Death, Taxes, and Hot Pink Leg Warmers (22 page)

Several of the homeowners who’d been bamboozled by the defendants also sat in the gallery. From the looks on their faces, they’d just as soon lynch the defendants as give them due process.

After we took our seats I glanced over at the jurors. The Indian woman wore a dark blue sari today and was already at work on a fresh bag of jelly beans. The hipster’s sex was still indeterminate, while the oil change tech was as fidgety as he’d been the day before. Clip-On Tie and the knitter seemed cozy, sitting next to each other in the jury box, each of them leaning slightly toward the other. Hmm. Without television or the Internet, maybe the two had turned to each other for entertainment last night.

The Asian man’s face was blotchy, his eyes puffy behind his glasses. Looked like the hotel had both down bedding and nonresponsive management.

A-choo-choo-choo! A-choo-choo-choo!

The man was at it again. It was a wonder he hadn’t popped a blood vessel.

He pointed at the knitter’s yarn. “Is that wool? I’m allergic to sheep.”

“No.” Her eyes narrowed as she continued to knit. “It’s cashmere. It comes from a goat.”

The man threw his head back again.
A-choo-choo-choo! A-choo-choo-choo!

Trumbull waved her gavel at the two jurors. “Either you’re going to have to put that yarn away or he’s going to have to move.”

The knitter continued to knit, drawing a line in the sand. She moved her eyes to indicate the back row. The Asian man swapped seats with the hipster.

Ross entered the courtroom with an expandable file tucked under each arm. Ackerman followed, rolling a dolly on which four bankers’ boxes had been stacked and secured with yellow bungee cord. Documents always played a part in tax cases, but the mortgage-fraud charges in this case made it particularly paper intensive. The boxes contained the real estate sales contracts, construction contracts, mortgage-loan documents, bank statements, and tax returns for both the defendants and Game Set Match. The mere cost of copying all of the documents had set the federal government back over twelve hundred dollars. Ross had shown me and Eddie the bill when we’d met for our strategy session.

The defendants and their attorneys did their best to feign nonchalance, not looking our way as Eddie and I unloaded the dolly.

I dropped one of the boxes to the floor with a
fwump.
“Oops. That’s a heavy sucker.”

Okay, so I’d dropped the box on purpose. But, hell, I was miffed these idiots were putting us through this charade. We knew they were guilty, and they knew they were guilty. The voluminous documents in the boxes would prove, without a doubt, that these jerks had defrauded banks and homeowners. They were wasting the taxpayers’ money and our precious time, not to mention taking up the court’s and jurors’ time, too.

Eddie and I arranged the boxes on the table where we’d have quick access to the paperwork. As the financial gurus on the case, we were intimately familiar with the documentation and would be responsible for managing it for the prosecutor.

We stood as Judge Trumbull entered the room and ascended to her bench. “Everyone ready to rock and roll?”

Eddie pushed my hand down when I instinctively raised devil’s horns.

Ross rose to a stand beside me. “The prosecution is ready, Your Honor.”

The defense attorneys announced likewise, and the judge instructed them to begin opening arguments.

Ross’s opening statement was a smooth, well-crafted, and persuasive soliloquy. The statements offered by the defense attorneys were anything but. Not knowing which way the trial would go, they hedged their bets, arguing both that nothing illegal whatsoever had taken place or, in the alternative, that if anything illegal had happened his or her particular client was not to blame. No wonder the jury bore skeptical expressions when they concluded. The Asian man offered another
a-choo-choo-choo.
Seemed he was also allergic to bullshit.

After opening arguments, Ross called Ackerman as his first witness and the agent made his way to the stand.

The hot-flashing bailiff turned the AC down another degree or two, and I found myself longing for my leg warmers. She stepped up to the witness stand and held out a Bible. “Steven Ackerman, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

Watching the sari-sporting juror pop a pink jelly bean into her mouth, I wondered how the oath was phrased in India where the primary religion was Hindu. Was it “so help you gods”?

Ackerman affirmed his oath, the bailiff stepped away, and the trial testimony began.

At Ross’s direction, the agent noted the FBI had launched its case against the defendants after being contacted by the bankruptcy trustee and several homeowners who’d been deceived. He testified regarding the magnitude of mortgage fraud, what it cost in terms of dollars and homes and lives turned upside down. Ackerman also detailed the specifics about GSM’s activities, how they operated their nefarious schemes.

While Ross asked the questions, Eddie and I managed the four boxes of paperwork, locating the relevant documentation and handing it to Ross at the proper time to be admitted into evidence.

With two decades’ experience under his belt, Ackerman was a fantastic witness who clearly knew his stuff. None of the defense attorneys bothered to cross-examine the guy.

Ross spent the rest of the morning questioning the homeowners who’d lost their houses to the Tennis Racketeers. While the Nguyens did a great job on the stand, the most heartbreaking testimony came from Marisol Ortiz.

The small, sixtyish woman showed photographs of her former residence, of the improvements her now-deceased husband had made over the course of two decades that turned the tiny house into their beloved home.

“My husband built the deck himself,” Marisol said, obviously proud of his craftsmanship. “Took him three full months.” And what a beautiful deck it was, with stained wood, a built-in grill, and steps that led down into the backyard.

Her breath hitched, her testimony dredging up feelings she’d tried hard to put behind her. “After my husband passed away suddenly, I began to struggle financially. Even though I picked the least expensive casket for him, his funeral still cost six thousand dollars. Between his medical bills and the burial, all of our savings was spent.”

She’d used up her paid vacation time to be with her husband in the final days of his bout with pancreatic cancer. Though her employer allowed her to take additional unpaid time off, she’d lost two full weeks of income, a significant sum for a person living paycheck to paycheck.

“I got behind on my mortgage. When I saw GSM’s ad in the newspaper, I thought I’d found a solution to my problems.” Instead, her problems only increased once she became involved with GSM.

She testified that she’d spoken with Darren Williams on the phone and relied on his representation that she’d only be signing over her deed temporarily, until she got back on her financial feet. Of course she couldn’t afford an attorney to look over the paperwork before she signed it. Hidden among the seventy-nine pages of legalese and gobbledygook was a clause that allowed GSM to terminate the buyback rights and evict the residents if they failed to comply with any of the terms, including the one requiring up-front reimbursement for GSM’s new insurance policy on the house.

Marisol ended up in tears on the stand, gulping for air as she testified how the con artists had stolen her home and every cent of equity she and her husband had worked years to build. I handed Ross the mortgage-loan statements that detailed the eighty-three grand in equity Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz had accumulated, along with documentation showing that GSM had paid less than four thousand dollars in back mortgage payments and insurance in exchange for the equity they’d obtained. I could hardly wait to point out in my testimony that the Racketeers had made a quick 2,000 percent return on their investment. No legitimate deal provided that kind of profit.

As she listened, the knitter’s movements grew more rapid and emphatic, her needles clicking and clacking like a train rushing down the tracks toward the defendants.
Choo-choo!
Clip-On shook his head openly. The dot on the forehead of the Indian brick house had disappeared into her furious forehead furrow. Even the hipster had pushed aside his or her bangs and glared at the defendants with one exposed eye.

The Tennis Racketeers had played their last game.

Neener-neener.

An hour later, I realized I may have prematurely neenered. The defense attorneys earned their fees and then some, expressing remorse for Marisol’s predicament in order to ingratiate themselves with the jurors, but craftily extracting information from her that painted an entirely different picture than the one Ross elicited. In response to the lawyers’ careful questioning, Marisol admitted she’d been advised by Williams to hire her own attorney to look over the contract but had not done so, despite her confusion about the contract’s terms. Of course, the Tennis Racketeers knew none of their “clients” could afford an attorney. The defense attorneys also elicited the fact that the value of Marisol’s house had declined in recent years and that the structure suffered a pervasive mold problem she couldn’t afford to treat.

By the end of her testimony, Marisol no longer seemed so much an innocent victim as a woman who’d foolishly failed to take reasonable steps to protect her own interests and who’d been lucky to unload her dilapidated shack on the defendants. The jurors who’d appeared sympathetic only moments before now seemed to be on the fence.

When Marisol Ortiz wrapped up her testimony, Trumbull dismissed court for a fifteen-minute break. The defense attorneys ushered their clients from the courtroom with confident smiles, the jackal casting us a smirk.

chapter twenty-six

Seeing Green

I took advantage of the break to sprint over to the IRS building and retrieve my leg warmers. It was a good thing I did. When court resumed the bailiff waltzed over to the thermostat and turned it down another five degrees.
Brrr.
The knitter had a half-finished shawl draped around her shoulders while she continued to work on the wrap.

Ross called Curtis Carter to the stand. After Ross ran through the usual preliminaries, Ross asked whether Carter held a Realtor’s license with the state.

“Not currently.” Carter slumped a little in the seat, his complexion turning the color of a lima bean.

“You surrendered it when a disciplinary action was brought against you by the Texas Real Estate Commission, isn’t that right?”

Carter hesitated a moment before responding. “The market had gone downhill and it seemed like a good time to get out of the business.”

Yeah, right. He’d stayed in the business long after the bubble had burst and resigned only in lieu of facing a license-revocation hearing. But Carter would never admit that, so Ross didn’t bother pursuing the matter further other than providing documentation to show that Carter surrendered his license three days after he’d been served with notice of the disciplinary action. The jury would put two and two together.

The door to the courtroom opened and three men in business suits slipped inside. When Carter spotted them, his eyes widened in panic.

Eddie and I didn’t recognize the men and looked to Ackerman for an explanation. He scribbled “straw buyers” on the legal pad in front of us. Aha. That explained why Carter had slumped even lower in his seat and turned a shade of green akin to split-pea soup.

Ross continued his questions, forcing Carter to admit he’d been the listing agent on all of the houses GSM had foreclosed on, as well as those they’d flipped. I handed Ross the spreadsheet summarizing the hundreds of thousands in real estate commissions Carter had earned on the transactions. After detailing the information, Ross offered my spreadsheet into evidence.

Ross launched into a series of questions regarding the multiple purchases Carter had made via his mother’s power of attorney. “You also recruited men from the country club to serve as straw buyers, isn’t that true, Mr. Carter?”

Slump.
The guy was practically in a fetal position now. His complexion had turned a sickly gray-green, like leftover guacamole. “I … offered them a good investment opportunity.”

That was an understatement. Their returns had averaged 30 percent over a mere four-month period.

Ross glanced at the jury to ensure he had their attention before turning back to the witness. “You told the buyers you had another person lined up to take the house off their hands at a good markup, didn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so, Mr. Carter, or you
know
so?”

“The house…” The guy seemed to gasp for air. Had he begun to hyperventilate? “The house was…” Carter made an odd croaking sound and his eyes rolled back into his head. He crumpled in his seat, falling over and—
smack!
—banging the side of his head on the wooden rail before falling to the floor.

Carter’s wife shrieked and ran from the gallery to his side, Needham on her heels.

The bailiff pulled a walkie-talkie from her belt and summoned medical attention.

Plimpton jumped on her cell phone and instructed her secretary to schedule her a massage for two o’clock. “My afternoon just opened up.”

*   *   *

Ross, Ackerman, Eddie, and I grabbed a late lunch at a downtown deli on the way back to the office. We slid into a booth with our plastic trays and dug in.

“What happens now?” I asked Ross. “Do we have to wait until Carter recovers to finish the trial?”

“It depends,” Ross said. “If he’ll only be out a day or two, Trumbull will probably postpone the trial until he recovers. If it looks like his situation is more serious, she may sever the case against him for a later date and try only the three other defendants now.”

Eddie stabbed his fork into his potato salad. “I hope he rallies. I’ve got a pile of other cases back at the office that need attention.”

Ackerman was less kind. “I hope he croaks. He’s insured for half a mil we could pay to the homeowners.”