The Lincoln Lawyer

monitor the card’s use by phone.
    Two hours after the first purchase the control number was used again to purchase a six-hundred-dollar leather jacket at the Nordstrom in the market. The credit card approval was delayed but not stopped. The detectives moved in and arrested a young woman as she was completing the purchase of the jacket. The case then became what is known as a “snitch chain,” the police following one suspect to the next as they snitched each other off and the arrests moved up the ladder.
    Eventually they came to the man sitting at the top of that ladder, Sam Scales. When the story broke in the press Wunderlich referred to him as the Tsunami Svengali because so many victims of the scam turned out to be women who had wanted to help the handsome minister pictured on the website. The nickname angered Scales, and in my discussions with him he took to referring to the detective who had brought him down as Wunder Boy.
    I got to Department 124 on the thirteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building by 10:45 but the courtroom was empty except for Marianne, the judge’s clerk. I went through the bar and approached her station.
    “You guys still doing the calendar?” I asked.
    “Just waiting on you. I’ll call everybody and tell the judge.”
    “She mad at me?”
    Marianne shrugged. She wouldn’t answer for the judge. Especially to a defense attorney. But in a way, she was telling me that the judge wasn’t happy.
    “Is Scales still back there?”
    “Should be. I don’t know where Joe went.”
    I turned and went over to the defense table and sat down and waited. Eventually, the door to the lockup opened and Joe Frey, the bailiff assigned to 124, stepped out.
    “You still got my guy back there?”
    “Just barely. We thought you were a no-show again. You want to go back?”
    He held the steel door open for me and I stepped into a small room with a stairwell going up to the courthouse jail on the fourteenth floor and two doors leading to the smaller holding rooms for 124. One of the doors had a glass panel. It was for attorney-client meetings and I could see Sam Scales sitting by himself at a table behind the glass. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and had steel cuffs on his wrists. He was being held without bail because his latest arrest violated his probation on the TrimSlim6 conviction. The sweet deal I had gotten him on that was about to go down the tubes.
    “Finally,” Scales said as I walked in.
    “Like you’re going anywhere. You ready to do this?”
    “If I have no choice.”
    I sat down across from him.
    “Sam, you always have a choice. But let me explain it again. They’ve got you cold on this, okay? You were caught ripping off people who wanted to help the people caught in one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. They’ve got three co-conspirators who took deals to testify against you. They have the list of card numbers found in your possession. What I am saying is that at the end of the day, you are going to get about as much sympathy from the judge and a jury-if it should come to that-as they would give a child raper. Maybe even less.”
    “I know all of that but I am a useful asset to society. I could educate people. Put me in the schools. Put me in the country clubs. Put me on probation and I’ll tell people what to watch out for out there.”
    “
You
are who they have to watch out for. You blew your chance with the last one and the prosecution said this is the final offer on this one. You don’t take it and they’re going to go to the wall on this. The one thing I can guarantee you is that there will be no mercy.”
    So many of my clients are like Sam Scales. They hopelessly believe there is a light behind the door. And I’m the one who has to tell them the door is locked and that the bulb burned out long ago anyway.
    “Then I guess I have to do it,” Scales said, looking at me with eyes that blamed me for not finding a way out for him.
    “It’s your choice. You want a trial, we’ll go to trial. Your exposure will be ten years plus the one you’ve got left on the probation. You make ’em real mad and they can also ship you over to the FBI so the feds can take a swing at you on interstate wire fraud if they want.”
    “Let me ask you something. If we go to trial, could we win?”
    I almost laughed but I still had some sympathy left for him.
    “No, Sam, we can’t win. Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you for two months?