The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [115]
“Do you understand what you are saying?” Judge Singleton pressed Anice. “That you wish to enter a plea of not guilty and proceed to trial?”
“Yes.”
“Very well,” said Judge Singleton, but he was far from convinced of her competency to stand trial. He ordered that Anice undergo a psychiatric evaluation prior to proceeding. The assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Irvin Rothrock, found that Anice was not only aware of her actions, but that she was “feigning an impaired memory hoping to avoid the legal consequences of her actions.” Judge Singleton ordered her case to proceed.
Both her lawyer and her daughter attempted to change her mind. “Arthur had tried to take the fall for everything,” Chrissy remembers. “He had tried to keep my mom and dad out of it, and she had gotten a good deal. I begged her to sign it. ‘Mom, you could lose,’ I told her. ‘I’ve seen the police reports.’ She blamed everything on Art junior. But she didn’t want to admit that she had anything to do with it. To say she was stubborn would be putting it lightly. Her freedom wasn’t enough for her; she wanted to clear her name.”
But Anice refused to turn back, and so on August 12, 2002, the case went to trial.
Bottini had expended his mercy. His prosecution of Anice, as her own lawyer described it, “was flawless.” Utilizing what was then the latest technology, he projected transcripts of the phone- and wiretaps, the ledger and the bill receipts, and her own signed confession onto a screen from a laptop computer. It was the federal flip-side of some of the same imaging technology Art had used to counterfeit. He put both Jim and Vicki Shanigan on the stand, as well as the Secret Service agents, and they confirmed every allegation against her. He also played back the audio of Anice’s own voice, arranging the meet with Vicki Shanigan.
Once Bottini closed his case, Anice’s attorney had little choice but to put her on the stand. Other than her word, he had nothing to contradict the evidence. But on the morning she was scheduled to testify, the box stood empty as the court waited in vain for her to show up. That morning, she suddenly started complaining about a sharp pain in her side. Paramedics rushed her to the emergency room, where doctors gave her a battery of tests and discharged her. They were unable to find anything wrong with her.
Back in court in following morning, she finally took the stand and answered the government’s charges.
“I knew absolutely nothing about any counterfeiting,” she told the court. On cross-examination, when Bottini asked her to explain where the money and the receipts the Secret Service had confiscated from her bedroom came from, she said that “it was from Jim Shanigan’s drug dealing. Vicki gave it to me because Jim was a drug addict and she was afraid he would squander it.” When it came to explaining her signed confession, Anice was flabbergasted. Despite her acute memory of holding the money for Vicki because her husband was an addict, she had “no memory of making any statements to the Secret Service agents.” At the same time, she quite clearly remembered signing the confession, claiming that she “had been told by the agents she had to sign it or go to jail.” It was the sort of contradictory testimony that prosecutors dream of and rarely see. On at least two occasions, several jurors were so incredulous at the boldness of Anice’s lies that they actually laughed out loud at her.
The jury returned with a verdict in two hours. Anice was sentenced to forty-one months in prison, followed by thirty-six months of probation plus the restitution. Next to her husband’s sentence, it was the longest of the six defendants’.
THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL