The Criminal Lawyer: (A Good Lawyer Novel) Read online

  The Criminal

  Lawyer

  A Novel

  Thomas Benigno

  This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this story are purely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher or this book.

  Contact email for press, licensing, or speaking engagements: [email protected]

  Copyright © 2016 Thomas Benigno

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1533109087

  ISBN 13: 9781533109088

  Praise for

  The #1 International Bestseller

  The Good Lawyer By Thomas Benigno

  Kirkus reviews: Benigno’s first effort is a crafty legal page-turner, just as good in the courtroom as it is outside... (he) fortifies his lead character with problems that his law degree can’t fix. Readers who like their courtroom thrillers packed with lawyer-speak and zigzagging plot developments should find much to savor.

  Publisher’s Weekly: Benigno presents… legal skirmishing and moral ambiguity in the saga of Nick Mannino...The interesting glimpses of courtroom procedure and a cast of eccentric characters will intrigue readers...

  The New York Post: “This one scared the briefs off me. Make room Grisham, legal suspense fiction has a new senior partner...” Mike Shain

  Also by Thomas Benigno

  The Good Lawyer

  Inspired by real crimes that occurred on Long Island

  For my mother,

  Ernesta Mary Benigno

  1923-2014

  “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  It was the perfect day and the perfect place...

  He parked his green sun-bleached van on the shoulder alongside the dune. Standing beside the tall mound of sand speckled with beach grass, he had yet to see or hear another car pass on the road behind him.

  Amid a warm and oddly soothing June wind, he turned to face north and the bay—a mirror of tranquility. The faint hum of a crossing motorboat was testament to the resolute serenity of this beautiful day.

  He took a long deep breath, looked up at the sky, and smiled. A resplendent sun shone beside a lone white cloud, and as far as his eyes could see, he was alone, but for the man sitting high on the dune, staring blankly at the ocean.

  Arms outstretched for balance, he buried each wolverine boot in the sand as he climbed. Once on top, he surveyed the beach from one end to the other.

  It was late afternoon. The crowd had thinned. Soaking up what remained of the sun, a few leather-skinned seniors lay face up on their recliners. Two teenagers threw a Frisbee. Others played volleyball. Parents gathered together blankets, towels and chairs while struggling to corral their small children into leaving.

  In an hour or two, this quarter mile stretch between the dune and the ocean would be nearly desolate; but come morning, it would begin to populate, as ever, once again.

  Because the beach is winsome, and seductive, and therapeutic.

  There is no cause for worry and fear in the pure and uncomplicated world of sun, wind, and water.

  As he pivoted and stepped back down, only the fleeting movement of a shadow marked his presence to the man who remained sitting on the dune, and seemed to pay him no mind.

  Walking quickly past his van he looked both ways before crossing the two-lane roadway aptly named Ocean Parkway. After twenty precise steps, and in the marsh up to his knees, he paused to study the small stretch of wetland where the stalks spread thin then disappeared into the encroaching bay. Turning around again toward the ocean, he looked up and across in an attempt to decipher the precise distance between the parkway lamps and the limits of its cones of light in the dead of night.

  This would be his last visit, his only visit, in the bold brightness of day. One last breath, one last taste and smell of the salty air, and he would be gone, never to return in the light, but more certain than he had ever been.

  This area so close, yet so secluded was, bar none, the perfect place to leave the bodies.

  1

  Tragedy, like a derailed freight train, did not discriminate on its errant path of ruin.

  Desmond Lewis was a fifty-two year old black man.

  We had much in common.

  Born in the same month and year, July, 1954, we were each happily married for over twenty years (or at least I thought I was), with two children to show for it, a boy, and a girl.

  We were also hard working to a fault and much too proud for our own good.

  It was a hot summer night in June of 2005, when Desmond’s son attended a party in his hometown of Valley Stream, Long Island. The boy was seventeen, and had been dating a girl from his high school. She was white and Italian American. It was his first serious relationship. It wasn’t hers. She broke it off a week before the party. They had been the only interracial couple at their school.

  On the evening that would forever change the Lewis family’s life, and all those involved, Desmond’s son and his former girlfriend found themselves at that same party. She had moved on. He hadn’t. She was there with her new boyfriend, also white and Italian-American.

  A beer keg in the living room and an unknown quantity of secluded hard liquor fueled the fires of discontent. Words were exchanged, and a fight broke out between the two boys. The new boyfriend got the worst of it. Bruised, beaten, and worse, embarrassed, he left the party.

  At 3 AM, there was a pounding on the Lewis’ front door. It woke the entire family.

  Desmond Lewis was scheduled to be at work at 8 AM. He
was a supervisor for the Long Island Power Authority and had just clocked in twenty-five years on the job, while his wife worked nearly as long as an elementary school teacher. They planned to retire after the kids graduated college. They would travel and see the world. They earned it. They deserved it. They raised two good kids, a son and a daughter who attended the Marianist-run parochial high school just fifteen minutes from their home.

  The Lewis’ were also keenly aware that black families like theirs were still a minority in Valley Stream, though the neighborhood was becoming more racially diverse with each passing year. A proud and God-fearing man, every Sunday morning at 8:45 AM sharp, Desmond would drive his wife and two children to Sunday mass at the Blessed Sacrament Church nearby. He was a member of the Holy Trinity Society. His wife volunteered at every church function. To all eyes and ears, their family was well liked and respected. So when Desmond peeked out his bedroom window and into the darkness of that hot summer night, and saw four high school boys on his front lawn, he was as surprised as he was frightened. The boys, members of the same lacrosse team, were screaming and shouting racial epithets.

  Desmond immediately told his wife to stay put and grabbed his deer rifle. She called the police the moment he left the room.

  Less than a minute later, the new boyfriend was lying on that same front lawn, shot dead, a baseball bat by his side.

  The Nassau County District Attorney’s Office charged Desmond with second-degree murder. Jury selection began in 2006, a year later.

  After a grueling one-month trial, wherein I lost over fifteen pounds and called twenty-five character witnesses, mostly white neighbors and coworkers, I delivered a two-hour summation to an all-white jury that ended in tears—mine and the jury’s.

  Five days later, after the foreman complained three times that the panel was deadlocked, and three times the judge sent the jury back to continue deliberating, a verdict was reached. Desmond stood in stoic silence while it was read aloud on another hot June night, only this one was rattled by a thunderstorm that lasted until daybreak.

  I collapsed into my chair when the jury convicted him of second-degree manslaughter. As for Desmond, he just nodded to the jurors, and then consoled me with thanks and praise for the “fine defense work” I had done.

  In retrospect, it is as clear to me now as it was then that I was not trying a case in the Jim Crow South, and that my client have should never left the house until the police arrived even if he had to barricade himself inside.

  When Desmond took the stand, he held up well during cross-examination by the head of the felony division of the Nassau County DA’s Office. Evidence corroborated his testimony that his front door had been kicked and punched so hard, the deadbolt broke away part of the door- frame. Desmond also testified that all four boys surrounded him once he went outside, that he feared for his life, and fired his rifle only when the one boy—the new boyfriend, swung a bat at the air between them. The bullet pierced the boy’s aorta and killed him instantly. Like Desmond’s son, the boy was seventeen.

  When I saw several jurors with tears in their eyes just before the verdict was read, I knew what was coming. They just couldn’t reconcile my client leaving his home with a rifle in his hands. It also didn’t help that the victim was a high school student, screaming drunk or not, and not previously known to act in a threatening or racist manner. The boy’s father, like Desmond, had worked one job his whole life. The boy’s mother was also a schoolteacher.

  It didn’t matter that the police took six minutes to arrive, and that in those six minutes, I argued, everyone in the house could’ve been beaten to death, especially his son, the attackers’ prime target.

  Desmond was sentenced to three years in State prison. He refused to allow me to ask for bail pending appeal, or to appeal the conviction at all. My primary ground would have been the DA’s uniform exclusion of every prospective black juror on the panel, while I used up my peremptory challenges, excluding every apparent racist I suspected.

  Desmond, who also believed he should never have left the house, was grief-stricken over the death of the boy. The appeal would have taken years. He wanted this tragedy behind him and his family as soon as possible. He was released from prison after serving less than twenty-four months.

  I took no fee for Desmond’s defense. After the conviction and sentence, I paid off the mortgage on his house so his wife and their two children could afford to live there on just her schoolteacher salary.

  My client was furious with me for doing so. I told him it was my Uncle Rocco’s mob money. He thought I was joking, and laughed. I told him I wasn’t, and he stopped laughing.

  As for me, the case was over. I had lost, and as a result, was impossible to live with. My wife Eleanor had seen it all before. It wasn’t the first time I took my workload, and my cauldron of discontent, home with me.

  Then came the inevitable meltdown.

  While she was initially understanding in the face of my biting remarks and irascible behavior, in my mind’s eye, I had failed, and although I seemed to be the only one who thought so, I was inconsolable.

  Two months later, she got on a plane to Atlanta, and left me for good. That was four years ago.

  I get it now. I didn’t then.

  Arms around my knees, I sat high on the dune, eyes locked on the ocean, the pulsating urge to swim to the horizon until I could swim no more, heightening with each visit.

  Staring out over beach and shore, and the wide expanse of the Atlantic, I felt a comforting disconnect from the world around me. But as the sun slowly set, and the towering shadow of a man loomed over me, the world around me had a different plan. Lost in thought, and without so much as a slight turn of my head, the shadow came and went, leaving a trail of large and deep footprints in the sand, which I paid no mind to anyway.

  As I left the confines of Jones Beach and drove north on the Meadowbrook Parkway, my Mercedes S600 reaching sixty-five miles per hour and coasting as silently as a capsule in space, I mulled over my last contact with Eleanor. When she phoned, it was usually about our kids. This time was no different.

  “I spoke to John the other day,” she said. “He sounded different. I think he’s in love.”

  “I met the girl only once,” I answered. “The three of us had lunch in the City. I didn’t notice anything unusual about John though, if that’s what you mean?”

  “As if you would,” she said with a slight chuckle. “But you’re closer to him in geography than I am right now. So please, call me once you have a better idea of what’s going on between them. Okay?”

  “Okay, but she seems like a very nice girl, and smart too, goes to CUNY Law, reminded me of you back in the day.”

  “Really? Trust me. I wasn’t that smart. You were the smart one. Now please get back to me on this.”

  Such was the extent of a typical conversation of ours since she left.

  Driving faster along the empty parkway than I should have, a chord instantly struck inside me, in that sorest of places, where lost love incubates, and like a bolt of black lightening striking me to the core, it sent my mind reeling into a dark cloud of confusion.

  With our telephone call came the realization that Eleanor sounded content, in control of her life, and even happy. We had not seen each other in four years, and she was doing just fine.

  I pressed my foot firmly down on the accelerator until I could press no more. Eleanor was gone, and for good. I checked the speedometer. It read ninety-five miles per hour and rising. The S600 was just a few fatal moments from being one and the same with the concrete overpass ahead, when I jerked the steering wheel hard and swerved off the exit ramp.

  Seconds later, I was on the street, my foot reflexively pumping the brake pedal, screeching lines of rubber on the asphalt.

  I pulled over, dropped my head to the steering wheel, my mind and heart in a pit of irrepressible sadness, when suddenly a horn blast broke through the sealed quiet of the car’s interior.

  A green van in despe
rate need of a paint job was slowly coasting past. Through its heavily tinted windows, I could see the opaque silhouette of a large man behind the wheel.

  Leaning over, his head turned, he seemed to be looking straight at me.

  2

  I pulled away from the curb and shook my head hard, as the realization set in that I had nearly killed myself in a moment of self-pitying insanity.

  With my foot firmly on the brake pedal and the car idling at a red light, I caught another glimpse of the green van. Still attempting to compose myself, my eyes, for some inexplicable reason, remained fixed on its weather-beaten rear doors until it passed the McDonald’s up ahead and vanished from sight.

  This was the same McDonald’s I had worked in during high school, after my mom and stepdad made the big move from Brooklyn to Merrick, Long Island, in the fall of 1968, and bought a small house—their American dream—just a few blocks away. I was thirteen years old, and considering the long and bumpy road Mom and I took to get there, it was my dream too.

  Though I was fortunately too young to remember it, my first home was a small apartment above a deli in Flushing, Queens. It was there, one winter morning when I was barely eighteen months old, that my biological father (or “sperm donor” as I liked to call him), kissed Mom goodbye, took what little savings they had for himself, and left for good. He even skipped the state to avoid child support.

  Broke and alone, Mom moved back to Brooklyn.

  Three tiny rooms above a drycleaner was our home for the next five years. If not for my Uncle Rocco, my mother’s brother and local mob boss, paying the rent over Mom’s objections, we would have wound up on the street. It was 1956. There weren’t too many choices for a divorced woman with a child. Rocco, by the grace of God, or wrath of the devil, was all we had. He loved his sister. He loved me. To the rest of the world though, he was one exceedingly dangerous man.

  When my stepfather, John Mannino, a senior zoning supervisor for the City of New York, came along, Rocco gradually fazed himself out of our lives. He became an uncle from a distance. Watchful. Waiting. This was also Mom’s wish and of no subtle doing.