Funny story. When I went to see Mark Mills in DC, he had me take an MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) test. It's a standard forensic diagnostic tool to ascertain personality disorders and/or addictions. It tries to give a complete psychiatric profile. It is over 500 questions and takes a few hours to complete. Since that first one I have taken about 15 of them. The questions are phrased very simply and require yes or no responses. One of the features of the test is repetition. The MMPI is designed to detect deception in the answers. It will ask maybe 20 questions related to drug or alcohol addiction but phrased differently and spaced throughout the test. So it may ask, "I think I have a drinking problem." If you were in denial or attempting to deceive, your answer would be NO. But it will also ask, "My friends think I drink too much." You might very well answer YES to this question not believing your friends are correct about your alcohol consumption.
So I took the test. Some of the questions I answered YES to were, "People are talking about me," and "I think I am being followed." Now those questions are there partly to detect schizophrenia or psychotic behavior. I answered YES because people were talking about me and the press and photographers were following me. But the test is not designed for high profile targets of criminal investigations. Mills faxed the answers and waited an hour for the results. He told me I had to take the test over; I had scored the highest possible on the paranoia scale. He told me ordinarily that score would make me committable. He said to try and answer NO on the questions that regular people would respond to in the negative.
It is hard to fully explain the feeling after a search warrant has been executed on your home. If it were a piece of clothing you would burn it. I am in no way comparing rape to a search warrant, but there is a similar feeling of being violated. My apartment never felt right to me again. But it was not a shirt or even a car, it was my home and I could not get rid of it. So I put back everything that they had strewn about and tried to clean up the mess as best I could.
That took place on a Friday. I had planned previously to travel to South Carolina the next day to see Seabright. I decided to go to get away from the apartment and clear my head. No sooner had I arrived there then Ray called me to suggest that I fire my lawyer, Irwin Rochman and replace him with Gerald Shargel. I was unhappy with Irwin's performance. He should have had better intelligence that the Feds were involved in this case and had been for weeks. He was too focused on DOI. I also wasn't happy with how he had treated me personally; always as Ray's kid and never as a real paying client. But the thought of firing him in the middle of this hadn't really occurred to me until Ray called. Ray seemed unusually adamant that I do this, which was odd to me since he pulled Irwin's strings and had things totally within his control, which was how he liked it. My guess is that Ray felt horribly guilty about having mucked this up. He was calling all the shots and yet he had missed the whole federal piece of this. Things were now going to be much more serious with federal involvement as opposed to state. Something else would make this urgency by Ray seem unusually odd. Ray had made the secret $25,000 payment to Irwin a few weeks before (I would only learn of this about 8 weeks after I fired Irwin). Why pay him that money and then urgently seek his dismissal? Something was fishy about all this but I never pursued it with Ray.
Why Shargel? I think he thought Jerry was a good criminal defense lawyer but also through Ray's partner, Rick Fischbein, a friend of Shargel's, Ray believed he could still exercise control over the case. In that at least, he was mistaken.
I had to be the one who called Irwin and I did a few minutes after getting off the phone with Ray. I thought Irwin would be happy to be done with me. But he argued and resisted being taken off the case. I didn't tell him the real reasons, I felt it would be rude - stupid I know. So I told him I wanted to go with someone who had more federal experience. Ray had also managed to find out in that short window of time that Jerry was friends with the federal prosecutor in my case. Irwin admitted that he knew her and that they had had bad experiences. Of all the mistakes I committed in my handling of this case, this, right there, was the biggest. I thought that having an attorney who got along well with the prosecutor was a good thing; having an attorney who didn't was a bad thing. At least in the federal system, that was a horrible miscalculation on my part and more than anything else that would happen in this case, cost me most dearly.
So after getting off the phone with Irwin I called Shargel. We set up to meet in his office when I returned to NYC. It bothered me that Irwin had made away with so much money. Given the hours expended and his hourly rate of $600 he hadn't used up even half of the $50,000 retainer I had given him just 8 weeks before. Not to mention the $25K he had gotten from Ray. All this without a legally required Retainer Agreement being signed.
I met Jerry and wrote out another check for $50,000. He, his associate, and I met for more than three hours. Most of our initial meeting was taken up with me just telling them the story of Fred. It's an extremely complex tale and much longer in its totality than what I have given here previously. Telling the story was, back then, always difficult. I have since gotten over some of the embarrassment factor; either because of time, the number of occasions I have had to tell it since then or that it's been written about so much subsequently, but at that time it was very difficult and emotional to talk about all these very private sexual matters. I was, as I have said, an intensely private person and all this revelation, even to one's attorney, was extremely hard to do. But I did it and held back nothing. I also told him that if we were to go forward on this together I would have to have his absolute assurance that he would have no communications with my father regarding this case; certainly not without my prior approval. He agreed completely and said he would have it no other way. This was the first week of May, 2002.
He told me his impressions of the prosecutor and his first conversation with her regarding my case. He said she was very thorough but not harsh and that this was her first case involving child porn. She said she wasn't familiar with the statutes and would have to get up to speed on all this. He told me that he and the prosecutor, Deborah Landis, were friends; they had dinner together fairly often. His impressions of Debbie Landis would in no way match the woman who prosecuted me for the next three years. Somebody, either Ray or Tony, spoke to the person who hired Debbie in the US Attorney's office. His impressions were similar to Jerry's although without any warmth. That same person, when asked about her conduct a year later, would say that it was beyond any reasonable investigation and that her behavior was "over-the-top."
One of Debbie's first actions was to use the Rolodex they had taken from my apartment and subpoena all my medical records from every doctor - medical or psychiatric - in my life. Back then I went to lots of doctors: podiatrist, weight loss, dentist, ophthalmologist, internist, dermatologist, orthopedic surgeon, etc. All received subpoenas demanding my medical records. I was furious. Jerry informed me of this very casually. I told him I wanted it stopped. I didn't understand why he was allowing this; there was no basis whatever for requesting these records. And worst of all, she had subpoenaed my psychiatrists dating back to when I was 17 years old. Wasn't there some patient confidentiality; I see it on cop shows all the time. No, he told me, there was no confidentiality. I was floored at that discovery and not sure that I ever fully believed him. But forgetting that for a moment, how could she do this with absolutely no rationale? It was completely a fishing expedition. And fishing for what?
Jerry absolutely refused to do anything to stop it. He thought I was being silly and kept telling me to save our objections for the big things. "What was there to find?" He asked me. "Nothing," I said, "but that's hardly the point. Why should we allow her to do this? Not to mention that this is going to poison the relationships I have with my physicians. Nobody wants a patient whose records are subpoenaed by the US Government in a criminal matter." Of course he could have stopped it and successfully. No judge would have allowed those subpoenas with no basis for the records had they been objected to. But he refused and that would become a pattern in the case. She did something outrageous and he would defend her actions as completely reasonable and ordinary. He would tell me over and over again that I simply didn't understand federal criminal law. As for my doctors; I turned out to be right. Two refused my requests for an appointment and a third made so many nasty remarks about the case that I stopped going.
There was now, at this point, a grand jury convened. Debbie began subpoenaing nearly everyone I knew. Most of the witnesses could not possibly have added anything to the case. This was all being done to harass me, to fish, and because Debbie is just a bad person. The stories that came back from the grand jury tore my heart apart. Tony Carbonetti's wife, Carol, was called (at that time she was still his girlfriend). Tony told me that Debbie was so hostile - screaming and carrying on - to Carol that Carol actually broke down on the stand. You need to understand that Carol is a sweet girl but has a tough Irish side to her too. I realized that Debbie's behavior must have been truly over-the-top to make Carol cry. Then there was Ralph.
Ralph was my dog walker; a great, 25 yo Puerto Rican kid. Seabright worshiped Ralph and Ralph was a real rock for me while all this went on. Remember back, when I told you that I had cleaned out a storage room before I was planning on killing myself? And that they had discovered its existence on the day of the search warrant? Well apparently they went to the storage facility and got the videotapes of the day I cleaned it out. They then had FBI agents scour the neighborhood with those photos trying to identify the person I was with. I think in the end one of my doormen gave Ralph up. Debbie sent four (4), yes four (4), FBI agents to the Upper East Side one afternoon while Ralph was walking dogs to hand him a subpoena to appear before the grand jury. The subpoena listed his full name as "AKA Ralph." Can you imagine - with 9/11 only a few months old - Debbie had four FBI agents wasting their time handing a subpoena to a 5'6, 120lb, unarmed kid. Any NYPD cop could have done this or even one armed FBI agent, but four? Further, there was a memorandum to US Attorney's offices from Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI, only weeks before specifically prohibiting this type of use of FBI personnel, it was revealed in Newsweek.
I got Ralph a lawyer, especially after the Carol episode. He told me that, again, Debbie had yelled and threatened. She did this first in front of the grand jury and then when Ralph asked to speak to his lawyer, in front of them. Ralph had nothing to say. He helped me throw out some books, boxes and memorabilia from HDC and EDC. The whole thing took 30 minutes. He had nothing to contribute. Debbie wouldn't accept this. It was another extraordinary waste of time and money on Debbie's part. Ralph told me that it was obvious by their reactions that the grand jurors were embarrassed by Debbie's behavior. When she was done she asked the grand jurors if they had any questions. They had one. What type of dog did I have?
The really remarkable thing to me then and as time went on, was Debbie's obsession with that storage room. It would be one thing, I admit, if something or things were missing from HDC - documents or ledgers, I don't know what. But there never was a single allegation of anything missing. Since there was none, what was her obsession with that room? Jerry once asked her what her obsession was with that room since HDC reported nothing missing. She had no answer. Jerry and I eventually came to agree that Debbie could not accept the fact that I had misused my HDC expense account with no effort whatsoever to cover-up and that I had not done anything else. She believed that no one would misuse their expense account, leave a paper trail miles long behind and not do anything else. In her prosecutor's mind it didn't add up. Jerry and I became convinced that Debbie firmly believed that there existed some Swiss or Bahamian bank account with millions that I had stolen; even though there was not the slightest suggestion that any monies had gone missing or were unaccounted for at HDC. Moreover, we believed, she thought that the storage room and any documents I had thrown out were the key to discovering this. I asked Jerry over and over, "How could I have destroyed HDC documents when HDC isn't claiming that any documents are missing?" It was one of the few times we concurred that Debbie's actions made no sense.
Like the alchemist who believes, - no, is absolutely dead sure - that the key to turning lead into gold is just a matter of persevering to find the proper formula, so I became equally obsessed with time. I was not in a good mental state during this period. Everything made me think of past years. Any reference to a past event or incident would instantly cause me to think of the month and year in question. And the constant question in my mind was: would I want to go back to that point in time? I was almost convinced that if I tried hard enough I could cause myself to return to a point in time before all this happened. I just didn't know the secret or wasn't trying hard enough. Each time I would look at a TV section I would see movie listings and beside them the year of release. 1983, 1999, 1990, 1971 - was this a year I would want to return to as opposed to being in the present. Anything and everything I encountered would instantly translate into that question. From looking at cars on the street and guessing their model year or what year I purchased a piece of clothing in my closet. Everything represented a potential time when this nightmare wasn't happening. And my most fervent desire was to escape from the present.
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