“But…”
“His name came up tangentially.”
“Whatever that means,” she said. “Well, yes. I can see Alberts doing all kinds of bad things. From the case file and his history he’s a grade-A psychopath. How long ago did this tangential thing come up?”
“Couple of months ago.”
“Then no way, Alex. All of us—Arnie Rodriguez, Bill Higgins, and myself—agreed that Alberts’s dementia began at least four years ago, possibly earlier. Per symptoms charted by his internist and a consulting neurologist, both of whom I happen to know are smart and upright. Both suggested at the time that Alberts get evaluated but he said no way. The psychiatrist the D.A. sent to evaluate him felt he could be scamming to stay out of jail but I’d expect that. Anyway, around two years ago, end-stage dementia set in and it progressed pretty rapidly. Bowel and bladder incontinence, trouble swallowing, failure to wake up for days at a time, loss of speech, involuntary movements, excessive salivation. For the past year, he’s been vegetative, Alex.”
“Got it, thanks.”
“Nasty man,” said Lee. “I don’t believe in karma, but in this case, it’s hard to escape.”
Chapter
14
Telling the truth is easy. Lying means shifting stories like a runway model speed-changing outfits. The most successful scams are often simple. Darren Alberts had been a master of simplicity.
Years ago, the story had been big so I knew the basics. I logged on to fill in the details.
After working as a short-order cook, a landscaper, a commercial fisherman, and the proprietor of several failed restaurants, Alberts enrolled in a non-accredited San Francisco law school at age fifty, graduated at the bottom of his class, and took four attempts to pass the state bar. Unable to find a job at a firm, he moved down to L.A. and started a practice as a slip-and-fall attorney, specializing in indigent, often uninsured clients.
That had earned him a comfortable income, but L.A. is a third-world nation with huge gaps between the haves and the have-nots and Alberts yearned to be at the top of the haves column.
It didn’t take a math major to figure out that forty percent of mega-payouts would kick him up to a whole new level.
The key was to choose your target.
—
The defendants Alberts focused on were large corporations. His clients were the working poor, often unaware they were parties to class-action suits.
After several false starts, Alberts’s first big victory occurred when an Illinois-based manufacturer of chemical fertilizer forked over tens of millions of dollars in reparation for soil contamination in California’s Central Valley that had allegedly led to cancer, birth defects, and other misfortunes. Allegedly because the case had never seen the inside of a courtroom.
That victory turbocharged Alberts’s status on multiple levels.
Professional advancement as a major courtroom player earned him membership in something called the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. The money allowed him to distribute political campaign funds and gain access to the corridors of power.
Most gratifying in a town that trucks in fantasy and appearance, he achieved red-carpet status whenDark Clouds,a movie based on the plodding work of one of Alberts’s investigators in the fertilizer case—a nondescript paralegal named Alice Pryzcik who’d since died—was supersized into a heroine-in-jeopardy action flick.
In the film, Alberts’s character came across rumpled, avuncular, and altruistic. In reality, he’d switched long ago to contact lenses, Hermès shoes, Bijan suits, and a head shaved weekly to distract from pattern baldness.
The actress who played Alice Pryzcik—anything but nondescript—won a Golden Globe, was nominated for an Oscar, and developed a six-month penchant for eco-lectures. Darren Alberts got to go to all the parties.
Meanwhile, he’d traded his first wife for a newer model and his comfortable home in Encino for an estate in San Marino. The Playboy Mansion became a familiar haunt. There, Alberts had been known to cavort in Hefner’s lagoon.
Subsequent legal triumphs included suing for a host of other toxic events and manufacturing defects. Ten years after the fertilizer case,Alberts had won well past a hundred million dollars in damages and an even newer third wife.
Tiana Crown, a formerPlayboymodel thirty years Alberts’s junior, had met him at the lagoon. Her association with a “legal rock-star” husband snagged her a screen agent. The agent snagged her an audition for a proposed “reality” show featuring women with similar backgrounds, tentatively titledCenterfold Contessas.
Part of the pitch was the promise that hubby Darren would show up from time to time and, despite behaving “dignified and lawyerly,” be outsmarted by Tiana.
Prospects for the show and everything else in the Albertses’ life screeched to a halt seven years ago when a federal prosecutor named Kevin Van Osler revealed that after a joint investigation by his office, the D.A., LAPD, and the IRS, the attorney faced multiple felony charges, including, but not limited to, grand theft, perjury, fraud, and money laundering.
Once that story hit, the media “discovered” that over the past ten years Alberts had been sued a hundred sixty-eight times for ripping off clients but had avoided disciplinary action because of his chummy relations with the state bar. Including sitting on several committees. Among them ethics and oversight.
The legal documents ran to thousands of pages but Alberts’s technique could be summed up in a sentence.
