CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
2002 – More Twisted Than The Jackie Robinson
I had a cousin who was an Assistant Attorney General in Manhattan. Shortly after I was transferred to MDC, my mother swallowed her pride and called my aunt.
It still kills me to think about her having to call her sister to ask for a favor to help out her vakabon son. But there was no way my mother was going to leave me hanging. She asked my aunt to ask kouzen Robenson to give her the name of the best possible defense lawyer available. My mom told me my aunt was surprisingly non-judgmental and got right back to her with my cousin’s recommendation. “Epi, Robenson di pou w kenbe fèm,” she added.
By January, right after New Year’s, my fancy new lawyer was ready to get crackin’. We started working together combing through all the files the prosecution team had compiled.
Eventually, the lawyer hit on the fact that there was a confidential informant in the mix.
“So, this could be our fulcrum,” the lawyer said. He went on to explain:
Unless we went a not-strictly-legal route, which he did not recommend, there was no way we’d be able to one hundred percent confirm the C.I.’s identity.
If I had any idea of who the C.I. was, where they might have come from or what they were connected to, he recommended getting a private investigator on the case and see what they could shake out.
If it we were able to figure it out and it turned out to be a low-level C.I., we could send the P.I. back out to see if he could roll that name up to someone higher up on the food chain and submit a formal proffer.
Considering my status as a first-time offender, with zero prior arrests, and no concrete proof that I ever physically transported weapons, a proffer would likely cut jail time down significantly and possibly get me into a minimum-security facility.
“Okay,” I replied. “I can get with that. And I have a few ideas.”
I laid it all out- the Brownsville garage breach and all the little dirtbike brats who’d been snooping around in July, the raid on Eula’s crib for the EBT scam, my August visit to Port of Newark. I gave him Hopeton’s contact info for the Brownsville lead and Biz’s number to get started on the Eula angle. I told him I thought the Port thing was probably a dead end, but if it seemed like there was something there, he should have to P.I. talk to Hopeton again.
I really hoped Port of Newark was a dead end.
