Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (12 page)

When we analyzed the data, we discovered that repeatedly at key junctures, Dalia called three people: Mike, Mohammed, and someone named Michael Stanley (her third Mike, given Mohamed’s preferred nickname). Stanley is one of those we cold-called and confirmed through a voice mail message. When I asked Mike Dippolito who Michael Stanley was, he told me he was Dalia’s ex-boyfriend whom she had lived with in New York and later in California during the three years prior to Mike and Dalia’s marriage. Except that his number came up repeatedly in the weeks prior to the arranged murder. We also found hundreds of texts during that same period, many of an extremely graphic nature. We did a phone dump off both of Dalia’s phones, pulling all the numbers, contacts, photos, and texts, and by comparing dates and usage rates, we could tell that a lot of information had been deleted from Dalia’s burner phone. But once we subpoenaed Stanley’s records, a more complete picture began to emerge.

In Florida, the rules of criminal procedure require that the prosecuting attorney provide the defendant with a list of all of the witnesses that have information relevant to the crime charged and, most importantly, any person that we intend to call at trial to prove our case. We are also required to list and make available to the defense any evidence that we have in our possession that we intend to use at trial to prove the crime charged. Once the defendant is in receipt of that information, he or she is obligated to provide the State with a comparable witness list and evidence. The rules also allow the defendant, through his or her attorney, the opportunity to depose any witness that the State intends to have testify at trial. This took up much of the year before the trial date, which was eventually set for April 25, 2011.

Pursuant to the rules of discovery, I received a list of prospective witnesses from Defense Attorney Salnick that included the name of Michael Stanley. Although he didn’t have to, Salnick also turned over the transcript of a fifteen-page interview an investigator had conducted with Stanley on May 17, 2010, in White Plains, New York. The interview was interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that in it, Stanley went out of his way to provide tortuous, implausible explanations of circumstances no one would think to challenge him on. According to him, he had not had sexual relations with Dalia since August 2008. The apparent sexually explicit texting between them was just a case of mistaken identity with Dalia’s husband or his anonymous consorts, except when it was some twisted sexual role-playing game her husband expected them both to participate in—using the exact same texts I had turned over to Salnick in discovery. Mike Dippolito’s history as Stanley recounted it was coincidentally the same one Dalia had portrayed to the police, with Dalia perpetually the victim of whatever mad whim or demented fantasy had taken hold of her husband. Any misimpression of a murder-for-hire plot was merely some misguided reality TV stunt Mike had forced on those around him (a conspiracy that involved everyone connected to it except Dalia, including the Boynton Beach Police Department). And if he, Michael Stanley, were to have reported this barbarism to a small army of civic authorities, often anonymously, using ethically questionable technology, well, it was merely in the performance of his civic duty.

He seemed like someone who had shot an arrow into the air and managed to split the bull’s-eye on his own chest. I couldn’t wait to get him on the stand and under oath.

This was also the first glimpse I had of something either so ingenious or so demented that it could only be a trial balloon for some part of the defense strategy—a meta-theory that would seek to transform incontrovertible evidence into conceptual performance, and turn the facts of the case inside out.

It was important for me to be very prepared for Michael Stanley’s deposition; to let him know from the beginning that I was running the show and that I had his number. So I spent countless hours learning absolutely everything I could about him. I had obtained a search warrant for his e-mails, and I reviewed them—following up on any information. I had e-mail correspondence between Dalia and Stanley dating back to 2006— including pictures. We contacted his ex-wife and caught her by surprise. She hadn’t heard about Dalia’s arrest and was more than happy to talk to us about their relationship. I followed up on every detail in their text messages, sent subpoenas to hotels to prove his whereabouts, and lastly, I served a subpoena on his employer, demanding proof that he was using his company cell phone and that it had never been reported stolen. I also obtained business trip expenses, credit card account numbers, and the dates of all his business trips and vacations. I was sending Mike Stanley a very clear message—I would be ready for him and he’d better tell me the truth.

According to the information he provided in his deposition (conducted eleven months after that initial interview, on April 8, 2011), Michael Stanley, forty-one, was a building contractor originally from Connecticut who specialized in the construction of high-end retail interiors in malls. He met Dalia at the Blue Martini, a trendy nightspot in West Palm Beach, while he was visiting for a long golf weekend (he did continuing business with several area malls). She was with her mother and aunt, and he bought them all drinks. Dalia called him back several days later when he was on his way to the airport, and they began what he characterizes as “a long-distance relationship.” At the time, he was separated from his wife and living in the basement of his house in Brookfield, Connecticut, which he refused to leave
for reasons of “constructive abandonment,” which could impact negatively on his impending divorce and custody issues. Stanley describes Dalia’s relationship with his daughter as “very strong,” even though his ex-wife stated they didn’t get along. (She also thought that Stanley and Dalia were still dating, even at the time of Stanley’s deposition, nearly two years after Dalia’s arrest.) For a beefy lug in his forties whose family was collapsing in slow motion, an attractive, available woman ten years his junior must have seemed like a ray of Florida sunshine.

Within six to eight months, they moved to Los Angeles. Stanley went out a month early and got set up with lodging and employment, and Dalia followed in a month or so. She “spent a lot of time furniture shopping and things like that,” according to Stanley, but their relationship did not survive the unfamiliar surroundings, Stanley’s long hours, and the trials of their pronounced age difference, and they called it quits six months later. For several months, they tried to cohabit platonically, sleeping in separate bedrooms, but after Dalia went back to Florida in October to visit her mother, she announced she had met someone and would remain there permanently. (This was also the time frame in which Dalia told Mohamed she had been engaged to a rich architect in New York, an assertion that Stanley denied under oath.)

Stanley denies any knowledge of his ex-girlfriend having worked as an escort, in California or elsewhere, even though her Eyesnatch website is registered to a corporation called Eye, Inc., set up in his name— curiously, at a Miami address. When asked about it in his deposition, Stanley volunteered that, based on his experience as a lifelong bodybuilder, having once avoided surgery on his shoulder through a self-administered regimen of stretching exercises and alternative medicine, it was his dream to open a weight-loss, workout, and health planning facility—say, for those with no health insurance who wished to avoid surgery. Unlike Eyesnatch, with which it shared a syllable, Eye, Inc., was to be a walk-in, bricks-and-mortar operation, sounding more like Dalia’s massage center “behind the Carl’s, Jr.” Stanley expressly denied ever incorporating a business on Dalia’s behalf, putting money into a massage business, or having anything to do with her escort service (which, at any rate, he was unaware of). His
explanation for incorporating the business in Florida using a Miami law firm was that “you’ve got year-round nice weather in Florida” and “a lot of elderly.”

Although Stanley’s contact with Dalia after their separation was by his own account limited, he does claim an enduring friendship with her mother and extended family—particularly Dalia’s grandfather, now deceased. (He says that he, Dalia, her mother, and her mother’s boyfriend once traveled to Peru.) He did see Dalia once, briefly, on her birthday in October—at the dinner at Tremonte’s in Delray Beach where Mike Dippolito met Mike Stanley for the first and only time, which Dippolito characterized as “awkward.” Stanley spoke with her for several minutes outside the restaurant and then disappeared. With Dalia unavailable to him, he returned to New York and tried to resume his life there.

And so it remained through the long months of 2009—through Dalia’s wedding, her economic travails trying to help her husband get off probation, the freakish electrical storm of drama that enveloped them from February on, the huge amounts of money that cascaded through their lives and bank accounts only to reservoir tantalizingly beyond their reach, her reunion and resumed friendship with Mohamed, about which she was apparently happy enough to buy him a car, and all the rest of it—none of which Stanley was privy to. He was out of the loop all the way up to the first week of July, when Dalia called him to discuss their dog Bella, who needed to have several teeth removed, which Stanley offered to help pay for. She first left him a phone message, and then resumed contact via MetroPCS text message on July 9, very quickly covering the open ground between them.

DALIA: Hey its me cll me bck

STANLEY: Im sure ur little toes look great :)

He seems taken by surprise, awkwardly commenting on her presumed mention of a pedicure, but quickly recovers.

STANLEY: Hey you, i almost fell of my chair that u left me a voice mail . . .:), sorry was on a call

DALIA: Really lol i miss u

STANLEY: Im glad, i miss u

DALIA: Happy to hear that im smiling soulmates

STANLEY: :)!!!!!!

DALIA: Muah

STANLEY:??? What is muah

DALIA: A kiss goofy

STANLEY: Haa ill take it :)

Dalia sent her first text at 12:58 p.m., which Stanley responded to at 3:47 p.m. His last text was at 5:10. They are now officially one hour and twenty-three minutes into their reconciliation. But Dalia is not content with long-distance pleasantries after a nine-month estrangement. Eight minutes later, she texts:

DALIA: I want u

STANLEY: Wow . . . I want u

DALIA: Just know no one has ever made me feel the way u have u always spoiled and romanced me and i loved it

STANLEY: I was truly in love w u, so craxy about u and have never felt that before or after u

DALIA: Thank god for that

The next night, after some ineffectual repartee, Stanley says:

STANLEY: Sorry wish we were together . . . I am thinking of u!

DALIA: Me too I want u and hank lol

In the deposition, I asked Stanley who Hank was. At first, he repeatedly insisted it was a “play name.” I then read him the postscript to an e-mail he
sent to Dalia on September 7, 2006: “Hank agrees with everything above and he wanted me to say more, but I told him to chill out and I was the boss.” After an uncomfortably long pause, he claimed that Hank was his heart. He denied it was a pet name for his penis.

She continues:

DALIA: i want to feel u in me

STANLEY: ouch

DALIA: What lol r u speechless do u want my hot tight body all over u

This shocks him, and he writes at 9:41 p.m.:

STANLEY: Yes but the reality is having u, have a nice nite babe

By the next morning at 9:25 a.m., he seems to have worked through his reticence:

STANLEY: The answer to ur question . . . Would [be] HELL YES

Over the next five days, in roughly a dozen texts a day, they keep this banter going: field-reporting their time at restaurants or in rowboats; debating Frank Mir, a mixed martial artist in whom they seem to share an interest; and Dalia’s relentless campaign to convince Stanley to come and visit her. With a breathless, minute-by-minute text message buildup worthy of
The Bachelor
, they finally meet on July 15, moments after 12:34 p.m., at the Marriott on Okeechobee Boulevard, less than a mile from the West Palm Beach Airport. In between, Dalia continues to respond to messages from her escort clients, including one from Wellhung Kevin, during the five-hour window she spends with Stanley, at times scrambling to find girls to send out on short notice. Then, at 5:22 p.m., the text trail picks back up:

DALIA: I love u baby

STANLEY: Infinity plus plus? lol, i love u sweetheart

DALIA: Soulmates so happy i saw u baby

STANLEY: Me too! soulmates

DALIA: Really wish u would have cum in me i wantd to feel u

STANLEY: Ahhhhhhh me to im sooo sorry

DALIA: Lol baby I love u and I only want to fuck u I’ll be here waiting for u u have made me smile and laugh haven’t done that in forever

In his deposition, Stanley denied that he and Dalia ever resumed a physical relationship. Meeting at the Marriott coffee shop, he says, he noticed a bruise on the inside of her arm that resembled a handprint. When he pressed her on it, the tale she told was a sordid one.

According to Stanley, Dalia claimed her relationship with her husband had turned abusive. He would grab her, push her, and shove her; when he wasn’t being physical he was talking down to her, cursing at her, forcing her to do things she didn’t want to do. Mike had a “tainted history”—Stanley balked at my use of the word “fraudulent,” although he used it himself later in the interview. He had a criminal background, had done jail time, and had bought their house with a bag of dirty money, essentially laundering it through her bank account. Now that she was immersed in his world, Dalia saw that Mike was returning to his old ways, despite bad blood with his former business partners. He was required to pay them $100,000 in restitution for “skimming money from the business.” In fact, merely operating his own business was a violation of his probation. During their brief time together, after Dalia met him at a Starbucks in September and married him in February, there had been numerous instances when police investigated him for dealing drugs, surprise visits from his probation officer, a late-night domestic disturbance call that led Mike to threaten her family. Stanley tried to be a good friend and listen, but she wouldn’t go to the police, even when he encouraged her to. She feared for her life.