George Higgins - A change of gravity

This is not a watering-hole for the common man. This a club for rich men, a closed society of very wealthy men. Yet there among their number we find recorded the names of Ambrose Merrion and Daniel Hilliard.

"How on earth did they get in there? What on earth are they doing there? Neither of these men, both of whom we would most likely describe as liberal populists, was born into a wealthy family. Neither one of them since the age of twenty-one has ever held any job other than the ones they've had on the public payroll. Yet if we allow for inflation and say the average annual cost of Grey Hills membership for these past twenty-two years was half of what we understand it is today, Mister Merrion's largesse in Mister Hilliard's behalf would amount to sixty-six thousand dollars. That on top of the eight-thousand-plus initiation fee and dues would be about seventy-five thousand dollars. All of which Merrion got from Lane's treasure chest, money Lane helped steal from us."

"Your Honor," Cohen said, "I must ask again to interrupt. Again we have Mister Bissell regaling us with stories that begin: "Once upon a time." We don't for one moment dispute the US Attorney's right to seek out crimes for prosecution if he thinks, as he seems to, there're too few in plain sight to keep his forces occupied. We don't quarrel with his privilege to go back in time far beyond the statute of limitations and rummage around as much as he likes, to see if he can then find something that will catapult him forward into the present tense, still clinging to a trailing string that he can pull on, like Orpheus to his Eurydice, to tow all of those old outrages forward under his cherished relation back. It seems like any case you managed to weave out of such flimsy stuff would be a pretty thin one, and a waste of the taxpayer's money, and unless you leave out ego, a personal desire for the limelight, it's mighty hard to see why he'd want to do it. But nevertheless, however poor his judgment seems to be, there's no arguing his right to spend his time this way if he wants to.

"Mister Merrion has now known since the last week in August; he didn't until then that Mister Bissell the week before had federal marshals serve a subpoena duces tecum on Mister Merrion's bank. It demanded the records of his checking and savings accounts much further back than the bank is able to go. They notifed him as they must and then of course turned over to the government everything they had. So, if my client ever had any notion of trying to claim he never paid any club dues, bills or fees in Mister Hilliard's behalf, as he did not, he now knows going in that the US Attorney can prove otherwise, and would certainly reward him for such impudence by indicting him for perjury.

"But even without that, why go through all of it? Why bother to have him before the grand jury? We'll stipulate he paid Mister Hilliard's initiation fee, annual dues, and a lot of miscellaneous other stuff at Grey Hills over the years. Thousands and thousands of dollars. We'll even give the US Attorney the explanation for Mister Merrion's strange and remarkable behavior which despite his formidable powers of data-collection and analysis, seems to have eluded him: Mister Merrion and Mister Hilliard are friends.

"It's as simple as that. They've been buddies for thirty-five years.

Dan Hilliard's former wife told me she used to tell her husband that if it hadn't been for her, and later on his girlfriends, people would've thought that he and Mister Merrion were gay. Mister Merrion's a bachelor, from a small family. His father died years ago. His mother's terminally ill, in a vegetative state; his brother and he are estranged. Dan Hilliard's the closest thing to "family" my client's ever had, all his adult life.

"Is it really surprising that he's treated Hilliard like an elder brother? Wouldn't you, or even Mister Bissell, as morally demanding as he is, think it appropriate to share a completely unexpected large inheritance which I assure you this was, no 'shrewd move' on his part, the windfall from the Lane estate with a family member? Or with someone who had filled, most faithfully, for years, the vacant family place?

"Of course you would. We all would. So our question here becomes:

Given the quantity and detail of the evidence that the US Attorney has outlined as already in his hands, what need or purpose except humiliation, can he possibly have for forcing Mister Merrion to testify against Dan Hilliard?"

"Your Honor please?" Bissell said. "I was getting to that. We don't know where Dan Hilliard got the money to put up the house in Bell Woods that he and his wife occupied until their divorce. We can't figure out where he got the money for the house on Martha's Vineyard. It may've been from innocent sources, bequests we can no longer track down. We doubt it, but it may have been. The Grey Hills money is different. We know where that money came from, and we also know he didn't earn it, or pay taxes on it, either.

"We anticipate that if we obtain an indictment alleging Mister Hilliard with criminally evading income taxes due and owing on the monies Mister Merrion paid to Grey Hills in his behalf, Mister Merrion may interpose as one defense for his friend the fact that he himself had paid income taxes on the money, before sending it to Grey Hills in Hilliard's behalf. Countering our allegation that the monies were not annual gifts but a bribe paid in annual installments as a stipend for Merrion's job and thus, constructively, income to Hilliard when paid to Grey Hills for his benefit Merrion would be able to tell the jury they were after-tax dollars in his hand, a gift to his pal Hilliard.

Exceeding the then-statutory lifetime limit of thirty thousand dollars; perhaps exposing them to civil penalties and interest, but negativing the criminal aspect of intent to evade income taxes."

"Mister Cohen?" the judge said, 'any comment here?"

"Just that that indeed would be part of the evidence Mister Merrion will give, if Mister Bissell brings about the unhappy event he just described," Cohen said.

"Secondly, your Honor," Bissell said smoothly, 'we anticipate that the grand jury may return an indictment alleging Mister Hilliard under color of his official authority sold a state office to, and extorted monies from, its occupant; and further that he conspired with Mister Merrion and others to sell, trade and traffic in a public office, and extort monies from its occupant. And further: alleging that he conspired with Mister Merrion and others to deprive the public of the rightful service and free and unfettered judgment of a public official in other words, alleging racketeering that Mister Merrion might interpose in Mister Hilliard's defense the claim that the monies he paid to Grey Hills in Mister Hilliard's behalf were not within the knowledge or the contemplation of the parties when Mister Hilliard arranged the clerkship, and were given of his own free will."

"Of course he would," Cohen said. "It's the same horse under a different rider."

"Exactly," Bissell said. "We have a right to compel Mister Merrion to commit himself to a story before we seek any indictments, to lock him into it before trial. We may never call him at trial, but we have a right to find out what he'll say if we do, and to prevent him from colluding with a clever lawyer to fabricate a different story to counter our case-in-chief. Reasonable doubts are counterfeited by such fabrications, to mislead credulous jurors. We want to find out what he'll say, before he finds out what we can prove.

"We know he wont do that voluntarily," Bissell said. "That's why we've given him immunity. As Mister Cohen demanded, it's Transactional, not Use. We've told him, through his lawyer, he is not a target. We've told him that nothing that he says will be used in evidence against him, unless he lies to us if he does, of course, we'll go after him for perjury. Hammer and tongs, to use a Hilliard phrase. We've filed the document declaring all of this with you."