced, “Say, Judge, I need to serve papers on them too. I represent Kerrbow Properties and these two skipped out on their leases back in January.” He was waving more paperwork. Sarrano stepped over and accepted it. Four rows behind the guy from Kerrbow, a man stood and said, “And, say, Judge, I hired that guy, Mark Upshaw, to handle a DUI for my son, paid him a thousand bucks in cash, and he skipped out. There's a warrant out for my son and I want my money back.”

Mark looked at the guy, who was suddenly familiar. In the center aisle, Ramon Taper staggered forth and said, at full volume, “These guys took my case and screwed it up, Judge. I think they should go to jail.”

A uniformed bailiff stepped to the bar to block Ramon. Judge Abbott rapped his gavel and said, “Order, order.”

Phil Sarrano looked at his clients and said, “Let's get out of here.” They scooted around the bench and disappeared through a side door.

FOUR MONTHS AFTER
buying fake driver's licenses and launching their ill-fated adventure into the practice of street law, Mark and Todd returned to the Bethesda workshop of their favorite forger to obtain fake passports. Another crime, no doubt, but the guy actually advertised fake passports online, along with dozens of others in the “documents trade.” He verbally guaranteed that his passports could fool any customs and immigration officer in the world. Todd almost asked him how he would make good on this promise. Were they expected to believe he would dash off to the airport and haggle with the guards? No. Mark and Todd knew that if they got caught, the guy would not answer the phone.

After posing for photographs, and signing the names Mark Upshaw and Todd Lane on the signature pages, they watched for an hour as he meticulously cut and pieced together the data and endorsement pages, then stamped them with an amazing collection of entries, clear proof that they had traveled extensively. He selected two well-used covers for regular passports, and even added security stickers to the backs of both. They paid him $1,000 in cash, and as they left he said, “Safe travels, boys.”

THE GRADUATION PARTY
was an impromptu celebration that materialized in a sports bar in Georgetown. Wilson Featherstone sent a text message invitation to Mark, and because he and Todd had nothing better to do on Friday night, they arrived late and joined half a dozen old law school pals for some serious drinking. Tomorrow, Foggy Bottom would go through the formality of a proper commencement service, though, as always, it would be sparsely attended. Only two of the gang planned to actually attend and receive their near-worthless degrees, and they were doing so only because their mothers insisted.

So they drank. They were fascinated by the adventures of Mark and Todd over the past four months, and the two regaled them with the escapades of Upshaw, Parker & Lane. The table roared with laughter as Mark and Todd tag teamed through stories involving Freddy Garcia, and Ramon Taper and his beautiful lawsuit that went sour on their watch, and their visits to the offices of Trusty Rusty, Jeffrey Corbett, and Edwin Mossberg, and poor Zola hanging around hospital cafeterias, and ducking process servers at The Rooster Bar, and being hounded by their loan counselors. There were no secrets any longer. They had become legends at Foggy Bottom, and the fact that they were now facing jail time, and laughing about it, only enriched their stories.

When quizzed about their plans, Mark and Todd said they were considering opening a branch of UPL in Baltimore and hustling the criminal courts there. Who needs a real license to practice? At no time, though, did they reveal their grand scheme.

Of the eight, six would sit for the bar exam in two months. Three had jobs, though two involved nonprofit work. Only one would be employed by a law firm, and that was contingent upon passing the bar. Every one of them had a mountain of debt, thanks to the great law school scam orchestrated by Hinds Rackley.

Though his presence was felt, Gordy was never mentioned.

T
odd won the coin flip and took a cab to Dulles late Saturday morning. He paid $740 for a round-trip ticket to Barbados on Delta. His fake passport worked with ease at both the Delta desk and the security checkpoints. He flew two hours to Miami, snoring most of the way. He knocked out his cobwebs in an airport lounge during the three-hour layover, and almost missed his flight south. He arrived in Bridgetown, the capital, at dark, and took a cab to a small hotel on a beach. He heard music, kicked off his shoes, rolled up his pants, and walked through the warm sand to a party at a resort next door. Within an hour, he was flirting with an attractive fiftyish woman from Houston whose husband had passed out in a nearby hammock. So far, Barbados was agreeable.

Mark boarded the train at Union Station, and left D.C. behind, forever. He arrived in New York at 5:00 p.m., took the subway to Brooklyn, and found their suite just as they had left it on Thursday.

Zola's Saturday was more eventful. Mid-morning, an important cop in a coat and tie arrived at the hotel with two uniformed officers at his side. He left them in the lobby and rode with her to her room on the fourth floor. With Fanta translating, Zola handed over a thick envelope filled with West African francs, the equivalent of $26,000 U.S. He counted the money slowly and seemed pleased with the transaction. From one coat pocket he withdrew her cards. From another he pulled out a thinner envelope and said, “Here is your money.”

“What money?” she asked, obviously surprised.

“The money from the hotel safe. About $6,000 U.S. The hotel has a record of it.”

Honor among thieves, she thought, but couldn't find any words. She took his envelope as he took hers and crammed it in a pocket. “I'll be back in an hour,” he said and left the room.

Exactly one hour later, a police van stopped in front of the hotel. Abdou and Bo crawled out of the back, free from handcuffs, and strolled into the lobby like a couple of tourists. They wept when they saw Zola and Fanta, and the whole family had a good cry. They retired to the café and feasted on eggs and muffins.

Idina Sanga found them there and snapped everyone into action. They hurriedly packed their bags and prepared to leave. Zola settled her account with the front desk as Idina called two taxis. They hustled out of the hotel, without once looking back, and drove away. Forty-five minutes later, they stopped in front of a cluster of modern high-rise buildings. Idina was working her phone and a clerk of some variety met them in the lobby of the tallest building. Their temporary apartment was on the seventh floor. It was sparsely furnished, but who cared? After four months in a detention center and a week in a Dakar jail, Abdou viewed the place as a castle. His family was together, free, and safe.

Idina rattled off instructions. The apartment was leased for ninety days. On Monday, she would begin the task of securing documentation. Their Senegalese citizenship would be restored in short order—after all they had been born there—and Zola would be naturalized as well. Based on the reports from her two law partners, she was in no hurry to return to the U.S.

FOR THE SECOND
morning in a row, Todd woke up with an aching head and parched mouth. He rallied somewhat with strong coffee by the pool, and by noon was ready to go shopping. He took a taxi to a new development on the northern edge of Bridgetown, a sprawling mess of prefab condos that was far more appealing on the website than on the ground. Websites. For no reason he could discern, he still glanced at the Foggy Bottom website when he was in a foul mood and cursed the smiling faces of the attractive and diverse students who were happily pursuing the challenge of law school. Who can trust a website?

At any rate, he met an agent who walked him through two apartments available for sale or lease at ruinous prices. He chose the smaller of the two, and, after haggling over the earnest money, signed a contract to purchase it, and handed over a Lucero & Frazier check for five grand, a check that would bounce all the way back to Brooklyn. With the contract in hand, he returned to his hotel, checked in with his partners, put on some shorts, and went to the pool, where he bought a frozen daiquiri at a tiki bar and began roasting in the sun.

LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON,
Barry Strayhan was summoned to the Fifth Avenue mansion of Hinds Rackley. They opened a bottle of wine and sat in the sun on a terrace with Central Park below them. Doug Broome and his team had indeed tracked down Mark and Todd and were still busy putting together the pieces. The news reports of Gordy's suicide led them to the Foggy Bottom Law School, where an investigator sat through the dismal commencement service the day before. With a list of graduates from the program, some easy phone work produced the names of Frazier and Lucero, a couple of third-year students who had been close to the deceased and who dropped out back in January. A fellow student even volunteered that they had been arrested for practicing law without a license. A brief story in yesterday's
Post
detailed their eventful appearance in court on Friday. Rackley wasn't the only person looking for them; seems they were leaving a trail of disgruntled clients and people who wanted to sue them. Their Facebook pages had been closed two months earlier, but a hacker hired by Broome managed to retrieve some photos. There was no doubt that Frazier and Lucero were the two boys posing as journalists in the meeting with Rackley and Strayhan five days earlier in Brooklyn.

Rackley looked at a series of photos and compared them with the mug shots from their fake D.C. driver's licenses. He tossed them on a table and asked, “So what's their game?”

Strayhan said, “Two and a half months ago Mark Frazier joined the class action in Miami as an aggrieved customer of Swift Bank. He opened an account with a branch in D.C. back in January.”

“Big deal. So he gets a few bucks in the settlement. There has to be more to the story.”

“Todd Lucero joined the class action in New York and their pal Zola Maal joined the one in D.C. Not sure what they were doing but maybe they just wanted to see how the racket worked.”

“There's more to it. They wouldn't go to so much trouble for such small settlements. What do we know about the Cohen-Cutler class?”

“The largest of the six. Two hundred and twenty thousand clients referred by dozens of smaller law firms. Most of the plaintiffs can be found online using one of the litigation tracking services, but not all. As you might guess, with that many, and with the settlement happening so fast, things are somewhat chaotic. Cohen-Cutler is not required to list the names of the referring firms. But Broome is still digging.”

“How can we get inside Cohen-Cutler?”

“We can't. It's confidential. But the FBI can certainly ask questions.”

“I don't want the FBI snooping around.”

“Understood. But there are ways to tip them off.”

“Figure out a way and do it fast. When does the money change hands?”

“Soon. This week, by agreement and court order.”

“I'm in a box here, Barry, and I don't like it. I want the settlement done, and quickly, so the bank can put this nightmare to bed. At the same time, I can't stand the idea of getting ripped off. You and I know that nobody can trust these class action lawyers, and with a million possible plaintiffs out there, it's nothing but a frenzy. There's gonna be fraud, and a lot of it.”

MONDAY MORNING, TODD
dressed in his best and took a cab to the Second Royal Bank of the Lesser Antilles on Center Street in the business district of Bridgetown. His 10:00 a.m. appointment was with a Mr. Rudolph Richard, a dapper old fellow whose specialty was welcoming foreign clients. Todd's spiel was that he and his partners back home had knocked a home run in the litigation wars, and, at the ripe age of twenty-seven, he was cashing in his chips and moving to the Caribbean. He was shutting down his law firm and would spend the next few years running his new hedge fund, York & Orange Traders, from the side of a pool with a view of the ocean. He presented his fake passport, his contract for the condo, a place he would never see again, and a rather gushing letter of recommendation from the Citibank account manager in Brooklyn. Mr. Richard wanted $10,000 to properly open a bank account, but Todd would have none of it. The big money was a week or two away, he explained in legalese that Mr. Richard had a difficult time following, and the best he could do was $2,000 in U.S. cash. If that wasn't enough, he would simply walk down the street, where there were at least a hundred other banks looking for business. After an hour of Todd's smiling, lying, and cajoling, the account was opened.

He left the bank and found an empty sidewalk café where he texted his partners with the delightful news that they were now in business in Barbados.

Back home, Mark was hammering away at Jenny Valdez and Cohen-Cutler. The Swift settlement had been approved at all levels, so where was the damned money? She wasn't sure, these things take time, she explained, but they were waiting on the wire transfer. It did not arrive on Monday. Mark roamed the streets of downtown Brooklyn, where the skies were overcast and gloomy, and tried not to think of his partner lying in the sun and pickling his liver. To make matters worse, every hour or so Todd zipped along another photo of another hot babe in a string bikini.

LATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON,
two FBI agents entered the offices of Cohen-Cutler in downtown Miami and were quickly led to the office of Ian Mayweather, the firm's managing partner. Special Agent Wynne did most of the talking, and the meeting was tense from the opening bell. The Feds wanted information that was confidential and not to be shared.

“How many law firms referred clients to your class?” Wynne asked.

“Several dozen and that's all I'm saying,” Mayweather replied, somewhat abruptly.

“We are requesting a list of these firms.”

“Great. Show me a court order and we'll comply. You're asking for confidential information, gentlemen, and absent an order from a court we cannot hand it over.”

“Well, we suspect there may be some fraud involved with your class.”

“That wouldn't surprise me. Fraud is not that unusual in these massive settlements, as you know. We've seen it before and we do our best to prevent it. But we're dealing with over 200,000 individual plaintiffs and dozens of law firms. We cannot check everything.”

“When will you pay out the money?”

“Our disbursement staff is working around the clock right now. The first tranche arrived from Swift this afternoon. We will start disbursing first thing in the morning. As you might guess, with so much money involved our phones are quite busy. We are instructed by the court to disburse as quickly as possible.”

“Can you delay this for a day or two?” Wynne asked.

“No,” Mayweather answered angrily. “We are under a court order to disburse as soon as possible. From what I gather, gentlemen, the FBI is in the early stage of an investigation, so you are, basically, just fishing right now. You show me a court order and this firm will do as instructed.”

Never stand between a mass tort lawyer and his money from a class action settlement. The FBI knew that Cohen-Cutler's estimated haul from the Swift litigation was expected to be something close to $80 million.

Wynne stood and said, “Okay, we'll be back with a court order.” He and his partner left the office without another word.