She was arrested and charged with conspiracy to deliver methamphetamine, specifically fifty grams, precisely the amount that would trigger a ten-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.
In the Criminal Code, the crime of conspiracy does not have as one of its elements the actual commission of the underlying felony; the agreement itself constitutes the crime. It was irrelevant to my client’s case that no actual drugs had been exchanged. By promising to find methamphetamine, she had conspired to traffic. Her sentence would be determined by the quantity of drugs she had agreed to provide.
The only question that remained for the jury was whether she was entrapped, tricked into conspiring to commit the crime. Central to that question was whether or not my client was predisposed to deal drugs. If she was, then the informant’s trickery was absolutely legal—no harm done. If she wasn’t, then she must be acquitted.
I had, as you can imagine, a pretty good case, made all the better by what I discovered about the informant’s long and colorful personal and professional history. After being found not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted murder of his wife, the informant had escaped from a secure psychiatric facility and made his way to Central America, where he ended up in the employ of the CIA. His job with the CIA involved transporting cocaine. The CIA referred him to the DEA, who were even more generous than the spy agency had been. Over the years, the informant, a legally insane attempted murderer, earned hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. He focused on first-time offenders, setting up one after another. These people inevitably went to jail, most of them for at least ten years. Then, in one of his cases, a large quantity of cash disappeared. The informant denied knowing anything about the lost money, but when his handlers hooked him up to a lie detector, he failed unambiguously. Their response? Not to charge him with a crime, but to move him to a different jurisdiction, where the defense attorneys would have no information about his nefarious past.
I would have found out nothing about this history but for a mistake in the discovery file the U.S. attorney was required to turn over to me. Though the documents were aggressively redacted, on one page the black pen had slipped, leaving part of a case number visible. It didn’t take me long to tease out the jurisdiction. Half a dozen phone calls later, I had everything I needed to eviscerate the informant on the witness stand. I knew I could convince a jury that his testimony was at best unreliable, at worst criminal perjury.
When I confronted the assistant U.S. attorney about the man, he just shrugged. Your client is guilty, he said. We have her on tape.
But the informant! I insisted. He’s a murderer! A perjurer!
The assistant U.S. attorney was unmoved.
Furious, I began spreading the word to the community. There’s a man on the street in East L.A. soliciting drugs, I told people. He’s not a buyer or a dealer, but a DEA informant. He’s also easy to recognize amidst the various Latino communities of Los Angeles; he’s got a Puerto Rican accent. Tell everyone you know.
Week after week, as I prepared for trial, my client was held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, while her kids struggled to care for themselves, to make it to school on time, the older ones taking responsibility for feeding the younger, working after school to earn money to pay the bills so they wouldn’t be evicted or have the power cut off. And then, one day, I got a phone call from my client’s sister, who lived in San Diego.
“Your secretary called me,” the sister said.
“My secretary?”
“Your secretary says that you’re a government agent. That you don’t really work for my sister, but for the prosecution.”
“I’m a government employee, true, but I represent your sister. I’m a federal public defender. She’s my client. I do what’s best for her, not for the government.”
“Your secretary says to fire you. He says he can help me find a better lawyer.”
My secretary was busily preparing for an elaborate wedding and had no time to talk with my clients’ families about their cases. Moreover, my secretary was a woman.
“The man who said he was my secretary,” I asked, “did he have a Puerto Rican accent?”
“Yes.”
I don’t remember if I said “Fuck” out loud, but chances are good.
Then my client’s sister said, “I recorded his call on my answering machine. Do you want to hear the tape?”
What I wanted was for her to get in her car and drive it to me. “Do not speed,” I said. “Do not get in an accident. Do not give the tape to anyone but me. I will be waiting in the street in front of the federal building.” Hoping I don’t get shot by that fucking madman, I thought to myself.
Two and a half hours later, a battered minivan pulled up to the curb. A sweet-faced young woman, short like my client but not carrying the weight of five pregnancies, peered at me from behind the steering wheel. Wisely, she insisted on seeing my picture ID before she handed me the tape. I ran with it up to the U.S. attorney’s office.
As he listened to the tape, the AUSA’s sneer curdled.
“Well?” I said.
“How did you get this?” he asked me.
I held his gaze. “Well?” I repeated.
He threw up his hands. “We’ll dismiss.”
Twenty years later, as I stared at the text from Lucy, I thought of this informant and his deliberate specificity about the quantity of drugs he wanted my client to produce. I had asked for a few doses, a quantity that I felt comfortable arguing was for personal use, a quantity I felt would limit any penalty to one I was willing to risk in order to preserve my emotional well-being and the stability of my family. But sixty doses? What court would ever believe that a single person intended to use sixty doses? Sixty doses didn’t add up to possession for personal use. Sixty doses added up to intent to distribute.
I was suddenly certain that Lucy was no friend of a friend of a friend. She was a confidential informant, or maybe just a cop. Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where Vince (John Travolta) calls Lance the drug dealer (Eric Stoltz)? Realizing that Vince is calling about a girl who has ODed and might die, Stoltz shouts into the phone, “Prank caller! Prank caller!” and slams the phone down. That was me on the street corner.
A bead of sweat trickling down my forehead. Fingers trembling, I typed, “No thanks. I’m only interested in a small quantity for PERSONAL USE. I wouldn’t know what to do with more than that.”
I hit “send,” then deleted the text stream from my phone. I would not be buying LSD from Lucy or from anyone else.
Shaking, I walked home and tried to prepare myself. It mattered not at all that I’d never bought the drug. The crime of conspiracy lies in the agreement, not the action. It wouldn’t take them long. Meditation, it turns out, does little to calm the nerves when one is waiting to be arrested.
Spoiler alert: I’m still here.
What I won’t be doing ever again, however, is buying illegal drugs. So I suppose that means the next Microdose Day will be my last.
Day 27
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.