The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [116]
“So in regard to the letter to Louis Opparizio, what made you send him a target letter?”
“Well, my partner and I were very familiar with his name because it came up often in other cases we were working. Not necessarily in a bad way, just that Opparizio’s company is what we call a foreclosure mill. It handles all the paperwork and filing on foreclosures for many of the banks operating in Southern California. Thousands of cases. So we kept seeing the company—ALOFT—and sometimes there were complaints about the methods the company was using. My partner and I decided to take a closer look. We sent out the letter to see what sort of response we’d get.”
“Does that mean you were fishing for a reaction?”
“It was more than fishing. As I said, there was quite a lot of smoke from this place. We were looking for fire and sometimes the reaction we get from a target letter dictates what our next moves will be.”
“At the time you authored and sent the target letter, had you gathered any evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of Louis Opparizio or his company?”
“Not at that point, no.”
“What happened after you sent the letter?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Has Louis Opparizio responded to the letter?”
“We got a response from an attorney saying that Mr. Opparizio welcomed the investigation because it would give him the opportunity to show he ran a clean business.”
“Have you availed yourself of that welcome and investigated Mr. Opparizio or his company further?”
“No, there hasn’t been time. We have several other ongoing investigations that appear to be more fruitful.”
Freeman checked her notes before finishing.
“Finally, Agent Vasquez, is Louis Opparizio or ALOFT currently under investigation by your task force?”
“Technically, no. But we plan to follow up on the letter.”
“So the answer is no?”
“Correct.”
“Thank you, Agent Vasquez.”
Freeman sat down. She was beaming and obviously pleased with the testimony she had drawn from the agent. I stood up and took my legal pad back to the lectern. I had written down a few questions off the direct examination.
“Agent Vasquez, are you telling the jury that an individual who does not respond to your target letter by immediately coming in and confessing must be innocent of any wrongdoing?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Because Louis Opparizio did not do so, do you consider him to be in the clear now?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you make it a practice to send target letters to individuals you believe are innocent of any criminal activity?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then what is the threshold, Agent Vasquez? What does one need to do to receive a target letter?”
“Basically, if you come across my radar in any sort of suspicious way, then I’ll do some preliminary checking and that may lead to the letter. We’re not sending these out scattershot. We know what we’re doing.”
“Did you or your partner or anyone from the task force speak with Mitchell Bondurant in regard to the practices of ALOFT?”
“No, we didn’t. Nobody did.”
“Would he have been someone you would’ve talked to?”
Freeman objected, calling the question vague. The judge sustained the objection. I decided to leave the question floating out there unanswered in front of the jury.
“Thank you, Agent Vasquez.”
Freeman went back to her scheduled rollout of the case after Vasquez, calling the gardener who found the hammer in the bushes of the home a block and a half from the scene of the murder. His testimony was quick and uneventful, by itself unimportant until it would be tied in later with testimony from the state’s forensic witnesses. I did score a minor point by getting the gardener to acknowledge that he had worked in and around the bushes at least twelve different times before he found the hammer. It was a little seed to plant for the jury, the idea that maybe the hammer itself had been planted long after the murder.
After the gardener, the prosecution followed with a few quick hits of testimony from