David Ellis - Breach of Trust

It was my turn. By now, Cimino didn’t even have to look in my direction. We had this down to a formula. “Mr. DeSantis,” I said, “the contract allows the department to terminate the contract without notice, if the termination is for cause. And if it’s without cause, you have as long as it takes the department to rebid the contract, which is about ninety days.”

“What is it?” he asked. “We’ve always kept up our stock. We had one issue once with the new ink-which we fixed right away, and without charge to the state.”

“What my lawyer here is saying, Mitch, is that we don’t need a reason. In which case you have about ninety days left. And if Jason informs the department that cause exists, your contract could be terminated tomorrow. Mitch,” he went on, changing his tone, as if he were now dispensing friendly advice, “I can see a situation where your company finishes out the governor’s term. That’s about a year from today. January 2009. And I can also see your company reupping for another four years, if Governor Snow is reelected.”

DeSantis seized on that. “Obviously, we’d be very grateful, if Governor Snow-”

“If, Mitch. ‘If’ is the operative word here. You realize he’s running in a contested primary. And then the general election.” Cimino shook his head. “These are expensive things, these elections. Did you know that candidates for governor are budgeting twenty million for the race?”

DeSantis sat back, as if flabbergasted at what was occurring. “No, I didn’t know-”

“So Friends of Snow is looking for friends, right, Mitch? You follow me.”

DeSantis pushed his thick glasses back up his nose. “I don’t know that I do.”

“Sure you do. Mitch, I know you got your contract under the Trotter administration. But now you’re working for the Snow administration. So we want to know if you’re willing to help.”

DeSantis’s face colored, as had the faces of several others, sitting in his spot, after hearing our pitch, over the last few weeks. “And if I don’t, I lose my contract?”

“Did you hear me say that?” Cimino delivered the line with a cool glare, no trace of a smile. “You didn’t hear me say that. Did you, Mitch?”

The man deflated. Cimino removed a piece of paper from his pocket and slid it over. The number on it was “25,000.” DeSantis looked at Cimino, who raised his eyebrows. It was clear that certain things would remain unspoken. He took the paper back and said, “And obviously, with Willie Bryant running against Governor Snow in the primary, and Lang Trotter’s son, Edgar, running in the Republican primary, there would be the question of whether you intend to support anyone else. We’ll be sure to keep tabs on any contributions being made to other campaigns, as well. Jason, you check the semiannual reports, right?”

“Like clockwork,” I said. This was part of the routine, too, every time. Governor Snow had a serious challenger in the primary, the current secretary of state, a guy named Willie Bryant. And the Republicans were another concern, obviously; the smart money seemed to be on Langdon Trotter’s kid, Edgar. Charlie was not only shaking down companies for contributions; he was threatening them if they contributed to anyone else.

“Look, Mr. Cimino,” DeSantis said.

“Charlie. It’s Charlie.”

“Charlie.” DeSantis sighed. “Look, Charlie, I have a small company-”

“Mitch, I want to thank you for lunch,” Cimino said, which was probably news to DeSantis, who hadn’t realized he was buying. “I suppose”-he looked at me-“I suppose the decision on the contract could be delayed for a week or so. That would give both of us time to think about our next step. One,” he repeated, “week.”

It was a script we’d worked out. We would start with an idle threat of terminating a contract, and nine times out of ten, that was all it took-a check to Friends of Snow was cut within the next twenty-four hours. On the two occasions, thus far, that anyone had pushed back, I had followed up by meeting with the contractor and showing him a “preliminary” report demonstrating a basis for terminating the contract-basically showing him that we weren’t kidding when we said we were going to shit-can them. At Charlie’s insistence, I never left a copy of that report with the contractor; I always kept it with me. Charlie was extremely careful about leaving bread crumbs.

But he wasn’t being careful with me. I had gained his trust; it was I who had come up with the idea to extort existing state contractors, and I who helped him orchestrate the entire pitch we made. All of this was done under the guise of shielding our scheme from unwanted scrutiny, and Cimino thought of me as the most risk-averse person he’d ever met, which in turn further cemented my credibility with him. I’d even gone so far as to insist that we not move on one particular contractor who seemed more than a little nervous about the whole thing; I told Cimino that the guy just didn’t feel right, and he decided to trust my gut, albeit with a patronizing laugh. It didn’t matter; the point was that he put me down as having as much to lose as he did, which put me squarely beyond the realm of suspicion.

It became clear, quickly after our scheme began, that we’d need to rely on some sort of technology to communicate with each other. Charlie had always avoided emails, cell phones-anything that could be captured by the feds. He’d always preferred face-to-face conversations. But we were working too quickly to pull that off anymore. So we settled on text messages. And we came up with a plan. Charlie had a master list of all companies that had contracts with one of the governor’s agencies in excess of a hundred thousand a year. Charlie figured a hundred thousand was a good break-off, sufficiently large that a company would be willing to make a campaign contribution, and/or throw Charlie or me some side business, in order to keep it.

Charlie put that list in order, from bigger contracts to smaller, and assigned a number to each one. When he had a company in mind to target, he would send me a text message that contained that number somewhere within the body of the message. A text saying It must be 25 degrees outside meant the next target was contractor number 25. Did you see that article in the paper on page 11? meant contractor number 11 was next up. That gave me the contractor’s name and the contract itself. I would study it to look for ways that we could break the contract and dump the company. And after our meetings like the one we just had with Mitch DeSantis, I would be responsible for any follow-up. If the contractor balked in any way or if they reached out to me at all, I would text Charlie back, again using the coded number to indicate the company.

All of that was acceptable, from Charlie’s perspective. He wasn’t thrilled about the text messages but the messages themselves were indecipherable without a translator. The only person who could translate them, besides him, was me. And he trusted me.

The two of us were making out okay on these deals, as well. Cimino picked and chose among our targets-the ones with the larger contracts and, therefore, more to lose if we pulled the plug on them-and made sure consulting contracts went to his sham companies. Some legal work was sent my way, as well. My plate was beginning to swell at the office. Even Shauna was impressed, though still skeptical. The feds and I had to figure out how to handle the issue of the legal business. On the one hand, it was ill-gotten legal work, the product of extortion. On the other hand, I was performing legitimate legal work for these clients, however they arrived at my doorstep, and I couldn’t be expected to do it for nothing. So the arrangement that I made with the U.S. attorney’s office was that I would receive the hourly fee for private attorneys who are referred cases from the federal defender. Every private lawyer who was a member of the federal bar was eligible to be referred such a case and was required to handle it for a paltry hourly fee as part of our duty to provide legal services to the indigent; in my case, it wasn’t the indigent but the extorted.