Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (8 page)

After they woke him up at home at 6 a.m. that morning, Mike rode to the station with Sheridan and Moreno, who were jazzed about having rescued him from such a close scrape. (Mike was still having trouble absorbing the first part—how such a star-crossed love affair could have revealed itself as a flaming meteor as it crashed to earth—and he hadn’t quite processed his miraculous survival yet.) He watched Sheridan’s interview with Dalia on closed-circuit TV, and then right after he briefly exchanged words with her in the hallway, he was debriefed by Detectives Moreno and Anderson in that same room while Dalia was booked and placed in the holding cell. In his interview, Mike seemed shell-shocked but not all that surprised. He noted that everyone he knew had been predicting some kind of fallout where Dalia was concerned, even if not quite this dramatic, and he’d lost his two best friends over it. Now at least it made sense. When asked how he and Dalia met, he came clean and admitted to soliciting her as an escort, even though it meant possibly violating his probation. Both cops were sympathetic to his plight, and didn’t dwell on his prior difficulties.

As Mike explained later, “I’m waiting the whole time for the cops to get nasty with me. They were just really good about it. I’m thinking, ‘When am I gonna get in trouble here? It just has to happen.’”

When he left the station and returned home, Mike made the decision to contact Dalia’s mother. Dalia’s family had always treated him well, and he thought he owed it to them. So by the time Dalia called from jail, her
mother was already up to speed on what had happened. On the tape, Randa speaks with a thick Latin American accent, and appears reasonably calm, given the circumstances. Dalia, on the other hand, sounds hysterical.

DALIA: Mom! I’m in jail!

RANDA: I know, Dalia, I find out already.

DALIA: Mom, I need you to call Mike in New York, please!

She repeats this several times.

RANDA: I call already and I call Dad. Everybody knows. What is it you want me to do? Where are you exactly?

DALIA: I’m in the county jail. What did Mike say? Is he coming?

RANDA: Everybody is coming, Dalia, but we’re going to get you a lawyer. Don’t worry.

DALIA: Mike did this to me. But I didn’t do anything!

There is much cross talk. She confirms that she’s at Gun Club.

DALIA: I heard Mike is at the house. I want him out of my house!

RANDA: Okay, well right now we’re going to need to have a lawyer first.

DALIA: It’s my house! The title’s in my name!

RANDA: Okay, don’t worry about that right now. Right now we need to find out what is going on. Where did it happen?

DALIA: Where did what happen?
This morning
, Mom!

You can hear the petulant teenager coming through in her voice. She runs through the events of the morning in a kind of self-justifying selflessness.

DALIA: There was tape everywhere, the door was open, and they told me that Mike was dead! … I wanted to call you, I wanted to call his mom, I wanted to call everybody and they told me no … And then I left with the officers to help them try to see who did it!

RANDA: How many times did I told you to leave that guy? How many times did I told you that?

By the time she placed the call to Mike Dippolito two hours later, after the seriousness of her situation must have sunk in, she had calmed down considerably. At times, she sounds positively casual.

MIKE: Hello?

DALIA: Hey. It’s me.

Mike laughs nervously, not sure what to make of this.

MIKE: Yeah … What’s up?

DALIA: Nothing. Mike, can you please come here?

MIKE: What?! Listen: I don’t want to fight with you—honestly.
I can’t help you.

DALIA: Mike …

MIKE: Don’t you understand what just happened?

DALIA: What they’re saying is not true.

MIKE: How is that possible?

She keeps him on the phone for another eleven minutes, and the result is like the old vaudeville sketch where a wife catches her husband in bed with another woman and he continues to deny it, right up until the other woman gets dressed and leaves. Except that here, the words she’s saying are merely killing time until she can get her hooks back into him, reel him in, exercise that control over him she has tirelessly cultivated over the past
ten months—that susceptibility she probably spotted in him the moment she showed up at his apartment on an outcall. If he says he heard the tape, she insists he misunderstood. When he asks her to explain what he saw in the pictures and video at the police station, she splits hairs or says she can only discuss it with him in person. She wants him to get her an attorney, help her mother, try to imagine how this is all making
her
feel. She reminds him of all she does for him, berates his efforts as never enough, tells him how much she has suffered and continues to suffer. It’s a tour de force, a breathtaking display of narcissism that runs the gamut of callousness and manipulation. He tries to avoid confronting her on it, until finally, the light streams in and he snaps.

MIKE: Listen—I don’t know how you’re gonna actually have the nerve to sit here and lie to me now. I don’t understand. I fucking heard you say it, Dalia. I saw your fucking mouth do it. ’Kay? I can’t help you, even if I wanted to. Do you get it?

DALIA: Why don’t you want to?

MIKE: It’s out of my fucking hands!

DALIA: You’re not even trying. It’s different if you’re trying. You’re not even trying.

MIKE: What could I possibly do for you? I don’t get it. What could I do?

DALIA: You’re not even trying.

MIKE: Trying
what
? I’m fucking sitting here like a dumbass.

DALIA: Hmm. Okay, they’re getting ready to take me again.

MIKE: Dalia. Listen. I’m gonna give you some advice, and you need to listen. You’re gonna be ran around in there for a little while—a couple days. You need to just try and fucking relax, and fucking just go with it. And keep to yourself, and don’t say a lot.

DALIA: (sobbing) Mike, I love you. Don’t do this to me. Everybody has treated me awful and I didn’t do anything to you. You
know
me.

MIKE: I can’t help you. There’s nothing I can do to help you, you know?

An uncomfortable silence.

DALIA: Hello?

MIKE: You know what I’ll do? You know what I’ll do for you? Seriously?

DALIA: What?

MIKE: You sign my house back over to me, I’ll help your mom. Immensely. Give me my house back. That’s it.

DALIA: That’s it what?

MIKE: I’ll help ya. So I don’t have to go through the fucking legal fucking bullshit I have to go through already.

DALIA: What does that mean?

MIKE: It means, sign my property back to me—that you stole, basically.

DALIA: That’s what you’re thinking? And I didn’t steal anything.

MIKE: All right, so listen: I’ll have the papers sent over to you some how, you’ll sign them over to me, and then I will help your mother. Okay?

DALIA: I’m not signing anything.

MIKE: I knew you wouldn’t sign anything. I knew that wasn’t gonna happen. So, I can’t help you.

DALIA: That’s what you’re worried about? I’m sitting here rotting, and you’re thinking about the house?

MIKE: Dalia—you tried to have me killed!

DALIA: That’s not true.

MIKE: You’re a liar. You’re a fucking liar.

DALIA: What does your mom say?

MIKE: She’s not saying shit. She’s sitting there. The fuck my mom’s saying? Check it out: My mom, your mom, fucking everybody else’s mom? They’re all out of it. You know where you’re sitting right now? That’s the reality. I can’t fix it. I just offered to help you, and you had the balls to say no to me. Okay. But I can’t help.

DALIA: How do I believe you’re gonna help me if I do that?

Still negotiating, pressing her advantage. And Mike hits the wall.

MIKE: ’Cause you know why? ’Cause I’m the one person on the phone that’s ever done what they said they were gonna do. Okay? Me!

DALIA: How do I believe that?

MIKE: Don’t say shit. I just said I’d help you, okay? And you just basically said fuck you to me, which is hilarious considering your situation, and considering what the fuck just happened today. Have your mom call me, I’ll talk to her about it, and I told you what I’d do. I’ll fix it. I’ll help you.

DALIA: How?

MIKE: You got to fucking do the right thing.

DALIA: I have to go. I’m getting fingerprinted now.

But he’s already hung up.

“Everyone asks me why I answered the phone,” says Mike today. “How could I not answer the phone? I had to take that call. In my mind, I’m thinking that any normal person would be honest—give me some truth. But she gave me the opposite: all lies … I couldn’t believe she called me, to be honest with you. I was probably her third phone call. Then she’s calling me at what she had just told people was
her
house. When I met her, she had a bag of clothes. If she would have done the right thing, I would have helped her—just to be done with her.”

But such is the nature of this case that nothing I’ve covered so far was the biggest bombshell of the day. Because that afternoon, the Boynton
Beach Police Department, primarily Chief Matthew Immler and his Public Information Officer Stephanie Slater, decided to put their video of Dalia being notified of her husband’s death at the “crime scene”—the one they filmed just to make it all look authentic—up on the Internet, first on their official website, and then, for good measure, on YouTube. And the Internet did the rest. By that evening, it was starting to trend viral, and by the next morning it was everywhere. I saw it the next evening on Nancy Grace’s show on CNN’s Headline News network (now HLN).

In their defense, Florida is unique in that it has a very broad Public Records Law, so a government agency in the state is forced to disclose far more than in comparable jurisdictions. For example, it’s feasible that police would turn over a 911 call if media made a request for it. According to testimony, the thinking was that since it was a public street, anyone could have made a similar video—as in fact, the crew from
COPS
did—so they were justified in releasing it. (Although the facts were muddied up later on,
COPS
refused to release any footage until the final disposition of the case, in accordance with their long-standing policy and written agreement with the police departments they ride with. Producer Jimmy Langley voluntarily met with me right after I took over the case and showed me the edited version of the show that they planned to air—their first thirty-minute episode dedicated to a single case—but I couldn’t use any of it.) And in fact, it’s not uncommon for police to post information or even crime scene video on their website in soliciting help from the public. They may have felt a story this compelling and media-ready would leak anyway—they were sitting on an old-fashioned scoop—and they wanted some say in how it broke. The first rule of public relations is to get out in front of the story. And certainly they would have been proud of their efforts and those of their officers, diligently mobilizing over the course of a weekend to save a life in a murder-for-hire plot. From their perspective, it may have looked like a slam dunk.

I have no opinion on whether releasing the video was a good idea or not. I had no previous experience with a case like this, and I suspect neither did they. It was the conclusion they came to and the action they took, at which point it became a fact. I do think if there had been a public records request, which there was not, they would have been justified in denying it on the
grounds that the video was part of an ongoing investigation. I also think it was a brilliant idea to stage a fake crime scene. How better to establish intent—and possibly countershock her into a confession—than to convince Dalia that she’d been successful, only to rip the illusion off like a bandage, revealing her true self there wriggling in the bright light of the third degree?

But from the moment I was confronted with this situation, I had two unwavering reactions: (1) I knew it was going to be a problem, since the footage was going to figure heavily as evidence, and now the handling of the evidence had become the story. And (2) How was it that a case this significant, especially one with such pronounced domestic violence overtones, had happened without me knowing about it? I was the head of the Domestic Violence Unit. Although law enforcement is not required to keep the prosecutor’s office apprised of its actions, we traditionally enjoyed a very good working relationship. And by including prosecutors at the earliest possible opportunity, police often save themselves problems down the line, since we’re the ones knowledgeable in case law—i.e., what kinds of attacks can be made on the evidence or the merits of the case. Here’s how I explain it: Law enforcement just needs to establish probable cause to make an arrest—is it more probable than not that a crime occurred?—whereas a prosecutor needs to prove that a crime occurred “beyond a reasonable doubt” in order to secure a conviction. In terms of percentages that means prosecutors are looking for closer to 99 percent certainty, while law enforcement only need 51 percent certainty that a crime occurred. We review search warrants and arrest warrants, and we like to know about sting operations in advance. But it’s really better to have everyone on the same page from the very beginning.

When my boss, then State Attorney Michael McAuliffe, learned about the video the next morning, by seeing it on the news and reading about it in the paper, he was livid. As the chief law enforcement officer in the county, he didn’t like surprises, he didn’t like being blindsided in the press (no one does), and he always wanted to be on top of whatever was going on in the cases that are handled by his office. Now, here, suddenly the burgeoning Dalia Dippolito media circus had hit the trifecta on his worst-case scenario. Since this was a domestic violence case, it was assigned to my unit. So I tracked down the case file and read the Probable Cause Affidavit—two
pages that made a compelling case for how I would spend the next two years—and set about the business of issuing subpoenas and building a case. In that document, although he wasn’t named, the Confidential Informant’s actions were describe in detail, and by now Dalia knew who he was. It was just a matter of time before the media would as well.