WITH A GRUNT, MEGAN O’DOWD HAULED HER BODY OUT OF the yellow cab and up onto the sidewalk at 125 White Street in lower Manhattan, immediately causing pedestrians to veer sharply around her like schools of salmon skirting a grizzly bear in the river. They scattered even more violently when the assembled media spotted the bombastic defense attorney and swarmed to where she stood sneering up at the looming Manhattan Detention Complex, otherwise known as the Tombs.
O’Dowd paused dramatically, with her hands on her wide hips, so that the cameras could capture her scripted contempt for the building and all that it represented. “White man’s justice, ain’t no justice for the African man,” she liked to say, and would again today when the moment was right. And she would deliver the line—as she did with all her speeches, except in the courtroom—in the patois of Ebonics, although she was as ethnically Irish as a bottle of Guinness Stout.
Her legal assistant, a thin, coffee-colored young man with Malcolm X glasses and dressed in a plain black suit with white shirt and thin black tie, scrambled out of the other side of the cab. Sweating despite the frigid air gusting in from the East River, he hurriedly unfolded a hand truck and loaded it with two file boxes, which he quickly secured with bungee cords. After plucking two briefcases from the backseat and placing one under his arm, he used his free hand to haul the cart around the cab as fast as he could walk.
His boss did not offer to relieve him of some of the burden. Nor did she wait for him to catch up as she pushed through the reporters. “No comment until after I’ve met with my client,” she said for the microphones and notepads, and launched herself in the direction of the front entrance. The young man followed in her wake, his eyes locked on her watermelon-sized calves, the cart creaking along.
O’Dowd wore a purple traditional African dashiki blouse with a voluminous lime-green skirt and gele head wrap. She wanted everyone to see that she identified with “the African experience in racist America.”
Proceeding through the doors and up to the security screening area, she flared her puggish nose as if she’d caught a whiff of something particularly loathsome, and her dark green eyes—such as they could be seen in her fleshy face—sparkled with righteous indignation. She tossed her oversized purse onto the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt and then squeezed through the metal-detector cubicle while glaring at the security officers.
Waddling across the foyer and up to the intake desk, she bellowed in a voice intended to be heard by the media that had followed her into the building hoping to witness one of her famous temper tantrums. “Megan O’Dowd. I’m here to see my client, Imam Sharif Jabbar, who is being held as a political prisoner of a racist regime.”
The reporters caught their collective breath and smiled as one, sure that they were about to witness a monumental battle of wills. Known to the press as a “great quote,” O’Dowd had been raised in the wealthy enclave of Riverdale, in the Bronx, the daughter of a wealthy hedge-fund manager and his glitterati wife. She’d attended Riverdale Country School, a private academy that boasted such past students as future president John F. Kennedy, actor Chevy Chase, Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, and musician Carly Simon.
Upon graduating from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies, she’d gone on to Albany Law School. However, after passing the bar, she professed to be “ashamed” of her privileged upbringing and her “capitalist oppressor” parents, who, after trying and failing to get her “professional help,” had disowned her.
For the past thirty-plus years, she had inserted herself into the African-American community of Manhattan, most of whose principled majority ridiculed her behind her back and sometimes to her face. However, certain criminal and political elements in the community found it convenient to have a loud, abrasive white lawyer who saw every arrest and every job or political appointment not given to one of their own as an act of racism. They tolerated her fawning and publicly lauded her as “a friend of the black community.”
O’Dowd was known for her diatribes against the Man, in particular as represented by the men and women of the NYPD. But she was no slouch as a lawyer, having won several notable, and many run-of-the-mill, cases, often by portraying her clients as innocent victims of a racist police state. And she knew how to work the press to taint jury pools and garner public sympathy where none was deserved. Several of Karp’s predecessors had simply refused to prosecute cases in which she was the attorney or quickly agreed to her terms for lesser charges, rather than deal with her public accusations and courtroom stunts.
However, the intake sergeant at the desk, one J. P. Murphy, was unimpressed and gave O’Dowd a dour look over the top of his half-glasses. An old-school Irish cop with the requisite ruddy cheeks and jowls, rheumy blue eyes, and bulbous red-veined nose, he’d walked beats in the worst neighborhoods Manhattan had to offer. He had kicked in doors of heavily armed drug dealers, had been shot twice, and was stabbed once by a Puerto Rican drag queen in Times Square. He feared nothing—except maybe his impending retirement and the thought of spending 24/7 with the missus until the good Lord called him, or Mary Louise Katherine, home.
Murphy wasn’t about to make it easy on O’Dowd. There wasn’t a cop in the NYPD who didn’t know and despise the woman for her rhetorical attacks on their ethics and professionalism, as well as her defense of cop killers. “Is he an inmate?” he asked, and gave a sideways glance to the young male officer standing next to him.
O’Dowd frowned. “You know damn well he is.”
“Do I now? He got a date of birth?” The sergeant’s thick, callused fingers hovered ever so slightly closer to his computer keyboard as though he was trying to be helpful.
“What?” The attorney’s face furrowed into numerous scowl lines. “Oh, I see how it’s gonna be! Ain’t that just like the Man, to make it difficult on the black man . . .”
“You’re a white woman,” the sergeant pointed out.
“I represent an African man,” O’Dowd retorted, her face beginning to turn purple.
“Wait a minute, you say you represent an African man, but word on the streets has it that there’s a Sharif Jabbar who was born in the Bronx. So, like I said, date of birth?”
“How many damn Sharif Jabbars do you have in this gulag?”
The sergeant’s bored expression and tone didn’t change. “We get a lot of perps with the same names. Jimmy Johnsons. Johnny McPhersons. Sharif Jabbars. And Pablo Espinozas by the dozens,” he said. “Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass, lady. I need a date of birth so I can make sure we’re both talking about the same upstanding citizen.”
O’Dowd started to sputter something in response but looked at the sergeant’s face and realized she’d be wasting her breath and losing the battle in front of the media. She snapped her fingers for her assistant. “Elijah, I need Sharif’s date of birth.”
Her assistant’s eyes widened in fear. “I . . . I don’t have that with me,” he stammered. “Unless it’s in your briefcase.”
His thin, worried face betrayed that he didn’t have much hope of that. The two file boxes on the cart were for show and only filled with empty manila folders and a couple of reams of printer paper. Ever conscious of the press, O’Dowd thought it would make her look as if she was on top of the situation, rather than having been taken by surprise. Elijah’s own briefcase was basically empty except for his lunch, and he doubted that O’Dowd had much more in hers than the writ of habeas corpus she’d dictated to him that morning.
Jabbar’s arrest two days earlier, on Christmas morning, had caught O’Dowd sleeping, literally and figuratively. She’d been awakened by her client’s angry, panicked phone call from the jail. He’d made several nasty threats and hung up. She’d immediately called Elijah and demanded that he drop everything and start trying to find a judge who would grant a writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, essentially a court order demanding that Jabbar’s jailer bring him immediately to court for the judge to decide if he was being legally detained. However, finding such a judge on Christmas morning had proved impossible. All but the most activist liberal judges were no more thrilled with O’Dowd than the police were. Elijah had been told to wait until Monday, “like everybody else.”
In terror, Elijah had called O’Dowd to relay the bad news and, as anticipated, had been subjected to a stream of vitriol so foul that the devout Muslim took his second shower of the morning immediately afterward, even though most of the verbiage had been directed at “that racist cracker,” New York District Attorney Roger “Butch” Karp. So now he cringed when he had to tell O’Dowd that he didn’t have Jabbar’s birthday memorized.
Indeed, she looked as if she might strangle him before she hissed, “Then get your ass on the phone and call the office. Maybe someone there can actually be of some use to me.”
Elijah’s eyes filled with tears of anger as he stepped back and flipped open his cell phone, hitting the speed-dial number for O’Dowd’s office on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem. He spoke briefly, and after a pause, in which he kept his eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling, he wrote down the answer on a piece of paper and handed it to his boss. She glanced at it and turned to Sergeant Murphy. “Five ten sixty-five,” she said tersely.
The sergeant typed in the numbers, hit the Enter key, and nodded. “Oh, that Sharif Jabbar.”
O’Dowd glowered one last time at the sergeant, walked over to the security door leading into the Tombs, and was buzzed through.
When she was out of earshot, Murphy turned to the young officer. “Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that woman’s got a better mustache than you do, Gleason.”
“Up yours, Sarge,” Gleason replied. “But she is one foul human being.”
“Inside and out, me boyo.” The sergeant nodded grimly. “Enjoys getting cop killers off when she knows they’re guilty as sin.”
“Well, then, I guess she better hope she never needs a cop,” Gleason replied.
Murphy grunted and smiled. “We won’t exactly come a-runnin’, now, will we?”
Sharif Jabbar feigned indifference as one of the two guards following him stepped past to open the door to the interview room. Eyes straight ahead, chin tilted up, face set in what he hoped passed for a look of disdain, he sauntered into the conference room without a word and circled around the table, sitting down on a stool facing the door. He gave a bored sigh when the guards turned and left, closing the door behind them.
It was, of course, an act. In reality, he was sweating bullets, sure that every inmate they’d passed since they pulled him from his isolation cell had a shiv up his sleeve and was preparing to assassinate him. And he was positive the guards would do nothing to stop it. They hated him. Two cops had been gunned down during the attack on the New York Stock Exchange, and that was something they weren’t going to forget. Although they said nothing to him, made no threats, he could see the hatred in the eyes of the police and the guards he’d come in contact with. In fact, he was sure that if an inmate tried to kill him, it would probably be the NYPD who put him up to it.
Just being a high-profile prisoner put you in jeopardy. In fact, it was a good way to get killed. A few weeks earlier, a famous Broadway producer got his liver sliced up just standing in line with a bunch of other prisoners. The Puerto Rican who killed him claimed he’d done it for the notoriety. Though others say it was a gang hit, he thought. And if some rich white-ass mutha fucka can get jacked up like that, sure as shit in this racist hole, so can I.
He couldn’t even count on protection from other black Muslims. Most of them didn’t like him or the Al-Aqsa mosque. They were home-grown Muslims and didn’t like his ties to the Arab world. Envious, he thought. Jealous of my benefactors in Saudi Arabia and Libya.
Even black street gangs like the Crips and the Bloods would just as soon see him dead because he’d encroached on their territory and recruiting pool. There were some incarcerated members of the Rolling 777s, a gang he’d created for protection and to fund his “ministry” through criminal activity before his Middle Eastern benefactors made it unnecessary, but they were too few to impose their will on other gangs.
And as if he didn’t have enough enemies already, his anti-white tirades in the press had certainly made him a target for white supremacists. That had been okay as long as he stayed in Harlem with his bodyguards. But the Tombs housed plenty of Aryans, Klansmen, and other dangerous white crackers, and his bodyguards were dead, on the run, or in jail themselves. You got a damned circle painted on your back, and Inshallah—God willing—that fat white bitch better bail you out of here quick, or someone’s gonna fuck you up.
Waiting for O’Dowd to show, Jabbar felt bitterness rise in his throat like a bad case of indigestion. He should be enjoying his hero status in some foreign country, but instead, he was waiting for his lawyer in the Tombs. Raised on New York streets, he had a mind as suspicious and shrewd as a sewer rat’s; he wondered if it had been Al-Sistani’s plan all along to abandon him.
Well, if Al-Sistani and his wealthy benefactors thought they could just leave him to take the fall for everyone, they were mistaken. He’d been kept out of the planning meetings between Al-Sistani and the old white lawyer, Dean Newbury, at the mosque. My mosque. But that hadn’t stopped him from secretly taping them, and some surprising names had come up in conjunction with the Sons of Man. If he didn’t like what he heard from Megan O’Dowd, he’d make a deal with the feds.
In the meantime, the tapes plus a very incriminating video were well hidden. My ace in the hole.
O’Dowd had shown up shortly after his arrest following the attack on the stock exchange and said he didn’t have to worry about her fees. “They’re taken care of,” she’d said with a wink. He had rich and powerful friends who were going to see to it that nothing happened to him and Al-Sistani. He’d said nothing then about his tapes and only planned to use them if necessary.
Now Jabbar looked up as the lock in the door clicked and the door opened. O’Dowd moved ponderously into the room, followed by her skinny assistant. She smiled, which made her tiny eyes disappear behind her fat cheeks. “Sharif! Brother!” she exclaimed.
Scowling, Jabbar pointed at the stool across the table from him. “Sit your fat ass down. Where the fuck have you been? And why ain’t I out of here already?”
The smile left O’Dowd’s face for a moment, but she glued another back on. “I understand you’re frustrated . . . as am I. This was all supposed to have been arranged, but now we have to deal with it in a different way.”
“Different way?” Jabbar hissed, his bulging eyes threatening to pop out of his skull. “Get me the hell out of here.”
O’Dowd tapped the table, and her assistant, Elijah, placed her briefcase on it. She opened the case, pulled out a piece of paper, and slid it across the table to Jabbar.
“Writ of habeas corpus?” Jabbar frowned. “What’s it mean?”
“It’s a demand for a hearing in front of a judge claiming that you’ve been unlawfully detained.”
Jabbar nodded. “Okay, so I get out after this hearing?”
O’Dowd heaved a sigh and shifted uncomfortably on the insufficiently wide chair. “Well, probably not. You were arrested for the murder of Miriam Juma Khalifa, whose decapitated corpse, as we know, was found in the basement of your mosque.”
Jabbar licked his lips. He was thinking that it had been stupid that his people hadn’t gotten rid of the woman’s body. But he’d planned on being in some Arab capital enjoying life before she was discovered.
“The grand jury is meeting this morning, and I expect they will hand down a murder indictment against you,” O’Dowd continued. “That fascist pig Karp is apparently handling this himself—the man’s a racist, no doubt about it. There’s a good reason they used to call him KKK Karp.”
Jabbar swallowed hard. He didn’t like the way this was going. “Then what?”
“You’ll be arraigned,” his attorney replied.
“After that, I can get out?”
O’Dowd sighed and shook her head. “Sorry, but I think Karp will request that you be held without bail. You’ll be charged with the capital crime of murder, and he’ll point out that you were getting ready to leave the country aboard a private jet owned by an accused terrorist and carrying a large sum of money. It’s going to be tough to get bail.”
Jabbar blinked as if he’d been hit on the head with a stick. “You’re telling me I’m going to have to stay here until they put my ass on trial?”
“Yes,” O’Dowd said with a nod. “We’ll try to get you out of here, certainly. I will point out that you’re a respected religious leader in the community, and we could put the mosque up for a surety bond. But I think we’re fighting an uphill battle. So, yes, we’ll go to trial, where I’m sure we’ll prevail.”
Actually, O’Dowd was struggling to sound more confident than she was feeling about facing Karp. The New York District Attorney’s Office probably had the best-trained prosecutors in the United States, but she’d had her share of successes against them. Except Karp. She was zero-for-whatever when it came to the Man himself.
The closest she’d ever come had been many years earlier, when they were both young attorneys. She’d taken on a case of three black “nationalists” who’d ambushed and shot to death four police officers in a Harlem projects complex. As they’d explained to her at the first interview, they’d killed the “pigs” hoping that the enraged members of the New York Police Department would overreact and come down hard on the black community, which would in turn riot. A riot in Harlem, they’d said, would spread to every black-dominated urban center in the United States and set off a race war. The result of that war would be a free and independent country, “where the Afro-American man is in charge and honkies may visit only with permission.”
Megan O’Dowd was enthralled with the revolutionary rhetoric. A devotee of a not-so-subtle form of casuistry, she convinced the killers that she needed to spin their story in a somewhat different way in the media. Yes, they were black nationalists hoping that someday there would be a separate nation where their people would not be subject to racism. However, the central theme core of their trial strategy would be that the police officers had been shot in self-defense.
“The storm troopers of the racist, capitalist white society entered the projects intending to provoke a violent confrontation that would provide the excuse for a wholesale attack on the Afro-American community of Harlem,” O’Dowd had argued. “My clients were providing armed patrols of the projects at the request of local residents to protect them from the criminal element. They were confronted by the police officers, whose aggressive behavior caused my clients to believe that their lives were in danger. They fired upon their oppressors in self-defense.”
She had, of course, ignored the fact that the first two officers were shot and killed from behind, never having seen their attackers, much less confronted them. The other two had died in a hail of bullets without pulling their guns from their holsters. It was, she said without batting an eye, “justifiable resistance to government provocation.”
The whole argument was ludicrous, of course. But she wasn’t trying to prove her clients’ innocence. She only wanted one thing: a single juror. Someone who would believe enough of her story, or who held enough of a grudge against police officers or government, to vote for acquittal.
Karp was a formidable adversary. However, in this case, he’d made some mistakes, and the jury hung. Her experience in the retrial was a different story, not one she wanted to repeat.
Normally, a hung jury is a good thing for the defense. The defense has a chance to see all the evidence and cross-examine the witnesses based on their testimony in the first trial. The defense can take any witness inconsistencies between the first and second trials and argue to the jury that the witness was lying. Or, if the witness testimony is consistent, the defense can argue that the testimony was scripted.
In the ordinary course, the DAO would usually come back with a sweetheart plea bargain or in some cases decline to retry the defendant. However, to O’Dowd’s surprise, Karp had immediately refiled the case. No attempt to get a plea, no lesser charge, just four counts of murder. This time, he’d learned from his mistakes. The verdict: four counts of guilty, four life sentences.
It had been a humiliating defeat but not the last one. Over the years, there’d been a half-dozen other battles, and she—or, more accurately, her clients—had come out on the losing end. She hated Karp more than any human being on the planet. Her cop-killer clients had referred to him as Captain America, and she detested his personification of American values. Nevertheless, she also feared him and would not have sounded anywhere near as confident with Jabbar if not for other information she’d received.
When Karp’s men had intercepted and arrested Jabbar on his way to Fort Dix, O’Dowd had worried what the men footing the bill would say. She knew from Al-Sistani and Jabbar that their benefactors were extremely wealthy and extremely powerful. She thought they would be upset that the plan to free Jabbar had gone awry, and she had cursed Karp as never before.
However, while not pleased, they had said that she would continue to be paid—at the generous rate she was already charging them—to represent Jabbar at trial. When she’d noted the difficulty she would have, they’d said not to worry, they had a “plan” that would not only free their man but humiliate and frustrate Karp as well. And it was that last notion that had truly appealed to her.
The men wouldn’t tell her how this plan was going to work. “Better you not know,” she’d been told, “so that you will be able to deny anything that might come up. You will be contacted by a woman, Natalie Stiefelmaier, who will give you instructions.”
They had said that the end game would be to cause a mistrial, at which point a federal judge would immediately issue a writ of mandamus ordering Karp to hand Jabbar over to federal agents who would be present at the court. Jabbar would be taken to Fort Dix and turned over to Saudi authorities.
“So, how you gonna beat Karp?” Jabbar demanded now.
O’Dowd smiled and leaned forward. “Can you keep a secret?”