Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (20 page)

That left me. I was amazed that the DoJ had come to me last. Giles had told me that was because they saw me as the ringleader; the architect and the brains behind the fraud – which was further proof, if I needed it, of how little they had either investigated this ‘offence’ or understood it. Reid called me the day David turned the DoJ down. He had Schwartzy and Kevin on the phone with him – great guys and a great team, but whenever the three of them were on the line, it spelt trouble. The call was awkward and at times unpleasant and it left me with a decision to make.

I decided to write it all down. The positive part of the deal was that I would serve minimal – if any – time in a US prison, with a good chance I could be home by Christmas. That was quite a thought in itself. The alternative was to go to trial with all the pressure that entails. I worried whether we could mount a proper defence in any trial in Houston, particularly without the key witnesses we needed from London. If we lost – which I understood was a real possibility – we could face up to fifteen years in prison, maybe longer given how seriously Judge Werlein seemed to view these Enron cases. Even if we won, the DoJ had already indicated they would seek to continue to hold us in Houston for another two years or so if necessary for a retrial. None of this was encouraging, and although I had been aware of all of this for a while, I sighed as I wondered again if I’d ever get home – if there was any way out of this.

If that wasn’t enough, the DoJ had laced their ‘offer’ with some new ‘personal’ enticements to encourage me to plead guilty.

The first one was that they would countenance an immediate short-term trip home for me to meet my London lawyer and my lawyer in Tunisia so we could make some progress in tracking down Cara. They had completely resisted my entreaties on these matters before, but either had found a sudden new spring of compassion or, more likely, were cynically targeting my soft spots.

After eighteen months of complete silence on Cara, the thought of actually meeting face-to-face with the two lawyers I had found to help me through the legal process of getting her back was sorely tempting. The best we had ever managed were telephone calls from the US to London or Tunis – hardly the ideal way to make progress in locating Cara. I had made some headway through the UK courts, who now properly recognised Cara’s case as a parental abduction, but I was always hampered by the simple fact that I was not there. I was the father trying to get his daughter back from Tunisia to England while he was confined in Houston, Texas. Ironically, even being in prison in the UK would have given me a better chance of getting her back than being ‘free’ in Houston. Incarceration can come in many guises.

I sat back in my seat to think about this and to contemplate the even greater bombshell the DoJ had dropped on me: that Laura my ex-wife had been in Washington a couple of times talking to them, with the first meeting having taken place shortly after I had arrived in Houston. All that time, all that effort, all the frustration and all the hurt in trying to find her and they knew; they knew all along where my daughter was. I was stunned. I never realised the game was played this way. I never realised these people worked like this. I thought that even to them, the safety of my daughter transcended the mere rights and wrongs of the stupid investment we made – that everyone could see, could understand, how much more important a little girl’s welfare was. More important than this shit.

The
coup de grâce
came with the clarification that if I didn’t accept a deal, then the DoJ as well as seeking the maximum sentence they could, would never agree to a transfer home to a UK prison. As no one could be transferred back to a UK prison unless the DoJ first of all agreed to allow it to happen, I would serve the entire sentence here in the US with all the implications that had for me in terms of Calum and Cara, and the rest of my family. I would be finished as a father, my life over. I had often used carrot-and-stick techniques in negotiating business deals in the banking world, but this was a whole new dimension of brutality.

I wondered about the prosecutor sitting in his Washington office, interviewing Laura, knowing she had broken the law in England and disappeared with my daughter, and was still sought by the UK police for being in contravention of a specific High Court order to return Cara to her home and family in England. I wondered how he did that; how he got comfortable with that both legally and morally. I wondered if he had children – children he went home to and played with at night – and if so, whether he ever contemplated the horror of losing one, and not knowing where she was.

I sighed again and rubbed my temples as I tried to take this all in.

The way the plea-bargaining system worked provided its own twist to the pressure to ‘rat out’ on the others around you. Once the judge had ordered our separation when we arrived in Houston we weren’t allowed to communicate or be in the same room without a lawyer present. Each client had to have individual and separate legal advice and it didn’t take long before the lawyers would start to suggest that one or both of the others may be guilty – or if not guilty, perhaps too weak to resist a deal to go home. I understood that the only person who I could actually be sure was ‘not guilty’ was me. I couldn’t know for certain if Giles or David were guilty of a crime, just as they couldn’t know for certain about me or indeed each other. The DoJ had assumed that all three of our actions were interchangeable and that we were reasonably aware of what each other said or did, or emailed or indeed intended throughout. But we knew that wasn’t actually true. Any one of the three of us could have been aware of what was going on from Fastow’s perspective, or hidden a key piece of evidence or information, or decided not to say or do anything that would have led the others to abandon the deal. There were thousands of permutations, maybe all unlikely, but all I knew with certainty concerned my own actions and thoughts, not those of Giles or David.

I must admit I had had my moments of doubt and I’m sure the other two must have had them about me as well. There were loads of inconsistencies, of failed recollections or misunderstood events. With lawyers constantly around, I had lost the ability to talk freely to David and Giles and the doubts about them and how they were viewing me began to increase. David had already told me on more than one occasion that he was told, ‘Mulgrew’s missing daughter makes him a shoo-in to do a deal.’ Clearly the DoJ thought so too.

But I tried to dispel such thoughts from my mind. Inconsistencies were part and parcel of human recollection – one man remembers a green room while another saw blue. When we finally gained access to the emails that had contained so much of the inflammatory materials used to extradite us, it had been four years since we had been indicted and six years since we’d written or received them. I can struggle to remember what I meant in an email sent last Tuesday, yet still the lawyers would spend hours re-examining potential nuances in every email. It was pointless. All I knew was I hadn’t set out to defraud anyone. I never would.

In an attempt to sweeten things, the DoJ had also stated that if I accepted a deal, I wouldn’t have to testify against my two friends, although they stressed that they might reduce my sentence further if I did. But I knew even if I didn’t testify against them, just the act of pleading guilty would almost certainly lead to their conviction. The inference a jury would draw from my guilty plea and the fact that Giles and David couldn’t count on my testimony would be enough to sink them, guilty or not guilty.

That is the problem with so-called ‘conspiracy’ cases: during the plea-bargaining process, at some point you can become the de facto judge. Now, if I changed my plea to guilty, I was effectively sentencing David and Giles to years in prison; judging them based on nothing more than a few lawyer-induced random doubts or feeble inconsistencies, just as surely as if I stood there and admonished them myself. Sure we all had doubts, and in the hard times we had endured in Houston any paranoia was easily fed. But Giles and David had both gone through the same doubts about me and about each other, goaded no doubt by lawyers required to do the best for their client. Maybe one of them was guilty, maybe they both were guilty of something – I’d never know – but my sense and experience of them suggested otherwise. And anyway, who was I to judge?

I looked down at the paper again and consider once more the nature of this ‘deal’ and the people who were offering it to me. I felt cheated, angry, insulted and amazed by the squalid nature of their approach. I paused for a second before I ripped the piece of paper up and threw it across the table.

Reid had told me once that he’d seen brothers plead against brothers, fathers against sons, and having tasted the pressure exerted first hand, I could understand why. I began the journey thinking I had lost my country. But even for a man who tended to think of himself principally as a Scot, there was something very British and dignified about the way we three individuals independently determined not to assume the role of judge or executioner of the other two. Maybe I was getting my sense of country back; maybe one day I would get it all back. Anyway, I wouldn’t be pleading guilty.

‘I don’t need to waste time thinking about this anymore,’ I thought, my anger and determination growing as I reached for the phone to call Reid. I wanted to tell him to go back to them today – to go back to them now, this morning, immediately after my call – and tell them, in words as stark as his lawyerly professionalism would allow, ‘to go and fuck themselves’.

The memory of that morning re-ignited the anger in me. Angel was still sat on the bunk, patiently waiting for my answer. ‘I don’t think there is anyone,’ I began with a passion that probably surprised him, ‘that hates those fuckers more than me. I wouldn’t help them if my life depended on it. Read my fucking papers and see for yourself. I wouldn’t rat on anyone.’ I stood to get up, as Angel’s hand locked onto my wrist.

But I was way beyond being frightened of Angel or anyone else at that moment, and he seemed to sense that, quickly letting go of me with a nod and a smile. ‘OK, Scotland, OK. That’s cool. I’ll take your papers and get it all checked out, then get back to you. I hope for your sake they stack up, I really do. You understand we need to check through these things.’

I didn’t say anything, I just nodded. I was still thinking of the Department of Justice, that institutional misnomer. I hated those people. Loved America, loved its people, hated its justice system. To me, the DoJ were no better than Angel, no better than the people who had perpetrated the beating in the Range the previous day, or the people who had looked away.

‘Can I go?’ I said to Angel, my face set in stone.

‘Sure Scotland,’ he responded offering me a fist bump. ‘I pissed you off?’ he added, intrigued.

‘No, no,’ I responded, reminding myself a little of the delicacy of my position. ‘You just started off a lot of bad memories. Let me get you those papers.’

Back then, Reid tried to get me to take longer to consider my decision, but I knew I would never change my mind, and he eventually delivered my message to the DoJ, although I doubt it was with the gusto or the wording I would have preferred. He was too professional for that. It looked like we were all set for a trial a few months later in October, but then in a move that surprised us all, the DoJ offered a deal to all three of us to plead guilty. In what Reid saw as a coincidence and I saw as an orchestrated move, the judge ordered a further delay in the trial ‘to at least January, but possibly the Spring’ on the same day the DoJ approached us with this new, collective deal. The official explanation was that a state murder trial was to take precedence over our case, even though Reid and Dan told me they had never known any state trial to trump a Federal prosecution.

The deal was this: a straight thirty-seven months for the three of us, with a significant twist. Provided we agreed to waive all rights to any future appeal, the DoJ would agree to transfer us home ‘in an expedited manner’. That was our shabby deal. ‘Expedited’ was as far as they would go, despite our best attempts at some stronger assurance. The price of waiving our right to an appeal was inviolate; the DoJ recognising without doubt that the nonsense to which we were pleading guilty was quite likely to be overturned in time.

Transfers normally took anywhere between eighteen months to three years to arrange; so Reid’s guess was we were looking at around a year if we got lucky. Having geared ourselves up for trial and having resolutely refused an individual deal, it was amazing how quickly the cracks in our resolve now appeared. We could be home late the following year – almost four years since we had left. We were tired, drained and had all been away from home for too long. People had died, life had moved on. Life was in danger of leaving us behind.

And so we all agreed to plead guilty. Bizarrely all that remained with the sentence already agreed was what we were pleading guilty to. To be honest, I was past caring, but in the end we worked out what was known as a Statement of Facts. I understood that as long as everything in it was true, or at least I had no knowledge to suggest it was untrue, then I could sign it. It didn’t matter if there were material omissions.

In the end, when I read it, I was still unclear of the crime I was supposed to have committed: a breach of my employment contract with NatWest because I had apparently failed to ever mention the investment opportunity to them. It was rubbish and in a court in England, where I could have compelled witnesses to appear (we couldn’t compel them to come to Texas), it would have been thrown out in a day with testimony from NatWest alone, but by that stage, I’d have pleaded guilty to being Osama bin Laden if they’d asked me. I just wanted to get home.

I handed my papers containing this nonsense to Angel. ‘You’re welcome to that,’ I said, sitting on the bunk below mine as Angel started flicking through the papers. After a while he looked up, briskly, all business again.

‘OK. Once we’ve checked these out, we need to talk about who you’re running with.’