“No, not true. Not true at all.”
I stared at Kurlen for a long time, hoping that my face showed my disgust.
“No further questions at this time,” I finally said.
Thirty-three
Freeman kept Kurlen on the stand for another fifteen minutes of redirect and did her best to resculpt his account of the investigation into a sterling effort of crime fighting. When she was through I passed on another crack at him because I was convinced that I was already ahead on Kurlen. My effort had been to sell the investigation as an exercise in tunnel vision and I believed I had succeeded.
Freeman apparently felt that the need to address the federal target letter was urgent. Her next witness was the Secret Service agent, Charles Vasquez. He had not even been known to her twenty-four hours earlier but had now been interjected into her carefully orchestrated lineup of witnesses and evidence. I could have objected to his testimony on the grounds that I had not had the opportunity to question or prepare for Vasquez but I thought that would be pushing it with Judge Perry. I decided to at least see what the agent had to say on direct before I’d go that far.
Vasquez was about forty, with a dark complexion and hair to match. During the preliminaries he said he had formerly been a DEA agent before shifting to the Secret Service. He went from chasing drug dealers to chasing counterfeiters until the opportunity came to join the foreclosure task force. He said the task force had a supervisor and ten agents coming from the Secret Service, FBI, the Postal Service and the IRS. An assistant U.S. attorney oversaw their work but the agents, assigned to pairs, largely worked autonomously, with freedom to pursue targets of their choice.
“Agent Vasquez, on January eighteenth of this year you authored a so-called target letter to a man named Louis Opparizio and it was signed by U.S. Attorney Reginald Lattimore. Do you recall that?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Before we get into that specific letter, can you tell the jury exactly what a target letter is?”
“It’s a tool we use to smoke out suspects and offenders.”
“How so?”
“We basically inform them that we are looking into their affairs, their business practices and actions they have taken. A target letter always invites the recipient to come in to discuss the situation with the agents. A high percentage of the time the recipients do just that. Sometimes it leads to cases, sometimes it leads to other investigations. It’s become a useful tool because investigations cost a lot. We don’t have the budget. If a letter can result in charges being filed or a witness cooperating or a solid investigative lead then it’s a good deal for us.”
“So in regard to the letter to Louis Opparizio, what made you send him a target letter?”
“Well, my partner and I were very familiar with his name because it came up often in other cases we were working. Not necessarily in a bad way, just that Opparizio’s company is what we call a foreclosure mill. It handles all the paperwork and filing on foreclosures for many of the banks operating in Southern California. Thousands of cases. So we kept seeing the company-ALOFT-and sometimes there were complaints about the methods the company was using. My partner and I decided to take a closer look. We sent out the letter to see what sort of response we’d get.”
“Does that mean you were fishing for a reaction?”
“It was more than fishing. As I said, there was quite a lot of smoke from this place. We were looking for fire and sometimes the reaction we get from a target letter dictates what our next moves will be.”
“At the time you authored and sent the target letter, had you gathered any evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of Louis Opparizio or his company?”
“Not at that point, no.”
“What happened after you sent the letter?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Has Louis Opparizio responded to the letter?”
“We got a response from an attorney saying that Mr. Opparizio welcomed the investigation because it would give him the opportunity to show he ran a clean business.”
“Have you availed yourself of that welcome and investigated Mr. Opparizio or his company further?”
“No, there hasn’t been time. We have several other ongoing investigations that appear to be more fruitful.”
Freeman checked her notes before finishing.
“Finally, Agent Vasquez, is Louis Opparizio or ALOFT currently under investigation by your task force?”
“Technically, no. But we plan to follow up on the letter.”
“So the answer is no?”
“Correct.”
“Thank you, Agent Vasquez.”
Freeman sat down. She was beaming and obviously pleased with the testimony she had drawn from the agent. I stood up and took my legal pad back to the lectern. I had written down a few questions off the direct examination.
“Agent Vasquez, are you telling the jury that an individual who does not respond to your target letter by immediately coming in and confessing must be innocent of any wrongdoing?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Because Louis Opparizio did not do so, do you consider him to be in the clear now?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you make it a practice to send target letters to individuals you believe are innocent of any criminal activity?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then what is the threshold, Agent Vasquez? What does one need to do to receive a target letter?”
“Basically, if you come across my radar in any sort of suspicious way, then I’ll do some preliminary checking and that may lead to the letter. We’re not sending these out scattershot. We know what we’re doing.”
“Did you or your partner or anyone from the task force speak with Mitchell Bondurant in regard to the practices of ALOFT?”
“No, we didn’t. Nobody did.”
“Would he have been someone you would’ve talked to?”
Freeman objected, calling the question vague. The judge sustained the objection. I decided to leave the question floating out there unanswered in front of the jury.
“Thank you, Agent Vasquez.”
Freeman went back to her scheduled rollout of the case after Vasquez, calling the gardener who found the hammer in the bushes of the home a block and a half from the scene of the murder. His testimony was quick and uneventful, by itself unimportant until it would be tied in later with testimony from the state’s forensic witnesses. I did score a minor point by getting the gardener to acknowledge that he had worked in and around the bushes at least twelve different times before he found the hammer. It was a little seed to plant for the jury, the idea that maybe the hammer itself had been planted long after the murder.
After the gardener, the prosecution followed with a few quick hits of testimony from the home owner and the cops who carried the chain of custody of the hammer to the forensic lab. I didn’t even bother with cross-examination. I was not going to contest chain of custody or the fact that the hammer was the murder weapon. My plan was to agree not only that it was the weapon that killed Mitchell Bondurant but also that it belonged to Lisa Trammel.
It would be an unexpected move, but the only one that worked with the defense theory of a setup. The lead through Jeff Trammel that the hammer might be in the back of the BMW he’d left behind when he disappeared to Mexico didn’t pan out. Cisco was able to locate that car, still in use at the dealership where Jeff Trammel had worked, but there was no hammer in the trunk and the man in charge of fleet management said there never was. I dismissed Jeff Trammel’s story as an effort to get paid off for information that might be helpful to his estranged wife’s case.
The murder weapon sequence brought us to lunch, and the judge, as was beginning to be his custom, broke fifteen minutes early. I turned to my client and invited her to go to lunch with me.
“What about Herb?” she said. “I promised him I would go to lunch with him.”