Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (9 page)

By the time I was assigned as chief prosecutor, Dalia was already out on bail. After spending the night in jail, she appeared before a judge on Thursday morning, August 6, for what is known as a First Appearance. The judge’s obligation was to determine whether to release a defendant on bail or other conditions, and what that bail or those conditions may be. The court may consider the nature and circumstances of the offense charged and the penalty provided by law; the weight of the evidence against the defendant; the defendant’s family ties, length of residence in the community, employment history, financial resources; the defendant’s past and present conduct, including any record of convictions, or previous flight to avoid prosecution, and whether she represented a potential threat to the community.

Sergeant Sheridan appeared at the bond hearing, and between him, the prosecutor handling the First Appearance, and defense attorney Michael Salnick, they determined a reasonable bond in the amount of $25,000, with the conditions of house arrest and no contact with her husband. Dalia was also given special dispensation so that she could work, attend church, etc. Since she only needed to raise 10 percent in cash, or $2,500, she was set up at her mother’s house with an ankle monitor by the time I knew anything about it.

Over the next week, I reached out to Mike Dippolito through his lawyers and was advised that he felt uncomfortable with the terms of Dalia’s bond. He took exception to her claim of employment, saying the only sale she ever brokered at Beachfront Realty was his townhouse, and he indicated he was concerned for his safety—particularly since she was staying less than a mile from his house. I informed Salnick that I planned to petition for a bond modification unless he agreed to changes in the terms of her release: no work provision, church services, etc. She would be enjoined from leaving the house, period—she couldn’t even go out in the backyard—except to her lawyer’s office or to a doctor or hospital in a health emergency. And they
would enter all of Mike’s hot spots—home, office, Starbucks, gym, and the usual haunts—into a GPS program, and if she entered any of those “exclusion zones,” the Sheriff’s Office would be immediately notified that she was in violation. I didn’t seek a bond increase because she was essentially locked down. I let him know that if I had to file my motion, I would be forced to inform the court how Dalia actually made her money. Salnick agreed to these terms without comment.

But not before Dalia had made plans to come and get her things from Mike’s house, in the company of a house arrest supervisor. Mike would wait down the block until she was through. The night before, Mike’s mother helped him box up everything Dalia owned, which he loaded into her car. While he was going through her things and putting them into boxes, he found used tampons shoved into corners and crevices all over the house.

It turned out she hadn’t been pregnant after all. Even that was a lie.

S
ix days before Dalia was arrested and Mike dodged a bullet, a phone call came in to the Boynton Beach police station on a Friday evening. Property Crimes Detective Asim Brown picked up the message from someone named Mohamed claiming he had some important information to impart, and asking him to call. When Detective Brown returned the call, Mohamed claimed he had intimate knowledge of a woman who was planning to kill her husband. The story he told in person that night was compelling enough that Brown alerted Sergeant Frank Ranzie, his superior in the Property Crimes Unit, and Sergeant Paul Sheridan of the Major Case Squad. Mohamed told them a detailed story stretching back a decade about a woman and intermittent lover he knew only as “Delilah” (who nonetheless once bought him a $38,000 Range Rover), the husband she seemed hell-bent on seeing dead, and the reasons why he thought the threat was credible. He obviously convinced them, because they signed him up as a Confidential Informant on the spot. Unlike a lot of CIs, he wasn’t paid for his work. Rather, he believed she was serious, and he didn’t want to get caught in the blowback.

Mohamed Shihadeh is a thirty-two-year-old Jordanian Muslim born in Jerusalem’s West Bank who immigrated to the United States when he was a year old. With his shaved head and intense eyes, he is striking enough to have caught the eye of a producer who, after meeting him in a Miami nightclub, cast him in the USA Network dramatic series
Burn Notice
, where he played (what else?) a terrorist. He had a small empire of check-cashing/
convenience stores around South Florida, where he has lived for the past dozen years, and is a self-proclaimed card counter who claims to have won and lost millions at blackjack in Las Vegas, all the while nursing a vicious prescription Xanax habit. (On some of the police recordings of his phone calls, his speech is so slurred as to be almost incomprehensible.) Thoroughly Westernized, down to his Lexus and the T-Pain remixes he made a CD of for Dalia, he is known to his friends as Mo or, strangely enough, Mike.

Mohamed had first met Dalia over a decade ago when she walked into his convenience store in Boca Raton one day. She was eighteen, five-foot-seven, with jet-black hair and emerald-green eyes, and she looked like the devil’s jewelry. She was in and out of his store four times in ten minutes, telling him she was getting her car washed at the Mobil station, and when she flirted with him, he flirted back. They hooked up that night and began seeing each other casually a couple of times a week, whenever it was convenient for both of them, although it was probably more casual for him than it was for her. (“I don’t want to say dating, but more intimate friends,” he described it in his initial police statement.) But soon enough he saw a less attractive, pushy side of her, this “two-faced personality” where she “all of a sudden throws a tantrum if she doesn’t get her way.”

She berated him for agreeing to an arranged marriage to appease his traditional Middle Eastern family, claiming her own Egyptian father had tried to force her into a similar situation. (Mohamed says Dalia hated her father, and that he had basically disowned her for breaking up her parents’ marriage.) After she showed up at his apartment on a night when his designated bride was also scheduled to be there, and then refused to leave—a gesture somewhere between defiance and obsession—he distanced himself from her, although they continued to rendezvous at hotels and bars occasionally, even after his marriage in May 2003.

He saw her again for two or three months while he was going through a divorce in 2004, taking her to strip clubs and on gambling trips to Las Vegas. Yet for all the intensity of their times together, the porous way that money traveled back and forth between them, and the star-crossed manner in which they exited and reentered each other’s lives, Mohamed only ever knew Dalia by her given Arabic name, Delilah; never went to her house;
never had her sleep over at his; and, when pressed, could reveal precious little of substance about her. When she left for California, he didn’t see her again for another four years. Their whole relationship was based on lies, he told the police. (According to Mohamed’s various, sometimes contradictory accounts, in the interim he went on to meet a woman in Las Vegas four days before she won a $2.3 million Wheel of Fortune slot machine jackpot; began dating her when she bought a house a mile from his in West Palm Beach; ended his arranged marriage, only to have his new fiancée charge him with aggravated assault following a dustup with her extended family—a charge she later recanted, and which was expunged from his record; remarried his first wife two days after he was released from jail; divorced his first wife—now his second wife—six months later; and reconciled with his fiancée, with whom he now has a child. He claims that each of his divorces cost him half a million dollars.)

In late 2008 (possibly on the same trip where she met Mike), Dalia called Mohamed out of the blue and met him for drinks at E.R. Bradley’s Saloon in West Palm Beach. She told him she had opened some massage parlors in California, which at first he thought was a joke, and that she was engaged to someone in New York, a rich architect who had given her a $40,000 engagement ring, which she showed him, and a black CLK-class Mercedes. Since they were both involved with other people, they called it a night and promised to keep in touch.

The next time she saw him, months later at the Yard House, a restaurant in Palm Beach Gardens, it was a different story. She had gotten married— not to the guy in New York, but to someone else—and now she was trapped in a nightmare. Her husband was on probation for financial fraud, abusive, scarily violent, a drug dealer, on steroids, insanely jealous, and stalked her everywhere. Mohamed asked her why she didn’t just divorce him, or have the marriage annulled, or get a restraining order, but Dalia said he would kill her. At times she was laughing, flirty like he remembered her, and at times she seemed genuinely terrified. Her lack of bruises or signs of obvious trauma made him skeptical of her claims, but she insisted she needed his help—especially after she showed up at his apartment at 6 a.m. the next morning. (Out of it on Xanax and still half asleep, he thinks he may have
received oral sex from her, which no doubt helped convince him to help her.) Mohamed ran a check-cashing business and knew how to deal with miscreants. He had been a boxer in his youth and had a concealed weapon permit and two handguns. It made sense she would turn to him.

Mohamed’s store, Cross Roads Market & Deli, was immediately adjacent to the Palm Beach Gardens Police substation, and he knew many of the officers who stopped through on a constant basis. He offered to put Dalia in touch with Robert Wilson, an undercover officer working in the narcotics unit, and she came by the store on March 17 hoping to run into him, but had to settle for a phone introduction through Mohamed. According to his police report, Wilson spoke with Dalia a day or so later, whereupon she repeated her claims, adding that her husband routinely sold steroids at the gym. She claimed she could guarantee he would have drugs on him if he was stopped in Palm Beach Gardens—conveniently, within Officer Wilson’s jurisdiction—and she offered to pay him for his efforts. He assured her he didn’t need any compensation to do his job. He talked to her several more times over the next few days and met with her at least once, but when she persisted in offering him money, he broke off all contact and advised her to contact her local police department.

That first day after they hooked up again, Dalia also asked Mohamed for some Xanax. He had been taking three five-milligram tablets a day for as long as he had known her, prescribed for anxiety and the ensuing insomnia, and it seemed like he wouldn’t miss them. This was right before the incident at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan in which Mike’s car was searched for drugs for the first time. Mohamed revealed that Dalia later told him that in addition to the search with the police dog at CityPlace, which she admitted to orchestrating (she had a friend call in an anonymous complaint), there was an unknown third attempt to have police arrest Mike for drugs, but they missed him by two or three minutes.

Back in touch after a lengthy hiatus, now that she was apparently doing well, Mohamed claims he asked Dalia if she would cosign on a car loan for him, since his credit was suspect due to the extreme fluctuations in the life of a gambler. Dalia didn’t want the car in her name, but offered instead to buy the car for him outright. So the next afternoon, in the drive-through of
her bank right across the street from his convenience store, she requested a cashier’s check in the amount of $38,000. From there, they drove to the Land Rover dealership, where she purchased a used, light-blue recent-model Range Rover for exactly that amount. He claims the car was technically for both of them to use whenever they wanted, but since she still had the Mercedes in addition to her husband’s Chevy Tahoe she was driving, he considered it a gift. (He testified that they routinely transferred large amounts of money back and forth between them throughout their friendship.) Dalia confessed to him that the money came from the $200,000 she was supposed to be holding for her husband to make restitution on his stock fraud crimes. She had spent half of it shopping, getting hair extensions, tanning, and now buying Mohamed a car, and the other half was stashed somewhere she wouldn’t say. She even asked at one point if Mohamed could help her set up a fake account and forge a wire transfer transaction. He declined.

Within a couple of weeks, Dalia’s mood had grown more desperate, and her proposed solution more extreme. Sometime before April 2, Dalia called Mohamed and demanded to see him. He was hanging out at a store called Urban Wear owned by his cousin on a bad corner in Riviera Beach, in the heart of the hood, and he told her to meet him there. Dalia showed up in her Mercedes in a tiny dress and no bra, the promise of sex spilling out of her, unlikely to have attracted more attention if she’d been on fire. She told Mohamed that her situation had become untenable, and asked him if he knew anyone who could kill her husband. She was a live wire, and Mohamed tried to calm her down, telling her she didn’t know who these people around them were and what they were capable of. This just inflamed her.

When she got loud enough to attract the attention of some guys hanging out by the counter, Mohamed’s cousin tried to make a joke out of it, saying, “She wants him to find somebody to kill her husband.”

Except these were members of the notorious Buck Wild gang; this was their corner and the store was their hangout, and now it wasn’t a joke anymore.

Buck Wild is an extremely violent African-American gang centered in Riviera Beach that specializes in drug dealing, robbery, extortion, and murder. They hold their tiny, otherwise law-abiding community hostage
through intimidation, yet their influence is felt beyond its borders throughout South Florida. Not as organized or structured as the Crips or Bloods, it can best be described as a loosely affiliated crew of ultra-violent street thugs who have exhibited a breathtaking capacity for mayhem, and have been linked to some two dozen shootings.

One of the gang members jumped at the offer, telling her, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

Soon the conversation had spilled out onto the sidewalk as they tried to determine whether she was serious, putting Dalia in direct negotiations with Larry Coe, a longtime gang member with a string of violent felonies in his past who surrounded himself with teenagers eager to do his bidding. As Mohamed and his cousin tried to warn her off this line of inquiry, Dalia brazenly told him that she had money, where she lived, what Mike’s habits were, and the best time to pull off a hit. In exchange, she offered them $30,000 or the title to a Range Rover (presumably the one Mohamed was driving)—their call. Coe was intrigued enough to investigate further, and since Dalia didn’t want to drive her own car and risk being recognized, she agreed to ride with him. The other guys would follow in a second car. Mohamed watched helplessly as they all drove off together, convinced he’d never see her again.

Forty-five minutes later, they all returned, Coe shaking his head. “That girl is crazy,” he said, according to Mohamed. The house was equipped with security cameras, motion detectors, and an alarm system front and back. There was virtually no way in without being detected and recorded. Mohamed told them she was trouble; it would get out to everybody, plus there was already a cop involved. He felt like she was his responsibility. Coe told Dalia they weren’t interested. Afterward, she tried to get Coe’s phone number from Mohamed, who told her he didn’t have it; later, she stopped by his cousin’s store looking for the gang members. On April 2, Dalia placed thirteen unanswered calls to Larry Coe’s cell phone. This was four days after the drug incident at CityPlace, and three days after Mike lost the $191,000 cashier’s check to Erik Tal. Police responded to a domestic disturbance call at her house later the same evening. The next week, Mohamed took the Range Rover back to the dealership and settled for a $4,000 loss. He was concerned
that Coe would try to take it from him due to Dalia’s offer, or otherwise consider it his for the asking, and Mohamed considered it too hot to have in his possession. He checked with one of his cop pals about the legality of accepting a vehicle as a gift, and then used the cash to pay off his divorce attorneys.

For most of May and June, Mohamed was traveling with his daughter in Jordan and the Middle East. When he returned in late June, he claims, Dalia often called him as many as ten times a day. She was on the verge of getting Mike to sign over the house to her in order to expedite his restitution process, and she didn’t have long before her husband’s suspicions would hit a tipping point. She also admitted she had lied about being pregnant, and had even had her mother convinced. Now it had been four months, and she was worried because Mike had invited her whole family—including her dying grandfather, who was in a wheelchair—to the Philadelphia Phillies–Miami Marlins major league baseball game on July 19, renting a luxury box at his own expense. The wife of one of Mike’s friends was also four months pregnant, and Dalia was afraid that the other woman had begun to show while she clearly had not. She tried to get Mohamed to tag along as a friend from the old days, but he begged off. She also offered him $5,000 to find her a street gun, which wouldn’t run more than a fraction of that. He tried to ignore her, but she wouldn’t let it drop.