Read Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam for Free Online

world was collapsing and banks were failing left and right—especially in Miami, which is perhaps the fast-money capital of the Western Hemisphere. It was enough so that he could have paid the restitution in full, but it also would have cleaned him out. Starting over is not the same thing as starting over with nothing.
    Mike never thought to question her motives. She had a job selling real estate, she went out two or three times a week to show properties, and shewas about to close on a house. “She seemed successful,” he says. “I had no reason to question it. That was part of the attraction.” So he wrote Dalia $87,000 in checks over a period of several weeks, adding $13,000 in cash to make it an even hundred grand. She was supposed to deposit it in her bank account and send a wire transfer of the full $191,000 to his Fort Lauderdale lawyer, who would take care of all the further details. He wrote the first check on February 18 for $6,000, and he could feel the dread slowly starting to lift.
    As the weeks dragged on, though, it was clear that something wasn’t right. The wire transfer should have gone through immediately—that’s the whole point, so you don’t have to be driving bags of cash around South Florida. Every time he asked her about it—and he asked her a lot—there was some new wrinkle and a new excuse to explain it. She claimed it had been wired through a Cayman Islands account to save on transfer fees, then that the wire had been reversed. She produced an official receipt to prove it. At one point, she even suggested that Mike’s Fort Lauderdale attorney, Michael Entin, must have stolen it, and she would call his office every morning to see if the money had arrived. Mike gave Dalia three weeks to sort it out or else . He didn’t care where the money came from. All he could think about was getting off probation. This should have been done by now, and here he was coming up on yet another meeting with his probation officer.
    On the night of March 12, David Banks, Mike’s probation officer, made a surprise visit to their townhouse just shy of midnight with half a dozen Boynton Beach police officers in tow. He was apologetic, but he had received an anonymous phone call that Mike was dealing steroids and ecstasy, and he planned to conduct an “administrative search” of the premises. Mike was mystified; he had been on probation for almost six years now without the slightest problem. His house had certainly never been searched in the middle of the night. Despite the fact that the search turned up nothing, Banks continued to stop by unannounced in the afternoons, ostensibly to check up on how Mike was doing.
    That weekend, on a whim, Dalia suggested they get away and booked them a room at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan. She thought it would do them both good to clear their minds, and she paid over $1,200 for their night there. The next morning, Mike got up early and went down to thegym like he always did. Coming back from his workout, he noticed a group of cops congregated in the lobby, conspicuous at that hour of the morning. When he went down to check out, they were still there, and when the valet brought his truck around, two of them approached him and asked, “Is this your car?” When he told them it was, they said they’d had a report of suspicious drug activity associated with the vehicle, and would he mind if they searched it. He told them it had been in valet since he and his wife arrived, but the officers were free to do what they wanted. While Mike stood there in growing embarrassment, on display for all the high rollers getting into their Bentleys and Jags, the cops conducted a cursory inspection of his SUV. When that turned up nothing, one of them thanked him for his cooperation, and for being such a gentleman about it. Dalia watched this all unfold from the lobby. Afterward, they both thought it was weird. On the drive home, Dalia called Michael Entin in a panic and relayed the story to