Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (29 page)

Two days later, she was arrested.

In his closing statement, Mr. Salnick claimed that I intentionally failed to ask Mohamed about reality TV, implying that I had something to hide. But in the trial interview, I asked him of the defendant, “Did you ever tell her that you could make her famous or that you could make you famous with all of this?” to which he replied, “No.” Since that testimony was taken on March 7, 2009, seven weeks before the start of the trial, the defense’s case was not quite so clear then (if in fact it is even now). But leaving that aside, consider Mohamed in the context of the reality-TV plot the defense is suggesting. Look at his testimony as he’s sitting across the table from her, staring at her, discussing their sex life, and betraying their shared intimacy. He looks down, away. He laughs at inappropriate times. He doesn’t want to say anything bad about her—he even tries to minimize her role at times, almost to protect her. He said he just wanted to stop her from doing something crazy; he thought he could talk to the police once and that would be the end of it. In private, he urged her to divorce her husband, go to the police, and report his crimes or abuse, walk away even. He tried to talk her out of hiring a hit man—the very one he allegedly had just procured for her. He never spoke to the media, never made a dime off of his privileged vantage, even though the offers were substantial and he was in bankruptcy. He just didn’t want to see someone get killed. But he clearly didn’t want to have to testify; his body language screams it.

The defense wants you to believe that Mohamed went to the police because the defendant asked him to, because her husband wanted his own reality television show. To believe that, you would have to believe that Mohamed was willing to lie to the police for Mike Dippolito, a man whom he’d never met and whose wife
he was sleeping with. If so, wouldn’t he have been a little better prepared—by knowing the defendant’s last name, for instance, or where she lived, or anything about her? If it was a publicity stunt, why go ballistic once it was posted to YouTube and garnered publicity—even calling the Boynton Beach Police Department and getting into a heated and protracted argument with one of the detectives he felt had misled him? This was his moment to shine; his audition tape had just gone viral. He’d won the lottery, the one most actors only dream of, and instead he claims he didn’t know he was being filmed at all. And then, why bring Larry Coe into it, a man he claimed to fear, and whose violent exploits later earned him a lengthy prison sentence in the next courtroom over—or if he did, then why regret it so vocally afterward, unless the Buck Wild gang had shown up at his convenience store and branded him a snitch?

If this were all a reality stunt, wouldn’t Mohamed the failed actor have been a little more on his game? If he wanted his big break for reality television, wouldn’t he have been here live to testify? On some of those phone calls, you can barely understand what he’s saying: he’s zonked on Xanax, asleep on his feet. If this was all acting on his part, don’t you think he would have put a little more effort into it, planned it out a little bit better, played it up, maybe have not slurred his speech so much, or tried to enunciate just a little more? It doesn’t make any sense.

For the second time during my Closing Statement, Salnick asked to approach the bench. In a sidebar, he called attention to my reference to Mohamed’s presence in court.

SALNICK: I don’t know if the State misspoke or not, but I was told that I couldn’t mention any of that in terms of why he wasn’t here. For the State to make the comment, “Wouldn’t he have been here live to testify?” is certainly not within the spirit of perpetuated deposition testimony.

JUDGE COLBATH: Is there an objection?

Salnick asked that the comment be stricken and for the court to reread the instructions on perpetuated testimony.

SALNICK: And I am going to move for a mistrial because had I stood up and said, “Where is Mohamed?” I would have invited error, and I would have breached an agreement. Again, things are said in zeal during closing argument. I’m not mad at Ms. Parker; it’s just not what we agreed to.

I tried to explain my meaning, which to me was obvious: if this were really his big break, he would have shown up, regardless of the reasons he didn’t. The first rule of show business: the show must go on. The fact that it didn’t meant that in his mind, it couldn’t have been a performance. Judge Colbath overruled the objection and again, we continued as we were.

PARKER: Why did the defendant overreact when her hit man asked for a key to her house, other than because it was a spontaneous request on the part of Officer Widy Jean, and Mohamed hadn’t warned the defendant it was coming? She is on her way to Mohamed’s house to discuss the matter in person when Mohamed tells her not to come, since his house was not wired to record their conversation. Rather than talk in the car, she pulls over on I-95 and paces on the shoulder of the freeway while she debates the hit man’s motives. After telling him to make sure he’s not near anyone while they discuss this, she informs him that Mike will be carrying a large sum of money when he leaves the bank on Wednesday morning—money that Mohamed and the hit man could dispose of as they see fit. She does this because she is driving Mike’s Tahoe, which already has been stopped several times by police for suspicion of drug dealing. Why would that matter if this were all pretend? It seems like she would welcome the attention, and certainly the drama. Let them record everything. On that call,
she tells Mohamed that in the future if she can’t talk, she will use the code phrase “I pulled up some listings for you”—ostensibly a common phrase associated with her real estate career. But the likely reason she gives for not being able to talk is if her husband is nearby—the one who, under the defense’s working theory, is actually calling the shots. In frustration, she even tells Mohamed to give her the gun she paid for and she’ll do it herself. That does not sound like an elaborate joke.

The defense would have you believe that after seventeen calls and countless texts taking up pretty much the previous eight hours arranging for a murder two days hence (or, in the defense’s version, orchestrating a faux hit and elaborate cover story), the defendant suddenly takes time out of her busy schedule to help her mother make funeral arrangements for her grandfather who has not yet died. A far better explanation is that she is planning for a death in the family even closer to home. This is the real reason Randa didn’t want to answer my questions under oath and expressed momentary moral outrage: she didn’t want to have to commit perjury.

Elizabeth Parker delivering her closing statements.

Before the meeting with Officer Widy Jean in the CVS parking lot, Mohamed and the defendant went across the street to Chili’s—a setting that, as the defense would not let us forget, was not conducive to surveillance. In theory, this meant that they could have talked about literally anything, including the strategy they would employ manipulating the would-be hit man within the contours of their elaborate ruse. But in reality, Mohamed always believed he was wired for sound. If he wasn’t being taped, he was certainly prospectively being listened to, even if the added element of video came as something of an unwelcome surprise when he discovered it several months later. During the meeting with the hit man, if this were all an elaborate ruse, why would the defendant lie about Mohamed being her cousin, if not to reassure a stranger with a rarefied service skill? She lies because blood is thicker than water, especially in matters of the blood. Why would she reiterate what she told Mohamed about Mike carrying money on the morning of the August 5, even if Mike’s Boca Raton bank branch was far outside the Boynton Beach Police Department’s jurisdiction, were it not for the fact that this way, Mike could unknowingly finance his own assassination? On the day she made that argument, she was overdrawn on her bank account—the same bank account that five months before had held a six-figure balance.

During the meeting with Widy Jean, she is cautious, evasive—overt language unsettles her, the naked acts of her aggression somehow offend her delicate sensibility. When she has her preliminary meeting with Mohamed the day before, she is careful to instruct him to wipe her fingerprints off the photo she gives him—the one from the baseball game in Miami that she orders him without a wisp of sentimentality to cut her dying grandfather out of. She can’t leave town to float an alibi like he suggests because she never leaves town; it will look too obvious. She’ll go to the gym instead. She takes special care to point out the security
cameras and motion detectors to the hit man so he can plan around them. These aren’t the actions of a budding reality star imagining how she’ll look on camera. They’re the self-conscious actions of a criminal who is building an alibi and doesn’t want to get caught.

And Mike Stanley, her hapless accomplice and bumbling suitor: Why does she text him at key moments in this run-up to the coming atrocity, but not Mike Dippolito, the supposed architect of their plan and puppet master of their collective fates? And why do the text messages between her and Stanley—callous, brazen, sexually unbridled—suddenly change after she meets with Mohamed and removes the brakes from this runaway train? Suddenly they no longer talk about violating her husband’s probation; suddenly she is no longer his “unicorn,” his rare and cherished object of devotion, but someone who is giving him lessons in how to talk to women. The simplest explanation is that this isn’t a stunt for reality television. It is cold-blooded, calculated, premeditated murder with a firearm, two shots to the head, in the home that her husband bought her, filled with the artifacts and trophies of their lavish lifestyle, but strangely few photographs of them enjoying it. It’s what Mohamed said it was: she wanted the house, and she wanted his money, and she didn’t want to be married anymore.

When the defendant arrived at the crime scene, her reactions were mostly ad-libbed. She thought she was coming home to a dead body and she’d have time to plan her action. Instead she found police tape and a media circus and cameras in her face. She responded with hysterics and crocodile tears because it was the best she could come up with. Nobody who could have warned her—Mohamed, Widy Jean, Mike—was in on the prank, because there was no prank. If this was a reality stunt gone awry, that’s the moment when she should have pulled the plug—like someone who’s expecting a surprise party that never comes. Eventually, she’d have to ask someone what’s going on, what just happened, where’s Mike? He can’t be dead, so where is he? At no time in the
well-documented record does she allow herself a moment of victory for having pulled this off—even when her partner in crime and future reality series costar walks through the door. Instead, she plays the grieving widow, and then the grateful spouse.

But more than the defendant’s dubious reaction, look at how their alleged caper is designed. If you believe what the defense has said about this being a reality show setup with Mike the mastermind, does it make any sense that the defendant is the one in all the videos? Look at what his wife is doing to him. He has no role. He’s not even in the spotlight. It’s all about her. He says it himself in their one jailhouse phone call: he looks like a dumbass. Not only is she two-timing him, taunting him like the spider does the fly, blinding him with rocket sex, and targeting him for destruction—he doesn’t even get his moment in the sun. If he knew this was going to happen, doesn’t it make sense that he might have been awake, dressed, ready for his close-up? He still has his braces on, his liposuction has left him bandaged and debilitated, the
COPS
cameras are buzzing around, and he looks like a deer caught in headlights. He’s in shock; he thought
he
was about to be arrested.

If it’s a stunt, why does Dalia take every piece of expensive jewelry with her when she goes to the gym? Because she’s been told the house is about to be robbed. In the defense’s Bizarro World, wouldn’t the safest place for the valuables have been home with Mike, watched over by his surveillance cameras, motion detectors, and alarm system? On the ride to the police station, she’s less concerned about her dead husband than she is about her $3,000 Prada bag with its $33,000 worth of jewelry and the key to her safety deposit box, with its field guide to her life in crime (none of it related to a reality stunt). She zeroes in on the black guy somebody saw running: Did they get a good look at him? There have been lots of suspicious black people in their neighborhood; one even told Mike he liked his Porsche. Why ask how they got her number if they had planned out together that Mohamed would give it to the cops?

Safely ensconced in the interview room at the police station, she tells Sergeant Sheridan they’ve been married going on a year, which sounds less suspicious than six months. She has to be talked into signing a waiver to be videotaped, unlike any reality star ever. And before she knows what evidence they have against her (or even that they’re looking), and therefore what her options are, she makes it her stealth agenda to portray Mike as someone whose bad decisions and shady associates have finally caught up with him. She volunteers the Cliff’s Notes version of his life on the mean streets. She says he owes his business partner $40,000—the same amount in the mysterious note left on his car. He’s an alcoholic, a crack addict, an ex-con with Mob ties. Her husband’s body is still lukewarm, and she can’t wait to roll him under the bus. If this singular moment is the apex of their plan, their star turn as actors and producers, and their red carpet to coming stardom, why trash him so severely?

And then there’s the jailhouse call with Mike—the last-act confrontation between conspirators and lovers, the dramatic crest where the fire meets the fireworks. Except that it fails a basic rule of drama: it doesn’t advance the narrative. They don’t take a victory lap, finally home free. They don’t even speak in code (all defense claims to the contrary notwithstanding) and set the stage for their next unbelievable high-stakes act. The defendant alternately tries to convince the victim that she still loves him and excoriates him for not doing enough for her. She is distraught and delusional. You can see the gears inside her head spinning furiously, running on adrenaline and panic. It’s high drama, all right, just not for the story the defense is telling; only for the consensus one that really happened, sanctioned by the police, the prosecution, the principals, and your own common sense.

To go with the defendant’s version of events, you’d have to believe she took the fall for Mike, the man she had just spent the last five months stripping of his possessions and trying to return to prison. She’s going to cover for a man she cheated on with not
one person but two, the man she told Mike Stanley she hated, whom she told Mohamed she didn’t want to be married to anymore—she just wanted his house. Who thought she was off selling real estate in Aventura; whose money she used to buy Mohamed a Range Rover, money she conned him out of after offering to help him with the most protracted problem in his life. She had a radar for human weakness: she did what she wanted, when she wanted, with whomever she wanted, at whatever cost.

And she told no one.

The simplest answer is the right answer: Dalia is deceitful, scheming, lying, and manipulative. She’s not concerned with who gets caught in the swirling vortex surrounding her, or the carnage she wreaks on innocent bystanders or her unwitting, often all-too-willing victims. She is shameless in the way she uses her sexual powers to bend the will of others. She shows no guilt, no remorse, and no concern for the safety of others. She will play the victim when it suits her, invent acts of abuse against her, and prey on others’ sympathy or emotions. She sees herself as invincible, never thought anyone would suspect her, and believes she can lie her way out of any situation, even murder. She merely has to bat her eyes, like she did with Widy Jean (or Michael Stanley, or Mohamed, or Mike), and obstacles will dissolve before her. Her only emotion was outrage that she was being treated like a criminal.

The last thing she told Detective Anderson in the interrogation room is the way she wants to be remembered, and the whole of her defense: “I didn’t do anything.” Denial and arrogance. That’s what she leaves you with. The evidence against the defendant is overwhelming. She is shameless about the way she uses her sexual power to get what she wants. She shows no guilt, no remorse, no concern for the safety of others. She faked being a victim to manipulate Mohamed. She doesn’t care who she lies to or who she manipulates. She intentionally creates acts of harassment against herself. She is scheming, devious, deceptive, and manipulative. You haven’t heard anything different in this trial,
not even once. There is no denying the evidence in this case. It is overwhelming.