“Got a big one for you,” Agent Joe Warpinski said. He sat down at a table in the Naval Base San Diego’s legal office. On the other side was the base’s brand-new lead prosecutor, a forty-year-old commander in Navy whites named Chris Czaplak. Warpinski had come over to introduce himself bearing a thick case file that he tossed across the table. “Murder case, multiple victims, Navy SEAL.”
It was September 2018, a few days before Eddie was arrested.
Commander Czaplak raised his eyebrows. He was the most experienced Navy prosecutor on the West Coast. A Naval Academy grad who had done a number of years on a submarine crew before going to law school, Czaplak had been trying Navy cases for ten years, both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney. In the civilian world it was exceptionally rare for defense attorneys to become prosecutors, but in the military it was standard, and Czaplak liked it that way. It gave Navy prosecutors something that their civilian counterparts sometimes lacked: an understanding and respect for both sides. Czaplak was confident but easygoing, a man who loved the law. He was completely bald and a bit round, with dark eyebrows and a ready laugh. His last name was pronounced chap-lack, but other legal staff who worked with him called him “Chappy.” He had worked on a number of high-profile cases, including a few murders, though only from the defense side. Warpinski, as an NCIS agent, was in charge of investigating the crime. Czaplak would have to argue the case in court.
Czaplak leafed through the evidence spread out before him: A Navy SEAL chief overseas. Multiple witnesses. Photos. He stopped and read the text message that seemed to claim credit for the murder. Interesting. He kept going. There was no body, no autopsy, no smoking gun. If a slam-dunk case was a ten, this was maybe a seven. There was a lot to work with. But there was also still a lot of work to do.
Eddie had not entered a plea yet, but to his family and friends he had denied everything. There were no murders, no shootings, no nothing. It was all being made up by the platoon.
Any concern about the honesty of the witnesses? Czaplak asked. Warpinski said he didn’t think so. There were guys in the platoon who weren’t talking, but no one was contradicting what Craig Miller and the others were saying. NCIS had run background checks on all the guys. As far as he could tell, they were good.
Czaplak knew unless video evidence suddenly dropped in their laps, everything would come down to the witnesses, and that was a little scary. When it came to the SEALs, tribal was an understatement. The Navy was tribal. The SEALs were more like a cult. Witnesses would be under tremendous pressure to keep quiet. He was surprised anyone had come forward at all. They must have really hated the chief. NCIS and the prosecutors would have to hope the witnesses held together. At least Eddie was going to the brig so he couldn’t get to them.
Warpinski and Czaplak started to quietly grind through the evidence. Eddie would go to trial in June 2019. In the meantime, they would hunt down leads and try to find new physical evidence that might strengthen the case.
Czaplak was joined by an assistant attorney named Lieutenant Brian John. He had a blond crew cut and pink cheeks that made him look much younger than his thirty-five years. He had been practicing as a Navy JAG for seven years, but this was his first murder. Before the Navy, John had been a high school civics teacher, and he still retained a lot of the textbook beliefs about how the United States should work. That was in part why he raised his hand to serve. Military lawyers got very little attention and next to no adoration. The public venerated the Navy SEALs as heroes. The Navy lawyers? The public barely thought of them at all. But John believed that respect for due process and the law was as critical to the Navy as its special operators or its aircraft carriers. You needed law and order to make everything work. Without it, what were they fighting for? But prosecuting a guy like Eddie wasn’t going to be easy. No one around the base seemed to like it. He would sometimes hear sailors grumbling about Eddie being punished just for doing his job. After looking at the evidence, John knew that wasn’t the case, but that’s why the Navy needed lawyers: There had to be a fair and public hearing. Let a jury look at everything and decide.
At one point, John was interviewing Dylan Dille. The sniper was struggling with his decision to come forward. He was getting beaten up on Facebook and called a traitor. Sometimes he got so lost in thinking about the trial that he would spend all day in his pajamas. “You know, us coming to you, us doing this, isn’t exactly popular,” he told John. John replied, “It’s not popular with us either. I don’t give a shit, we don’t murder prisoners.”
Both Czaplak and John still had full caseloads, but the Gallagher case immediately took priority. It was the biggest case in the Navy—by far. Czaplak soon noted that his junior co-counsel was good under pressure. Right when they started working on the case in the fall of 2018, John’s hometown, Paradise, California, was almost completely destroyed by a massive wildfire. His parents’ house had been spared, but nearly everything else was gone. Neighbors and friends died in the flames. John’s father had been a fire prevention coordinator. His mother, in her capacity as superintendent of schools, had lost five of nine schools. Nearly everything John knew from his childhood had been reduced to ash. The stress was clear on his face, but he kept going with his work, interviewing the key witnesses repeatedly, and trying to confirm critical details without ever letting his personal issues interfere with his professional duties.
Meanwhile, Agent Warpinski kept digging on the case, slowly bringing more to light. Warpinski was able to track down one of Alpha’s interpreters, the middle-aged Iraqi named Phil. Phil said he didn’t witness the stabbing but mentioned that an Iraqi journalist had interviewed the victim just minutes before he was brought to the SEALs. Phil sent the agent a link to a video on YouTube. In the video, a journalist from Al Iraqiya, one of Iraq’s leading news organizations, with “PRESS” printed in yellow on his body armor, got down on his knees and stuck a big microphone with a blue foam top just inches from a kid’s face. The victim was lying in the dirt, unable to lift his head, speaking only in mumbling bursts. “Speak up,” the reporter said in Arabic.
“I joined ISIS before Ramadan month,” the kid said. Warpinski could tell it was the same kid from Eddie’s photos: Same shaggy hair, same delicate shoulders and black tank top. Same face. The striking difference was that there were no bandages and no blood. His neck was completely smooth. Not even a scratch. Warpinski could see the reporter’s watch. It said 9:00 a.m.
“Why did you join ISIS?” the reporter asked.
“My dad was beating me, and telling me we do not go with ISIS,” the kid said.
“So why did you join them if your dad didn’t want you to?”
“So they could tell me, ‘Good job.’ ”
“That’s it? So they would say, ‘Good job’?”
The reporter turned to the camera. “Dear viewers, here is a young man, about seventeen years old—ISIS fooled him to join them.”
Why did the Iraqis take the prisoner to Eddie instead of to an Iraqi medic? Warpinski had no idea. Were they really planning to give him medical attention? The video left a lot of questions unanswered. Warpinski still didn’t know the victim’s name. He didn’t know where the body was. But at least he knew at 9 a.m. the kid was conscious and breathing, was able to speak, and had no visible wounds to his neck. And an hour or so later he was dead in a pool of blood at Eddie’s feet. The video would keep Eddie from arguing the kid was bleeding out and almost dead when he arrived.
Another video came to Warpinski’s desk. This one was on a disc mailed from Iraq, and it contained a statement submitted out of the blue from General Abbas al-Jubouri, the Iraqi officer who had partnered with Eddie throughout the entire deployment. He said Eddie was innocent.
NCIS interviewed al-Jubouri several weeks later, but the interview produced as many questions as it answered. Al-Jubouri said he knew “Chief Ed” well. They had worked together almost daily for several months, along with a SEAL lieutenant whose name the general couldn’t remember. He remembered the day the ISIS fighter was brought in. The boy was shot several times, including a bullet through the right leg that had hit an artery; he was “bleeding very badly.” The SEALs tried to help the captive, but it was no use, the captive died.
The agent asked if the general had seen Eddie stab the prisoner. Al-Jubouri shook his head and clicked his tongue. “No—why would he do this? There was no need for this. No—he died from gunshot wounds. If I wanted to kill someone, I wouldn’t do it in front of witnesses. There were twenty-plus people out there, including several Iraqi officers. He would never do that.”
There were some things al-Jubouri clearly had wrong. The kid hadn’t been shot several times, only once. And he’d been shot in the left leg, not the right. The video showed that the wound wasn’t gushing blood. If the kid bled to death, photos suggested it was because someone had cut open his neck.
The bigger problem was not whether to believe al-Jubouri, it was what to do about the scarcity of physical evidence. Besides the photos and texts and a few videos, there was nothing to tie Eddie to the murder. Then NCIS caught a break. They had sent Eddie’s hunting knife to a lab for testing, and the results had finally come back. The murder weapon had been in Eddie’s possession for more than a year. He had plenty of time to clean it, but the lab found two distinct forms of DNA on the knife. The first matched Eddie. The second was from an individual whose identity was unknown, but the test revealed two things: The DNA was from a man, and that man was Middle Eastern.
There was not enough DNA to tell if it had come from blood or just another person handling the knife. On its own, the new evidence was hardly a smoking gun. But together with the videos of the victim alive with Eddie, the photo of the victim dead with Eddie, with the bandage on his neck and blood on the ground, the three eyewitnesses, and the text Eddie sent bragging that he “Got him with my hunting knife,” NCIS was getting close.
An email arrived from the FBI. Warpinski clicked it and started reading. It was not what he was expecting. There were new allegations against Eddie. Murder allegations. This time they were from Afghanistan.
Afghanistan had come up again and again in Warpinski’s interviews with SEALs. Nearly everyone the agent talked to said they had heard Eddie tell the story of shooting a little girl to kill a Taliban. Eddie told it as a BUD/S instructor and again as the new chief of Alpha. Lieutenant Commander Robert Breisch knew the story, too. He told Warpinski he had been Eddie’s platoon leader in 2010 when the girl was shot. Eddie was in another part of the country, embedded with an Army Special Forces team when it happened. In Breisch’s telling, the Special Forces soldiers demanded an investigation, and Eddie was absolved of any wrongdoing.
Josh Vriens told the agent he had heard Eddie tell another story about that tour, in which Eddie saw a goat herder walking through a field and dropped him with a sniper rifle.
To Warpinski the Afghanistan stories were intriguing because they established a pattern, but NCIS had no plan to pursue them. Why chase leads on a nearly decade-old case when they would only take focus away from the stabbing? The best way to put Eddie behind bars was to stay locked on the one murder where they actually had some evidence.
But now there was this message from the FBI. He picked up the phone and dialed. The agent on the other end laid out the situation. The FBI had arrested an Army Special Forces soldier named John Rindt a few months before on child pornography charges. Rindt eventually agreed to plead guilty, and told the FBI he had seen something else the FBI should know about. When Eddie was arrested, his photo had been on the news. Rindt told agents he recognized the SEAL and saw him shoot an unarmed farmer in a field in Afghanistan. It was in Helmand Province, Rindt said, 2010, in a rural town called Marjah.
Marjah at the time was a Taliban stronghold. The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan was at its height, and commanders were determined to go in and clear the enemy out for good. The Marines would hold the ground, but Army Special Forces would strike first by helicopter and seize a few key strongpoints where they could set up snipers and machine guns to cover the Marines. One of those strongpoints was a two-story building at a rural crossroads that the troops nicknamed the Thunderdome.
The Special Forces guys were getting ready for the mission at the big American forward operating base when a random Navy SEAL sniper offered to come along to help.
The day after they landed, Rindt said, the SEAL and a handful of soldiers watched an Afghan peasant walk into the field. They noted that he was unarmed. Then the SEAL shot him for no reason.
“What did you just do? That man was unarmed!” the soldiers yelled at the SEAL.
“Well, they’re all bad,” Rindt recalled the SEAL saying.
Rindt and the other soldiers reported the killing to the Army commander, but Rindt said he was told to drop it.
In the FBI interview room, investigators spread out a series of photos of various SEALs and asked Rindt to pick the SEAL out of a lineup. He scanned them, trying to find a familiar face, but it had been nine years. The SEAL in Afghanistan had been wearing sunglasses, a helmet, and a beard. Rindt knew the SEAL had blond hair and blue eyes, but he had only been with the soldiers for about a day. Rindt failed to pick him out.
The FBI had an admitted child pornographer telling a story right before he was sentenced about a guy he had seen on the news. He had no evidence to back it up and had just flubbed the identification. That was pretty terrible evidence. Warpinski contacted a few other soldiers who had been at the Thunderdome, but they all refused to talk. For NCIS it was a dead end. Warpinski let it drop. It wasn’t that he doubted the story; it was just that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
What Warpinski did not know was that two other soldiers from the Special Forces team also saw Eddie on the news and independently came to the identical conclusion as Rindt: That’s the same guy. They remembered the scene from the Thunderdome clearly. It was February 15, 2010. Soldiers from the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 3121 were getting ready to board helicopters for the flight to take over the Thunderdome. At the last minute, a SEAL sniper signed on with them. His blond hair and reddish-blond beard were consistent with photos of Eddie from the time.
Right away, the SEAL started running his mouth, complaining about how the Special Forces weren’t aggressive enough. But it quickly became obvious to everyone, the soldiers recalled, that the SEAL had no idea what he was doing. He claimed to be a sniper, but he shot too often and sometimes in the wrong direction. The snipers set up on a roof of the Thunderdome. Within hours, the SEAL fired recklessly at a convoy of Afghan partner forces, barely missing an Afghan driver with a bullet that buried itself in the dashboard.
The team held their position at the intersection all of the next day. Taliban forces fired several times from the distant tree line and soldiers returned fire, but for hours on end quiet pervaded the patchwork of farm fields around the Thunderdome. During one of those long lulls, the SEAL was behind his sniper rifle on a rooftop with two Special Forces soldiers acting as his spotters. Rindt was there, too. They watched an unarmed man walk out into a field to work the spring earth. The spotters called out that they saw a man with no weapon. Without warning, the SEAL fired, and the man fell dead.
“You just smoked that dude,” a young spotter stammered. The soldiers immediately left the roof and reported what had just happened to their commander.
To the soldiers at the Thunderdome, the shooting was a massive fuckup. They were in the midst of a major offensive. If they reported the murder, they might be pulled back to the base and would not be there to provide overwatch to the Marines. Guys could die. Ignoring a murder was obviously wrong, but an investigation that would potentially cost American lives seemed worse. Just like with Mosul, it was a shit sandwich.
The officer in charge of the Special Forces team decided the best thing to do was just quietly get the SEAL out of there. He was put on the next helicopter to base with a curt Thank you very much, never come back.
The two soldiers besides Rindt who had seen everything never reached out to law enforcement and law enforcement never reached out to them. They didn’t want the blowback they might get. And like Rindt, nine years on, they couldn’t say for certain that the SEAL who had been with them for only one day was Eddie Gallagher. The San Diego Union-Tribune got hold of the FBI report and published a story. Through his lawyer, Eddie denied everything. The lawyer said Eddie had been investigated and cleared by the Army for accidentally shooting a little girl while aiming for the Taliban commander holding her. As for the man in the field in Marjah, the lawyer said it was impossible. Eddie couldn’t have shot a farmer in Marjah, he said, because Eddie was never in Marjah and had never worked with Army Special Forces.
Navy records suggest the soldiers were right and the lawyer was wrong. Eddie’s records show that, in fact, Eddie was in Marjah with Special Forces. In 2010 his platoon was assigned to another province in the western part of the country, but they had been given a village stability mission, living with locals, trying to make friends. To say the least, this was not Eddie’s style. He wanted to fight. So he started volunteering for other missions. Eddie’s performance evaluation right after the deployment, signed by Robert Breisch, said Eddie had “planned and coordinated combined sniper overwatch missions with Army Special Forces…in effective support of offensive operations in Marjah Province, Afghanistan.”
Eddie was there at the right time and met the description of the guy who pulled the trigger. The soldiers’ accounts matched what Vriens heard Eddie say about dropping a goat herder. There were other people still serving in the Army who knew about the whole ordeal. Fortunately for Eddie, the Navy had decided to drop it.
Brian Ferguson texted Craig Miller in November, a few months after Eddie was locked up, and warned that the investigation was growing more dire every day. It threatened to suck everyone in. The lawyer had already warned Ivan Villanueva that he was probably going to go to jail for buying trammies for Eddie in Mexico. He said Miller was at risk because he was in the photo with Eddie. Best-case scenario, Ferguson warned, everybody involved was going to get thrown out of the Navy. This is serious, and you are all going down if you don’t get smart. Ferguson texted Miller the names of the crowd of guys from the platoon he was already representing and urged Miller to join.
“Those are good guys, don’t screw it up,” Miller responded. He still couldn’t figure out what the deal was with this guy and why he was handing out free legal advice. Miller trusted Agent Warpinski. He trusted the prosecutors. He trusted the Navy. He didn’t see any reason to trust a dude who showed up out of nowhere and suddenly seemed to know everything about a platoon he had no business with. Miller always tried to see the good in people, but he did not get a good vibe.
Ferguson told Miller it was important to get everyone to refuse to cooperate with NCIS. That would give the lawyer leverage to get total immunity for the whole platoon so nothing they said to NCIS or in court could hurt them. There was a good chance the higher-ranking SEALs like Breisch and Alazzawi were getting sucked into the investigation, and it might even go higher than that, he warned. If the brass felt threatened, they could easily turn on little guys like Miller and hang them out to dry. They needed protection.
Miller brushed him off. “I’m going to do the right thing. Let the chips fall where they fall. I tell every one of my guys, whatever you do, you have to tell the truth.”
That was the last time they had any conversation of substance. But Ferguson kept giving the same hard sell to just about every holdout in the platoon. One by one more came over to his side. So many were eventually represented by him that the investigators and prosecutors started using his name as a verb. Ferguson, v., to lawyer up and refuse to cooperate with NCIS.
Joe Arrington, the JTAC who had almost come to blows with Eddie in Mosul and urged everyone to tell the truth when they came home, Fergusoned on November 19, 2018. Stephen Snead, the SEAL chief Eddie had texted all through deployment, Fergusoned on November 24. Ivan Villanueva, who had seen Eddie stab the ISIS captive, Fergusoned on December 4. And Corey Scott, the medic who was inches away when Eddie stabbed the kid in the neck, Fergusoned on December 5.
Each time a SEAL Fergusoned, a letter with Ferguson’s oil derrick letterhead arrived in the Navy’s legal office stating that NCIS and the prosecutors were no longer allowed to communicate with the witness without Ferguson present. The Navy couldn’t figure out what the lawyer was up to. Was he just some freelance nutjob, or was he somehow in cahoots with Eddie? Warpinski asked Dylan Dille if the guys were getting skittish about coming forward. Dille replied, “Brian Ferguson has put the fear of God into everyone.”
Ferguson always told people he had nothing to do with Eddie. Yes, he was speaking to Eddie’s lawyers. And, yes, he even met a few times with Eddie, but just to help his own clients. The lawyer insisted he was involved just to keep the little guys from getting crushed by the system. He didn’t want them to do the right thing only to take the fall for a bunch of officers who for years had ignored warning signs, promoted Eddie, partnered him with a bunch of war criminals in ERD, and created the whole fiasco. All the maneuvering over immunity was serving his clients. If it also helped Eddie, that wasn’t Ferguson’s problem.
Guys that signed with Ferguson described it to others in the platoon as a simple precaution: Better to be safe. As Miller watched one guy after another Ferguson, he heard them talk about being smart or careful or protected. Miller didn’t buy it at all. He started to view the trial like a combat mission. There were plenty of ops the platoon had gone on where odds of getting shot were steep. It was one thing to take precautions, but that didn’t mean you didn’t go out. Guys were simply refusing to face the fire. To Miller that wasn’t being smart, it was being a coward. He expected better from his men. He was mystified that a bunch of warfighters who had spent months fighting ISIS were suddenly afraid of a courtroom.
As Ferguson predicted, the fallout from the case did start to widen. Not long after Eddie was arrested, Alpha’s officer in charge, Lieutenant Jake Portier, was charged for failing to report Eddie, conducting a reenlistment ceremony over the body, making false statements, dereliction of duty, and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. He denied all charges. Breisch was next. The Navy sent him a letter saying he was under criminal investigation.
In the commodore’s command suite at Coronado, Captain Matt Rosenbloom looked at Portier’s case from his perspective as a SEAL who had twice been in the same position leading platoons and tried to give the young lieutenant the benefit of the doubt. What if Portier had done his duty and had immediately reported the crimes to troop commander Robert Breisch, but Breisch, a longtime ally of Eddie who had deployed with the Good Old Boys, had told him to keep his mouth shut? It wasn’t far-fetched. Maybe when the men in Alpha kept pressing Portier to act, he demurred because he knew it was no use. But Rosenbloom wasn’t ready to cut Portier that much slack. Even if his troop commander had refused to act, Portier could have circumvented him. He could have handled Eddie, and had chosen not to. Rosenbloom had no say in who got charged, but he believed Portier should get what he deserved.
But what about Breisch? Rosenbloom had never understood why the troop commander seemed to have repeatedly stood by Eddie and tried to bury the investigation. The commodore wondered if maybe it had to do with what Eddie had yelled at Tom MacNeil in the parking lot by the high bay: I have shit on all of you. If you take me down, I will take all of you down.
Breisch had been on deployment with Eddie in Afghanistan in 2010 when Eddie said he shot the little girl and when Eddie was with the Special Forces in Marjah. He had been there when Eddie was quietly moved out of BUD/S for striking a student and when he was arrested for assaulting a gate guard. What if there were things Eddie knew about Breisch’s past that kept Breisch silent? Rosenbloom wished he could have it out with Breisch and Portier frogman to frogman and find out what happened. But he couldn’t. The legal rules tied his hands.
As Eddie sat in jail, Ferguson worked feverishly to deploy an immunity for his clients. He already had three key witnesses: Arrington, Villanueva, and Scott. He tried the hard sell on Dille and Tolbert but couldn’t get them on board. T. C. Byrne was so weirded out by Ferguson that he told him to leave him alone and got his own lawyer. David Shaw, the JTAC, ignored attempts by Ferguson to reach him and willingly talked to NCIS without a lawyer. Miller did, too. He just wasn’t afraid. He knew he was in the group photo, but he wasn’t going to tap out just because he might end up having to answer for what he had done.
That really only left Josh Vriens. Ferguson pushed hard on the sniper. For weeks Vriens didn’t respond to his texts, but eventually, Ferguson had Scott act as an envoy and Vriens agreed to a phone call. Immediately Ferguson pushed Vriens to get on board with the other guys. He didn’t sound like a lawyer to Vriens, he sounded like a used car salesman. “I don’t feel like I need a lawyer,” Vriens told Ferguson. He hadn’t been in any photos; he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had already been investigated for the Switchblade.
That’s what you think, Ferguson shot back. He asked why it had taken Vriens months to report the girl he had seen shot. “I did the best I could,” Vriens said. He said he reported what he had seen to the chain of command. “I guess I didn’t do more because I was desensitized to killing after so long in the SEALs.”
See, you just implicated yourself in murder, Ferguson told him. Defense attorneys are gonna tear you apart on the stand, and you’re gonna implicate yourself in a crime. A lot of guys just want the whole thing to go away. The case against Eddie is going to be weak, don’t get caught on the wrong side of it.
Ferguson warned Vriens that he was in way over his head, but if anyone was in over his head, it was probably Ferguson. He openly told SEALs he represented that his limited legal expertise meant he could only handle small stuff. If they were ever charged with a crime, he said, they should call a real lawyer. When it looked like Jake Portier was going to get charged, Ferguson referred him to another lawyer. Even so, based on a cold call from Portier, Ferguson had gone on a mission to represent all of the platoon. The guys who didn’t go with Ferguson suspected him of sinister motives. Some even thought he was working for Eddie. More likely he was simply recklessly naïve. It was just like running for editor of the student paper without ever working there. Experienced lawyers watching the case just shook their heads. Representing so many SEALs with so many potentially competing interests was a raging ethical conflict. Ferguson had all his clients sign a waiver acknowledging the conflict of interest, but what did that really mean? It wasn’t clear where his allegiance actually resided.
On the phone, Ferguson warned Vriens that the Navy was going to pull his Trident.
“At this point, I don’t give a fuck,” Vriens told him. He was done with the SEALs. He was walking away. “They want my Trident, I’ll put it right on their desk.” Whatever Ferguson was selling, Vriens wasn’t buying. He hung up and never talked to the lawyer again.
Ferguson stuck to his original plan to demand immunity. From the outside it seemed like a simple and reasonable request, but for prosecutors it came packed with risk. Chris Czaplak had been around enough criminal cases to know immunity could be twisted so that something intended to protect the witnesses could actually protect criminals. He laid out his concerns to his junior attorney, Brian John. The risk was not that SEALs with immunity would get away with whatever minor misconduct or even major misconduct happened on deployment, the risk was that they would go into court and take the fall for Eddie’s crimes. It was an old mob trick. One guy agrees to sing, gets immunity, and then on the stand claims he committed all the crimes. If that happened, it would torpedo the case, and it would be almost impossible to prosecute the SEAL who took the rap because of the immunity. In other words, immunity was dangerous, especially if there was any doubt about the trustworthiness of the witnesses.
John listened to Czaplak’s warnings reluctantly. He hadn’t dealt much with immunity. He had never tried a murder case, and he had certainly never tried a case as complex as Eddie’s, where half the platoon was lawyered up and not talking. Ultimately, he wanted to make sure he knew the truth. As a prosecutor, he was dying to hear what that half had to say. Maybe what Eddie was claiming was true. Maybe the guys in the Sewing Circle were all lying. John doubted it, but he’d feel more confident if he could hear from everyone. Wouldn’t it be better, he suggested to Czaplak, to just grant everyone immunity and hear them out?
Too risky, Czaplak responded. The SEALs were a tribe, and some of them were probably willing to take a bullet for Eddie.
Maybe we get a prosecutor in from L.A. who’s an expert at gang cases, John joked. That’s what this is starting to feel like.
Seriously, Czaplak said. He was in a tough position. He wasn’t going to hand out immunity to everyone, but it looked like Ferguson had forced the Navy’s hand on at least two key guys: Corey Scott and Ivan Villanueva. Without them, there was only one witness to the stabbing—Miller, who only saw it from a distance. With only Miller the case was in big trouble.
Grudgingly, Czaplak emailed Ferguson. He drew up agreements to give Scott, Villanueva, and a handful of other SEALs what they wanted. He hoped it wouldn’t blow up in his face.