knew. At one point they brought in experts. Whether they were military or CIA wasn’t clear. There were no introductions. The questioning went on until I lost track of time. Inside, with no windows, I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day, or how long I had been there. I wondered about Harry and Herman and assumed that they were getting the same treatment.
Once they were certain they had squeezed us for every thing they were going to get, they brought Harry, Herman, and me together in a room. There Thorpe, flanked by a lawyer from the Justice Department in Washington, warned us in the strongest possible terms to say nothing to anyone about the events leading up to the assault on the naval base. In particular, they told us not to mention the explosive device. They told us that we could be charged criminally if any of the information we had given them turned out to be knowingly false.
Given the stress we were under, the multitude of details, and the fact that none of us could be sure whether our stories conformed entirely, truth was largely in the eye of the beholder. It was the sword Thorpe held over our heads to assure our silence.
Before they let us go, Thorpe warned us that the press was waiting outside. He offered to take us out through the basement and give us a ride. At first, I turned him down, but then he showed us the photograph.
It was a picture taken that afternoon of the area outside our law office. A sea of cameras and lights blocked the entire sidewalk in front of the Brigantine restaurant, near the arched entrance to Miguel’s Concina where our office was located. There were satellite trucks double-parked on the street out front from one edge of the photograph to the other.
He explained that they were also camped out on the front lawn at my house, and that the media trolls had found Harry’s apartment and Herman’s place as well.
I asked about my daughter.
The FBI had taken Sarah out of the house that afternoon. She was fine. They were providing protection. They had a place for us, a kind of “safe house” near Balboa Park, until they could figure out some way to get the media heat off us. We didn’t have to accept his offer. It was up to us. We could go to a hotel, but there was no assurance that the press wouldn’t find us. It was clear Thorpe didn’t want us in front of the cameras. There was no telling what we might say.
All I wanted was to see Sarah, hold her in my arms, and bury her head in my shoulder. We took him up on his offer. If we had to, we could make other arrangements later.
It was the beginning of a long nightmare. Harry, Herman, and I spent weeks hiding out in an office tower in San Diego. We shared two condos near Balboa Park, Sarah and I in one, Harry and Herman in the other. When the FBI tried to gather some clothes and personal belongings for us from home, stories on the cable channels with film footage showed authorities presumably removing evidence from the residence. There was nothing Thorpe could do to set them straight without revealing that he knew where we were, and that there was a reason for hiding us.
Work files from the office were shuttled by secretaries, driven by the FBI to the office across the bay. Local police ran cover in squad cars if the media tried to follow them.
Sarah was unable to tell her friends where she was living. She couldn’t go anywhere without an FBI chauffeur.
It became impossible for me to show my face in court without being questioned by print reporters on the courthouse beat. The two times I appeared in the courthouse, a near press riot erupted when word got out that I was there. The FBI decided it was not a good idea. I was forced to step away from a case that was scheduled for trial. When the judge threw a fit, the U.S. attorney’s office quietly went behind closed doors and got a continuance along with a substitution of counsel. The bottom line was I could no longer practice.
Over time the details of the shootout unfolded, a little more each day. Other names surfaced, most of them foreign sounding, all perpetrators who were dead. Slowly, like leaves from a tree in autumn, the satellite trucks in front of our office began to thin out.
The authorities made it clear that the investigation now centered on those who had planned the attack. To their knowledge there were no other active perpetrators. The shooters and those carrying out the plot had all been accounted for.
In time the myth of the IED was unveiled. A news blackout was thrown over the contents of the truck, all part of the continuing investigation.
Thorpe was worried that if he simply went to the press and told them right up front that Herman and I were not involved, it might look suspicious. A sharp reporter would wonder what we knew that might cause the FBI to carry water for us. So instead, Thorpe posed one of his undercover agents as a journalist during a news conference. After all the hot questions were asked and answered, the agent, with his notebook out, his pencil at the ready, prefaced his question by saying, “This is sort of ancient stuff, but as I recall, just after the scene was secured outside the base, didn’t you arrest a local lawyer and a private investigator? Can you tell us, were they involved in any way?”
Thorpe mustered up his best toothy grin and said, “No. They were taken into custody and questioned, but they were cleared. They weren’t involved in any way. As I recall, they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Then he pretended that he couldn’t remember our names, until one of his minions behind him whispered in his ear.
“That’s right. As I recall, Mr. Madriani was the lawyer and I think Mr. Diggs was his investigator. They…no, as I remember, I think they just happened to be in the area talking to a witness who lived in the neighborhood regarding a totally unrelated matter. And they got pulled up in the net. It’s regrettable, but it happens. No, they were cleared long ago,” he told them.
Thorpe watched as some of the reporters in the room jotted down notes. “Next question.”
It took a full day for the gardener to clean up the mess in my front yard after the media horde pulled out. Crushed paper cups, cigarette butts, and discarded sandwich wrappers covered the lawn. Part of the top rail on the low fence separating the garden from the sidewalk was gone. The flower bed behind it was flattened and the shrubs around it trampled where the fourth estate had decided to blaze a new trail to the house.
The office fared a little better, but only because the owners of the building hired security to keep the cameras and equipment out on the sidewalk. Miguel’s Cocina sold enough coffee and chips with guacamole that Harry was afraid they might frame us on other charges just to get the customers back.
We’ve been back in the office now since early May, a couple of months. The first few days we noticed a black town car parked across the street in the same spot each day. The shadowed silhouette of two men could be seen in the front seat. Thorpe was probably trying to make sure that we weren’t inviting any journalists in for coffee. No doubt they were tailing us but it was hard to tell. After a while we noticed that the car was gone. Apparently the FBI was satisfied that Harry and I had developed a terminal aversion to publicity.
We brought in a professional security service to check the office for electronic bugs, wires, and taps on our phones. Everything tested clean.
The print press, always the first to find a story and the last to give it up, made a few calls to the office, mostly voice-mail messages that we never returned. One enterprising reporter tried to inspire a new angle with the rumor that we were preparing to sue the government for defamation and invasion of privacy. He wanted to know if it was true. Before Harry could warm to the idea, I shot a one-line e-mail back to the guy telling him, “No truth to the rumor and no further comment.” A lawyer unwilling to file a lawsuit; this seemed to kill the last vestige of the beast. Life had finally returned to normal.
SIX
Bart Snyder sat staring at the half-packed cardboard transfer box resting in the middle of his desk. One of his fleet of meaningless mementos was sticking out of the top like the prow of a sinking ship. The wall of respect behind his executive leather chair now stood stripped nude except for the patchwork quilt of nail holes and little brass hooks.
It seemed that this was all Snyder had to show for forty years of labor in the trenches of the law. He had resigned his position as managing partner with Todd, Foster, and Williams, a firm with more than three hundred
