David Ellis: Breach of Trust

I am recounting this story in case I am not around when the dust settles. If some unfortunate accident should befall me, as they say, and I am unable to testify, I want to have some account of what I did and why. I will not try to justify my actions. I could tell you that they made me do it, but that’s hardly the point, and it may not be entirely accurate.

I won’t lie to you, which is to say I will not deliberately mislead you. I will give you the most accurate account of events I can muster, but I can’t promise it will be the truth. Truth is a matter of perspective, and if you don’t believe me, then just watch how this whole thing plays out. Everyone who is a part of this story will tell a different version, when their time comes. In most of those versions, the hero will be whoever is telling the story.

In many of those versions, no doubt, the villain will be me.

March-June 2007

If Ernesto Ramirez had been a better liar, he’d still be alive.

If he had told me right off the bat, or never given me the slightest indication that he had anything to tell me, I would have been on my merry way.

Joel Lightner was the private investigator. I was the lawyer. We were in Liberty Park, by which I mean not the southwest-side neighborhood bearing its name but the actual park itself, a city block of unhealthy grass and broken-down playground equipment, with a war-torn aluminum fence on the perimeter and a large wooden park district building with more graffiti on it than actual paint. The spray-painted gang insignia was an even split between the Columbus Street Cannibals and the Latin Lords. This was La Zona, disputed territory claimed by each of the gangs.

Almost two years ago to the day, exactly a half-mile straight west from this park, a small business owner named Adalbert Wozniak took five bullets to the chest, neck, and face. My client, State Senator Hector Almundo, was charged with his murder.

Nobody thought that Hector had pulled the trigger, of course. The Wozniak murder was part of a larger federal prosecution that went like this: Senator Almundo, harboring ambitions to be the state’s next attorney general, had cut a deal with the Cannibals street gang to shake down local businesses for monthly payments-an old-fashioned street protection tax-which the Cannibals then shared with Hector’s campaign fund. The government figured that the take was roughly a fifty-fifty split between Hector and the Cannibals. That meant that, over an eighteen-month period, Citizens for Almundo took in about a hundred thousand dollars courtesy of the Cannibals’ extortion of local businesses.

Anyway, Wozniak was one of those business owners but refused to pay. The feds figured that the Cannibals decided to teach Wozniak a lesson and send a message to other like-minded dissenters that the street tax wasn’t optional. The message was sent well enough that Wozniak’s family couldn’t have an open casket at his funeral.

But the feds charged the whole thing, from the shakedown to the murder, as a conspiracy-their favorite word, that one-which meant that all of the crimes that were a part of the overall scheme could be attributed to all of the co-conspirators. Thus, State Senator Hector Almundo, as the supposed architect of the whole extortion scheme, was on the hook for the murder of Adalbert Wozniak, regardless of who pulled the trigger or who made the ultimate decision to pull it.

Joel Lightner and I passed a group of kids playing soccer, using anything they could find-a stone, a brick, a backpack-to frame their goals. I narrowly missed an appointment with a flying soccer ball, which made the kids howl in laughter almost in unison. I felt more than a decade and a half removed from that carefree bliss, having no other responsibility than to run around in a field chasing after a ball, though my sport was the American version of football.

Ernesto Ramirez was standing near the basketball court, in part observing and in part refereeing a four-on-four game of half-court hoops. The backboard was tattered and the rim had no net, but it didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the kids, who looked to be ages six through mid-teens. Ernesto was shouting something to them in Spanish I couldn’t place. I spoke the language pretty well but had trouble keeping up with native speakers.

“We can talk right here,” he said to us, which wasn’t our preference but we didn’t have any leverage over him. I wasn’t used to that. Until recently, I’d been a county prosecutor, where the failure to cooperate meant an arrest for obstruction.

It didn’t take long to learn that Ramirez knew of Senator Almundo, the criminal case, and Adalbert Wozniak. “I didn’t know Wozniak,” he said. He spoke well but it was clear that English was his second language.

“Did you know Eddie Vargas?” asked Lightner.

After Wozniak’s murder, eyewitness accounts of the make and model of a Chevy sedan, together with partial license plate identification, led police to discover what they believed to be the killer’s vehicle in a dump several miles away. The feds used some of their fancy forensic technology to conclude, from sediment found within the tire tracks, that the vehicle had spent some time parked behind a housing project controlled by the Columbus Street Cannibals. They also found a print on the rearview mirror that belonged to a sixteen-year-old Cannibal recruit named Eddie Vargas. When the FBI raided Vargas’s home, they found a small pistol, a Kahr MK40, which could be mistaken for a metal spray nozzle on a garden hose, and which they confirmed was the murder weapon. Young Mr. Vargas has never been located and is strongly believed to have suffered an unfortunate accident of one kind or another, probably involving a machete, the Cannibals’ weapon of choice when silencing potential talkers. Bottom line, the feds had their shooter, and he was a Cannibal, but that shooter wouldn’t be talking.

Ernesto Ramirez stared forward in the direction of the hoops game, but his eyes weren’t tracking the players or the movement of the ball. He’d drifted away momentarily at the mention of the name.

“Eddie was a sixteen-year-old kid,” he said. “A sweet kid.”

Though Ramirez was only thirty-two, his skin was weathered and his wavy dark hair was flecked with gray. He was a former Latin Lord member and drug addict who had managed to break free of both problems, but not without some residual wear. He spent his time these days running youth programs to provide alternatives to gangs. Eddie Vargas had been one of those youths.

“He didn’t shoot nobody,” Ramirez added.

Lightner shrugged. “The federal government is saying he did. Can you help us out?”

Ramirez’s jaw clenched and his left eye twitched. He was still making a show of watching that stupid basketball game. But I thought he was thinking. His mouth parted and his tongue moistened his lips, like he was on the verge of speaking.

“Senator Almundo shouldn’t have to go down for something he didn’t do,” Joel said.

Ramirez snapped out of his trance, turning on Joel. A vein throbbed near his left eye. “Hector Almundo can go to hell. I don’t know nothin’ about this, anyway. I can’t ‘help you out.’ Okay, guy?”

Another satisfied customer, Joel would say; I’d done a few of these interviews with him. Joel tried a couple more times, but Ernesto Ramirez wasn’t going to budge.

“Almundo shouldn’t go down for something he didn’t do?” I said to Joel, when we got back in his car.

Joel laughed. “It sounded good at the time.” Neither of us thought we were representing an innocent man. We didn’t think Hector had ordered a hit on Adalbert Wozniak, but the part about working out a deal with the Cannibals to shake down the local businesses? We figured the government had that part right.