“Your Honour, the defence would like to request access to a copy of the said data footprint in order to validate its authenticity as well as help us to prepare for argument. Could we please be granted this request, Your Honour?” Joe asked.
“Mr. Abrams, I find it ironic and amusing that in your current position and with the charge in question, you are requesting to verify information presented by the very team that is prosecuting your client. This is indeed fascinating. Permission granted. Mr. Grant, please make the relevant information available to Mr. Abrams. In the meantime, I will accept Exhibit A into evidence. If I find reasonable cause that this piece of evidence is flawed in any way, I will reverse my decision. Mr. Abrams, you have until after recess to prove your case on this matter.” replied the judge.
“Thank you, Your Honour,” Joe said.
“Oh, don’t mention it. Anything for you, Mr. Abrams,” the judge replied sarcastically.
The judge was a piece of work, his sarcasm was unmatched. The lead prosecutor, Michael Grant, was one of the Nation’s most ruthless prosecutors. Considering everything I’ve noticed with this guy, he seemed to be just like everyone else working in the judicial system, like he had something to prove. His co-prosecutor was Tracey Vorderman. Joe mentioned that, like the lead prosecutor, she also had a merciless approach to questioning and had been known to make a few tough guys crack under pressure. So, this was what we were up against: a couple of anal-retentive individuals who made it their life’s mission to bring down me down. We will need to work quickly on the data footprints. Joe will only have a few minutes to look it over and then rebut, if need be. He will need to spend time on reviewing other pieces of evidence as well, so we didn’t have the luxury of wasting too much time on just one.
“Your Honour, for the charge of online racketeering, we present Exhibit A(1). We have documents signed by four confidential informants that will prove the defendant’s involvement in online racketeering. The testimony of these individuals will show how Mr. Dominguez gave the orders to his men to disrupt the online presence of their small e-businesses. The documents detail how the businesses would have been sabotaged had regular payments not been made to the defendant’s organization. The evidence will also reveal how the payments were made regularly to the defendant,” said the lead prosecutor.
This is the part I hadn’t been looking forward to. I initially thought we would be dealing with one witness, maybe two. But four…
“Your Honour, we would like to request access to the testimonies,” Joe said.
“Nice try, Mr. Abrams. Giving you access to these documents will reveal the identities of the witnesses, which is not going to happen. Their testimony will be admitted into evidence with no option for review,” replied the judge.
Joe knew he wasn’t going to be given access to those digi-docs—even I knew that. Joe was quite the character. I think he asked the question just to get a reaction from the judge.
“Your Honour, for the charge of distribution of illegal narcotics, we present Exhibit B. This plastic medicine bottle is one of many that contains drugs that were seized from one of Edom Pharmaceuticals’ warehouses. As you can see, the container is clearly labelled Oxyoraliphine. After some testing had been carried out in the NLEU’s labs, it was discovered that the composition of this drug contained ingredients that are not listed on the container. This was the case for ninety-nine other containers.
The evidence will also reveal that some of the ingredients haven’t been approved by the NFDA. We will prove that the unlisted ingredients have been omitted intentionally by Edom Pharmaceuticals to conceal the mind-altering capabilities of the drug. We will make the case that the defendant, being the president of Edom Group, had direct involvement in this,” said the co-prosecutor.
I guess the co-prosecutor would be doing the questing for this charge during the trial. This is the charge that I had no worries about. Drugs played a massive role in the Nation’s revenue, legal or otherwise. We had so many ways to beat this charge. What perplexes me is that my organization is actually active in illegal narcotic distribution, but not a single eyebrow had been raised about that. We’ve been pushing coke and heroin across the UNEA for years with hardly any problems, but now they’re trying to nail me for missing an item on the list of ingredients for our semi-legal drugs.
“Mr. Abrams, you don’t plan on reviewing this piece of evidence?” asked the judge sarcastically.
“No, Your Honour, at this point we have no reason to review it. We are already prepared for arguments on this issue,” replied Joe.
“Oh, how nice. Very well, Exhibit B is now admitted into evidence,” said the judge.
The reason Joe was so confident about the drug thing was that there were a few senior officials in the NFDA that had been paid off by shareholders of Pharmotek, the pharmaceutical company responsible for manufacturing Oxyoraliphine. Edom Group’s involvement was only procuring in bulk and redistributing in the retail market. For us to go down meant that Pharmotek would be going down as well, and Pharmotek’s shareholders weren’t going to let that happen. Also, Edom Group had earned Pharmotek hundreds of millions. We were protected. I’m not even sure how things got this far—the enforcers behind this must have kept the investigation very discreet. The prosecution team agreeing to pursue the case was a silly move. I believe that even the judge knew that this charge wasn’t going anywhere. I was confident that this charge wouldn’t make it to trial.
“Your Honour, for the charge of distribution of illegal military-grade firearms, we would like to present Exhibits C(1) and
