Lieutenant Brian John stood up smartly in a crisp white uniform, walked alone into the center of the courtroom, and faced the jury.
A photo flashed up on the screen behind him: Eddie in his dusty combat uniform in Mosul gripping a knife in one hand and the hair of a dead Iraqi teenager in the other.
“I’ve got a cool story when I get back. I got my knife skills on,” he said. His voice, like his face, seemed young—a bit too wholesome for such dark material.
John paused. He wanted to hit the jury with the worst facts first, show them the cold, premeditated brutality of the SEAL seated in dress uniform before them. He brought up a photo of Eddie and the corpse on the screen behind him.
“Good story behind this,” John said, reading another text message. “Got him with my hunting knife.”
Those were Chief Edward Gallagher’s own words, the lieutenant told the jury. He sent them out shortly after killing a wounded captive in Iraq on May 3, 2017. He was proud of it. He thought it was cool. He wanted all of his friends to know what he had done.
“He celebrated that stabbing,” John said. “He celebrated that murder.”
It was June 18, 2019, the first day of Eddie’s murder trial. Eddie arrived at the plain stucco courthouse on Naval Base San Diego like a movie star on the red carpet, pulling up in front of the court in a sleek, white Ford Mustang convertible with the top down. The courthouse had a back entrance where he could have slipped in unnoticed, but that wasn’t his style—or the strategy his wife and legal team were going for. He walked up the front steps in inscrutable black Ray-Bans, past a phalanx of news cameras and supporters. He was buff and fit, impressively tan. Andrea was on his arm, meticulously done up and with a new hairdo, a fitted striped dress, and strappy high-heel sandals.
Inside, the small courtroom had none of the high ceilings or dramatic shadows of a Hollywood courtroom that would befit the grand moral struggle for the soul of the SEAL Teams. Instead, utilitarian office furniture sat under pallid fluorescent lighting reminiscent of a Department of Motor Vehicles branch. The judge, in black robes, sat behind a modest bench under a low ceiling. The jury sat to his left. A plain witness stand with a plastic swivel chair was on his right. Behind the small tables that held the prosecutors and the defense team stood six benches in the gallery with only enough room for about twenty-four people.
Eddie’s mother sat down at the first bench, wearing a conservative floral dress covered by a cardigan; his father had the rumpled suit of a retired professor. Both of them had been conspicuous in their silence, never participating in the Fox News campaign on Eddie’s behalf. Sean sat near them in a business suit, looking polished and professional. Andrea, next to them, sipped from a paper coffee cup. Next to her was Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, who had become a personal friend. He put his hand on Andrea’s shoulder and whispered a word of encouragement. The rest of the benches were filled with Navy officers and journalists.
Eddie sat at the defense table in a starched white uniform with gold chief’s anchors on the collars, his Trident gleaming on his chest. His blue eyes and weather-lined face betrayed no emotion. Gazing straight ahead as Brian John gave his opening statement, Eddie looked like a recruiting poster for the SEALs, regal and tough, unmoving. His lawyers had instructed him not to react, even when the young prosecutor stood just a few feet away calling him a murderer.
“Chief Gallagher was the de facto leader of his platoon,” John told the jury. “He’s the one that they’re looking to.” But instead of being a role model, he said, the chief became so obsessed with killing that his own men took warning shots at ISIS in an attempt to keep him from killing civilians.
John declared the facts with confidence, but inside he was so shaken that he could hardly think. His senior counsel had been pulled with no time to get someone else up to speed. Even under normal circumstances, that would have been hard to manage, and John had not had a normal week. Seven days before opening statements, John was going through the evidence when his phone rang. His father had been riding his bike when he suffered a catastrophic heart attack and died. They had been close. John’s father had served in Vietnam and was one reason his son left teaching civics to join the Navy. His death was a complete shock. John raced home to Northern California. He now had to try to run a complex trial without his partner while also helping his mother deal with the sudden death, all while trudging through his own grief. On the plane home, John switched between writing the eulogy for his father and the opening statement for trial.
After Czaplak was removed, the Navy had scrambled to find another senior trial lawyer for the case. Given that there were only two weeks to prepare and the president had publicly hinted that he might reverse the verdict, no one volunteered. The Judge Advocate General’s Corps assigned a replacement from the East Coast, a veteran of both defense and prosecution cases named Commander Jeffrey Pietrzyk. In thirteen years as a Navy lawyer, Pietrzyk had worked in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and Japan as well as Navy courtrooms on both coasts. In the courtroom, he was almost indistinguishable from Czaplak—both were respected senior trial attorneys, both were completely bald with Polish surnames that judges struggled to pronounce. It was as if the Navy had ordered a stunt double. But there was an important distinction. Czaplak had studied the case for months. When Pietrzyk took over, he had about a week.
Because of the time limitations, Pietrzyk couldn’t truly act as the lead attorney. He would be there as an advisor and an expert on the law, but the young lieutenant, Brian John, would be the expert on the case. After the death of his father, John was not sure he could handle it. When wildfires destroyed his entire community, one of the few things that remained in the ashes was family. Now that was in ruins. John worried his mother was too fragile to leave alone. He called Pietrzyk at the office. I can’t do the trial, he said. My head isn’t clear. I wouldn’t be effective. I can’t be in court. I’m needed here.
Sorry, there’s no choice, Pietrzyk said. The stakes are too high. “This is your case. You can grieve later, but right now we need you here.” Pietrzyk said others would try to shoulder most of the load, but no one knew the case as well as John. Do the first day, the opening statement and the witness right after, he said, then pick one other witness, the most important one in your mind, and focus on him. Pietrzyk said he could pull in other lawyers to help handle the rest.
John agreed. For his witness, he picked Corey Scott. The medic was the key to everything. He had been just inches from Gallagher when he pulled out his knife. He saw it all clearly. He watched the captive die. NCIS and the prosecutors had interviewed him a half dozen times and knew every detail. He was the strongest witness and the key to putting Eddie away. John didn’t want to chance leaving Scott to anyone else.
As John prepared for trial, he was calling home several times a day. His mind was in so many places he walked around as if it were a blur. Now the first day of trial had arrived and he was giving the opening argument, trying to project confidence that he was far from feeling.
He led the jury through the crucial morning of the case. The platoon was fighting ISIS on the outskirts of Mosul. A wounded prisoner was brought to them, and in front of multiple witnesses, Eddie killed him, then held an enlistment ceremony over the body. On the big screen, John put up the photo of platoon members gathered around the body with Eddie.
When SEALs tried to speak out, Eddie threatened to kill them and worked to ruin their careers, John said. You will hear from those SEALs, he said. “At the end of this case, it will be clear that Chief Gallagher stabbed a wounded ISIS prisoner under his care, that he celebrated it with photographs, that he shot at civilians, and that he systematically tried to intimidate those who had the courage to report him.”
In the plain jury box, just a few feet in front of the young prosecutor, seven men in military uniforms sat in two rows listening silently. It was a jury like none of the Navy lawyers had seen before because there was hardly anyone on it from the Navy. Of the seven, only two wore white Navy uniforms—one was a surface warfare commander, the other was a SEAL senior chief. The rest wore the khaki of the United States Marine Corps. All of them were either enlisted Marines or prior-enlisted warrant officers. On their chests, the vast majority wore the same service ribbons as Eddie: the Iraq Campaign Ribbon, the Afghanistan Campaign Ribbon, and the distinctive Combat Action Ribbon, which signified that they had personally engaged with the enemy. A few had on aluminum bracelets in memory of comrades killed in battle. They were, overwhelmingly, a group of ground-pounding, battle-hardened grunts just like Eddie.
The combat-heavy jury represented an early victory by the defense. Eddie’s lawyers had asked the judge to select a jury from a pool of troops with combat experience, arguing it wouldn’t be fair for anyone else to judge him. The Navy had enough confidence in the evidence to agree. They didn’t want Eddie to be able to blame a conviction on being unfairly judged by a bunch of rear-echelon desk pilots. Any hint of an unjust conviction would invite the interference of the president, which the Navy was eager to avoid. So the admiral overseeing the court-martial granted the request.
The concession carried significant risk. There was a good chance that combat veterans would never convict a fellow grunt for the death of an enemy, no matter what the evidence showed, and might vote to acquit out of loyalty. The Navy hoped, though, that they would do the opposite, that their experience would allow them to judge Eddie without getting swept up by rhetoric about heroes, split-second decisions, and the fog of war. Senior enlisted grunts with combat experience understood the Law of Armed Conflict and the need for leaders to set an example. They knew the importance of discipline and order in a chaotic war zone. The SEAL on the jury would know the SEAL ethos. He’d be able to see clearly that Eddie had betrayed it. There was a decent chance that a combat-heavy jury would be the least likely to let Eddie off the hook.
The defense team maneuvered to increase the proportion of grunts when it was time for jury selection. They had been given extra chances to strike jurors after the email tracking fiasco. Right away, they got rid of three officers, including the only woman in the pool. By the end of jury selection, the seven men seated were so heavy with enlisted combat experience that even one of the jurors sitting in the group was struck by it. He wondered if it was possible to have a fair trial. A jury of peers is one thing, he found himself thinking, “but you would never get a jury of all police for the trial of another police officer.”
Eddie had another advantage when it came to the jury, one that he knew about but the prosecutors did not. He was personally acquainted with the lone SEAL on the panel. When prosecutors had asked the SEAL if he knew the defendant, he said not really. Coronado was a small community, so he knew who Eddie was, and maybe had seen him at the gym a few times. “I’ve said hi to him before,” he said. “That’s about it.” In fact, the SEAL had been to Eddie’s house five times, including for Bible study, and he was such a believer in Eddie’s innocence that he told other SEALs he had donated a thousand dollars to the “Free Eddie” campaign after Eddie was arrested.
Eddie perked up when he heard the SEAL lie. Obviously Eddie wasn’t about to tell the prosecutors, but at a recess he sure as hell told his attorneys. “That guy’s fucking lying, I know him,” Eddie said. Okay, his legal team acknowledged, but is he lying so he can hurt you, or lying so he can help you? Eddie said he wasn’t sure. After a lot of discussion, the team decided to keep it all quiet and leave the SEAL on the jury.
Lieutenant John finished the Navy’s opening statement and sat down. Eddie’s lawyer stood up and strode into the middle of the court. In the room full of Navy men in plain uniforms, he was a peacock. He was big and tall and broad with a thatch of blond hair swept stiffly to the side. He was forty but looked older. His voluminous neck drooped over the stiff white collar of a striped shirt paired with a mesmerizingly colorful necktie. Silently but theatrically, he picked up the podium and moved it so he was standing directly in front of the jury like a pastor about to deliver a sermon, then smiled and introduced himself as Timothy Parlatore.
“My negros,” he announced in a loud voice. “Craig’s done some good work making progress with handling the diablo situation, however, this will only work if we’re all on the same page. If guys want we can meet at my house tomorrow afternoon and talk about it.”
He paused, letting the confusion of his opening statement sink in. Then he explained that it was a text message to the platoon by one of its snipers, Josh Vriens. Some malcontents in the platoon had a secret group text they had used to conspire to spread lies against Eddie, Parlatore said. They called the secret group “the Sewing Circle.” Vriens’s text was part of the proof that the Sewing Circle hated their chief so much that they called him “El Diablo” and had gotten together to cook up a lie that would take him down.
“This case is not about a murder,” Parlatore said, looking at each of the members of the jury. “It’s about a mutiny.”
Parlatore wore a fat ring with a blue stone on his left hand to show that he was a graduate of the Naval Academy. He also had a pin on his lapel for the missile cruiser he had served on as a junior officer years before. But the garish ties and brash shirts he liked to wear in court showed a different influence. Parlatore had never worked as a lawyer in the Navy, and as a civilian he did not specialize in Navy cases. His practice was in Manhattan, far from any bases, and though his clientele varied widely, if he could be said to have had a specialty, it was the Mafia.
Parlatore graduated from the Naval Academy in 2002 under his birth name, Timothy Payne. His short Navy career was distinguished largely by a written reprimand for disobeying an order and being absent without leave in 2005. That same year he was convicted of reckless driving near his base, and he left active duty before his five-year Naval Academy commitment was up. He legally changed his name soon after to his mother’s maiden name, then got his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in New York and began several years of understudy with some of the city’s most prominent mob lawyers.
Parlatore cut his teeth working for lawyers like Eric Franz, whose clientele included a number of old-school capos with nicknames like “Mikey Scars.” Then he went to work with a theatrical, sharp-dressed lawyer named Bruce Cutler, who for years had represented Gambino crime boss John Gotti. In the 1980s, Cutler’s often combative style had produced three acquittals for Gotti and earned the mob boss the tabloid nickname “the Teflon Don.” At one point he famously argued that Gotti couldn’t be head of a Mafia family because there was no such thing as the Mafia. FBI wiretaps suggested that while Cutler was representing Gotti, he advised the don on criminal activity. A federal judge in 1991 ruled that Cutler could no longer represent Gotti because he appeared to have become “in house counsel” for the mob.
Under Cutler, Parlatore started taking on his own Mafia clients, but by then it was 2012 and the grand old days of Mafia prosecutions were long gone. One of his few mob clients was a woman on the reality show Mob Wives, and Parlatore readily admitted to the Associated Press in 2016 that “the existence of Mob Wives proves organized crime is dead.”
Eventually Parlatore went out on his own, representing a broader array of clients. He defended three men who illegally jumped with parachutes from the rebuilt World Trade Center and a lawyer accused of sexually assaulting a woman on a fold-out office bed. (In that case he argued that the assault couldn’t have taken place because the woman was too fat for the bed to support her. His client was found guilty.) He also took work that brought him into the conservative news sphere and eventually connected him to Eddie. In 2014, Parlatore started representing Bernard Kerik, who wanted to sue one of his former lawyers for cooperating with the feds in a case that sent Kerik to prison on fraud charges. Four years later, Parlatore represented none other than Fox News host and family-values champion Pete Hegseth, who was going through a second divorce after cheating on his second wife and having a child with a Fox News producer.
At the time, the Gallagher family was already represented by two experienced and established civilian lawyers who specialized in military law, Colby Vokey and Phillip Stackhouse. But Eddie and his wife didn’t like how the lawyers were operating. Andrea voiced her frustrations to Kerik, who recommended his own lawyer.
Parlatore was brash, bombastic, and, just like his mentor, proudly combative in court. He seemed to realize that a jury trial was not necessarily about who presented the most compelling legal argument but who told the best story. It was local theater without the makeup. And he knew in the Gallagher case that his audience stretched beyond the courtroom.
“This case is about battle,” he told the jury. Some of the witnesses against Eddie had never fired a shot before. They got dropped into combat in Mosul and were terrified. Eddie refused to coddle them. He called them out for the cowards they were. So, Parlatore said, “they banded together and made a plan to take Eddie Gallagher out of the fight permanently. That’s why we have this case. It’s not because of a murder but because of a mutiny. What they failed to think about at the time is that Eddie Gallagher was never out of the fight.”
Parlatore strode across the court, stood next to Eddie, and asked him to stand. He listed Eddie’s past accomplishments: eight combat deployments, two Bronze Stars for valor, number one lead petty officer, number one chief, sailor of the year. And, Parlatore said, smiling, Chief Eddie did the impossible for a SEAL. He married his high school sweetheart and they stayed together.
People in the courtroom chuckled.
Eddie stood absolutely still. Parlatore walked back to the jury and leaned close, as if to let them in on some juicy gossip. They weren’t going to see much evidence in the case, he said. No body. No autopsy. No forensics of the crime scene, no science, no physical evidence, he said, “because there was no murder.”
The young SEALs in the platoon had helmet cams and videoed everything on deployment, but they didn’t bother to record the murder that was so important to them or the alleged ceremony after, he said, because it never happened. An enemy had died of wounds from the battlefield. Now Eddie was being condemned for trying to do his job.
As Kerik listened to his lawyer from the gallery he leaned over and whispered to Andrea. After introducing the Gallagher family to Parlatore, he had signed on to the case as an investigator and consigliere. The family called him “the Godfather.” Kerik was a longtime friend of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had become one of President Trump’s lawyers and close advisors. The family already had a direct line to President Trump through Pete Hegseth and Fox & Friends. With Kerik, they also had a potentially powerful back channel.
Kerik also brought to Eddie’s team one of the president’s personal lawyers, Marc Mukasey, who had represented various Trump businesses and the Trump Foundation. Mukasey was a powerhouse boutique litigator and former federal prosecutor, accustomed to big cases with complex strategies. He was rail-thin and dour; journalists in the gallery during the trial compared him to Mr. Burns, the vulture-like billionaire from The Simpsons. Both Mukasey and Parlatore were bankrolled by the thousands of donations Andrea had collected online. Mukasey agreed to take a back seat to Parlatore and only do the most technical legal arguments, but every night he was there to steer strategy—a director for Parlatore’s theatrics.
The defense strategy that they chose was a full-frontal assault on the charges, one that would have been familiar to Parlatore’s mob-lawyer mentors. They weren’t going to offer mitigating circumstances. They weren’t going to argue that Eddie had acted in self-defense or that Eddie had a PTSD flashback that triggered the attack. The plan was to argue that nothing ever happened, and anyone who said something had happened was a liar. It was an all-or-nothing, scorched-earth tactic demanding not only that they show the evidence couldn’t be trusted and that the government couldn’t be trusted but also that they destroy the credibility of every SEAL who took the stand.
Parlatore plowed through the charges against Eddie. The alleged sniper shots at the old man and the girl? No evidence there. No photos, no video, no bodies. There weren’t even dates when some of the supposed crimes took place. They were so weak, he told the jury, that the prosecution should be embarrassed for even filing them. “That is a theme you’re going to see throughout all of these charges,” he told the jury. “No body, no forensics, no science, no evidence, no case. Because there was no murder.”
He got right up to the rail of the jury box and said he would show how a small group in the platoon had conspired to take Eddie down and how NCIS agents who wanted to make careers by nailing a SEAL went along for the ride. They ignored evidence. They raided the chief’s house, and dragged his children out at gunpoint in their underwear. They stuck a decorated SEAL behind bars and threatened him with life in prison.
Parlatore looked at each of the men sitting there in uniform, most of them with multiple deployments to war zones, all of them about Eddie’s age, all of them predisposed to be sympathetic. “This was a sham investigation,” he said, “and should be terrifying, terrifying to all of you, terrifying to all of us, terrifying to anybody that has to go down range and then have their actions questioned by investigators like this.”
Tom MacNeil raised his right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Opening statements had concluded, and the prosecution now planned to march through a series of eyewitnesses that they hoped would leave no doubt as to what Eddie had done. With minimal physical evidence, the accounts of the platoon were crucial. Alpha’s junior-grade lieutenant was the first witness taking the stand because MacNeil could take the jury through the whole day of the stabbing from premeditation to confession.
The young officer sat down in the witness chair without glancing at Eddie. He was dressed in the same starched whites but wore a totally different demeanor. If Eddie was grizzled and statuesque, MacNeil seemed nervous and uncertain. He had always been a reluctant participant in the criminal investigation. Though he had no love for Eddie, he had not pushed to go to NCIS like Corey Scott or Craig Miller. As an officer, even a very junior one, he could be on the hook for not turning Eddie in.
When agent Joe Warpinski had MacNeil in an interrogation room a year before, the junior officer mumbled for nearly an hour about Eddie’s “performance issues” and a “decline in professionalism,” never mentioning the stabbing or the shootings. Warpinski eventually had to stop him and tell him to cut the crap. “Can I be completely honest with you, man?” Warpinski told him. “I can see you in every one of your answers being extremely careful about every single word you say. I get what’s going on here. And I told you before we came in here that I’ve talked to most of the platoon. I know these stories. I know what happened. I know these details and I think you might be trying to cover for yourself.” Over time, MacNeil had grudgingly come around. He ended up giving a detailed written statement to NCIS about the day of the murder and a long list of other misconduct. On the stand that day, MacNeil was cooperative but tense, as if waiting for someone to sucker punch him.
Brian John took him back to the morning of May 3. MacNeil told the jury he was with Eddie near the front lines near Mosul. They were in gun trucks on the flank of the Iraqi soldiers attacking a village when word came over the radio that an injured ISIS fighter was being brought to the compound. MacNeil heard Eddie say on the radio, “Lay off him, he’s mine.” Eddie then drove back to the compound, forcing MacNeil’s truck to leave its position on the battlefield and follow. Mentally John checked off a box: There was the premeditation.
At the compound, Eddie began providing medical care to a dirty, nameless teenage fighter, MacNeil told the court. After watching for a minute, MacNeil wandered off to do other things, then passed back by the scene just in time to see Eddie above the captive holding his custom hunting knife. John checked another box: the murder weapon.
John stopped MacNeil. He put up on the screen a photo of Eddie wearing the knife in a black sheath across the back of his belt. He asked if it was the same one. Yes, MacNeil said. He had seen that knife every day in a room they shared, hanging on the nail where Eddie hung his pants.
When MacNeil saw Eddie holding the knife over the captive, he thought little of it and walked past to talk to General al-Jubouri in the building, he said. But when MacNeil came back outside, the captive was dead. There was blood splattered on his neck and on the ground. Then Jake Portier reenlisted Eddie next to the body.
The jury sat silently riveted. Most of them were taking notes.
John put up a photo on the big screen: a dozen SEALs arranged in two rows like a high school soccer team, Eddie in the captain’s spot taking a knee in the center, the nameless victim splayed in the dirt with his hair gripped in Eddie’s hand. Is this photo from that day? he asked.
Yes, MacNeil said. He identified the victim and Gallagher, then himself in the back row, standing with his rifle dangling in his right hand. In the photo, a few SEALs were smiling. MacNeil wore a concerned glare. John checked another box: evidence of a dead body and the accused murderer holding his head. Now he needed one more: Eddie admitting to the crime.
John asked about the evening of the stabbing. There was an argument between Eddie and some of the guys over what had happened, MacNeil said. MacNeil had not been there, but when Eddie came back to their room, Portier asked how the confrontation went. Gallagher said the guys were upset. I don’t care, think about what would have happened if they had one of us, Portier said. Eddie responded, “Yeah, exactly.” John checked a box: acknowledging the killing.
John thanked MacNeil and said he had no further questions. MacNeil had set the scene, identified the murder weapon, introduced the photos from the compound, and said Eddie had essentially admitted to the killing. The ground was laid for the eyewitnesses. It was a promising start.
Parlatore stood up for the cross-examination. He was about to give a preview of what he planned to do to every SEAL in Alpha who took the stand. The public had placed a halo of heroism on all SEALs, and he planned to knock that halo off. The case, he knew, would come down to whether the witnesses could be believed. He was determined to dredge up every piece of dirt he could and smear it all over them, until each one was discredited. He hit MacNeil hard right at the start.
“You were arrested for assault and battery, public intoxication?” he said.
MacNeil cleared his throat and said yes. It was early in his career, before he went to BUD/S. “I was intoxicated, and I got into a fight, and I defended myself.”
Is drinking permitted in Iraq? Parlatore asked.
“No, sir.”
“Were you drinking in Iraq?”
The prosecutors tried to object, but the judge overruled them.
Which members of the platoon were you drinking with in Iraq? Parlatore asked.
“I mean, I drank on the rooftop of the safe house with most if not all the enlisted SEALs that were at my outstation,” MacNeil said uncomfortably.
Parlatore put up a photo of MacNeil. It was night on the rooftop and he was playing DJ. MacNeil smiled nervously.
That’s the first time I’ve seen that photo, he said. He protested that the photo was from the end of deployment, after the battle in Mosul was over. No one had been drinking during operations.
Parlatore kept punching. Did the platoon take other photos of other dead bodies? he asked.
Yes.
Would you be surprised to find out other SEALs had taken photos posing with the body of the stabbing victim?
No, MacNeil said.
Parlatore hammered at why it took so long for MacNeil to come forward about Eddie. He was an officer. If he had a problem with Eddie taking the photo with the dead body, why didn’t he stop him? If he suspected a murder, why didn’t he say anything or do anything? Why didn’t he report it?
MacNeil stuttered that he reported it to Portier that night. He said he also had tried to get Eddie to confess in front of Brian Alazzawi in Iraq. With Alazzawi right there, he had told Eddie to tell Alazzawi about the situation with the stabbing. But Eddie smoothed it over. Nothing was done.
One of the Marines watching from the jury box was stunned at what he was hearing. SEAL officers were on a first-name basis, drinking beers with their men in a war zone? Total lack of discipline. If Navy SEALs had a time-honored tradition of working around rules and regulations, the Marines were the opposite. Every detail of military life had to be followed to the letter, from the roll of the uniform sleeves to the laces of the boots. Enforce the small stuff and you have to worry less about the big stuff. These officers weren’t doing their job, the juror thought, and Eddie seemed to be just as bad. How could these screwballs have risen up through the ranks to leadership positions? The juror had always thought the SEALs were the elite of the elite, but the details coming out made them seem more like a bunch of drunk frat boys with guns. He couldn’t wait to hear from Portier. The lieutenant seemed to be right in the thick of things, and he clearly had to answer for it.
Dylan Dille could feel the tension growing as soon as he arrived back in San Diego for the trial. He’d moved back to the Rockies a year before and had tried to put Eddie behind him. It wasn’t easy. It seemed like Fox News was talking about the case every day, and never in a way that made the guys look good. On Facebook, SEALs who referred to themselves as “the real brotherhood” were calling him a coward and traitor. He was now only checking the SEALs’ private 5326 page to monitor threats against his safety. Every time the case came up, Dille would get showered in hate. None of the SEALs on Facebook seemed to care that a chief had targeted civilians. They were just mad that guys in Alpha had said anything about it. One SEAL who had served in Vietnam and gone on to write several books about the SEAL Teams posted about Dille, “I wonder if he wants to hear about the time I dropped a high explosive round into a hooch we were taking fire from and four little kids got killed! FUCK THAT ASSHOLE.” Dille went for long runs with his dog to clear his head. He grew a thick beard and never wore clothes that suggested he was a veteran. He went hunting with his father deep in the mountains. Slowly, he was starting to move on.
As his plane touched down in San Diego, he could feel his heart speeding up. He was slated to appear near the beginning of the trial and hardly slept the night before it started. The first day, he sat all day in a small witness waiting room, then was dismissed. He came back the second day. Again he sat, waiting. He listened to a meditation app on his phone, trying to clear his head. He had been warned by the prosecutors that the defense attorney would try to tear him apart. That’s what they do for a living, they said. Anything you’ve done wrong, they are going to bring up.
But the defense wasn’t what had Dille on edge. His conscience was clean about Iraq—he had refused to get in any of Eddie’s photos, he had never taken a sniper shot that he wouldn’t stand behind, he didn’t do drugs or get involved in pirate shit. When Portier refused to do anything about Eddie, Dille had tried to save people by firing warning shots. Let them try to tear me apart, Dille thought, I have nothing to hide.
Something else was bothering him. He was starting to suspect that something sinister was unfolding in the platoon, something that seemed to be covered in Eddie’s fingerprints. It had started on the first day of the trial. Dille had gone to the courthouse, expecting to go up on the stand. Going through the metal detector at the front door just ahead of him were Eddie’s mother and father. Dille put his head down. He felt bad that they had to go through this. He knew he was going to say hurtful things about their son in front of them. No parent deserved that. As they were getting their bags searched by a security guard, Corey Scott came in. He nodded at Dille, whom he hadn’t seen in months, then turned to the parents. “Hey, are you the Gallaghers?” Scott said. “I don’t think I’ve met you, I’m Corey Scott.”
Dille snapped to attention. What was going on? His patient sniper’s instinct to watch for patterns couldn’t make sense of it. Scott detested Eddie. Despite his reputation as the Ghost, he was the one who encouraged everyone to turn him in. As an eyewitness to the stabbing, he had the most damning testimony of anyone in the whole platoon. It was going to fry Eddie. And now he was getting chatty with the parents?
Scott made small talk with Eddie’s parents as they shuffled through the metal detector. Dille followed, feeling as confused as he had on the day of the stabbing. Both Dille and Scott went to the witness waiting room where Dille sat warily, hesitant to say anything. The youngest SEAL from Alpha, Ivan Villanueva, walked in. As Eddie’s gopher, he was the other guy who had been right there at the body when Eddie stabbed the prisoner.
Scott and Villanueva immediately started catching up like they were kicking back on the couches in the high bay. Villanueva said he was with Alpha for another workup. They were headed to Guam again. Scott was an instructor at BUD/S but was about to get out of the Navy. They talked about family and about other guys in Alpha. Dille volunteered little. Eventually, conversation turned to the trial. Villanueva said he had gone to see Eddie the other day, and they had hung out a little bit.
Dille’s head involuntarily ticked to one side. Did I hear that right? Why would anyone be hanging out with Eddie?
Oh nice, Scott said, I went to visit Eddie, too.
Dille had heard right.
What the hell is going on? he thought. A year ago these guys hated Eddie. Villanueva was pissed that Eddie had made him get his mom to buy drugs. Scott had encouraged others not to let Mosul drop. He had asked them how they could live with themselves if Eddie ever led SEALs again. Now they were hanging out?
You seem quiet, Dylan. What’s going on? Scott asked.
Dille shook his head. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind,” he said.
As the other SEALs continued to chat, Dille felt a creeping dread, like dark water was slowly filling the room. He knew when Eddie had told MacNeil he had “shit on all of you” there was some truth to it. Eddie had ordered guys to fire rockets and Javelins at bad targets, and guys had done it—especially the younger guys. Eddie had encouraged bad sniper shots. Guys might have done things they regretted, maybe even things that could get them arrested. But who was on that list? Dille didn’t know.
Then there was the massive fuckup with the Switchblade. Dille knew guys in Squad 2 were worried it would come out. Was that enough to scare guys into working with Eddie? Who else was in? He knew Dalton Tolbert was solid, but what about T. C. Byrne and Josh Vriens?
Dille shook his head and told himself he was being paranoid, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. This was how the pirates survived and how they spread. They had shit on everyone. It was easy to get tangled up in it. In fact, at first, it seemed like a favor. Pirates like Eddie let junior SEALs get away with things or smoothed things over. Maybe it was drugs or a drunken arrest, maybe it was a bad shot on deployment. But what seemed like a favor was, in fact, insurance. Once the pirates had helped a guy cover something up, they owned him. He could no longer speak out because there was collateral. It was mutually assured destruction. Forced loyalty. It ensured silence. And by staying silent, even a SEAL who hated the pirates effectively became one.
As Dille crossed the courtroom to the witness stand on day two in a civilian suit, he looked directly at Eddie. He wanted to send a message that whatever pirate plan was in the works, it could not touch him. He was clean. He wanted him to know that now that the chief had no power over him, he would finally get to say the things he couldn’t say in Iraq. He held his gaze for a second longer, hoping to meet eyes. Eddie did not look up.
Commander Jeff Pietrzyk, the prosecutor who had just come to the case, swore in Dille, and the sniper sat down. Dille tried to put his concerns about the other guys in the platoon out of his mind. He couldn’t control how anyone else would testify. Eddie might have shit on some guys. He didn’t have shit on Dille.
Pietrzyk took Dille through the stabbing and the meeting afterward where Eddie acknowledged it, then turned to the Towers. It was the first time the jury was hearing about Eddie’s shots on civilians. It was what Dille was most eager to get off his chest. He went on for several minutes talking about how the chief shot at groups of civilians and women by the river. He mentioned that he saw Eddie shoot at an unarmed boy, adding, “He missed on that one.”
“Objection!” Timothy Parlatore said standing up. “This is wildly vague and wildly prejudicial.”
The judge allowed Dille to continue, but he urged the prosecutor to keep things specific.
Pietrzyk steered Dille to June 18, 2017. It was Father’s Day, Dille said. He saw two elderly men standing on a corner. He heard a shot ring out from Eddie’s position and saw a vapor trail as a bullet cut the hot air. A spot of blood appeared in the small of one man’s back. He fell to the ground, struggled to get up, fell again, lurched to his feet, and stumbled out of Dille’s view.
“I don’t know what happened to him after that,” he said. Then Eddie came over the radio and made a comment about the shot. Dille said the chief “thought he had missed.”
Pietrzyk checked several boxes: attempted murder and Eddie taking credit for the shot on the old man. No further questions, he said.
Parlatore stood up to cross-examine the sniper. For day two of the trial, he had on a pink striped shirt and a dazzling pink-and-purple tie. Dille thought he looked slimy but high-dollar. He caught himself looking over at the Navy lawyers to see if they were outgunned. They seemed quiet compared to Parlatore. Maybe even timid.
“You never personally watched Eddie Gallagher pull the trigger, did you?” Parlatore said.
“Correct,” Dille said.
The stories about seeing vapor trails and hearing Eddie say he missed on the radio, those were all new, weren’t they? You hadn’t told investigators about those in the year leading up to the trial.
That’s true, Dille said.
Parlatore read a text message Dille had sent to the rest of the Sewing Circle a few weeks after returning from Iraq, when they were discussing who they could trust in reporting Eddie to the authorities. Alpha’s texts were the uncensored, full-throttle talk of a bunch of young gunfighters, and they were full of dick jokes and filthy language. Parlatore seemed to relish each chance he got to read them in court and juxtapose the dressed-up, polished SEALs on the stand with their locker room talk.
“ ‘Our shit is watertight,’ ” Parlatore recited with a half grin. “ ‘And if people take Eddie’s side, they are going to have a dick on their forehead when this is all done.’ ”
He looked at Dille. “What do you mean, ‘Our shit is watertight’?” he asked.
If the question was meant to rattle Dille, it didn’t.
“The truth is watertight, Mr. Parlatore,” he said firmly.
Parlatore barreled forward, unfazed. He wanted to show the jury that the platoon had never mentioned the murders until months after the deployment. It had started out with petty gripes about cookie butter and had grown into a story about war crimes only when their gripes were not enough to sink Eddie’s career.
When the platoon met after deployment in the high bay to complain about Eddie, Parlatore said, Dille only mentioned Eddie stealing his cookie butter. You never confronted Eddie about the stabbing or the shootings, did you? he asked.
Dille admitted he had not.
If Dille was so worried about civilians, Parlatore asked, why didn’t he report Eddie in Iraq or tell the platoon so it didn’t happen again?
“We did that,” Dille said, a little upset. “I did that.” He looked around, as if waiting for a ref to blow a whistle. He had told Portier multiple times. So had Miller. NCIS knew that. Dille didn’t understand why Parlatore was saying he didn’t. He glanced over at the prosecutors, hoping they would object or something. They were silent.
“And, again, there’s no proof or anything that you actually did that. That’s just what you’re telling us here, right?” Parlatore said.
Dille was deflated. “Yes,” he said.
Dille wanted to explain that he had reported the shooting to his lieutenant, and he had seen Dalton Tolbert do the same, but Parlatore turned and walked back to the defense table. “No further questions,” he said.
Dille left the courtroom physically drained. His joints hurt, and his muscles were trembling with fatigue. His father had come to San Diego to be with him. The two drove off the naval base, past the ranks of gray warships, to San Diego’s Balboa Park, where the sniper lay down in the grass in the shade for a long time and stared up at the sky. He knew that even if Eddie was convicted, he’d have to testify all over again at Jake Portier’s trial. The end of a career he had loved would be spent revisiting the worst moments over and over in detail as roomfuls of people stared. It was all too exhausting and sad to think about.
Craig Miller pulled on his white uniform and checked that his Trident and chief’s anchors were positioned just right, hoping that the polish and precision could camouflage his roiling thoughts. He was dying to get the trial over with but dreaded his part. For two years he had kept the platoon in line as Eddie went off the rails. The Sheriff had led the effort to investigate the chief. In many ways, he was the moral center of Alpha, a man who truly tried to live what he believed. The SEAL ethos was the closest thing he had to a religion. He knew all he had to do was tell the truth. Still, he felt unprepared. He was a professional gunfighter but didn’t know anything about courtrooms. The SEALs practiced everything over and over until he knew exactly how to rush the door, sweep through the house, and take down the target. The Navy legal team seemed more thrown together. They barely met with him as trial neared. He was used to working with Chris Czaplak, but Czaplak was gone. He had no idea what to expect from Eddie’s lawyers. He worried that he would say the wrong thing. It was not how the Sheriff liked to run things, but it was out of his jurisdiction.
Miller took the stand in dress whites, tall and fit, with new chief’s anchors on his collar. His eagle gaze swept the room and focused on Eddie’s legal team. The chubby lawyer with the dazzling tie looked to him like a mobster. Behind him, the bald investigator with the furrowed brow next to Andrea looked like his hired goon. Where did Eddie find these guys? he wondered. Then Miller looked at the prosecutors’ table. It was a few young guys who barely filled out their uniforms. It didn’t inspire confidence.
Like Dille, Miller was worried that Eddie somehow had worked out a backroom pirate deal to worm his way out of trouble. Miller had run into Corey Scott in the waiting room that morning. They sat down together and tried to make small talk, but it was awkward. They weren’t allowed to talk about the trial, and of course that was the one thing consuming both of them. Scott said the whole thing had been really stressful. He seemed like he was about to cry. Scott told Miller, “I hope when this is all over, we can still have a beer together.”
“Of course we will,” Miller replied. But Scott sounded truly worried. And that made Miller worry, too. He found himself thinking, Why wouldn’t we?
Miller was called to the stand still thinking about Scott’s words. There was a brand-new prosecutor there, not Brian John or Jeff Pietrzyk, but a new lieutenant named Scott McDonald who had been pulled in to help. Miller couldn’t believe they were going into this having never practiced together. You would never do that in the Teams.
Miller began to give an account of the stabbing that was in step with the testimony of Dille and MacNeil. The platoon was on the edge of Mosul on May 3 helping Iraqi soldiers clear a village when there was a commotion and the Iraqis arrived at the compound with a wounded ISIS fighter.
Eddie came back from the front lines without explanation, he said. “I saw him arrive at the scene. It was just him. And, yeah, that was surprising, because I didn’t hear anything over the radio.”
From the prosecutors’ table, Pietrzyk noticed the mention of the radio and waited for the young prosecutor to ask for an explanation. Why had Miller not heard Eddie tell the platoon “He’s mine” when the other witnesses had? It was a small detail, but telling. Pietrzyk had joined the case only about two weeks before, but knew the Gallagher family was on a public campaign accusing Miller and the other witnesses of lying. Pietrzyk had almost no time to learn the case, but he did have one advantage: He was fresh. He had no investment in the investigation that could bias him and he hadn’t come in dead set on trusting the witnesses.
Miller had changed that. Pietrzyk had interviewed him before trial and specifically asked if he had heard Eddie come over the radio and say, “No one touch him, he’s mine.” Miller said he had not. The battery in his radio had been loose that morning, he explained. It had been going in and out without him noticing. If Eddie had said anything about the ISIS prisoner, Miller hadn’t heard it. For Pietrzyk, this was huge. If the platoon truly had been lying to try to frame Eddie, they would have cooked up a consistent story. They would have all said they witnessed the same litany of damning details. But Miller had not. That told Pietrzyk that this SEAL was completely trustworthy. The others probably were, too. It gave Pietrzyk confidence in the whole case. He hoped that McDonald would ask that question. He didn’t.
Instead the new lieutenant wandered through questions in a way Miller had never encountered. On the stand, Miller was struggling. The man who had been the backbone of Alpha seemed to teeter on a tightrope of worry. With no preparation, he didn’t know what was expected of him. He wanted to avoid answering in the wrong way. He paused. He stammered. He equivocated. He had not had a chance to review what he said to NCIS more than a year before, and he was unsure about simple details. He testified that he saw the Iraqi Humvee bring in the captive and that he watched Eddie start to give medical care. But he couldn’t remember who else was working on the captive. He couldn’t explain exactly why he left the scene. All of Miller’s take-charge confidence seemed to have evaporated, as if the courtroom was his kryptonite.
The new prosecutor stumbled through questions on how Miller returned to the yard and spotted Eddie kneeling over the kid with his hunting knife.
Corey Scott was there, Miller said. “There was another SEAL that was there as well on the other side. And there was somebody also behind, but I can’t see like their faces.”
Miller was visibly nervous as he tried to picture it. Eddie, he said, “was on both of his knees and he was kind of like leaning forward a little bit, his shoulders were forward. I kept walking and I saw his—I saw him stab the prisoner in the neck, on the side of the neck.”
The new prosecutor asked Miller to describe the blood flowing out of the wound.
“It just came out,” Miller said. His wife had just had their second son, and he reached for a familiar image. “It looked similar to a baby throwing up.”
Miller gestured with his hand to show where the knife entered.
The new prosecutor was about to move on, but the judge intervened to tell him how to do his job. The official court record wouldn’t be able to see Miller’s hand, he said.
“Thank you, Your Honor. And for the record, Chief Miller gestured. He had his hand on the right side of his neck. I’m not an anatomist.” He pointed to the left side of his neck.
“Other side,” Miller said grimly.
“I apologize,” the prosecutor said.
Miller was not inspired by the leadership he was getting, but he pressed on. He testified that after the stabbing he immediately went to find the officer in charge. He told Jake Portier what happened and said they should leave. Instead the officer conducted a reenlistment ceremony and pulled everyone together for a photo.
It hurt Miller to say it, but he admitted he was in the photo. He didn’t agree with it at the time, but he had done it anyway. “It’s just unprofessional,” he told the jury. “There’s no reason for it.”
The evening of the stabbing, Miller said, Eddie had confronted him about the killing. “He said, ‘Who’s not good with this?’ And I paused and said, ‘I’m not good with this. I’m not good with it.’ ” Miller said. “And he sighed. And then he told me that he was going to get another one.”
The prosecutor then pivoted unexpectedly. He asked Miller if on that deployment, Eddie ever said he killed four women. The judge cocked his head in surprise. As Miller started to say yes, Parlatore shot up from his seat and yelled, “Objection!”
The judge shot a disappointed look at the young lawyer representing the Navy. To the jury he said, “Members, I apologize.” He asked them to leave the court.
With the jury gone, the judge did not try to hide his annoyance. “Come on, guys,” he said to the prosecution. “You just can’t launch in here with talking about killing four women and there’s nothing like that on the charge sheet.” He glared at the new prosecutor. “You owe me better than that.”
The prosecutor, clearly realizing he had just screwed up, said, “I apologize, Your Honor.”
Eddie watched the testimony from the defense table with no sign of malice, even though he considered Miller the leader of the effort to turn him in and the worst kind of traitor. On Facebook his wife, Andrea, had been taunting Miller with the same style of insulting nickname the president often used, making fun of the supposedly sealed evidence in his taped NCIS interview, calling him “Cryin’ Craig Miller.” But in the courtroom, Eddie didn’t bat an eyelash as Miller laid out the bloody details. At recess, before Parlatore got to question Miller, Eddie stood up and leaned casually against the bar. Andrea came over and kissed him. They talked low, faces close, and he smiled. They didn’t seem worried at all. They knew what was coming for Miller.
Miller knew little about courtrooms and didn’t really know what a cross-examination was. He watched almost no TV, so he had missed the courtroom dramas where lawyers angrily confront witnesses. He just thought he had to tell the truth. No one in the prosecutor’s office had warned him that it was Parlatore’s job to try to shred his credibility.
“How many times did you meet with NCIS and the prosecutors?” Parlatore asked at the start of cross-examination. Miller said he wasn’t sure, but it was several.
Yet you refused to meet with the defense, he said. You hate Eddie Gallagher, don’t you?
“I think I don’t trust Eddie Gallagher,” Miller said.
You told NCIS you thought he was evil, Parlatore said.
Yes, Miller said. He looked around the room. He didn’t know where this was going.
Parlatore planned to show that Miller was the leader of the Sewing Circle conspiracy, driven by hatred and a bald-faced liar. He’d been privately telling people for weeks that when Miller broke down in tears at the NCIS office a year before, they were clearly fake tears squeezed out to manipulate the investigators, and he couldn’t wait to get Cryin’ Craig Miller on the stand.
You set up the Sewing Circle, Parlatore said. You sent a text to the other guys about “getting together to get their stories straight.”
Miller said he didn’t remember that text. He shifted in his chair a bit uncomfortably. The Navy prep had been so minimal that no one told him it would include Alpha’s private text messages. How had Eddie’s lawyer even gotten those?
Parlatore smiled at him. How about the text where you said, “I spoke with Al and he’s good with the deal,” the lawyer said. What deal did the Sewing Circle have worked out?
Miller stammered. He couldn’t believe he was getting attacked when he had worked so hard to try to do the right thing. He stumbled, caught off guard. “The deal was for us to hold off going to talk to the master chief and the commodore while they I guess tried to get Eddie out of state or continue on with their investigation—I don’t know,” he said, exasperated.
Parlatore switched to the day of the stabbing, asking rapid-fire detailed questions that left Miller flustered. What was the age of the fighter? Miller said he didn’t know. When you first talked to NCIS about the stabbing, you didn’t say you saw any blood, did you? Miller said he didn’t remember. In the photo with the dead fighter, is there any blood on Eddie Gallagher? Miller said he didn’t know. Who are the SEALs in the platoon who wore helmet cams? Miller said he wasn’t sure. What did Miller say to Portier when he reported the stabbing? Miller said he couldn’t remember, specifically. “But I remember telling him we should leave because we were combat-ineffective and stuff was going down that was not good,” he said.
Then what did you do? Parlatore asked.
Miller said he didn’t remember.
You don’t remember? Parlatore raised his voice, as if to clue in the jury that they should be suspicious. Hasn’t NCIS and the prosecution asked you this question before?
“Sir,” Miller said, clearly growing frustrated. “This process has been a very long process, I don’t remember every conversation I’ve had. I don’t know!”
He looked around the room, as if searching for help. None of the guys from Alpha were there. The prosecutors had their heads down, taking notes. He was alone.
Where was the body put afterward? Parlatore demanded. Miller said he wasn’t sure. Was the body still there the next day? “I think it was,” Miller said.
Parlatore raised his voice again. “You’re trying to report your chief for stabbing this terrorist. Did anybody think to go take a picture of the body, take a picture of the stab wound, if one exists?”
Miller stammered. No, he said.
Then Parlatore switched gears again. “You ever lived in New Mexico?” he asked.
Miller paused. He said no. He was confused. What did New Mexico have to do with this? He looked over at the prosecutors for help.
Then how come you were a volunteer police officer there? Parlatore asked.
A tiny town in New Mexico for a few years had issued police badges to nearly any volunteer deputy who paid four hundred dollars. They didn’t have to do anything but sign a check. The volunteers were almost all from out of state. Scores of SEALs had gotten in on the deal because it gave them the ability to get around concealed weapons laws in California. It was a classic frogman workaround for a group of guys raised to believe the rules didn’t apply. The guy who claimed to have killed Osama bin Laden had done it. So had Eddie’s knife-making buddy Andrew Arrabito and the SEAL sitting on the jury. Eventually authorities caught wind of the scheme and shut it down. But Parlatore had learned that Miller had gotten in on the deal, too.
I volunteered for them, Miller said sheepishly. I never worked there.
No, it was a scam, Parlatore said. You were part of a scam that would allow you to get a badge and carry a concealed weapon in all fifty states. Did you ever get permission from the Navy to volunteer off duty? Did you ever do any patrols for them?
The Sheriff looked downcast. He realized, maybe for the first time, that he was just as vulnerable to the dark side of the frogman subculture as every other SEAL. He said no.
One of the Marines in the jury watched Miller, convinced that he was hiding something. After seeing the photos and texts from the stabbing on the first day, the juror had been ready to convict. Now he wasn’t sure. Something messed up was definitely going on in Alpha platoon. But what? He wasn’t sure he could trust the chief or the men.
Miller left the courtroom feeling hollowed out. He had watched his chief commit murder. He had kept pushing forward even though no one seemed to care, including the president. He kept getting knocked down, but he refused to ring the bell. He had sworn to serve and protect the rule of law, and now finally, he thought the battle had come. He wanted to tell the world what he had seen. He wanted it heard. He wanted justice. But he got on the stand and it seemed like a struggle for the prosecutor to even ask questions. Then Parlatore hit him with so many things that had nothing to do with the murder, and the Navy never seemed to object. He wondered if, amid the fusillade from the defense attorney, anyone had heard what he said about Eddie.
Miller checked the news later that day to see how he had done on the stand, and his fears were confirmed. One news outlet ran an article that began, “The main thing to remember about Navy SEAL Chief Craig Miller’s testimony on Wednesday is that he didn’t seem to remember a lot.”
A crush of news crews jockeyed for the right shot in the parking lot at the end of the day. Cameras were barred from the courthouse, but appetite for news of the trial was ravenous. Timothy Parlatore stepped out of the courthouse and greeted the throng with a smug grin for the first of what would become sometimes twice-daily public briefings by the defense.
It appeared to be a key part of Parlatore’s strategy. Inside the court there were rules of conduct, of evidence, of cross-examination, a chance for a response on the record. But not out in the parking lot. Parlatore could give the daily defense spin on everything that happened, knowing that the Navy’s lawyers and leadership would not respond. Even the civilian Navy spokesman whose job was to speak to the press just stood by with his arms crossed.
Parlatore called the prosecution embarrassingly inept. Witnesses were traitors colluding in a conspiracy. NCIS was corrupt. And Miller? “Craig Miller is an absolute liar,” he proclaimed. “When you’re not telling the truth you can’t remember anything,” he said. That, he told the media, is what everyone saw in the courtroom that day.
Parlatore knew the seven jurors couldn’t necessarily hear what he was saying. Another lawyer might not have bothered with the cameras because those millions of viewers didn’t get a vote. But Fox News was in the crowd of cameras, and Parlatore knew that the president, who was mulling a pardon, would be watching. Even if the seven jurors couldn’t hear him, the all-important eighth juror in the White House would hear just fine.
A reporter asked how Eddie was holding up. Parlatore’s tone became dour. “This entire process for him has been difficult. People he thought were his brothers, who he went to combat with, then turned on him.”
Eddie left the courtroom out the front door and passed the cameras feeling good. He had enjoyed watching his lawyer pick Miller apart piece by piece. Parlatore had gotten Miller so frustrated that Eddie later joked he saw him almost cry. From Eddie’s point of view, it couldn’t have gone better. As the cameras crowded around and reporters shouted questions, he and Andrea got into their convertible and drove off.