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The Constitution and the Bill of Rights

The legal battle was definitely getting more interesting. Once we had access to the disclosure materials, we could prepare a defense. The first thing Randy and the defense team did was ask the judge to force the government to cut the scope of the materials down to size. They couldn’t just hand us millions and millions of e-mail messages, documents, and computer files, as well as years of accounting entries, and then say somewhere in there is what you did wrong. If we were going to have a chance of defending ourselves, the claims of wrongdoing needed to be more specific. In legal terms, this is called requesting a “bill of particulars.” The government fought it, but the judge issued an order forcing prosecutors to specify exactly which dealer acquisitions and which accounting entries they were going to present at trial.

In all these years of seeing the truth manipulated until it became unrecognizable, this was the first time I saw that we had some say in the matter. The U.S. Department of Justice is one of the most powerful forces in the world. But it is not all-powerful. The judge had the right to overrule the DOJ. I reminded myself that this was not the case in lots of other countries. If those governments were convinced that you did something wrong, it was pretty much over. As long as I had to go through this ordeal, I wanted to learn all that I could about our legal system. I asked Randy what exactly gave us the right to make this demand of the government. I really loved his answer—the Constitution. The Sixth Amendment says, “The accused shall enjoy the right—to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusations.” Supreme Court rulings through the years have interpreted this right to mean that if the disclosure materials presented to you are too broad in scope, you have the right to demand a bill of particulars.

I didn’t tell Randy at the time, but that moved me to the core of my being. For three years I had been sitting quietly deep inside myself watching the powers that be take Bobby’s lies and turn them into a seemingly unstoppable force of destruction. Suddenly, I was reminded that people I’d never met had possessed the caring and foresight to make sure I had rights. If it was going to be the United States of America versus Michael A. Singer, I had some very great people in my corner—Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison, to name just a few. Over the next few years, it would become painfully obvious to me that only a single piece of paper stood between me and the dark abyss. That piece of paper was the U.S. Constitution.

I went back and read the Constitution, beginning to end. From the perspective of my predicament, it was so evident that the Founding Fathers were not only creating a government, they were protecting the people from it. I had always known this intellectually, but now it was personal, very personal. This was not a civics course—it was my life. Under these circumstances the Constitution really came alive for me.

Throughout 2007, the joint defense group worked on finding all relevant documents regarding the items the government had listed on the bill of particulars. I went up to Washington a few days each month for review meetings and also had regular conference calls with the legal team at Baker Botts. Randy was present for almost all the meetings, and his partner, Casey Cooper, and the associate attorneys handled much of the day-to-day work.

Each associate had been assigned a share of the dealer acquisitions to thoroughly reconstruct, and we would review each of these transactions in painstaking detail. It was like having a jackhammer taken to my ego. I had built and run a beautiful company. We had a great product, great employees, and great clients, and we had been very successful. But underneath the dealer acquisition program, there was filth. It was like looking into a cesspool. Bobby had been stealing, lying, manipulating, and controlling everything in his world—including me and the rest of the executives. It took my breath away to see what he had done. Behind it all was the realization that these meetings were not about what Bobby had done; they were about the fact that he had managed to find a way to make us criminally responsible for what he had done. It was like being in the Twilight Zone. All I could do was keep letting go at the deepest possible level. My mantra was: This Is Reality—Deal with It. I just took the attitude that on my journey through life, I was now part of this excellent legal team that had been pulled together to defend this poor sap, Singer, who had been framed by the evil villain. I took a breath, let go, and contributed positively to the topic being discussed.

We were definitely making headway. We had discovered that the disk drive the government gave us that held data from people’s personal computer files had been indexed improperly by the FBI. For some reason the agents had only indexed the files by the short description header they had assigned to each file. The contents of the files had not been indexed for search purposes. This severely limited the search results of this important source of data. The defense team had a full indexing done, and we were finding lots of interesting historical documents. We found early drafts of documents and letters that directly contradicted some of the lies Bobby had told. Little by little we were unraveling the convoluted mess he had created.

Judge Blatt was our judge, and Randy was doing really well with him. We were having regular pretrial hearings, and Judge Blatt was approving many, but not all, of our motions. Randy found him to be very fair in his rulings and felt that the judge was beginning to get a sense of how far the government had stretched its case. It had been more than four years since the raid, and things were finally beginning to look up. I couldn’t have felt more confident in Randy as my lead attorney and as the leading figure in the joint defense group.

Things began to unravel in 2008. Randy informed me on February 7 that he had gone in for a checkup, and they had found a tumor. It was cancerous and they wanted to operate immediately. They ripped open his chest and cut out the tumor. In the midst of the battle, the general was down.

It only took three or four weeks for Randy to be back on his feet leading the charge. But there was a lingering issue. The doctors said there was a good chance that the tumor could return, and he should consider chemotherapy. He decided to wait and see, hoping for the best. In the meantime, it was back to work. That was a good thing because the government had been petitioning the judge to finally set a trial date. We had been telling the judge that due to the sheer volume of the disclosure materials, we were nowhere near ready. But in June 2008 the judge gave us our trial date—February 2, 2009, just seven months away. We had so much work left to do; it really was going to take an army of attorneys.

Halfway to the trial date, Randy’s cancer returned. This time he was going to need eight weeks of very intense chemotherapy and an indeterminate recovery period. I remembered back to when Jim Mercer was advising me about choosing an attorney. He said the Holy Grail would be to get a senior partner from one of the country’s premier firms who would be personally committed to your case alone. Randy had turned out to be that Holy Grail. Now, against his doctor’s advice, Randy was seriously considering risking his life by waiting until the trial was over before starting his treatment. I assured him I would have none of that, but he decided to wait and see how fast the tumor was progressing before making his decision. Randy was like a Samurai warrior who had finally been given a battle that was about Honor, Truth, and Justice. He was not about to lay down his sword for a tiny tumor.

Unfortunately, it only took a month for the tumor to progress to the point that there was no longer a decision. We knew Judge Blatt was adamant that there would not be any extensions of the trial date. Though it was a long shot, Randy requested a three-month extension so that he could represent me at trial. Once again, it was the Constitution that took care of me. The motion filed invoked my Sixth Amendment right to have the assistance of counsel of my choice. Though the government opposed the motion for an extension, it was granted by the judge under the condition that I begin working with another lead attorney in case Randy did not recover in time. With the new trial date set for May 4, 2009, just five months away, Randy began his treatment.

I had been working with Randy for more than five years by then. He had not only been my lead attorney and good friend, but he was also the chief legal strategist for the entire joint defense group. There was no replacing him. Having promised the judge that I would do just that, at least as a backup, I took a deep breath and surrendered to the reality before me: I would have to start working with a new lead attorney.