Michael Harrison
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This paragraph is from a text book, copyrighted in 1963. It comes under a chapter subtitle called ’Clear Thinking’ and a further subdivision called ’Base your thinking on the facts’.
“Sometimes poor thinking results because a person has taken a position on a matter and only tries to defend the position. He is not willing to examine the position. The defender looks only for facts and opinions to support his position. He lives in a strange world to which no opposing idea can get through. He avoids any of his opponent’s arguments; he seeks only to maintain the rightness of his position.”
When I read this I thought of prosecutors. For it seems that this is the state of prosecutors and politicians of late, from what I’ve seen (and felt). They do no one a favor when a paragraph such as above applies so excellently to them; people get hurt. When people get hurt, society is not helped; It is hurt.
People are hurt because of the inherent dishonesty which comes from not desiring to know the facts, but rather desire to know the facts that support (as the paragraph says) the rightness of their position. In other words, this is prejudice. And it has led to the injury of people such that many do not feel that they can trust in the system at all. This sets many up to be receptive to the propaganda of socialist ideals. This is how socialist ideals take root in the minds of those who do not feel represented.
But I am not undertaking to expose socialism here. I have included however, an article from the Miami Herald from the summer of Hurricane Andrew, which illustrates the paragraph a little more shockingly. It is a practical story that indicates both the state of things, and the dangers involved if things become any worse. For even in this country, stuff happens.
“Through the Looking Glass” by Neil E. Botel
It was 11:30 on the night of April 8, 1988. I had been driving the limo since 11 that Friday morning, steering carefully between and around the maniacs rocketing up and down South Florida ’s roadways, arguably the wildest in the land. I was beat.
A few blocks from HQ, I began to ruminate. I had come to Miami following the death of Victor, my business partner back in Pennsylvania . I had closed out little used European auto parts operation to seek a fresh start on America ’s wild new frontier. I’d been ready for something unconventional. Victor, a rough-and-ready Brazilian émigré, had regaled me with his tales of work as a Washington limo driver, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
But I had grown weary of South Florida ’s rude, oppressive highway culture. I was ready to leave this madness for good. I had planned my departure for three months. I had to stash away just a few more dollars before starting back North. I had given notice on my apartment in Miami Beach and moved all but a couple of changes of clothes to a friend’s place across the causeway. Just a few more weeks, I thought. Just pray nothing goes wrong. No accidents, no mistakes.
Automatically, I pulled up under the canopy in front of the limo service office next to the gas pumps, got out, and filled the tank. I put the nozzle back and started for the office door.
Suddenly, a band of screaming men, shotguns at the ready, ran from behind the garage. I heard them yell it twice: “Hands on top of the car.” The second time, I did what they said, in-case they were talking to me. “Hands behind your back.” I felt the frisk and then the handcuffs.
“Are you sure you’ve got the right guy?” I asked with a grin. There was no response. I was bewildered, even amused. Boy, were these guys going to be embarrassed when they realized they had made a mistake.
By this time, Richie, the club Limousine dispatcher and Mario, a driver, had emerged from the office. “What are they arresting you for?” Richie asked. I shrugged my shoulders. “What are you arresting me for?” I asked. “Armed bank robbery” came a voice from their midst. “Armed robbery, Richie,” I yelled back. Richie asked the officers: “Are you sure you’ve got the right guy?” “We’ve got the right guy,” someone shot back.
I would spend the next three hours with the FBI. It felt like sitting in a mental ward, chatting with delusional psychotics. One finds such characters on the street, the kind you see a half a block away yelling at someone for no apparent reason. Only they were yelling at me, and I couldn’t cross the street to avoid them.
Two of the men grabbed my arms and led me to the garage. One of them introduced himself. “I am special Agent Richard Gannaway. I am in charge of this case.” He was in his late 20s, thin, mustachioed, and but for his blue FBI Windbreaker, he looked as if he was ready to go out on a date.
Speaking softly and politely, with a trace of a Western drawl, he got down to business. “I have some forms for you to read and sign.” There was the Miranda waiver advising me of my rights. I signed it. They wanted to search my apartment. I signed on the dotted line and an agent was dispatched. They asked to search my car. Why not? Two agents proceeded to ransack the cardboard coffee cups and fast-food wrappers piled knee-high in the front seat of my 1973 Chevy Caprice. Then came the questions.
“Tell me what you did last Friday,” Gannaway said. The other agent, later identified as Jorge Miyar, stared directly at me in what was the opening salve of his bad-cop routine. I fumbled for an answer.
Last Friday? Well, I couldn’t be precise. I could tell them what I had probably done. It was what I did every day. Up at 10 a.m. Coffee and the New York Times on the dead-end street in South Beach with a view of the Miami skyline across the bay. Then personal errands, undoubtedly. I usually got to work by 3:30 or 4, I told them.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” said Gannaway. “Do you have anything that will prove where you were?”
“Well, I may have made an automatic-teller withdrawal that afternoon.”
“What time?”
“Maybe around 2 or so,” I surmised.
“Do you have proof, a bank slip or something?”
Doubtful. I never saved them.
“Why do you need to know all this?” I asked.
“The bank robbery occurred last Friday, and we need to know what you did that day,” Miyar said impatiently.
Then I listened, astonished, as Rick (Gannaway and I were now on a first-name basis) began, “Let me try to refresh your memory. At 4 o’clock you picked up the Schwartzes in Hollywood and drove them somewhere.”
My mind went blank, then filled with a tide of recollected images. The Schwartzes, an elderly couple, appeared before me. I remembered leaving early and sitting outside their apartment complex for about 20 minutes. I remembered the ride back. As we entered the sprawling lanes full of rush-hour traffic on I-95, I was jockeying for position with a red 300ZX that was attempting to cut me off. I won. Mrs. Schwartz liked it. Mr. Schwartz didn’t.
“What time did you get back to the limo office?” asked Rick.
“I dropped them at about quarter to 5, and I parked the limo at about five or 10 till, after I gassed it up and logged in.”
“All right. Ten till.” Gannaway glared at me. I didn’t realize it, but I had unwittingly attempted to steal five minutes from his unstated scenario.
“Then what?”
My mind again went blank. He reminded me I had, had another job that evening at 8, but I could not recall what had transpired in the interim. “Look,” I said, “you’ll have to give me more time. I simply can’t remember. Now please, I’ve been working all day, and I’d like to go home and get some sleep.”
“Neil,” said Rick, “I can’t release you. You’ve been arrested.”
The Interrogation
At about 1 a.m. agents Gannaway and Miyar led me to their car in handcuffs, followed by the bewildered stares of Richie, Mario and Ali, the parking attendant at the Italian restaurant across Biscayne Boulevard . They tucked me into the back seat and off we sped to FBI headquarters.
The first arrest of my life came on my father’s 63rd birthday. I remember being thankful I had called the night before to wish him happy birthday. I would have hated to do that from jail. I had stopped feeling amused. I was stunned, fearful. Still, I clung stubbornly to a naïve belief that the truth would come to my rescue at any moment.
In a tiny Spartan room at FBI headquarters, the interrogation continued. It seemed less a bona fide search for information that a one-way shouting match with several agents milling around my chair, insisting that I confess, asking for details of my purported villainy.
Pictures of a strange and ghostly figure were thrust before me – pictures of the Bird Road Robber, who had knocked off the Professional /savings Bank, 5900 Bird Rd. , the week before.
“So?” I replied. “This guy is ugly.” The agents laughed. The man in the picture was gaunt and his face was disfigured. It was difficult to tell whether the odd shape of his skull was a natural feature or resulted from the skewed angle from which the picture was taken. The second photograph was blurred profile, almost featureless.
“You can’t be serious. You don’t think these are pictures of me?” I was incredulous.
“We know they are you, one of the agents declared. “That’s you,” he insisted, stabbing at the picture of the standing figure.
The interrogation turned to other objects. “Do you own a pair of gray pants?”
“Yes.”
Gannaway looked up intently at the other agents. “The robber was wearing gray pants,” he said proudly. The others nodded their heads and cooed their approval. A decisive piece of evidence had just been uncovered.
After a half—hour of fruitless badgering, the agent sent to search my apartment stormed into the room. “There’s nothing there,” he yelled. “Just a couple of changes of clothes. Were you planning to leave town in a hurry?”
“In a couple of weeks,” I said. “The rest of my belongings are at a friend’s.”
“Who? Where?”
Now I realized that Diane would be drawn into the mess as well. I would have to give them her address and phone number. She had let me store my belongings in her well-secured apartment. South Beach had become too risky a place to keep things. Break-ins were commonplace, and I had come to feel vulnerable there.
By now, the agents had repeated the same questions three or four times. They had begun to lose their intensity, while mine had increased. I now felt not so much wronged as simply unnecessarily inconvenienced. I was angry, indignant. I insisted that, if they were satisfied, I should be allowed to go home and go to sleep.
One of the agents went to a thin-walled adjoining room, picked up the phone and called the U.S. attorney. “He’s pretty pi—ed off,” I heard him say. “And he doesn’t have any marks on his face.”
What was that all about? I thought.
After he hung up, he said it again: He doesn’t have any marks on his face.” The agents assembled behind a partition and began to argue. “Shut that door,” yelled one, as they moved into an adjoining room. The sharp voices became a muffled roar.Agent Miyar was left to stand guard. The men in the other room soon emerged. “Let’s go. We’re taking him to North Dade .”
“Not the federal lockup?”
“No, it’s too late. North Dade will take him through the weekend.”
My Jail House Lawyer
It was sheer good luck that I had been given a bunk in Ted’s cell. He was remarkably cordial considering the hour (about 3 a.m.), and he seemed to understand and sympathize with my plight. Thoroughly exhausted and discouraged, I looked on Ted as a reassuring presence. We discussed my arrest and his recent conviction for bank fraud in Sarasota . “No way was I guilty,” he said, “and then the judge sentences me to 27 years. For me, that’s life. I’ll be over 90 years old if I ever get out.”
By late morning, the entire cellblock knew the circumstances of my arrest. The jailhouse was divided into blocks, each block containing about 10 cells opening to a common area. When breakfast was served, the inmates shared a table. The television was already blaring, as it would be for the rest of the day, until lights out. There was a single telephone on the wall near the exterior bars with a sign that warned that all calls were monitored and that they should not exceed 10 minutes. The phone was in continuous use. Amid the din and chatter after breakfast, Ted broached the subject of my arrest with the jail’s veterans, who assembled in dead seriousness and acted for all the world like a panel of seasoned legal advisers.
“Twenty years for armed bank robbery. Am I right about that?” Ted demanded.
“Twenty years minimum mandatory,” said one.
“That’s right,” another confirmed. “They’re pretty tough on armed robbery,”
“Nope, they don’t like it.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Ted.
“What’s minimum mandatory?” I asked.
“The feds are tough on armed robbery,” said a man in the far corner. “They want to make sure they send you away for a long time, ‘cause it’s the MO [modus operandi]. If you do it once, you’re gonna do it again unless they keep you inside. The judge don’t have a choice. And you can’t be paroled or released. . . If you’re convicted, you’ll do the whole 20.”
Ted was essentially in charge here. Everyone listened to him. He handed out daily work assignments and settled disagreements. He was a natural leader, and in spite of his incarceration, he controlled considerable financial and legal resources. He spent a lot of time on the telephone, speaking to attorneys; business associates and subordinates as one might from a portable phone in the back of a limousine. The night before, he had promised to put me in touch with a good lawyer.
“What about a public defender,” I had asked.
“They won’t take you seriously if you go in with a public defender.”
“But the expense…”
“Don’t worry about the expense,” he said. He had called the breakfast conclave to stress the importance of my decision.
It was the first I had heard mention of the consequence of my alleged crime, and it terrified me. Twenty years behind bars. Twenty years…gone. Suddenly, I was on the verge of abject panic, consumed with the chilling thought that if these idiot lawmen succeeded, I might spend the bulk of my productive life behind bars. I decided I should meet the lawyer – Ted had told me his name was Paul – and then call my parents.
I looked down at my right leg. It was shaking up and down, thrusting my heel at the floor in a fibrillating staccato.
“You look nervous man.” It was a young fellow who had bragged during breakfast of a life of credit card fraud. “Look, don’t worry,” he added. “If you didn’t do it, nothing is going to happen to you. There’s nothing to be nervous about.” This seemed to be the cellblock consensus. A couple of prisoners had actually seen the picture in the paper the week before and agreed that it was obviously not I.
“You’ve got 12 people on a jury, “Ted consoled me. “Unless they’re all blind, some of them are going to see it’s not you.”
“You actually think it’s going to go to trial?” I exclaimed. None of this talk was doing much to foster the positive outlook the others had apparently mustered. “Why should this even get that far?” I had become unconsolable.
“Don’t start jumping to conclusions,” Ted said, “until you’ve talked to Paul. If anyone can get you out of this, it’s him. He’s very good. Don’t worry.”
The Camera Never Lies
My attention soon turned to reconstructing the events of April1, the Friday of the robbery. (April fool’s Day. How appropriate.)
I was still massaging my memory, trying to account for the hours I had spent between my afternoon and evening drives. I had gone over the day a hundred times. Then, it occurred to me: the chess game! There was a crowd gathered around, so there must have been others who would remember as well. Later that same Saturday evening, when I called the limo service from jail, I got welcome news.
“Don’t worry, Neil. Mike and Walter remembered the chess game on Friday afternoon,” Jim, another driver, told me. The FBI had spent most of the day questioning the drivers who might have seen me that afternoon, as well as the people in the front office.
Jim gave me a full account of the agents’ activities. They had begun by brandishing the now-famous bank photo in the front office, asking if anyone recognized the figure. No one did.
Finally, one of the agents had lost his patience and yelled at the dispatcher. “Is this Niel Botel?”
“Well, I guess it looks like him,” he said.
“Neil,” Jim told me on the phone, “I looked that guy right in the eye, and I said, “That looks like Neil Botel, but it is not Niel Botel.’ We were starring right at each other, and if looks could kill, I would have been dead on the spot. This guy did not want to hear it.”
I would get a similar story from my friend Diane. Agents had entered her apartment with a search warrant, demanding to see my belongings. They flashed the bank photo. When Diane didn’t identify the man in the photo as Neil Botel, the agents insisted I was the man in the picture anyway. When she denied any resemblance, they harangued her, suggesting, she told me that the photograph was taken by a camera that makes “distorted pictures.”
Jim told me something else. “It was a woman at NBC News who identified you. I asked that agent Gannaway. He told me not to tell you, but screw ‘em, ya’ know.”
“Yeah, Jim. Thanks,” I said.
The woman at NBC. Four days before my arrest I had picked up Bob Costas, the NBC sports announcer, at his hotel. By any account, it was an ordinary excursion. I was, by now, fairly celebrity-proof, having driven a number of well-known figures since I started working for the limo service almost two years before. I delivered Mr. Costas to NBC studios, located on the 79th Street Causeway that runs from Miami to Miami Beach. Anticipating a long wait before chauffeuring Costas back to his hotel, I walked up to the studio with him.
As I nursed a cup of coffee in a hallway by the elevator, a short blond woman stared at me with an unseemly malevolence, prompting me to break into a quizzical smile. Her frown momentarily melted, and she nodded a rejoinder as I passed.
If Jim was right, I now thought I understood the reason for the malevolent stare. The photo of the Bird Road Robber stuffing a wad of his ill-gotten cash into his pants – snapped by the South Dade bank’s surveillance camera – had run in The Miami Herald and had been seen by thousands of readers.
At the time, Paul Miller, the Bureau’s special agent in charge, had said, “This particular photo was one of the best I’ve ever seen… Once he sees his photo like that, I hope he pleads guilty.”
When I looked at the picture, the differences from my own image seemed lit in neon. But a quick glimpse of my face rang a bell with woman in the hallway at NBC. That was all it took. That was all they had. But it just might be enough to destroy my life.
Still, my talk with Jim left me feeling better. At least, I thought, the limo drivers in the chess game would support my alibi. I hung up the phone and wandered back to the common area of the cell block. It was late, and most of the inmates had drifted back to their bunks. A lanky man in the corner remained. He was finishing a five-year sentence for scamming extra paychecks from the Army. He had occupied the same seat for the past several hours. His posture seemed unchanged in all that time; leaning forward, elbows on his knees, he drew heavily on a cigarette and flicked ashes to the floor. I asked his opinion.
“Son, if I was goin’ to be a hundred percent straight John, I’d have to tell you that they’re gonna try their best to put you away. I’ve seen guys like you before. They look for guys like you. No family, no kind of steady work, comin’ from some other part of the country. They’re goin’ to put you on trial no matter if they think you’re the one that did it or not, and they will do everything in their power to convict you.”
Soon it was time for lights out. For the second night in a row, I would not sleep.
The Shell Game
The next morning, in the visiting room of the jail, I met Ted’s attorney. Paul Lazarus was a well-known and respected criminal attorney in Miami . He had been a prosecutor for the Federal District of Southern Florida before going into private practice, and Ted said he know the system and everything in it. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt – not his usual attire (it was Sunday). He could have been one of the guys on my side of the Plexiglas partition, as far as I was concerned.
Paul was equally uncertain about me. He seemed not at all sure that I had not done exactly what they said I had. But after several minutes of discussion, our sense of each other improved, and before I knew it, Paul was mapping strategy.
I was to come the following day before the federal magistrate who had signed my arrest warrant. I called my sister and got her to break the news of my predicament to my parents, then got them to confer with Paul.
Monday was my first day in court. We were awakened at 6 a.m. for a short breakfast, and those of us scheduled for arraignment were loaded onto buses and taken to the federal courthouse downtown. The surreal nature of my sudden arrest and incarceration was magnified by the vastness of the courtroom. This large chamber, suited to accommodate major trials and spectators, stood practically empty. Here were gathered the magistrate, prosecutors and defense attorneys, two marshals who had escorted me from the holding cell, a stenographer, and agent Gannaway, sitting silently in the back. My case was the last of the weekend batch to come up. I had been sitting silently in the crowded dull-gray holding cell since early that morning. It was now 1:30 p.m.
The magistrate shook his head as I entered the courtroom. Perhaps, I thought, he was able to see how mistaken they had all been. But quite the opposite was true. He had been amazed, he later confided to my lawyer, at how much I resembled the man in the photo, the one that had appeared in The Miami Herald the Thursday before – showing a tall, lean figure stuffing booty under his belt as he left a teller’s window, caught by the isolated bank camera.
When he addressed the magistrate, Paul described me as “the son of a professor and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania ” – not the sort of person likely to knock off a bank at gunpoint and stare right into the camera, unmasked.
“And we will show, your honor,” he said, ‘That my client would have needed a helicopter to cross town during a busy Friday-evening rush hour in order to have appeared at the bank by 5:30 when the crime was committed.”
The assistant U.S. attorney, a rosy-cheeked, nattily dressed preppy, shook his head and grinned more broadly with each of my attorney’s assertions, as though he appreciated the presentation of a well-crafted farce.
Paul passed me a copy of the arrest warrant sworn out by Gannaway. In disbelief and dusgust, I began reviewing the allegations presented to the same magistrate who now sat before us, glaring and slowly shaking his head back and forth.
“I, R.W. Gannaway, being duly sworn, state as follows…On April 1, 1988, Proffessional Savings Bank… was robbed of five thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars… The individual exited the bank and departed the scene in a late model, dark blue Datsun 200ZX… Employees [at the bank] described the individual… [as] having a pock-marked face in a manner consistent with old acne scars… On April 8, 1988, I contacted two employees of Club Limousine Service… who viewed the bank surveillance photograph and stated that the individual in the photograph resembled employee Neil Evan Botel… A review of the work log revealed that Botel did not begin work until 8:30 p.m., EST, on April 1, 1988.”
None of it was true. I did not own a Datsun. I obviously had no acne scars. Jim had told me emphatically that he had denied that the photograph the agents showed him was I. Even more puzzling, it was Gannaway himself who had reminded me that I had begun work on the day of the robbery at 4 p.m., not 8:30 that evening. Here, in a statement taken under oath, were a litany of patent falsehoods. I grabbed Paul by the arm and began to point to the sheaf of official trash, He put his finger to his lips and shook his head.
Amid the exchanges of assorted legalisms, I wondered why they were still holding me. “What was this all about?” I asked.
“They are now saying,” he explained, “that after you finished your 4 o’clock job, you changed clothes and cars, drove across town, held up the bank, and then drove back to the limo service in time for your next job.”
Of course, it was absurd. The limo service was at 110th and Biscayne in North Dade, and the bank was on Bird Road in South Dade . I finished my job at the limo service at 4:50 and the robbery was at 5:31. I would have had 41 minutes to change clothes, change cars and drive from Club Limousine to Bird Road – during rush hour. But what about my alibi – the chess game?
“Gannaway says that your two witnesses were unclear about the timing. He said the guy you were playing with couldn’t remember whether the game was on Friday or Saturday.”
A short, thin, graying man conferred with Paul and Gannaway at the end of the proceeding. He was from the Associated Press wire service, Paul told me. Rick had joined Paul in asking him to withhold publication of any account of the hearing. This was a hopeful sign, Paul said. It showed that the FBI did not want the word to get out that they may have arrested an innocent man. I would sign some papers waiving a right to a speedy trial, in order, Paul explained, to give the FBI an out. The more time they spent in fruitless investigation, the less likely they were to ask for an indictment. However, no motion to dismiss the charges against me would now be entertained. But I might be able to get out on bond.
This was justice? By now, it seemed a variation of some shell game. Once again, I was to be transferred, this to the Metropolitan Correctional Center , where I ran into an inmate who immediately said, “I know who you are. You’re the guy whose picture was in the paper.” I cringed. He was in for bank robbery too. The prison was more like a modern recreation center – a large, impersonal plaza in pastels, palm trees and reinforced concrete, with a fish pond and a complete open-air weight room, to which the muscular types gravitated. Dominoes served as the social focus for large numbers of idle men. Each of the many tables were surrounded by kibitzers. I would spend three days at this federal facility awaiting my next court appearance.
My bond hearing was set for Thursday. Those of us taking the trip back to the federal courthouse in Miami were herded at 5 a.m. into the prison cafeteria, and thence to a crowded locker room where we received a stern lecture from a U.S. marshal, studied and unrelenting in his nastiness. He said little of any consequence, his primary message being that we would be viewed by those we would come in contact with that day as undeserving of the slightest courtesy. We were, as far as the outside world was concerned, dangerous criminals. It was nothing with which any of us was not already completely familiar. We were handcuffed in pairs and escorted to the gray prison bus. There was no talk. We were all still drowsy and self-absorbed.
A single unfortunate soul provided comic relief. He babbled gleefully almost the entire way up U.S. 1 to the courthouse. In a compulsive stream-of-consciousness monologue, he fantasized about several scenarios for crippling the intire city of Miami by commando action and popular insurrection.
“What did they get you for, man?” someone eventually yelled.
“Hell,” he said, “they got me for threatening the president’s life. Dragged me all the way up from Key West .” He became wistful for a second: “Geeze, I was just drunk, talking too loud. The bartender didn’t like it. You could take that sucker out with one decent bazooka shot. Who doesn’t know that?”
We arrived at the courthouse and were led down a delivery ramp into the same holding cell where I had spent most of Monday. It was now Thursday morning, six days after my arrest.
At about 2 p.m., I was led back into court, accompanied by five other prisoners We were in handcuffs and our legs were manacled. As I entered the courtroom, I realized that many in their court were awaiting my appearance. A loud murmur went up from the assistant prosecutors occupying a long table in front of the defendants’ bank. They were gawking and snickering at me, the suspected Bird Road Robber.
I scanned the seats at the back of the courtroom looking for my parents. They entered minutes later. I had not seen them for several months, and their physical state both worried and incensed me. They were brought forward, and my mother stood beside me, firmly taking my arm. One of the three marshals standing behind us pried my mother’s hands from my arm and unceremoniously pushed her back to the other side of the lectern at which we were standing. He moved back to his position behind us and, in a loud and unrestrained manner, began joking and laughing with his two confederates.
I turned around and berated him: “I’ll bet you think this is real funny, don’t you.”
“Shut up and turn around.” He said. “You’ve got a whole lot more to worry about.”
The judge remained absorbed in his admonitions regarding the terms of my bond. I would be released, but my parents would have to surrender the deed to their home as collateral for the $75,000 bond. Within 15 minutes, I was free.
The Waiting Game
Let it never be said that the burden of proof rests with the accuser. This may be an axiom of law, but in practice, a defendant must actively discredit even the most outrageous prosecutorial claims. Those investigating my case spent much of their time attempting to prove that I had driven clear across town in around 30 minutes in the middle of a Miami rush hour.
[FBI agent Michael Boyle would later say agents had been able to do just that in a test run. “I won’t say it wasn’t close. It was. But it can be done,” he said. “Not even Neil Botel can drive that fast,” said Richie, the dispatcher on duty the night of my arrest. Jean Mignolet, Paul’s private investigator, using several teams of drivers, ran five separate routes from the limousine service to the bank, discrediting the FBI’s dubious scenario. At the time, all of the other evidence the FBI collected, or, more accurately, did not collect – the fingerprints taken at the scene that did not match mine, the notable lack of any of the fruits of the crime, the lack of the gun used in the robbery, the fact that the robber escaped in a blue 1987 Datsun 200SX and I drive a 1973 Chevy Caprice, and the lack of a positive I.D. from a bank teller – seemed of secondary importance to the scenario they had created.
Two series of photographs were taken by FBI specialists and sent to the identification lab in Washington , D.C. The conclusion after two months of analysis: “Inconclusive.” Publicly, I never heard the FBI specifically mention the absence of acne scars on my face. Gannaway may have alluded to it once, when he pointed at the mole on my right cheek and queried: “Have you had that for a long time, or is it recent?”
Three months would pass. My life was laid siege. There were occasional interviews; a lie-detector test administered by a man selected by Paul (I passed) and one administered by the FBI’s choice – a young man who, as he apologetically admitted, had only recently graduated from “polygraph school” (I failed). There were a couple of court appearances to extend the so-called “speedy trial exception” signed at my arraignment. We would not ask for a dismissal since, Paul told me, this might force the governments hand and lead it to indict me.
At Paul’s suggestion, I modified my work habits, driving only in the evenings – after bank hours – and spent my days with friends and family who could vouch for my whereabouts. Eventually, this routine handcuffed me so much that it became difficult to work. Still, I played the waiting game. As if I had a choice.
Then, in early July, three months after my arrest, I was called in for what would be a final interview. Over a month before, Paul told me, a bank in California had been robbed by a man whom the feds believed to be the same man who had robbed the banks in South Florida .
I was asked for an accounting of my whereabouts on the date of the crime. Fortunately, I had been visiting my parents in Philadelphia , and with my mother’s help – she had kept complete records of my comings and goings – we were able to establish that, on the afternoon in question, I had seen our family doctor. FBI agents also went to the trouble of confirming that it would have been impossible to keep a doctor’s appointment at 2 p.m. in the East and arrive in Los Angeles before the close of the banking day. Did these guys never quit?
Well, yes. Once they realized I couldn’t have pulled the California robbery, the FBI pulled back its claws. Paul’s patient strategy, out-waiting the FBI’s expectations of an evidentiary tooth fairy, finally paid off. He had averted an indictment and trial, which would have resulted in further tribulation and more expense. But in spite of the FBI’s recommendation to the government, sat on it for another month until Paul filed for a formal dismissal.
Three months after the government dropped its charges against me, the following article appeared in Fort Lauderdale ’s Sun Sentinel:
A suspected bank robber who carried a passport with a Hallandale address remained hospitalized in critical condition on Wednesday after shooting himself in the head as authorities surrounded his car in Oklahoma , the FBI said.
Michael Allen Cadwell, 45, was listed in critical but stable condition at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas …
Cadwell is suspected in bank robberies in Miami, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Tulsa, and Washington, D.C…
Lix Lambertson, Paul’s assistant, told me that agent Gannaway had called to tell Paul that the man they had been looking for – the one foe whose crime I was arrested – was now in custody.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said agent Mike Boyle when I showed up to collect the papers and effects they had taken from me during their investigation. “I can’t tell you things like this don’t happen.”
In all, $5,750 had been stolen in the Bird Road robbery. The FBI cost me more than $12,000 in legal and private investigating fees. In the months to come, I would lose my savings and begin to borrow money while I resettled and looked for new work.
Soon after the charges were dropped, I began looking for a lawyer to represent me in seeking damages against the government. I was determined to make these people pay for what they had done to me. But winning restitution would be by no means easy. Most attorneys considered it an impossible case. Since the agents had procured a warrant, attorneys consistently told me, a false-arrest case could not be made.
One young Miami attorney agreed to talk to me on his day off. “Forget about it,” he told me. “By the time you pay a good lawyer $250 an hour, assuming you win, you’ll end up with little or nothing anyway. Try to see it this way,” he said, “You might have fallen victim to some dread disease. Just think of it as having been cured. Look, this is the price that we pay for living in a free society.”
With each new rejection, I became more determined. Certainly, my family and I ought not to bear the cost of government ineptitude and obfuscation.
An appeal to the public sense of outrage was my best and perhaps final option. Paul put me in touch with Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen’s resulting column explained clearly what had happened.
The FBI reaction to Hiaasen’s queries was sadly predictable. “We’re awfully sorry,” agent Boyle told the Herald, “but we’re talking about a look-alike even his mother would misidentify.”
In a letter to The Herald that appeared in January of1989, my parents answered him: “Wrong, Mr. Boyle! This shabby remark is an example of the way the FBI mishandled the case, jumping to a conclusion within 24 hours without conducting a proper investigation. The real bank robber had been eluding the FBI for such a long time that they used a deliberately feeble excuse to arrest first - and then investigate.”
Posts: 3273 | From: Charlotte N.C. | Registered: Sep 2007
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