Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (11 page)

DALIA: What if I meet with him and nothing gets done and the key’s floating around, and then I fucking get robbed? … Why does he need a key to my fucking house? I thought you said this shit wasn’t going to get personal … I don’t like talking all this shit over the phone. It’s already fucked up.

In the prosecutor’s lexicon, we call this “consciousness of guilt.” It’s the reason she took her jewelry with her to the gym the next morning. She knew what she was doing, and she was concerned with the consequences. Mohamed tries to look on the bright side.

MOHAMED: Worst comes to worst, he’ll have to give you back the $1,200 if he won’t accept the thousand down payment.

DALIA: Okay. Or just give me the fucking shit they were going to use. I fucking paid for it, didn’t I? I’m just going to have to get my own man, call somebody I know or whatever.

Around five, Dalia met Mohamed at a Chili’s beforehand to go over strategy, although since the police department’s backup Unitel recording
device wasn’t working properly, no record exists of their conversation. The hit man calls along the way and they agree to meet at a CVS near her house, which is virtually right across the street from Chili’s. He’ll be driving a red Chrysler Sebring convertible. Mohamed—introduced as her cousin “Mike”—gets on the phone briefly to give him directions, after which the hit man asks to speak to Dalia again.

“I know you got somebody with you,” the hit man tells her. “He don’t got to be in my car, right? This is just between you and I.” (Since Mohamed, aka “Mike,” had already supposedly given him $1,200 and a photo of the victim, the hit man should have recognized him—if not over the phone, then certainly at their upcoming meeting—a slipup that might have tipped Dalia off if she had realized.)

At 5:55, they pulled into the CVS parking lot, a location chosen for its ability to conceal multiple surveillance teams. Mohamed stayed in the Tahoe while Dalia walked to the Sebring in a light-blue tight-fitting sun-dress. Once again, the vehicle was wired for sound and video.

“We’re staying in here, right?” she asks as she climbs in the passenger side. He says yeah.

The first thing he says to her is, “Damn, you look good.” Dalia kind of rolls her eyes but smiles, flattered. Right off the bat, she’s got a home field advantage.

The hit man is mostly no-nonsense and straight to the point. He is Haitian with tight cornrows, a two- or three-day growth of beard, and dark wraparound sunglasses that give him a slightly alien quality and no doubt make it hard to read his intentions. A Wyclef Jean comparison would not be out of line. He gets right to it. He tells her that after they talk today, his burner phone is going in the garbage and she won’t have any way of calling it off.

HIT MAN: You sure you want to kill this dude?

DALIA: Do we really have to … it’s just I’d rather be less, you know …

She laughs, unable to find the words to discuss not saying certain words. Accordingly, they talk in abstractions. She raises the issue of the money, which she didn’t bring with her.

DALIA: And it’s not like … I have a stash under my pillow.

Surprisingly, for someone who allegedly kills people for a living, he is sympathetic to her plight, despite working for the insider’s “lowball” price of $6,000. A conscientious small businessman, he even gives her a cost breakdown of her homicide dollar.

HIT MAN: You know, whatever I get, from whatever money I get from you, most of it goes into planning and getting people the good stuff … Twelve hundred went to buying my heat—my gun—okay? A couple hundred for other people to do things … I had to get this car. I gotta get rid of this car … this phone … There’s a lot more I have to do.

He tells her she can pay him on the back end if she’ll bump the price by a thousand, and she assures him she’s good for it. They settle on Wednesday morning, and he volunteers that he’ll make it look like a robbery gone bad, since the newspapers have reported a recent crime spree in her area.

HIT MAN: I’m gonna think he’s at work, but he’s not at work, you know? He gets two to the head, and that’s it.

That wasn’t abstract.

He asks about Mohamed, who’s been waiting in the car, whom she has identified as her cousin, and if she trusts him.

HIT MAN: You know, I’m just saying for you, understand, ’cause I don’t know how well you handle pressure …

DALIA: I’m a lot tougher than what I look.

HIT MAN: All right.

DALIA: I know you’re thinking … You’re, like, “Oh, what a cute little girl,” whatever, you know? But I’m not.

She laughs easily, and bats her eyes frequently for effect.

HIT MAN: Yeah. That you are. You’re beautiful.

She tells him Mike will be going to the bank early on Wednesday in Boca Raton, and they discuss possible scenarios and exit strategies. Only this time in the telling, the hit man would get to keep the $10,000, not Mohamed.

HIT MAN: It’s like taking candy from a baby.

(Mike claimed the withdrawal was to have been for the purchase of marketing data. Since he was taken into protective custody at 6 a.m., the meeting did not take place.)

Dalia offers to go scout the location with him right then. She also drops the fact that Mike has a Porsche sitting in the garage, if that serves as added enticement. He lays out some possible scenarios, all of which seem amenable to her.

HIT MAN: You’re the client. I’m not gonna, you know, do anything without your approval, you understand?

At one point, Mohamed comes to the driver’s side window to make sure everything is okay, but the hit man tells him they’re fine. He gives Dalia one last out, just to make sure.

HIT MAN: Between now and when it’s done, you know, you’re not gonna have an option to change your mind. Even if you change your mind, we’re talking—

DALIA: There’s no changing, no. I’m determined already.

HIT MAN: You definitely want to do this?

DALIA: I’m positive—like, 5,000 percent sure.

HIT MAN: Okay.

The next day, Tuesday, the hit man called Dalia and told her, “The bank thing’s not going to work. Be out by six.” Boca Raton would mean a change of jurisdiction, meaning the Boynton Beach Police Department would have to work in conjunction with the Sheriff’s Office. There was neither the time nor the appetite to try to mount an operation of that magnitude.

After Dalia was arrested, but long before his name became connected with hers, Mohamed received a handful of mysterious calls, all between three and fifteen seconds in duration: On the first one, a male voice said, “You’re going down, too.” The second and third, there was just giggling and bar sounds in the background.

“I wasn’t paying attention to that stuff,” he says. “I had a lot more serious stuff to deal with.”

After Dalia had been arrested, Detective Moreno took another statement from Mohamed on August 10. As almost an afterthought, Mohamed mentioned to police that this wasn’t the first time Dalia had tried to kill her husband. According to her, she had tried to poison him just the week before. After doing research online, while Mike was still laid up on the couch following his liposuction surgery, she stopped by Starbucks and got him an iced Chai tea, then poured half of it out and filled it with a colorless, odorless brand of antifreeze, hoping he was so zonked on painkillers that he wouldn’t notice. He took a big mouthful but didn’t swallow it, claiming it tasted like gasoline, and immediately spit it out. Mohammed said he assumed she was kidding until the incident with the gun. When Detective Moreno asked Mike about it, he confirmed the incident, saying he thought something had happened with the concentrate and it had all collected at the bottom, where he’d positioned the straw. But for the next ten days he’d suffered diarrhea and stomach cramps, and the inside of his mouth was lined with ulcers. He even asked the doctor who was supervising his lipo if he could have accidentally given him something. His doctor told him he was stupid and that this was something else altogether.

“The money was slowly disappearing,” observes Mohamed. “Now that I put one and one together, maybe because he met her through an escort agency. It’s kind of weird to marry an escort.”

W
ith Dalia forcibly detained behind the prison walls of her mother’s luxury home and backyard pool, just down the road from the town-house she still co-owned with her victim-husband, it was time to try to put this Byzantine criminal saga into some kind of coherent order.

Every witness or person of interest—from the victim to the reluctant accomplice to the arresting officers—recounted what seemed like a convincing version of the events. But when you overlaid them one atop the other, the cumulative pattern was so much more complex than any one depiction could suggest. Like a lot of full-time criminals, Dalia lavished far more effort and ingenuity on the easy life than she ever would have on a career. Meanwhile, a media wildfire was raging out of control just beyond the battlements, with the release of the crime scene video on the Internet and round-the-clock cable news, and the surveillance videos, bombshell revelations, lurid text messages, and the rest of it ready to set off new shock waves as soon as the cable doyennes and broadcast mandarins knew what I did. Dalia’s tour de force performance as the grieving widow was one minute and nineteen seconds of uncut digital adrenaline ready-made for a reality-TV audience raised on the likes of
American Idol
and
The Apprentice
and
Survivor
, adept at spotting bad actors (in both intention and ability) and second-guessing the professionals—a potential jury pool of millions.

Dalia’s $3,000 Prada purse contained the keys to a Bank of America safe-deposit box her husband knew nothing about, so that seemed like an excellent place to start, and Detective Anderson obtained a search warrant. At this stage of an investigation, I like to work closely with the investigators on the case—in this instance, lead Detectives Moreno and Anderson and Detective Asim “Ace” Brown (who first fielded the Mohamed call, and concentrated on the elaborate financial transactions)—to obtain evidence. I was on hand to sign subpoenas, review search warrants, or just brainstorm on the evidence we might need to slam the door on any possible defense strategy. (A subpoena is something that a prosecutor signs and issues—to bring a witness to court, say, or obtain certain documents. Some documents can only be obtained via search warrant, which is issued by a judge. In a search warrant, the officer or detective has to set forth “probable cause” as to why they believe that evidence of a crime exists at the place of the proposed search.)

The safe-deposit box contained a number of items that corroborated Mike’s version of events, especially the money trail between Dalia, Mike, his lawyer, Mohamed, and Erik Tal. Dalia had saved the March statement from a separate checking account she maintained at her mother’s address, which allowed us to obtain a search warrant for her mother’s house, a potential treasure trove of additional evidence. At about the same time, detectives got a call from a storage facility where Dalia had rented a unit in her name, on which she had stopped making payments. Mike remembered seeing a duffel bag there once when the couple went to retrieve their bicycles, and the owner considered whatever was left abandoned property. On the way to execute the search warrant on Randa’s residence, the officers stopped by the storage facility to see what kind of bounty they might find, only to discover they had just missed Randa, who had ransomed the duffel bag for her daughter. When they arrived at Randa’s house, Dalia was in the process of surveying its contents, which included many items related to her escort business: photographs, print ads, photo books, client lists, the dates and times of the “appointments,” and other incriminating records, all of which they put into evidence and made copies of for me.

We also got search warrants for Dalia’s computers and their content (we were never able to find her laptop), text messages, and e-mails, and subpoenas for her phone records and bank records—trying to cast as wide a net as possible for anything that might track her movements through time. Although the evidence in this trial was particularly compelling—the accused as much as confessed on camera before she was even arrested—it wasn’t quite so easy to identify why. She had an enviable life, lots of nice possessions, a husband who worshipped her, and a clearly marked escape route from a sordid past she presumably would want to leave behind—one her husband was fully aware of and neither resented nor blamed her for. It was backward from most of the cases I see: we had all the evidence we needed; we just had to prove a motive. Not a whodunit, but why. And although the State didn’t technically have to prove a motive in a case like this, I knew from experience that if I was trying to figure out why, a jury would have the same question. This was why we tried to be so thorough in mapping out Dalia’s daily life and social connections. This process continued right up to the first day of the trial.

Mike’s legal troubles and subsequent incarceration were well documented, but I found two items of interest on Dalia. One was a missing persons report related to the December 1999 incident where she ran away to New York and was taken off the plane at JFK by local authorities. It wouldn’t be the last time she tried to influence the people around her through extreme behavior. The second item was a police report dated June 3, 2002, when Dalia was nineteen. According to the report, a Sergeant DeLong from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office was dispatched to assist a Greenacres police officer in interviewing a possible victim of credit card fraud. The man claimed to have gone to Breanne’s Photography Club (he spells it three different ways), a retail establishment operating in a strip mall in Lake Worth, just north of Boynton Beach. There he was greeted by a dark-skinned woman named Carmen who “told him that she was going to have him, and that he could not look at any other girls or he will have to leave and never come back.” After being made to wait for half an hour, he had sex with “Carmen,” claiming at one point she taunted him with a
rubber condom filled with coins “to make [it] appear very thick,” which she brandished “between her ‘pussy’ and ‘my pole.’” He was eventually charged $230 against his will. Although he claimed to have had sex there between ten and twenty times, she refused to contact the manager, and he was forced to leave.

When DeLong and the second officer went to investigate, they discovered three women on premises, and “Dalia Mohammed seem[s] to be in charge.” Dalia described the setup as follows: “Customers come in and use the cameras provided by Brianne’s Photo Company to do fantasy photo shoots in these bedrooms on the premises.” With her permission, DeLong completed a quick tour of the three bedrooms, at least one of which featured a black light. When he noted that the cameras contained no film, had dust all over them, and did not appear to be in working order, and that there was no evidence of a darkroom or even any photographs on the walls (outside of images from magazines), he questioned Dalia about her earlier statement regarding the cameras and she demonstrated her signature ability to think on her feet, claiming (according to DeLong), “That was one of the fantas[ies] for the customer to use, it’s some kind of stage prop while they were acting out their fantasies.” He also reports a thirty-gallon garbage can in back “filled to over flowing” with “various pieces of stained ladies’ lingerie and other incidental property.” No arrests were made, since they saw no evidence of crimes being committed.

We turned Dalia’s computer over to a forensic expert at the Sheriff’s Office, where we hoped to find evidence of the computer search Mohamed remembered for a lethal, undetectable kind of antifreeze. That effort proved inconclusive, but I did print out Dalia’s entire search history—all 3,000 pages of it. A great deal of it consisted of quasi-legal outcall sites like Eros. com (considered the premiere Internet escort site); SugarDaddyForMe. com, which seeks to connect “Sugar Daddies” and “Sugar Babies” for a subscription fee; and the Adult Services Section on Craigslist, which was discontinued in September 2010 following a public furor over illegal ads and child sex trafficking. Dalia also maintained her own escort site with the charming moniker Eyesnatch.com, where she apparently brokered “dates” for other women, and some of her Craigslist postings were marketing
notices targeting prospective escorts, making her a madam: “One week free advertisement on
www.eyesnatch.com
: Increase your clientele and business. Brand-new upscale website targeting high-end business. Your ad goes up within minutes. What do you have to loose [sic]?”

By connecting photos (she rarely posted photos of herself, even on outcalls she answered herself, like the one where she met Mike) and contact e-mails (she often posted real estate ads on Craigslist using the same Hotmail address), and filing subpoenas with the various sites, I was able to document Dalia’s career in freelance prostitution. Beginning in 2005 up through September 2008, the ads were all specific to Orange County in Southern California: “Colombian college girl looking to steam things up. Total GFE [Girlfriend Experience, shorthand for “will do anything,” although that doesn’t sound like any girlfriend I’ve ever heard of]. Only here for two days. Guaranteed to blow your mind.” Or “CUM check out this hot Colombian beauty. Looking for some weekend fun. Only in town for a few days. Looking to satisfy your craving.”

By late September, she was posting similar Craigslist ads with the same contact info in Boca Raton, Florida, confirming that she was running girls on the side: “Hot blonde Colombian bombshell ready to CUM to you. W4M. Age: 22. Hi boys! I’m a former swimsuit model all the way from Colombia. Ready to have some fun with you and spice up your life. For some hot, dirty fun—give me a call!” This is the story Mike told in his early interviews. (Craigslist turned over every ad she had submitted, some of which they refused to post due to content.)

In the material recovered from her duffel bag, there was a brown leather notebook with appointments listed in Dalia’s girlish handwriting (replete with i’s dotted with hearts), including addresses, phone numbers, and directions for her wide array of clients. Over time, I contacted a lot of these men. Most wouldn’t give me any information at all, but a couple of them took me at my word that I wasn’t pursuing a prostitution case and they weren’t in any kind of trouble. I was able to confirm with one of them that he had an appointment booked for the day Dalia was arrested (i.e., the day her husband was to have been executed), but he couldn’t remember whether he’d been stood up or not. Her records contained a number of clients in
the Washington, D.C., area. The Florida ads continued to run as late as June 2009.

In our early conversations, Michael Salnick, Dalia’s attorney, made several references to her as a “battered woman” who was forced to do what she did as a matter of self-preservation—a reference to Battered Spouse Syndrome, where women have suffered such trauma and abuse over time that their only perceived escape is to murder their spouse. This was a likely defense for him to pursue, and one that I found particularly galling, given the nature and extent of Dalia’s crimes. So I set about to pick it apart. For example, in many instances of domestic violence, the perpetrator isolates the victim from friends and family. But here, Mike made a point to include her family in their activities. Dalia (allegedly) had her own job and income as a real estate broker, and Mike never sought to control the couple’s finances—all red flags. Moreover, if Salnick pursued this line of defense, then he opened the door to whatever proof I had of Dalia’s financial independence, including running an escort business before she met Mike and while they were married—an enterprise he accepted, if not exactly encouraged. I made certain to mention my recent windfall from Dalia’s private records, and continued to leak this material to him up until the trial—a flanking maneuver that effectively limited his ability to successfully position his client, and may have led him to the defense strategy he ultimately pursued.

Also in California, during the period before Dalia returned to Florida permanently, her Craigslist ads are specific to the town of Santa Ana, about forty miles southeast of Los Angeles, and they all read similarly to this one: “Hottest girls! Hot oil massages by beautiful, exotic therapists. Here to meat [
sic
!] your needs and desires. You won’t be disappointed. Touch us soon.” The ads included a street address and the helpful tip “Behind Carl’s Jr.” (later changed to “Behind Midas”—perhaps trading on his golden touch).

Dalia had two phones—a Sprint phone and a MetroPCS phone, commonly referred to as a burner phone, since the company requires neither a contract nor proof of identity, and calls on such phones cannot be easily traced. Although her MetroPCS account was not in her name, presenting a challenge as to how to enter its contents into evidence, we did discover it in her car, and many of the escort listings led directly back to that
number. Mike understood that Dalia’s white MetroPCS phone was her escort phone and believed she used it exclusively for business. It explained why she would get texts at inopportune moments and have to answer them, why she received mysterious phone calls at all hours, and why she had to rush out at the drop of a hat. It was the perfect alibi for whatever business Dalia dreamed up, even when that business included getting rid of Mike. We spent hundreds of hours reconstructing her phone traffic and its intricate web of interconnections. In this case, I employed a technique I had used two or three times before, which I named the Phone Game. Such diagrams inevitably spiderweb out into hundreds of dead ends, numbers I don’t recognize and have no information on without further subpoenas. So a young lawyer in my office named Lindsey Marcus, who worked with me exclusively on this case and was my third chair—the third lawyer in a trial, who sits at counsel’s table in court—spent the three months beforehand doing scut work, including cold-calling numbers that came up at key intersections on our charts. Half the time she thought I was crazy, but my feeling is you never know until you try, and it dislodged all kinds of odd-shaped information that later helped complete the pattern. Even a voice mail greeting could confirm a name, which often gave us a face and an address once we searched online.