Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (3 page)

Now strung out on a designer high for spoiled teenagers, something his program buddies would have been appalled by if they’d known, he took a boiler-room job selling gold coins in nearby Broward County. He was good at it, but he hated the work, which was repetitive and mind-numbing. Then somebody steered him to a similar operation that traded in foreign currency. All he had to do was get the fish on the line and then turn them over to somebody else to close. After he got the knack of it, it was like shooting them in a barrel.

“Is this Joe? Joe Smith? Hey, Joe, this is Mike from such-and-such trading. This is a courtesy call, not a sales call. Just want to see if you’re actively involved in the markets. No? Okay, great. Like I said, this is not a sales call. What we do is broker in the foreign currency sector of the market. You know, basically the dollar versus the Japanese yen. Are you familiar with that? No? Well, no problem, I’m gonna send you out some information. You still at XYZ address? Great. Okay, just a few suitability questions. This isn’t for everybody; I want to make sure it suits you. If you see something you like, can you put in five, ten, twenty thousand? A million?”

Mike was a quick study, and he prided himself on learning the business from the ground up. He fancied himself a broker. Problem was, there wasn’t any business. That was the whole business model: ask someone for his money, put it in your pocket. Mike called it a greed investment. His wake-up call came when the Feds raided their room, and they just rolled it up and moved across the street under another name. Once he could see through the illusion, his mojo evaporated. That moment might have come sooner if he hadn’t been in the throes of what he calls “a vicious drug addiction.” He worked three separate rooms in all, where he had a reputation for softening up the cold calls and getting them in a good mood for the handoff. Some of the rooms were tipped up with organized crime: one had ties to the Bonnano family in New York, and another one was affiliated with Sammy “The Bull” Gravano—after he brought down John Gotti and the Gambino family in New York, and right before he went down on ecstasy charges in Arizona. Mike estimates they made between $13 million and $20 million in about a year and a half; his take was a couple hundred thousand. When the third room blew up, he decided to set up his own shop—right when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission started issuing licenses, which of course he ignored. But by then, it was just a matter of time.

He was spending every weekend holed up in a motel room in a dope haze, hoarding all his money in precious metals and seeing his bank accounts seized because his transactions were so suspect, the bank knew he wouldn’t challenge it. State authorities finally got him on trying to cash a bad check, but by that point, everyone he knew was in jail. When they came for him, all he really felt was relief. He sat in county for fourteen months, gained twenty pounds, gave up shaving, and was disgusted with himself and with life. His girlfriend, later his wife, sold her car to pay for his lawyer, who settled his case for two years in prison, minus time served, followed by twenty-eight years of probation, plus full restitution to his victims. According to Mike, the lawyer claimed that after five years they could negotiate a settlement of the amount of restitution he owed and be done with it, but that turned out to be all lies. The State considers a plea an enforceable contract and once a person has signed on the dotted line, the opportunity to negotiate is over. Mike pled guilty to “organized fraud, unlicensed telemarketing, and grand
theft.” His amount of restitution was set at $219,000. When he checked into Moore Haven in Glades County to serve the remaining ten months on his sentence, of which he did about eight and a half, the guards laughed at him for pulling such a ridiculous stretch of probation following his prison time.

He got his GED while he was in prison and came out at age thirty-two—older and presumably wiser.

T
he way Mike describes it, the honeymoon with Dalia never really ended. The only thing that got in the way is what he calls “the money nonsense.” Dalia seemed to magically perceive whatever he needed and made sure he got it. She would pick up dinner or buy him things when they were out shopping, even if it was mostly with his money. And they always had fun: whenever he saw Colombians or Puerto Ricans on the street playing their music or celebrating a national holiday, he would tease her, saying, “Isn’t that the Peruvian flag? Aren’t those your people?”

They constantly sent gushy notes back and forth, even kept a dry erase board on the refrigerator where they could leave spontaneous messages or cute pictures—“Miss you . . . Thinking of you . . . Love you so much.”

One time Mike drew a smiley face, then the next day Dalia added stick-figure legs, then Mike added the hands, and back and forth until finally a penis and testicles had been added—an image he later had to painstakingly explain in court, much to the amusement of the assembled courtroom.

Here is the card Dalia sent him for Valentine’s Day in 2009, handwritten in blue pen in a delicate script:

To my husband, love of my life, my soul mate, my best friend, my everything: You make me so incredibly happy. Since I met you I never
hesitated and never had any doubts! You are such an amazing husband. Baby, you are my dream. I promise to love you now, always and 4ever. —Dalia.

On the opposite page, a postscript read:

With you everything has always felt right!

And from what he says, the sex was mind-blowing. She was extremely experienced, and she had a kinky, masochistic side that Mike was hesitant about at first. Here’s Mike:

We’d have sex all day sometimes. All day, all night. I’d have to go to a meeting, and we’d fuck for a couple of extra hours. A couple of times, she was like, “Choke me.” That’s not my thing, but I’d start choking her, and she’d be like, “Harder!” One time I was choking her so fucking hard, I was really squeezing the shit out of her, and the funny thing was, she liked it more! And then she said, “Hit me,” so I cracked her with an open hand. The funny part was, she loved it, and I still didn’t do enough. I’m not nasty like that, but, I’m telling you: I could have gone ten times further.

“If any of that was real,” adds Mike, “I had everything I wanted.” (Except his freedom, since he was on probation until 2032.)

Before the marriage, Dalia brought a complaint to Mike: that endless probation he’d been saddled with through bad lawyering and epic inattention was going to wreak havoc on their impending marriage. They couldn’t travel, they had to hide their money—it was annoying and invasive. She had already seen him go back to his original lawyer to explore the possibility of a settlement, only to be blown off. They drove all the way down to Miami when Mike wasn’t even supposed to leave the county, and the guy canceled on them at the last second. A second lawyer took a $500 retainer and burned up six months without accomplishing anything. Why didn’t they just fix it? How much would it take to get the government out of his hair for good? Over time, he’d managed to whittle the $219,000 down to $191,000. Dalia
told him if he could come up with $100,000, she would put in $91,000, and they could be rid of this problem forever. She had her own money saved from her escort work and the girls she booked. They were going to be married and own a house together (even if he paid for it and added her name to the deed days later). They’d work it out in the long run.

Mike was overwhelmed by her offer. They had initially vowed to keep their finances separate in case things got messy. The fact that she cared enough to take on this shared sacrifice—and that he had spotted this quality in her when others clearly had not—just made him fall in love with her all over again. It restored his faith in people, and cracked his shell a little bit. Probation, and the restitution that enforced it, was the solitary bane of his existence—something he would be shackled to until he was well past retirement age—and suddenly it could all just disappear, shaken off like a bad dream. His mind was flooded with possibilities about almost everything, all those options he hadn’t dared to think about for years because they’d tear him apart.

Dalia told Mike to make out checks to her in small amounts—between $6,000 and $8,000—small enough so that it wouldn’t attract the attention of the courts or the IRS. In addition to full restitution, there was also a civil lien against him on behalf of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and they had already seized a $25,000 IRS refund. Of course, the beneficiaries of the CFTC lien were the same fourteen victims who presumably were to be made whole again through full restitution. Why they should want to hunt him down for money he was trying to pay them back anyway was beyond him. Still, he had managed to squirrel away close to a quarter of a million dollars, which he kept in cash and locked in a safety deposit box, far from the prying eyes of bank examiners or forensic accountants. This was at a time when the financial world was collapsing and banks were failing left and right—especially in Miami, which is perhaps the fast-money capital of the Western Hemisphere. It was enough so that he could have paid the restitution in full, but it also would have cleaned him out. Starting over is not the same thing as starting over with nothing.

Mike never thought to question her motives. She had a job selling real estate, she went out two or three times a week to show properties, and she
was about to close on a house. “She seemed successful,” he says. “I had no reason to question it. That was part of the attraction.” So he wrote Dalia $87,000 in checks over a period of several weeks, adding $13,000 in cash to make it an even hundred grand. She was supposed to deposit it in her bank account and send a wire transfer of the full $191,000 to his Fort Lauderdale lawyer, who would take care of all the further details. He wrote the first check on February 18 for $6,000, and he could feel the dread slowly starting to lift.

As the weeks dragged on, though, it was clear that something wasn’t right. The wire transfer should have gone through immediately—that’s the whole point, so you don’t have to be driving bags of cash around South Florida. Every time he asked her about it—and he asked her a lot—there was some new wrinkle and a new excuse to explain it. She claimed it had been wired through a Cayman Islands account to save on transfer fees, then that the wire had been reversed. She produced an official receipt to prove it. At one point, she even suggested that Mike’s Fort Lauderdale attorney, Michael Entin, must have stolen it, and she would call his office every morning to see if the money had arrived. Mike gave Dalia three weeks to sort it out
or else
. He didn’t care where the money came from. All he could think about was getting off probation. This should have been done by now, and here he was coming up on yet another meeting with his probation officer.

On the night of March 12, David Banks, Mike’s probation officer, made a surprise visit to their townhouse just shy of midnight with half a dozen Boynton Beach police officers in tow. He was apologetic, but he had received an anonymous phone call that Mike was dealing steroids and ecstasy, and he planned to conduct an “administrative search” of the premises. Mike was mystified; he had been on probation for almost six years now without the slightest problem. His house had certainly never been searched in the middle of the night. Despite the fact that the search turned up nothing, Banks continued to stop by unannounced in the afternoons, ostensibly to check up on how Mike was doing.

That weekend, on a whim, Dalia suggested they get away and booked them a room at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan. She thought it would do them both good to clear their minds, and she paid over $1,200 for their night there. The next morning, Mike got up early and went down to the
gym like he always did. Coming back from his workout, he noticed a group of cops congregated in the lobby, conspicuous at that hour of the morning. When he went down to check out, they were still there, and when the valet brought his truck around, two of them approached him and asked, “Is this your car?” When he told them it was, they said they’d had a report of suspicious drug activity associated with the vehicle, and would he mind if they searched it. He told them it had been in valet since he and his wife arrived, but the officers were free to do what they wanted. While Mike stood there in growing embarrassment, on display for all the high rollers getting into their Bentleys and Jags, the cops conducted a cursory inspection of his SUV. When that turned up nothing, one of them thanked him for his cooperation, and for being such a gentleman about it. Dalia watched this all unfold from the lobby. Afterward, they both thought it was weird. On the drive home, Dalia called Michael Entin in a panic and relayed the story to him. Mike was required to disclose this encounter with law enforcement to his probation officer.

The next day was Mike’s weekly AA meeting, where he was responsible for making coffee. On the way there, he and a friend stopped at a convenience store to pick up some sugar, and Mike decided to fill up with gas. When he popped the gas tank, there was a plastic bag containing a handful of pills and a small quantity of white powder taped inside. Rattled, he ripped it out and threw it in the nearest trash can. It was only later that he realized it probably had been there during his impromptu police search the day before. Someone was setting him up.

Eventually, Mike’s lawyer told him the cash never showed up, and in his professional opinion, it was never going to. Mike confronted Dalia and accused her of lying, telling her he was moving out of the house because he could no longer trust her. She finally admitted that she’d lost the money. She had tried to make a profit on the wire transfer and she’d been scammed. She promised to make up the loss when she got her commissions on a couple of houses she was selling. Instead of being angry, he felt like they were finally getting somewhere because she had come clean.

On March 29, a Sunday, they’d been out for the afternoon when, two minutes from their house, they decided to continue driving north and have
dinner at CityPlace, an Italian-styled open-air promenade with shops and restaurants in nearby West Palm Beach. At the restaurant, a guy at the bar kept looking over at him—it was like the final scene in
The Sopranos
. Mike even commented on it: “What’s with this guy?” Returning to the parking garage afterward, they noticed a dozen cops huddled thirty yards from Mike’s slate-grey Chevy SUV. Mike joked, “They must be for us.” But before they reached the truck, a policeman intercepted him, again asking, “Is this your vehicle?” Mike laughed and said, “Before we go any further, this is the second time this has happened to me in two weeks.”

He went into detail on the previous incident, then gave them carte blanche to search his car. This time, they conducted a thorough search—ten or fifteen minutes, refusing to give up even after it failed to produce any results. For her part, Dalia seemed irritated at having to be there.

Finally, they brought in a trained German shepherd drug dog that immediately hit on something behind the spare tire at the rear of the car. Mike didn’t even know how to get the spare off, and once they figured it out, they discovered it had been put on backward. Inside the tire well, one of the cops found a cigarette package with a gram and a half of coke in it. Mike was horrified, and some of that shock must have registered with the cops. It wasn’t just that he had alerted them to the possibility that there might be drugs planted on his vehicle beforehand; it didn’t make any sense. Why would you hide two grams of coke for personal use in such a hard-to-reach spot? In the time it would have taken him to get the spare off and retrieve the contraband, he could have snorted that amount and gone to buy more. When one of the female cops took him aside for a chat, Mike told her he was six years sober, and a drug test could verify it. He started to cry—he couldn’t help himself. She confided that an unidentified caller had claimed there would be a kilo of cocaine in the vehicle. In the end, they took his contact info and let him go. (Mike began collecting the police reports of these “random searches” in an envelope in his glove compartment for the next time he was stopped.)

On the way home, with Dalia driving, Mike asked her, “Did you put that shit in my truck?” Instead of looking at him or proclaiming her innocence, Dalia revved the engine and floored it—she got the car up to maybe 100
miles per hour on the interstate. It was the reaction of a child, except one in control of a mortal weapon. He began screaming for her to pull over and quickly dropped the accusation.

And then the next day, miraculously, Dalia came home with a cashier’s check in the amount of $191,000. He stopped her when she tried to explain the metaphysical happenstance by which this unlikely outcome had been achieved. He didn’t want to hear it. For the first time since she had offered to help him, things were finally moving in the right direction. Then he looked at the check and “rubbed it on his arm” to ensure that it was real.

It was an authentic cashier’s check, all right, and in the correct amount. But in place of Dalia’s name was a name he had never heard before: Erik Tal.

When he queried her on it, Dalia identified him as the husband of a girlfriend of hers, Kerrian Brown, a pretty Jamaican woman and mother of four whom she had worked with at Beachfront Realty. She told Mike that she’d had to reverse the wire to a third party. Or something. But it was money, and it was accessible, so he let it go.

The next morning, March 30, they drove to Entin’s Fort Lauderdale office forty minutes away. But as soon as they were seated at his desk, Dalia became hysterical. Mike had doubted her after the CityPlace incident the day before, their trust was now broken, and she no longer wished to invest $91,000 in his future. She would not turn over the check to him until she had the money in her hand. Entin advised Mike that if she didn’t want to turn over the money, there was nothing he could do about it. He added that wire transfers generally take one to two business days, not all month, and told them to come back when they had come to an agreement. For his part, Mike felt like he was standing at the door of the solution to all his problems, only to have someone slam it in his face and bolt it from the other side. He still had roughly $140,000 in his safety deposit box. So, leaving Dalia there, he drove the half hour to Boca Raton and took out $91,000 in cash, put it in a Publix shopping bag, then returned and gave her the cash. She handed him an envelope with the check in it, and he marched back into the lawyer’s office and left it with the receptionist. When he came back out, Dalia was gone.