Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (16 page)

Dalia Dippolito entering the courtroom.

I could sense the momentary fear receding, this awkward jolt I’d created in them, like a sharp poke in the chest. By allaying that fear, answering the unasked question, I set the jury on solid ground—a path they could walk in confidence all the way to the end of the trial. And I felt like they never left me. I walked them through the evidence, using an aerial photograph that showed all our locations within a three-mile radius, a map that subconsciously connected the characters, their motives, and their fate like a spider’s silken threads. I noted Mohamed’s unlikely bout of conscience, and how it peeled back this privileged view on the police department’s rapid response, the videotaped evidence, bags of cash and jewelry, Dalia’s big scene, the big reveal at the police station, the first blooms of her alibi, the text record, and all the rest of it. I also tried to frame in subtext what I thought would be the jury’s biggest question: How could Mike Dippolito have fallen for all of this? How is that even possible?

My answer, which I would present during the trial, was simple: Mike. Mike in all his contradictions—the nice guy and the ex-con; the go-along, get-along guileless patsy; and the obsessive, hyper-motivated Internet hustler who brought in millions—legally, well after he’d done his time. Mike, warts and all. And the longer Salnick kept him on the stand, the more he was forced to withstand the cold hard glare of the justice system, then the more it became a simple calculation of the odds. I was betting that if you put Mike and Dalia head to head, a jury would find Mike the more credible of the two. After all, isn’t that what reality TV is all about? It lets the audience decide who wins and who loses, who’s good and who’s evil, who’s telling the truth and who’s lying through their carnivore’s teeth and claws. All I had to do was get out of the way.

In contrast, Michael Salnick’s opening statement finally gave us a first peek at this intriguing defense strategy we had been getting wisps and glimmers of in the months leading up to the trial. Here is how he began:

“We live in a world where the media has proven time and time again that it is used by people from all walks of life as a means to an end. We live in a world where the line between the reality of TV and people’s real lives get blurred. We live in a world where people seeking their fifteen minutes of fame lose all sense of judgment and common sense. The power that people give to the media, no matter who these people are, can have an impact on how they live their lives. And in this case, the evidence will show that people tried to use the media to hopefully gain exposure and that brief moment of fame that they can turn into opportunity and money.

“The evidence will show that Mike Dippolito enjoyed watching reality TV. Mike will tell you that he watches
Jersey Shore
, that he finds it amazing—
amazing
—that people make money doing this. But he thinks it’s cool. He was a fan of the show
Cheaters
. Now that’s the show where one person in a relationship suspects the other of infidelity, and the show basically investigates the suspicion. The show plants a hidden camera and stalks the suspected partner until there’s enough footage for the confrontation episode. The cameras roll, and they roll to catch the emotion and the drama that springs from the confrontation. Michael claims to have actually purchased for his wife, Dalia, a boxed set of all the episodes of
Cheaters
. It also came with a tank top with the logo of the show on it for her to wear.

“Now, the evidence will show that for many, reality TV shows depict the worst of our society: They’re superficial. They’re artificial. And they’re filled with attention-getting hokey drama. For others, reality TV has become a way to launch a center-stage career. Reality TV has evolved from letting real life play out in front of the camera to a meticulously produced program packaged to hold the viewer’s attention. The evidence will show that reality TV is not as real as it’s portrayed to the public. Producers sometimes engineer situations to activate the desired reactions from the actors, who are often carefully chosen through casting calls. Sometimes people just act as they go through what they believe to be a reality TV moment. Producers pore over footage, splicing it together to create the most attention-grabbing entertainment episodes. Almost anybody can go to a website and read about how to make a reality TV show. The trick is to come up with a unique idea
that will be picked up by a real producer and a real production team. The evidence will show that when Dalia Dippolito was younger, she was actually an extra on a reality TV show. It was called
Jamie Kennedy’s Experiment
and ironically, the episode in which she was an extra involved a fake hit on someone. The evidence will show that reality TV often glorifies what we call bad behavior that appeals to the gullibility of people. The evidence will show that the plot of the contract killing of Mike Dippolito was never real. It was a stunt, a hoax, a ruse—a plan that Mike Dippolito, whether he’ll admit it or not, hoped to capture the attention of someone in reality TV. And while he’ll never tell you this, the evidence will show you that his motives were very clear.

“The evidence will also show that as it so happens, one of the original and possibly the oldest reality shows on television is also involved in this case. The TV show
COPS
was coincidentally in South Florida to ride with the Boynton Beach Police Department during the week that Miss Dippolito was arrested.”

He goes on to link the incidents at Manalapan and CityPlace, the “cloak-and-dagger-type note that was left on his windshield,” with “the liposuction, the orthodontic braces, the expensive clothing, a Porsche, a Corvette, trips to the tanning salon, lots of cash, and a beautiful young wife” to prove “an orchestrated stunt to get Mike Dippolito in front of the cameras.”

“He’d come up with this story and plan for reality TV, which was absolutely crazy,” said Salnick. “She thought this was ridiculous, but maybe as a way to stop him, attempting to violate his probation might put an end to what Mike wanted to do. She was scared, and she didn’t know what to do.” By denigrating what was essentially his own defense strategy and then attributing it to Mike, he was using its sheer unlikelihood as his strongest selling point. The more outrageous the idea, the faultier its logic, then the crazier Mike was, and the more likely his guilt.

That must have appealed to Dalia, the long-shot gambler. She must have liked these odds, since they defied reality even as you were staring straight at it. It’s the same ploy she used on Mike in her jailhouse call: “You know me!” Who are you gonna believe? And because it gave her an unobstructed shot
at the jackpot—the house, the money, all the possessions, and the biggest score of all: walking out of the courtroom, free and clear, past the bailiff and the TV crews and her assembled fans.

One hand, heads up, all in.

Bring it on.

S
o I put Mike Dippolito on the stand. My main goal was to portray Dalia as the mastermind of everything— the missing key in explaining all of these inexplicable events in Mike’s cloistered world, culminating in his narrowly averted death and transition to a more circumspect way of life. For Dalia to emerge as the victim, they would have to redefine Mike as the ringmaster, the mad scientist of this elaborate social experiment whose ultimate payoff was still unclear two years later. I didn’t know how the defense planned to get there, but I instinctively felt that the jury wouldn’t go with them if they could see Mike the way I saw him. So I put him up and I let him talk.

Mike gave us a snapshot of his life now: Selling construction supplies online, diamond blades that would cut through cement blocks. How he filed for divorce a week after his wife’s arrest (a process that would continue until several months after the end of the trial). The details of his previous marriage, to a loyal girlfriend who had stayed with him all during his time away, and the compounded guilt he felt for ending their life together so suddenly. And the flip side of that coin—his meeting and marrying Dalia, this whirlwind that dropped out of the sky into his highly structured existence and blew everything that wasn’t battened down to the outer edges.

Here’s Mike on his marriage to Dalia:

It was exciting. I had fun with Dalia; it was interesting, we got along well, seemed to share the same interests in things . . . I thought we had
a good marriage. We had some issues, but I was in love with my wife, I married her and I wanted a future with her.

In plodding detail, I walked him through all of those issues I knew Salnick was sharpening his knives to dissect: Mike’s criminal history, time in prison, dysfunctional childhood, baroque drug legacy, stints in rehab, flouting the terms of his probation, the cache of money he had squirreled away, his health problems, superficial self-improvements, profligate spending, flashy trappings, and all the rest of it. If it was embarrassing and potentially character-destroying, we covered it, hour upon hour, through the rest of that first day and the morning of the second.

The monotony would be broken up by objections from Salnick, which would often require a sidebar at the judge’s bench. These were usually about the admissibility of evidence or to argue some point of law. As we got further into Salnick’s cross of Mike and later Mohamed, Judge Colbath grew increasingly annoyed at the repetitive nature of the cross-examination. But given that the trial could easily come down to what the judge allowed the jury to hear, there were relatively few objections on either side. Although it often seemed like we were mortal enemies in the courtroom, we actually had a very smooth working relationship. At one early hearing, Salnick told Colbath that if we got along any better we could serve as co-counsels. Salnick’s defense wouldn’t have made any sense without his reputation as an intense, accomplished trial attorney. That’s what kept everyone on their toes—this ingenious strategy and wondering what he knew that we didn’t.

Mike dippolito being cross-examined by defense attorney Michael salnick.

According to Florida law, the defendant is allowed to approach the bench during all sidebars, and this was the closest I ever got to Dalia. She wasn’t allowed to speak, but I was very aware of the jury watching us and tried to be deferential when I could. I prefer the practice, since the defendant is aware of every issue at trial and can’t claim later they were misinformed or were denied due process.

This was my first big national case, and my parents flew in to attend the trial. Because of the notoriety, local TV stations were streaming the court proceedings, and my brother Jeff was watching live in New York City. Sometime during the first couple of days, he saw a shot of my parents in the courtroom and got so excited that he called to leave them a message that I was doing great. Except that my Dad had forgotten to turn off his cell phone, and as I was preparing to ask a question, I heard it go off in the middle of the courtroom. I knew it was him because he has “The Entertainer” as his ring tone. The bailiff ran over to help him get it silenced. It took them forever, while I stood frozen with my head bowed, trying not to laugh.

Near the end of the six hours I kept Mike on the stand, after I’d walked him through the tightening circles of intrigue converging on the morning of his ersatz assassination, after he was spirited into the upside-down world of police stations and holding cells and everyone he met looking at him like he was a dead man walking, I asked him how it felt seeing Dalia in police custody, a dangerous animal boxed into a tight corner, pleading with him through an open doorway. He struggled to put the experience into words.

MIKE: It didn’t feel good watching it. It didn’t feel like . . . I’m not getting any satisfaction out of this whole thing. I felt bad for her. Not that I could do anything, but I didn’t want to see it—talking to her, asking her questions, [her] sobbing.

PARKER: You say you felt bad for her—why did you feel bad for her?

MIKE: How could somebody be that stupid? I’m a person who has been in trouble, and all I talked about was wanting to get out of trouble. I thought we had a pretty good thing going in life. To do something like that? That’s one of those things to me. I broke the law, I understand, but on the other hand, I’m not out hurting people. It’s violence . . . violence. I don’t get it. So stupid. I don’t understand. So stupid.

I asked him a series of blanket questions about reality TV to stake a claim for when the defense began to unfurl their shadowed theory:

PARKER: Did you ever try out for a reality show?

MIKE: No.

PARKER: Do you have aspirations to be on a reality show?

MIKE: No.

PARKER: Did you speak to a producer about an idea?

MIKE: No.

PARKER: Did you talk to the Boynton Beach Police Department about having a reality show?

MIKE: No.

PARKER: Did you write a script for a reality show?

MIKE: No.

PARKER: Did you act out scenarios with Dalia Dippolito for a reality show?

MIKE: No.

I asked him about his appearances on television news shows (he appeared on
The Today Show
on August 10 and November 20, 2009), in
case the other team presented that as some kind of unrequited craving for media attention—establishing that he was never paid for his appearances, cataloging his reasons, and trying to determine how it made him feel.

PARKER: Why did you go on
The Today Show
?

MIKE: They just—nobody would leave me alone. The phone keeps ringing, ringing. They’re in front of my house almost two, three days. Ringing the bell, ringing the bell, ringing the bell; my phone’s ringing, ringing, ringing. I thought if I just said something, not saying nothing, it would take it away from me. And that’s not exactly what happened, but that was the idea.

PARKER: Did you read any articles or see any news reports that painted you in a bad light?

MIKE: Yeah, lots of ’em.

PARKER: And how did that affect you?

MIKE: I mean, it’s uh . . . it affected me, but I know that’s nonsense and I try not to let it bother me. But being approached left and right, and reading stupid things that people write in the news. I’m not here because I want to be here . . . I’m gauged to be a fake gangster, a thief, a convicted felon, a wife beater—all these things that were said. And I’m none of that. I’m a convicted felon, I report to my probation officer every month and report, but I hold my head up as high as I can—I feel, rightfully so. So to just let people bash and bash and bash me, I didn’t feel it was right for me not to maybe say something.

Finally, I had Mike read transcripts of a series of texts between him and Dalia in the days and hours leading up to the event, while she was putting the final pieces of her plan into place, to demonstrate Mike’s complete obliviousness to the events unfolding around him:

On July 26 at 11:31 a.m.:

MIKE: Okay, pills make me feel sick.

DALIA: I’ll be there soon [and] take care of you. I’m sorry, love.

MIKE: I’m fine. I’m watching
The Hulk
.

DALIA: Nice. Thinking of you. You were great last night.

MIKE: LY [“Love you”].

And on August 4, the day before, at 1:28 p.m.:

MIKE: [Can you] see when the soonest will be that we can go to Fort Lauderdale to see a doc? Want him to drain my back.

DALIA: ’Kay. Why? What’s going on?

MIKE: This isn’t going down, and when I sit it bulges into my side and hurts. Just want it drained, you know?

DALIA: I’m sorry. I love you so much. I’ll call them right away.

MIKE: No biggie. Just see when we could go, okay?

As far as Dalia knew, in another seventeen hours her husband would be dead. Mike began to tear up a little bit as he read this last part.

I asked him if he had known anything about a plot to have him killed on August 5, 2009, and he said no. And with that, I had no further questions.

After a break for lunch, Michael Salnick began his cross-examination of Mike Dippolito. In his opening statements, he had laid a substantial amount of groundwork establishing Mike’s reality show gambit. I was really looking forward to seeing how he was going to pull that off, and I think the jury was, too. But whatever sleight of hand was going to come later, his one unwavering approach to the two days he kept Mike on the stand could be boiled down to a single declarative sentence:

“Mike Dippolito is a liar.”

He gripped it like a golden chisel and hammered at the edifice of Mike’s credibility wherever he thought it might warp or crack, only
letting up when I objected and the judge sustained it, which he did fairly consistently.

SALNICK: You talked about some kind of thing you had to wear when you were in rehab a long time ago, like a feeling thing or something?

MIKE: Yes.

(According to Mike, when he was fifteen, he did his first stint in rehab, trading six months of getting in touch with his feelings for another five and a half years of sobriety. One of his tasks was to wear a “feelings wheel,” with which he could dial in to his dominant emotion on a minute-by-minute basis.)

SALNICK: Okay, if you were wearing that today, how would you feel?

MIKE: Sad.

Salnick started off by enumerating Mike’s crimes—Organized Fraud, Unlicensed Communications as a Telephone Seller, Unlicensed Commercial Telephone Seller, and Grand Theft—forcing him to acknowledge them as “crimes of dishonesty.” (Mike called them “the dumbest thing I did in my life.”) When Mike volunteered that he knew how wire transfers worked (and thus knew Dalia was lying), Salnick couldn’t resist getting in a dig: “And you’re familiar with how this wire process works from scamming other people.”

Although Mike readily admitted his actions, taking full responsibility wherever he could, Salnick went through an itemization of how that money was spent:

SALNICK: Did you use pay-by-the-minute chat rooms with the money that you withdrew?

MIKE: Can you elaborate?

SALNICK: Sure. Did you withdraw money that you stole from people from ATM machines?

MIKE: Yes.

SALNICK: Okay, did you go into psychic hotlines and sex hotlines, chat rooms, with that money?

MIKE: Yes.

I tried to object on grounds of relevance, which was sustained, but Mike had already answered.

Salnick focused on the mechanics of purchasing the house, suggesting that because the cashier’s check was made out in Dalia’s name, it meant that he was trying to shield his assets from those seeking restitution. This brought on the first dustup of their contentious exchange.

SALNICK: Okay, so let me talk about this now. Just so that I understand, you told the jury before that it wasn’t until you supposedly talked to this fake lawyer on the steps of the Miami Dade County Courthouse that you were advised by someone on the phone to hide your assets, right?

MIKE: Later on, down the road, we’re talking. Not where you started.

SALNICK: Okay, listen to my question.

MIKE: You went from here to eight months later. I’m confused.

SALNICK: Does that make a difference to you?

MIKE: You confused me.

SALNICK: Does that change the truth?

MIKE: I don’t even know what you’re asking me at this point.

Salnick got them back on the rails and then returned to seven months earlier, when Mike purchased his house with “money that you didn’t tell probation about.”

SALNICK: So that check for the house says Dalia Mohammed.

MIKE: I don’t know where she would get the money from.

SALNICK: I didn’t ask you that question, but I appreciate your sharing that with me.

This brings a chuckle from Mike.

MIKE: Yeah. Sure.

SALNICK: What I asked you is: that check, if someone were to look at it, has the name of Dalia Mohammed as the person who purchased it. Correct?

MIKE: Yes.