Three Felonies a Day Page 7
The defense’s case consisted largely of cross-examining the government’s witnesses to demonstrate that none of them was ever threatened by Martinez, nor was anyone offered zoning help in exchange for any financial advantage conferred on the mayor. Importantly, the defense pointed out to the jury that in Hialeah, as in most of Florida at the time, local political officials were expected to maintain outside employment and business interests. Indeed, part of Martinez’s defense was precisely that he was on the way up, and therefore local business people vied to associate themselves with him. The immunized witnesses who testified for the government were hardly alone in wanting to hitch themselves to the Martinez political star. As one Florida House of Representatives member testified in the defense case:Mr. Martinez was so highly regarded in all parts of Dade County. He was one of the few Hispanics because he was so fluent in English, [who] was accepted wherever he went, and was very courteous to everybody. He was accepted in the Black community and in the Hispanic community and, of course, in the Anglo community.
Martinez’s defense thus sounded very much like the government’s prosecution theory. Businessmen gave Martinez good deals to encourage him to ally himself with them and their enterprises, because they believed that their association with Martinez would be of enormous benefit to them. To the U.S. attorney’s office, this was an extortionate (threatening) use of Martinez’s official power. To the defense, it was a natural result of the combination of Martinez’s golden career prospects, his official position and myriad contacts, and the realities and normal expectations of local politics involving, in particular, public officials who earn only token compensation. (In addition to traditionally low salaries for these offices, there is the matter of campaign expenses. Cardoso testified that in 1983 he spent some $100,000 on his own campaign, and won a position that paid $17,000 per year.)
If there are to be legal limitations to this cozy but quite logical symbiotic arrangement, it would have to be imposed by clear conflict-of-interest or other laws limiting the business activities of public officials. It would also have to be accompanied, presumably, by increasing their salaries, without which there would be a clear risk that the middle class would absent itself from running for local elective office. Were public officials not allowed to earn a living while serving in public positions that pay very little, government would become the fiefdom of the wealthy (or, of course, the thoroughly corrupt). Martinez’s business activities were conducted in the open, with money passing by check, not cash, and with properties passing by legal title held in the name of the mayor, not of a straw man. And still, he was indicted for extortion.
As Martinez’s first trial concluded, it appeared that the scales were tipping toward the prosecution. Just before trial, Judge James Kehoe instructed the jurors about the law that would govern their deliberations. The prosecutors argued to the judge that the Hobbs Act did not require them to demonstrate a so-called specific quid pro quo, that is, something of value given by the public official to the businessman in exchange for something of value from the businessman. To convict Martinez, they had to prove only that the mayor engaged in merely “passive acceptance” of the benefits that his business dealings could bring him, “so long as the defendant knew or believed that the benefits he was receiving [were] motivated by a hope of influence.” Betraying their complete ignorance of—or perhaps contempt for—the workings of local politics and the economic realities facing middle class candidates, the prosecutors added: “[I]f a politician wants to make money in business transactions, then he can stay out of politics.”
Judge Kehoe bought the prosecution’s argument and explained to the jury that the “passive acceptance of a benefit” by a public official constituted extortion “if the official knows he had been offered the payment in exchange for the exercise of his official power” or—and here is the rub that likely got Martinez convicted—“that such payment is motivated by hope of influence.” As for the question of whether Martinez was “entitled” to the property given to him, that’s a pretty slippery concept. While Cardoso did not “owe” Martinez participation in the deal, the developer did perceive a business benefit to himself by involving the popular politician.
Given the testimony and the jury instructions, it was no surprise that the jury, while acquitting on several of the projects, convicted Martinez of extortion relating to four of the deals. On July 22, 1991, Judge Kehoe sentenced Martinez to a ten-year prison term. Lehtinen emerged victorious. Yet it was a Pyrrhic victory, since Lehtinen was forced to resign just months later, due to his own erratic behavior. Martinez, now a convicted felon, won re-election while awaiting appeal; and in 1994 the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reversed Martinez’s conviction, ruling that Kehoe had erred in his instructions to the jury by blurring the line between extortionate threats and other non-threatening arrangements by which a citizen might do business with a politician.10 This paved the way for a retrial that commenced in March 1996.
At Martinez’s second trial, the jury, instructed in accordance with the Court of Appeals’ decision in the reversal of the first Martinez conviction, deadlocked, voting 11-1 for acquittal. Despite the prosecutors’ obvious inability to convince all but one juror that Martinez was an extortionist, the U.S. attorney’s office, this time without Lehtinen (who had stepped down under fire), decided to pursue a third trial. When that ended in acquittals on some counts and deadlock on others, the government finally gave up.
Raul Martinez remained mayor of Hialeah, as the voters wished. Almost two decades after his first congressional campaign, Martinez ran again for Florida’s 18th District in 2008, this time with significant support from the Democratic higher-ups. Yet his bid failed after a series of October attack ads devastated the campaign.11 Punctuated by the sound of a prison cell door slamming, one ad claimed: “We know Martinez is corrupt enough for Washington. But that doesn’t mean we should send him there.” Despite the DOJ’s repeated failures to tag Martinez as a felon (much less as a prisoner), the damage was done. Even when the federal prosecutorial juggernaut fails to directly dispatch its prey, the wreckage can still destroy the lives of the powerful and the popular.
The vagueness of the Hobbs Act, combined with the expanded use of aggressive ladder climbing, made local politicians increasingly vulnerable to politically or professionally ambitious U.S. attorneys. Nowhere was this more evident than in Boston in the early-1980s. It was a turbulent time in the city’s political history, as the fabled City on a Hill aggressively sought to shed its image as a dilapidated backwater. Having survived the embarrassment of the school busing wars of the previous decade, then-Mayor Kevin Hagan White, whose father and grandfather both served as Boston City Council presidents, earned high marks for restructuring municipal government and leading a campaign to revitalize the historic Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market merchant district—one of the country’s first urban malls. Democratic Senator George McGovern seriously considered White as a potential running mate in his 1972 presidential bid, and many political insiders believed White would eventually parlay his local popularity into his own run for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But before White could contemplate higher office, he would have to survive a massive attack launched by an emerging political adversary named William Floyd Weld, who was appointed U.S. attorney for Massachusetts by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. A graduate of Harvard College (summa cum laude, 1966) and Harvard Law School (cum laude, 1970) and the scion of a wealthy and prominent blueblood family, Weld cut a decidedly patrician figure. Some suspected that he had his own aspirations for high elective office, both state and federal. His Republican and Yankee heritage, however, required Weld first to prove himself in the rough-and-tumble world of Bay State politics.
As Weld assumed the U.S. attorney’s mantle in 1981, a spate of high-profile state and local political corruption prosecutions, most resulting in convictions, splashed across the papers. And they continued to splash throughout Weld’s tenure. The Boston Globe, Boston’s influential re
gional equivalent of The Miami Herald, cheered on Weld and decried the local corruption without paying adequate attention to the details and the deeper issues of the proper and reasonable line to be drawn between true corruption and accepted local culture. The paper gleefully played Weld’s cleverly orchestrated tune in a titillating 1984 article headlined: “[O]fficial corruption reaches dizzying heights.”12
It was not unusual to have sudden eruptions of political corruption (or suspicions of corrupt activities) appear on the urban scene. For the politically ambitious Weld, however, the timing of Boston’s focus on corruption couldn’t have been more fortuitous. An aggressive crusade against patronage, culminating in the indictment of the high-profile mayor himself, would open up for Weld all avenues to the governor’s corner office in Massachusetts’ iconic Bullfinch-designed State House, with the distant gleam of the White House slowly appearing on the horizon.
There was only one problem: either Kevin White was cleaner than Caesar’s proverbial wife, or he was exceedingly careful about not leaving an incriminating trail. With no detectable scent, much less hard evidence, emanating from White’s office, the Department of Justice and the FBI began snooping around the lower reaches of Boston’s infamous bureaucracy, where some sort of petty corruption could almost always be found regardless of who was the mayor. Climb the ladder by convicting lower-echelon functionaries and make deals in exchange for their testimony against their immediate higher-ups, went the theory, and Weld would eventually reach the mayor. And, as became evident to close observers of the subsequent unfolding legal proceedings, the U.S. attorney had the benefit of a then-nascent trend in federal law that allowed Weld to craft some of his criminal charges on the basis of conduct that was not so obviously criminal.
While Weld himself had no significant investigatory or trial experience, he assembled a crackerjack prosecutorial team to nab the mayor. The prosecutors got their opportunity to pursue White when they hooked a petty bureaucrat in the city’s Building Department, who was also a former senior administrative assistant in the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). Caught in a tape-recorded sting holding up a contractor, George Collatos pleaded guilty to extortion and subsequent perjury, admitting his attempt to extort $45,000 (though he had managed to grab only $12,500 before he was caught) from a local concrete company seeking the department’s approval to build a plant in Boston. In 1982, he was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Weld cut Collatos a deal. He would have his sentence reduced if Collatos would testify as to who higher up in the administration was in on this and other corrupt deals. Collatos did not have a sufficiently close relationship with Mayor White to convincingly claim that White was using Collatos as his bag man. However, Collatos did peddle the story that Theodore Anzalone (soon to be my law firm’s client), an informal long-time fundraiser and intimate of White, conspired with Collatos to extort an $8,000 cash payment from the C.E. Maguire Company of Providence, a company with contracts to provide engineering services to the massive rebuilding projects undertaken at the time by the BRA. According to the resulting indictment, Collatos contacted John Slocum, president of the firm, in 1979 and told Slocum that he would have to pay Anzalone, acting for the mayor, a cash bribe to retain the city’s business. Slocum supposedly handed two $4,000 cash payments to Anzalone in sealed envelopes, all arranged by Collatos. Anzalone, Collatos maintained, both insisted on the cash solicitation and knew that the money constituted a bribe destined for White.
Weld’s strategy was to get Anzalone convicted of extortion by way of Collatos’s testimony, fleshed out with some supportive declarations from Slocum, who was given a complete pass for any wrongdoing on his part. Pressure would then be exerted on Anzalone to implicate White, since neither Slocum nor Collatos could believably testify to any personal dealing with the mayor that would indicate the money ultimately was going to—or did—make its way to the top. According to this theory, only Anzalone, the mayor’s intimate, could credibly implicate White.
It is a very dangerous mind-set in federal prosecutors that induces them to “climb the ladder” from the lower echelons up to the offices of the top officials. All too often, it matters little if there is not yet any actual evidence that a mayor is corrupt. The possibility that corrupt lower-echelon extortionate officials might be “on a frolic of their own” is too often discounted, in the hope of landing someone at the top. Nor did federal officials in Boston have any solid reason to believe that Anzalone could deliver truthful testimony against the boss. They were all too prepared to believe someone like Collatos, who boasted of his higher connection with Anzalone. Prosecutors in this type of case manage to convince themselves that “the fish rots from the head down,” and that if they continue “squeezing” the underlings, they will eventually get something on the mayor. This mentality was (and remains) so pervasive within the Department of Justice that one could sense it animating the conduct even of prosecutors like Mark L. Wolf and Robert J. Cordy who, then and since, have enjoyed reputations for unquestioned probity and went on to attain high judicial positions where they distinguished themselves.13
Weld’s team had a shaky case even at the lowest rung of the ladder, and they knew it. Collatos, the prosecutors realized, would not be the most credible witness. And proving that Anzalone had violated the federal extortion statute would require a credible witness testifying to a specific set of actions. The extortion statute, in theory, is triggered if payments are made in response to threats of loss of benefits if payments are not made. If the payments were voluntary campaign contributions, even if in arguable violation of state campaign financing laws restricting cash contributions, they were not evidence of federal extortion.
The discovery by Weld’s investigators of two other transactions involving White and Anzalone kept alive the hunt for White’s scalp. Combining the Maguire Company payoff allegations with two additional instances in which Anzalone was engaging in large cash transactions on behalf of White would virtually assure Anzalone’s conviction on the extortion charge, they figured. The cash, the jury would likely conclude, even in the absence of any direct evidence of a link, must have come from the pattern of extortion engaged in by White with Anzalone’s assistance as middleman. Upon closer inspection, however, as Weld and his team would learn three years later—though not until a grueling and ultimately fruitless prosecution ruined more than one man’s life—the devil was not in the details this time around.
The first transactions involved a birthday party planned for the mayor’s wife, Kathryn, to be held in March 1981 at Boston’s renowned Museum of Fine Arts. The fete was cancelled, reportedly because city workers planned to picket the site. The state Ethics Commission conducted an investigation and found that Anzalone was a key fundraiser for the event. The commission also found that cash (presumably raised for both the party and a planned birthday gift for Mrs. White) had moved through different bank accounts in what some surmised to be an effort to disguise its origins. Neither the commission nor federal investigators, however, ever learned precisely from whom the cash originally came. Nonetheless, the feds added a count to its indictment of Anzalone (who was being charged with conspiracy, predicated on Collatos’s testimony, to extort the C.E. Maguire Company) alleging that he and his associates distributed packets of cash to various individuals who, in turn, contributed the money, in the form of their personal checks, to the birthday party fund. The Ethics Commission concluded that 64 persons, all of whom were tied to White or the city administration, managed to pass some $50,000 to the birthday party fund via this circuitous route. When the party was cancelled, Anzalone gave refund checks to the 64 individuals, who cashed them and then returned the cash to Anzalone. The trail stopped there, at Anzalone.
In adding the birthday party saga to the indictment, the feds put to use a tactically clever mechanism to increase their chances of convicting Anzalone of the C. E. Maguire Company extortion charge. Without Anzalone’s testimony, prosecutors could not determine the source of the b
irthday party cash. Weld, with no hard evidence, suspected that the money belonged to White as the product of presumed illegal payoffs. What seemed clear was that the bulk of the birthday party fund did not contain money actually belonging to the 64 donors. Only Anzalone, went the theory, could tell the feds where the money originated. The feds obviously wanted to put pressure on Anzalone to sing, but first they had to get him convicted so that they could make a deal. If the extortion charge and the birthday party money-laundering charge were tied and tried together, the jury would be led to speculate and conclude that somehow the birthday party cash must have been connected to an extortion enterprise.
The second money-laundering charge was even more strained. The indictment alleged that Anzalone transferred $100,000 in cash—the origins of which, yet again, the feds could not pinpoint—into a New York brokerage account set up in the names of the mayor’s wife (Kathryn) and mother (Patricia). The supposed laundering device this time was cash Anzalone took to various branches of the Haymarket Cooperative Bank in the Boston area in November 1980, for which he received bank checks in return. Each check was in an amount between $5,000 and $9,000. The checks were then deposited in the brokerage account and Anzalone instructed the broker to purchase tax-exempt bonds.