Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (5 page)

He awoke what seemed like two minutes later to someone pounding on the door.
Great
, he thought.
Now what?

He threw on some shorts and staggered down two flights of stairs to the front door. But instead of Dalia coming back for the gym card or I-pod, or even his probation officer getting a head start on the day, he found a tight scrum of police officers and TV cameras, all ready to explode into the foyer. He assumed he was being arrested and waited for someone to grab him, but everyone seemed to freeze. Finally one cop, a Sergeant Sheridan, said, “Are you Mike Dippolito?” The cameras were right in his face; it felt like he was on
COPS
.

“Yeah,” said Mike.

“Your wife is going to have you killed,” the cop blurted out. “You got to come with us.”

The words he was saying made no sense. It was like the first line of a joke, where you just have to accept the premise on faith. He felt light-headed and sat down on the stairs.

“Okay,” said Mike. The cameras kept whirring, like everyone was expecting him to say his line, or at least nobody wanted to be the one to cut him off and miss it.

While this was going on, as Mike was processing this raw encroaching data, he suddenly became aware of another sound—a giant roaring express train coming up his back and across his shoulders that would reach the center of his head in three, two, one. This was the tearing of consciousness, the rend in the fabric through which seeped revelation: all those months of denial and bad logic and the common sense he’d kept locked away in a tinfoil box, all now out in the open and soaking up the morning air like it was starved for oxygen. More than anger or disappointment or despair or even the torn ligaments of love, which still dangled from his chest like live nerves, the overwhelming thing Mike felt in that instant was relief. Of course she was going to kill him. Why wouldn’t she?

“Can I put some clothes on?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ll go with you,” said the cop. “But we got to hurry. She’s on her way back.”

(WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU)?

P
alm Beach County is a strange, at times incestuous, confluence of Assistant State Attorneys, Law Enforcement (city, town, or municipal officers, sheriff’s deputies, and state police officers), and private-practice lawyers setting up shop everywhere from pricey high-rise office suites to a table by the rest room in Starbucks. If L.A. has a surfeit of actors and D.C. is a fly swarm of lobbyists, in South Florida it’s the attendant professionals it takes to service the burgeoning criminal class, whose quest for money, power, notoriety, revenge, or some nexus of opaque psychological needs never seems to abate. Hemmed in by the Intracoastal Waterway, they bring to mind the image of sharks swimming in a circle. To those of us in the criminal justice system, a lot of times it seems like a company town.

At a special predawn briefing on Wednesday, August 5, 2009, Sergeant Paul Sheridan cataloged the details of a fast-moving undercover operation that had literally dropped into his lap over the weekend. A Confidential Informant had come forward Friday evening with details of a possible murder-for-hire plot. On Saturday, the CI, wired for sound and secret video, met with the suspect at a Mobil gas station to broker a meeting with a possible hit man. That meeting, with undercover officer Widy Jean in the role of the stone-cold contract killer, took place on Monday in a CVS parking lot. The planned assassination was scheduled to take place that Wednesday morning between 6 and 8 a.m. at the victim’s residence while the suspect, his wife
of six months, killed time at a nearby gym to establish an alibi. Sergeant Craig Anthony and CSI Technician Rob Eichorst were tasked with setting up a fake crime scene in order to coax an inadvertent confession out of the suspect, or at least put her off her guard.

Ninety minutes after the briefing, police converged on a faux-Venetian residential village of identical, priced-to-move townhouses called Renaissance Commons, whose surrounding moat of chain restaurants—Bonefish Grill, Village Tavern, Slainte’s Irish Pub, Dominic’s Italian—and lifestyle businesses, like the L.A. Fitness gym where the couple worked out and the Starbucks where they told friends they met, made this the perfect controlled environment for a compartmentalized guy like Mike Dippolito. Just after 6 a.m., lead investigators Detective Alex Moreno and Detective Brian Anderson, with Sheridan leading the charge, showed up at Mike’s townhouse at the last possible second and eased him into the new world that was cracking open before him. As quickly as they could, they secured the premises and shuttled him to the precinct where he could be quietly sequestered. After securing the perimeter with yellow police tape, Sergeant Anthony used his Sony Camcorder to film the crime scene, while CSI Tech. Eichorst pretended to dust the open front door for prints. A quick walk-through of the interior served as a makeshift prop inventory and continuity record like for any other location shoot—the
nouveau riche
furnishings, tasteful tans and greys, black lacquer furniture, brushed aluminum appliances, scattered chew toys for the dogs (Dalia’s snowball of a Maltese, named Bella, and Mike’s English bulldog, named Linguini), fake-fur bedspread, big-screen TVs, NordicTrack machine, and shelf full of MMA action figures doing more to establish character than any spare bit of dialogue or action ever could. Notable by their absence were any photos of the happy couple, save for one small picture of the newlyweds in a gold-filigree, heart-shaped frame consigned to a cubbyhole in the bedroom. Outside, a white van marked “Boynton Beach Police Department” was parked curbside, like a big-ticket product placement in a summer blockbuster, and a police cruiser blocked traffic at one end of the street. Meanwhile, across the median, the tabloid TV professionals from
COPS
rolled their own cameras from a discreet distance. They were there to do ride-a-longs with Boynton Beach’s
finest when somebody interested them in this fast-moving femme fatale sting. For the old hands at
COPS
it was icing on the cake. When Mike said he felt like he was in an episode of
COPS
, little did he suspect that he was right.

Two detectives, Al Martinez and Midian Diaz, had been separately surveilling Dalia since she left the house around 6 a.m. and knew she was at the nearby gym. Once everyone was in place, Sergeant Frank Ranzie placed a call to Dalia’s cell phone at 6:21 a.m. and left a message:

“Hi, this message is for Miss Dippolatti [sic]. This is Sergeant Frank Ranzie, Boynton Beach Police Department, Detective Division. I need you to call me as soon as you can, ma’am . . . It’s urgent.” Preserved on tape, his thick New York accent is a controlled blend of professionalism and muted pity.

She calls back almost immediately.

“Hi, I had a message on my phone?”

“Is this Miss Dippolatti?” Ranzie asks.

“Dippolito,” she says.

“Dippolito.” He identifies himself again. “We’re at your residence, ma’am. Are you nearby?”

She hesitates. “I—I’m nearby. Is everything okay?”

“Well, ma’am, I need to talk to you when you come home,” says Ranzie. “It’s very urgent. It involves your husband. There’s been an incident. Okay? Can you come right back to your residence, please?”

“Yeah, I’ll come right now,” she says. “Is he okay?”

“Ma’am, I’ll tell you everything you need to know when you get here. Okay? Thank you.”

One of the singular aspects of this case is that so much of it shows up on tape, where we can judge every gesture and nuance just like the cops or the jury—including virtually every moment between when Dalia is forced to confront her grisly handiwork and when she asks to see an attorney two hours later, drawing an end to this ruse, and the covert police interrogation that follows.

In a matter of minutes, Dalia’s Chevy Tahoe entered the block. This was Mike’s car—the same one that drugs were planted on repeatedly—but
she often drove it. She parked and was directed toward Ranzie—with his stocky build and cut profile, a reassuring presence in a time of crisis. Sergeant Anthony, in his role as vigilant media sentry, captured the entire encounter on video, augmented by the lapel cam Ranzie was wearing. In the footage, Dalia appears tiny in black form-fitting workout pants, a skimpy turquoise tank top, and a black ball cap over thick dark hair gathered in a ponytail. She makes a beeline for Ranzie over by the van, moving very fast and visibly concerned. Ranzie introduces himself, speaking quietly, and she nods quickly.

“I’m the one that called you,” he says. “I’m sorry to call you. Listen, we had a report of a disturbance at your house, and there were shots fired. Is your husband Michael?” She nods.

“Okay, I’m sorry to tell you, ma’am, he’s been killed.” It’s a judgment call whether she begins to wail before he even gets the word out, but maybe there’s no good end to come from walking into a setup like that. A foot shorter than he is, she collapses into him, as he steadies her with a hand on each shoulder. Ranzie continues.

“He’s been killed, ma’am. Try to calm down. Right now we need to get you to the police station.”

She says she wants to see him.

“I can’t let you in, ma’am, we have to do our job,” says Ranzie. “We have to find his killer. You need to calm down. Does he have enemies? Is there anyone who would want to hurt him?”

Hysterically, she answers, “He’s on probation”—an odd response, and not an answer to his question. She continues to cry in a single high-pitched wail that modulates in frequency, like a police siren that can’t seem to find the right note. Although Ranzie’s lapel cam frames it at an oblique angle, there are no tears visible on Dalia’s face, and Ranzie later claimed he thought she was faking her reaction. At one point, Detective Brian McDeavitt, a big Irish bruiser, turns his head away from her to stifle a laugh. Ranzie informs her that witnesses said they saw a black male running from the house. She keeps repeating that she wants to see the body—to obtain closure or verify the kill?—until Ranzie asks Detective Jason Llopis to please walk her back to his Dodge Charger and drive her to the station.

“If you want to help your husband, you need to go to the station with these gentlemen and tell us everything you know about who he knows and who he’s connected to,” Ranzie says.

She responds that she’s worried about her dogs. “They’re with animal control for right now,” he says. “Everything’s under control.”

“Get her leg in and close the door,” he tells McDeavitt as they ease her into the passenger seat—a calculated move to make her feel like the wife of a murder victim and not like a suspect. Through the open window, Ranzie asks for her keys to secure her vehicle. Sergeant Anthony follows them to the station in the Chevy Tahoe.

A tape recorder is already running inside the car so we have access to her conversation during the five-minute drive to the Boynton Beach police station. Dalia continues her intermittent crying inside the vehicle, but after a minute or so settles into a steady stream of observations and veiled suspicions that serve as a run-through for her coming interview. With her squeaky, little-girl voice and eagerness to please, she appears plucky in the face of adversity. Llopis drives and does most of the talking, and McDeavitt rides in back. From this point forward, although the dawning is slow in coming, she is essentially in custody.

DALIA: I don’t believe it. I just want to grab my stuff, please.

LLOPIS: What stuff are you asking about?

DALIA: I want my bag.

LLOPIS: I’ll have people bring it to the station, because you’re going to be there for a little bit, okay?

By now Eichorst had already grabbed her purse from the backseat and her Metro PCS burner phone from the Chevy console, and police will soon be poring through both while she answers questions at the station. Her breathing still unsteady, Dalia masters her composure and gets down to the business of surveying the landscape.

DALIA: Can you please tell me what happened?

LLOPIS: Well, we don’t have all the details. We responded to a disturbance call. One of the initial reports said there were shots fired, like the sound of gunshots. And there was a black male. That’s all we’ve got. We’re at the preliminary stages of it.

This sets off the first note of alarm in Dalia’s speech.

DALIA: What did the black guy look like?

LLOPIS: He was dark. We don’t have a lot of description yet.

This presents an opening, and she tries to direct them down the false alley that has just materialized.

DALIA: There have been a lot of black people that have been coming into the neighborhood. And normally he keeps the car cover on his Porsche. He hasn’t had one on for, I don’t know, the last month or something. And he had someone who was coming around, saying, “You’ve got a really nice ride.”

LLOPIS: You’ve got to think about all this stuff. All this stuff will help.

Now that the subject has been broached, Dalia starts to ramp up. She cuts him off, launching into what seems like a preconceived narrative, one that lifts the corners up just enough to ask more questions than it answers. If there is one trait that all detectives share, it’s probably curiosity.

DALIA: He’d had incidents already. We’ve had . . . My husband’s on probation and he owed, like, a lot of people money. And what happened was that he was trying to get off of probation, and I guess people found out he was trying to get off, and it’s just been nothing but problems so far.

LLOPIS: Just try and think of whatever you can. Whatever information you can provide to the detectives . . .

DALIA: Well, I went to the police station because somebody had called my cell phone saying that they worked for your police department, that they were a detective. So I went in and I filled out a report with Detective Rainey. Me and my husband went together. And it turns out he told me there is no Detective Hurley here at the station.

LLOPIS: Hurley?

DALIA: Yeah, it was a detective. I have all the police reports and everything. And it seems like somebody just like spoofed the call. I don’t know.

She delivers the “I don’t know” with almost a verbal shrug. She repeats the story with the cops at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan and how they searched the truck. How the same thing happened at CityPlace a couple of weeks later, only “this time they brought a dog” and found a small quantity of cocaine under the tire. And how on a morning just like this one, when they were coming out of the gym, “we found like an extortion note on the car, asking my husband for forty grand.”

LLOPIS: Wow . . .

DALIA: And that’s what he owes his business partner is forty grand.

LLOPIS: What type of business is he in?

DALIA: He got in trouble for stock fraud, and now he’s doing like an Internet thing, but he’s been getting a lot of complaints lately because, just, you know, some things that are wrong with what he’s doing.

LLOPIS: All this stuff is good. You give it to them when we get there.

His encouragement flushes out her first show of vulnerability, which automatically brings out his masculine protectiveness.

DALIA: What I tell you, like, I don’t get in trouble, or am responsible or anything like that, do I?

LLOPIS: (gently) You’re saying your husband is into shady stuff—it’s not your fault.

This leaves the opening she seems to be looking for, and she starts crying again. She asks to make a call on her cell phone, and between sobs, she notes that with everything else, Mike had just had surgery. McDeavitt calls in their location, noting they’ll be at the station inside of two minutes, and there are another thirty seconds of her sniffling and breathing deeply. Then something occurs to her.

DALIA: Where did you get my number?

LLOPIS: Off your husband’s cell phone.

They ride the last thirty seconds in silence.

In fact, the items that Dalia left in the Chevy Tahoe—according to the surveillance team, in a public parking lot that was known for its break-ins, where prominent signs warn, “Do Not Leave Valuables in Your Car”—was a $3,000 leather Prada bag with a number of interesting items in it, namely keys to a safety deposit box that Mike didn’t know existed; her cell phone, of course, with its secret life laid out in a latticework of intersecting numbers; and $33,000 worth of jewelry—a $26,000 diamond engagement ring and another $7,500 worth of silver David Yurman bracelets, chains, and a silver topaz ring—which comprised every piece of expensive jewelry she owned.