Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (20 page)

What I could prove was that Mike Stanley placed calls to Mike Dippolito from a 305 number—that of the Miami-Dade county courthouse—at the exact times Mike said he was contacted by “Richard,” the lawyer advising him in the intricacies of administrative probation. I asked Mike about this when I had him on the stand.

“The first guy I spoke to started talking about … he wasn’t going down a path that made sense,” Mike said. “This and that; going nowhere. I told my wife this guy isn’t making any sense, so she had another lawyer call. This lawyer was in Miami and he started talking about administrative probation and how he thought he could get it for me.”

Mike Dippolito claims that Dalia had canceled three or four appointments with her OB/GYN for the two of them to discuss her pregnancy with her doctor. The following text string occurred between Dalia and Mike Stanley on July 17 at roughly 2:30 p.m.

DALIA: Need u to cll me and act like doc just ask me y I didn’t come and how im feeln

STANLEY: K I will cll from private num in 15 min

Fifteen minutes later, at 2:42, she asks:

DALIA: Do u know how to spoof a cll

STANLEY: ??? Pretend to be doc?

DALIA: In two min cll the other phone … Yes dr emerick sound proper

STANLEY: Ill try

DALIA: K in one min cll

(Stanley admits making the call, but claims that Mike was aware of the ruse, and that the call was staged for the benefit of Mike’s mother, who still believed Dalia was pregnant.)

On July 22 at 8:15 a.m., the day before they were supposed to meet their lawyer’s paralegal on the courthouse steps, Dalia texts Stanley:

DALIA: Hey baby whats the earliest u cn make the cll I wana prep u before u talk to him

At 1:30, she texts:

DALIA: Cll my other phone w the spoof he wants to drop the paper tell me tomm call now please with the spoof 561 num

And then the next morning at 10 a.m., she texts him:

DALIA: I need u to spoof the cll and tell him that he needs to meet ur paralegal at 230 at the courthouse and that since ur vacation u live at the courthouse. ur paralegals name is sergio if he asks
and u apologize for the inconvenience but ur filing it tomm and need to revise the documents before and just in case its the miami courthouse on flagler 2:30

From the texts, we know that Stanley made additional spoof calls to Mike, once on July 27 (again apparently originating from the courthouse) that informed Mike his administrative probation was in the works, with a possible answer by week’s end (or August 1, four days before the planned hit), and once on July 30 recommending he transfer his house solely into Dalia’s name because of the amount of restitution Mike owed.

When I asked him in his deposition, Mike Stanley said he knew what a spoof call was, and claimed that it was Dalia who had steered him to the TelTech website. I asked him specifically about the spoof calls to Mike Dippolito.

STANLEY: The spoof call to Mike Dippolito was done [with] my spoof account but not made by me.

PARKER: Who had your cell phone at the time when that phone call was made?

STANLEY: Friend of mine made that phone call.

PARKER: Did that friend pretend to be Richard?

STANLEY: No.

PARKER: Were you there when your friend had your phone?

STANLEY: He walked away from me. I didn’t stand next to him and see him make the call, no.

PARKER: Who is this friend?

STANLEY: This guy Joe from the deli around the corner from my office.

I asked Stanley what was Joe from the deli’s last name, address, phone number; whether his work cell phone had been stolen, and if his employer
knew he was loaning it to acquaintances for personal calls. He could not give me any of that information.

PARKER: Did you give the phone to him and ask him to make a spoof call?

STANLEY: I gave the phone to him and said, “Make this phone call.” I said, “Offer advice to this person and say that they can file papers on their own. That was it.”

According to Stanley (i.e., according to Dalia), one attorney had already dropped Mike as a client over issues of fraud, and four or five subsequent attorneys recused themselves because they knew the first one, South Florida being the fishbowl that it is. Mike had asked Dalia to find him a Dade County attorney to help with his administrative probation, a situation Stanley had advised her not to get mixed up in because it seemed fraudulent on the face of it. He called the DA (actually called State Attorney in Florida) to determine the proper course of action, but the DA was out of the country for two weeks. So the spoof call was simply to suggest that Mike file the paperwork himself, and to stall until the DA returned. Problem solved.

PARKER: We’ll go back. So you told Joe at the deli to pretend to offer legal advice to—

STANLEY: No, no, no—I did not say that. I told him basically just call and just offer advice that you could do this on your own; don’t take money, don’t give him any legal advice, just go to the courthouse and do this on your own.

At this point, Salnick entered the deposition room and I told him we didn’t have a last name or address for one of his potential witnesses, Joe from the deli.

Salnick, ever witty, said, “It’s kind of like Larry the Murderer.”

I asked Stanley if he was aware that it was a federal crime to spoof a call to someone by use of fraudulent means.

STANLEY: Not understanding that, I’m sorry.

PARKER: It’s either yes or no. Did you know that it is a federal offense for you to use the spoofing card—the numbers, the spoofing system—to commit fraud in any way … maybe to get somebody to sign their house over to someone else, to misrepresent things?

STANLEY: Right, if you were committing fraud, I would assume that’s a federal offense.

For me to prove that he committed a crime, I would have to show that he had prior knowledge of the solicitation of murder, and that he was complicit in her plan, meaning that he furthered it in some measurable way. Even if he knew what she was up to, that alone didn’t make him a conspirator in her crime. I ultimately decided I didn’t have the evidence to prove that. Do I believe that he was involved? Buy me a drink sometime, I’ll tell you what I think.

After Meir Cohen, I called to the stand Dawn Hurley, a representative of Bank of America, to help make sense of Dalia’s bank statements, and proof of ownership and visits to her safe deposit box. In what I’m sure was excruciatingly boring testimony for the jury, I walked Miss Hurley through nine months of transactions: Documenting how Dalia deposited Mike’s initial $100,000 meant for restitution; demonstrating her spending habits, the Range Rover she bought on a whim for Mohamed, the bank branch she withdrew that money from, which was right across the street from Mohamed’s convenience store in Palm Beach Gardens. And especially how quickly she tore through the money—$700 to King Jewelers in Aventura; $1,175 to the Ritz-Carlton; $1,250 to Lulu, a clothing store in Bal Harbor; hair extensions, fake eyelashes, tanning sessions—six figures in five months; her checking account was overdrawn at the end of practically every month.

“It’s not even about the fucking money,” she told Mohamed in the front seat of his Lexus when she was ordering up a hit man a la carte. “We’ll spend it in a fucking blink of an eye.”

I tracked Dalia’s money trail from before she was married up until the day she withdrew her last $1,200 on the way to meet Mohamed in the parking lot of the Mobil station as a down payment on the gun. The sheer fact that she spent his money with such abandon and disdain is the best proof that she thought she’d get Mike’s probation revoked, and soon all the money would be hers.

Next I called Todd Surber of Independence Title in Delray Beach, the lawyer who supervised both transfers of the house title—adding Dalia to the deed soon after they were married and putting the property solely in her name just before her arrest. Surber testified that on July 31, he executed a quitclaim deed for the couple, a streamlined type of deed transfer, often between spouses.

The one question people continually have about this case is how Mike could have fallen for Dalia’s betrayals so consistently. It’s like Charlie Brown and the football: the inevitable conclusion seems to be obvious to everyone but Mike, and in the end it cost him all of his money, the best of his friends, briefly his sanity, and almost his life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his willingness to sign over property to her. Here is Mike from his initial police interview with Detective Moreno.

MIKE: I purchased the home, and then we put it in half her name, half my name, a month after the fact. Because she would say things to me, a little pressure here and there, so fine, I did it. You know, it’s my wife, I’m not thinking anything’s wrong, man.

MORENO: … Why did you transfer your title to her?

MIKE: She was saying maybe it’s better that it’s in her name. And I was nervous, too, because I had all my other business [to get] straightened out, everything’s upside down, I thought, “Okay, I’ll just do it.”

MORENO: Well, that’s what I’m trying to understand. By her having the house under her name, how would that help?

MIKE: I don’t know. I don’t know. It makes as much sense as what she tried to do to me, man.

In the end, Todd Surber’s bombshell testimony had him explaining that, despite the fact that the house was now in Dalia’s name, she could never sell it without Mike’s consent and participation because it was a marital asset.

What we forget is that Dalia had a real estate license going back to 2006. She worked at Beachfront Realty in Aventura and sold him his house. As far as he knew, this was her job and designated area of expertise—she left the house twice a week to show houses to prospective clients. He was lucky to have the in-house counsel. Not only that, but it was her real estate commissions with which she was going to resolve their financial impasse and repay the debt of his restitution money. It’s what kept him in the game, and why he repeatedly gave her the benefit of the doubt. It was only after she was arrested that he discovered the only house she ever sold her whole time at Beachfront Realty was Mike’s. These twice-a-week meetings with prospective clients were how she could carry on affairs with Mohamed, Michael Stanley, and who knows how many others. It was a ready-made cover story, in that it bought her space and time—the things she needed most to set her myriad traps.

And so close to the end, she hectored Mike into putting his house entirely in her name, wrongly believing that title and possession were the equivalent of ownership.

It was her inability to grasp even this most basic concept of property law as much as anything that put her over the edge to literally pull the trigger.

Mike wonders why she went to all the trouble. “Right now those houses are going for 150 grand,” he says. “You couldn’t sell it if you were lucky.”

Randa Mohamed was up next. She was questioned by my co-counsel, Laura Burkhart Laurie. I handpicked Laura as one of my Felony Assistant State Attorneys for the Domestic Violence unit because she was a talented trial lawyer who had a true passion for protecting victims of crime. She is tenacious and a hard worker, and I was blessed to have her as my second chair. Immediately prior to the testimony, our third chair, Lindsey, took Randa into a nearby conference room and played each jailhouse call from Dalia in succession, so that she would be familiar with their contents, and had her initial each CD. On the stand Laura established how Randa knew
Sergio—they attended the same church—and got her to identify Dalia’s voice in the jailhouse calls so that we could enter those as evidence. Laura also confirmed Randa’s phone number so we could link her to Sergio and Sergio to Dalia. I could have had Mike do that, but too much of this case was riding on his word as it was. Since Randa was a witness for both the State and the defense, after the Rule of Sequestration was invoked she was not able to sit in the courtroom and hear the testimony of other witnesses. This was an added benefit of her testifying. The last thing I wanted the jury to focus on was the suspect’s grieving mother sitting in the front row weeping.

I was never able to effectively determine Randa’s role in Dalia’s plans. But from the text record alone, I think her hands aren’t completely clean. On July 22, at 3:50 p.m., Dalia had the following exchange with her mother:

DALIA: Need someone professional to meet me and mike at the miami courthouse at 2 and act like a legal secretary and take a paper from us … They just need to say they r takn it to the attorney and thanks for meeting us they were in dipositions all day. Ill pay them 500

RANDA: What lawyer r they representing? And what happens 2 the papers after. R they talking 2 anybody besides u and Mike

DALIA: Me and mike r giving them papers they cn trash it later. Let me know if u have someone that looks professional they just need to meet us in front of miami courthouse and take a paper from us and say they will mke sure the attorney gets it and sorry for the inconvenience thats it … He thinks were handing it to an attorneys legal secretary. Ill give u the money then u cn put it in there acct when they meet us

RANDA: K I got a guy give me all the details. Including address and what is the lawyers name

DALIA: Does he look professional

RANDA: Yes he will

In the middle of this, as long as she’s thinking about it, Dalia sends Stanley a booster text:

DALIA: Love u sexy

I flew Linda Taylor-Vincent in from Texas. She is the Custodian of Records for MetroPCS, and I needed her to help make sense of Dalia’s phone and text records. They’re highly confusing to follow—more than once Mike went silent on the stand for ten or twenty seconds trying to figure out the printout in front of him to answer my question—and so much intrigue went on behind the scenes via text or furtive phone calls that I didn’t want an officer or detective to try to reference them without an expert to lead the jury by the hand. This allowed me to get all the phone records into evidence, which offered a ready-made blueprint for all the connections in this case.