Chapter 25
IN THE TWO years since I left criminal defense behind, I had handled a variety of civil matters ranging from mounting challenges to immigration detentions to fighting unlawful evictions to representing a successful class-action lawsuit against a state prison for women in Chowchilla that resulted in an abusive gynecologist being fired and a midrange payout to my sixteen incarcerated clients.
It was a solid victory, but the gynecologist who had submitted prisoners to painful and unneeded examinations was not prosecuted criminally or disciplined by the state medical board. He just went into private practice.
In some cases, I felt that I was using the law to do what law enforcement wasn’t doing.
I filed a claim on behalf of a nineteen-year-old woman against a motel in the Valley, alleging that its operators did nothing to stop the use of its rooms by sex traffickers, thus exploiting and profiting from the victims of this endemic crime.
The motel responded by shutting down and going out of business.
The litigation was stalled, and the rooms of the abandoned motel were now inhabited by homeless people.
I stayed away from personal injury and medical malpractice lawsuits, turning down many cases and even avoiding Lorna’s plea to refer the cases to other lawyers and thus earn a minor fee from each.
There was big money in those kinds of cases, even when chipping off referral fees, but to me they were hollow victories, and it wasn’t where I saw my career going.
I wanted something bigger, something more important, something that I could be proud of at the end of the day.
This led me down a rabbit hole defending several mom-and-pop businesses that were being systematically sued by the same lawyer and plaintiff.
The lawyer was named Shane Montgomery. He ran a one-man shop on the Westside, and he and a client, a blind man named Dexter Rose, had a never-ending supply of cases to file under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It was purely a moneymaking scheme. Montgomery would file a lawsuit on Rose’s behalf against a small business or restaurant, claiming that the website designed to promote the establishment was inaccessible to the blind man.
This was a gray area in the federal ADA law and challengeable.
But the lawsuit was quickly followed by a letter from Montgomery stating that Rose was willing to settle the lawsuit before it became too expensive and reputation-damaging for the small-business operators.
The records showed that the average settlement was only three thousand dollars, but I learned that Montgomery and Rose were filing as many as eight lawsuits a week.
Lorna pulled every active case filed by Montgomery and Rose in Los Angeles County.
We then sent letters to 109 businesses, offering my defense against the lawsuit at no expense to them.
This resulted in my filing a countersuit on behalf of forty-three businesses targeted by Montgomery and Rose.
In the course of investigating the case, Cisco Wojciechowski came up with a smoking gun.
The lawsuits filed by Montgomery all stated in the cause of action that Rose was blind and therefore could not drive and needed to rely on food-delivery services from local restaurants.
It said he lived on a stipend from the Social Security Disability Insurance program.
Cisco went to work and learned that Rose was indeed on the SSDI’s payout roll but he was not receiving the maximum monthly payment, as would be expected for a blind individual.
To get on the SSDI list at all, Rose would have needed a government physician’s confirmation of his disability.
Cisco cadged a copy of that report from a connection he had made at the Social Security Administration office downtown.
It stated that the physician had determined through testing that Rose was completely blind in one eye but retained half his vision in the other.
The physician said this limited disability allowed Rose partial function in terms of ambulation and other daily activities, such as reading.
He thus received only a partial stipend.
The SSDI report was a case killer. When Montgomery was confronted with it and notified that I planned to use it as the centerpiece of my case as well as in complaints to the Social Security Administration, the ADA commission, and the California bar, he quickly folded his tent.
He dropped all pending lawsuits filed on behalf of Rose and agreed to a settlement of $250,000, which I distributed evenly to my forty-three clients after taking 10 percent off the top.
Last I heard, Montgomery and Rose had both moved to Florida, where they were no doubt planning their next legal scam.
The point is, I had done some good work since I left the courtrooms and hallways of the Criminal Courts Building and crossed the street to civil.
But I had not stood in the proving ground in front of a jury or been in a trial in nearly three years.
I missed it. I craved it. I waited for it.
And now I had it. On Monday morning, April 7, I stood in front of the mirror in the house on Fareholm in my best suit, the blue Hugo Boss wool blend, and appraised my look.
I wore a powder-blue modern-fit dress shirt, buttoned at the wrists, as cuff links were too ostentatious to flash at a jury.
My tie was a muted blend of blue and purple stripes held securely down in the middle with a silver clip with the familiar Lincoln Motor Company logo of a cross inside a rectangular frame—my one holdover from my days in criminal.
A Lincoln salesman once told me that the logo symbolized power, leadership, and strength, and that was why I wore it.
I would need all of those attributes when I stepped into the proving ground of the courtroom.
“Who’s the boss? You’re the boss.”
It was Maggie. She had come up behind me and was reflected in the mirror. I blushed. She knew me and knew my routines, the things I did to prepare for legal combat. She put her arms around me from behind and buttoned my jacket.
“You look like a killer,” she said.
“Legally, I hope,” I said.
She kissed the back of my neck.
“Go get ’em, Tiger,” she said.
I smiled. She was sending me off to war. But it was also the name of a coffee shop in West Hollywood we frequented on weekends. We’d both sit there working on our cases while sipping lattes.
“You’d better get going if you want to be the first one in the courtroom,” Maggie said.
Again, she knew me. On the opening day of a trial, I liked to be the first one seated at the lawyer tables. I liked to see the courtroom fill as the call for the jury came. It helped drop me into courtroom-killer mode.
I turned around for a kiss goodbye. She was still wearing her long sleep shirt and looked beautiful despite her unkempt morning hair.
“When are you going in?” I asked.
“I’m being lazy today,” she said. “I have a ten o’clock charging conference. I’m not going in until then.”
In a previous life I would have asked who the suspect was and what the charges would be, always looking for the next client. But that was the criminal-case me.
We kissed and hugged and she wished me luck. It was very different from when we were married and she was a major-case prosecutor and knew that I was going off to defend someone accused by her own agency of criminal deeds. Now wishing me luck was legitimate.
I grabbed my briefcase off the chair by the door and stepped out onto the front deck.
My eyes were immediately drawn to the bottom of the steps, where a black Lincoln Navigator was waiting in the street.
The front passenger door was open, and Cisco was leaning against the fender, waiting.
He had pulled the tarp off the one Lincoln I still kept stored in the warehouse and put it back into service.
Cisco held his hand out toward the open door. I started down the steps. It looked like the Lincoln Lawyer was going to ride again.