Casey's Ghost: Why I decided not to be Casey Anthony's Ghost Writer.

9781483531502

~Opening Notes~

Although Casey Anthony was found not-guilty of all major felonies of which she was accused, and only received a token sentence for deceiving Orange County Sheriff’s Deputies in her 2011 trial, she may yet be brought to task for other events.

Al Capone ruled Chicago in the 1920’s and 30's. Capone controlled prostitution, gambling, loan sharking and of course, bootlegging. According to research by the University of Missouri - Kansas City - School of Law, the cigar chomping gangster, Alphonse Gabriel Capone marshaled a nefarious empire which grossed an estimated $105 million dollars a year. Adjusted for inflation, that figure would be close to two billion dollars in today’s economy. At the height of the depression in America, he lived the life of an emperor. Capone was never convicted of any of the aforementioned crimes. The only crime he was ever convicted of was income tax evasion. In 1931, at the age of only 32, Capone was sentenced to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for what would be the balance of his productive life.

It is widely believed that O.J. Simpson committed a double homicide in 1994, regardless of the fact that the jury found him not guilty. Though Simpson was not convicted in the subsequent criminal trial, he was found culpable in a civil suit brought by the families of the victims, the Browns and the Goldmans. If you believe the tabloid press (and I for one, do) Simpson is on a death watch and will probably die in the Lovelock Correctional Center in Pershing County, Nevada. Most Americans know that he was not sentenced for murder, but received an uncharacteristically harsh sentence for robbery, in an unrelated dispute over his own sports memorabilia.

If you believe that Casey Anthony should have been found guilty and are among the millions who are still hoping to see justice served, this book is written for you – because I believe that Casey Anthony is presently involved in an ongoing conspiracy to commit bankruptcy fraud and that I may have the evidence to initiate charges.

This will most likely be much different from any other book you have ever read. Unlike any of the other non-fiction books I have written, under my own byline and others, I have decided not to use a traditional narrative approach. Instead, I will allow Cheney Mason and myself to be heard in our own words from the hours upon hours of transcripts of recorded interviews and conversations obtained when I was the so-called ghost writer for Cheney Mason and Casey Anthony. in the weeks and months following the controversial and highly publicized July 5th 2011 verdict, in the closely followed and incredibly famous trial of Casey Marie Anthony.

If you knew anything about the case and saw any of the coverage, you know that first chair defense counsel for Casey Anthony was José Baez. That is officially correct. In reality, I have come to believe that the mastermind guiding the strategy of the trial, and particularly everything that has happened with Casey since the trial, was J. Cheney Mason. Cheney was and is the seasoned veteran of dozens of capital murder cases, while Baez had only a few years of practice under his belt.

My take on the defense was that José Baez frequently appeared at a loss, as he was consistently ruled against and overruled by Judge Belvin Perry from the very beginning of the trial until the end. By contrast, Cheney Mason generally appeared confident and polished and had far fewer motions and rulings against him. According to my reconstruction of events, in the back rooms of the Anthony trial, Cheney’s direction was generally followed. Regardless of title, it seems to me that Cheney was in charge. Certainly, he was the most influential, and in my opinion, the most effective member of the defense team.

In the interviews, Cheney repeatedly told me stories about how José offered and wanted to quit, because of the many rulings that Perry made against him and the opinion that he believed that Perry disliked him – had it in for him, and that Casey was therefore being deprived of effective counsel by his continued presence and participation. Cheney’s response was that he hadn’t signed on as lead counsel, didn’t want the job and that if José left, Cheney would be right behind him. How much of this is false modesty, I honestly don’t know. I did form an opinion that the real reason Cheney did not take over as lead counsel was more a strategic one for his own career purposes. By staying in the second chair, Cheney could ultimately take as much or as little credit for the success or failure of the case as he wanted. If, as I came to believe he expected, the case was lost and Casey was convicted, he could easily distance himself from the loss by blaming it on Baez' lack of experience. If, on the other hand, they won, he could take most of the credit - if not in the court of public opinion, certainly among his peers in the legal profession, whose opinions he valued far more. That appears to be what he has done.

Again, my opinion, is that I believe that it is easier to believe in the tooth fairy than to believe that a wealthy, expensive and high powered attorney like Cheney Mason took this case pro-bono (without compensation) in the purely unselfish interest of seeing that justice was done. Some of this was revealed to me in some early meetings that were not recorded. However, I have no trouble remembering what was said. Cheney clearly spelled out his motivation. He expected to make money on this case, in excess of the six hundred thousand dollars he claimed he was owed in legal fees for his time expended on the case. Keep this figure in mind, it will come back repeatedly. At the time this plan was first disclosed to me, I had no reason to believe that there was anything wrong with it. I later found out that there was a lot wrong with it and that I was being duped into being an unwitting accessory.

Following is what I believe to be the Smoking Gun. This is a brief excerpt from one of many recorded conversations with J. Cheney Mason about Casey Anthony and the lawsuits against her. Later, it will be put into context:

Cheney Mason: Why are we doing all of this?

The Author: Because everybody thinks she’s going to be getting a big chunk of money.

Cheney Mason: Well, by the time she does, she’ll bankrupt these fuckers. She delays getting her money, she finishes her probation, she immediately files a goddamn bankruptcy and discharges whatever the court does here.

Much of this book contains my opinions and should be taken as such. I have attempted to clearly identify and qualify opinions to differentiate them from factual information. Whether or not any charges are brought against anybody will be determined by the appropriate courts of law, not by me. My opinions that chargeable offenses have been and are being committed by Team Casey, are just that - opinions. I claim my First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of the press to express my opinions.

This document contains dialogue and quotations received by various methods. Much of it was taken from conversations in the office of J. Cheney Mason Esq., attorney for Casey Anthony, when it was formerly located in the Bank of America Building in downtown Orlando, where the office was located, during and immediately following Casey Anthony’s trial. Some is from contemporaneous notes of conversations I had with Cheney Mason. Some is from recollections of spontaneous conversations between Cheney and myself. Most of it came from transcriptions of digitally recorded interviews transcribed by two dear friends who would rather not have their names appear. They know who they are, and how much I appreciate their efforts.

The recorded interviews were done on a hand held RCA recorder that belongs to me and was always placed on Cheney’s desk in plain sight with his permission. I carried the recorder in plain sight at all times in the office so that everyone involved might know that they were subject to recording. There are recordings that picked up others in the office in very minor, background ways, nothing substantive. None of these were used.

A few times in the transcriptions, we erroneously refer to tape as if there were tape recordings of the meetings. There was and is no tape. The recordings were made digitally. In order to preserve them and prevent the recorder from re-recording over them, and to protect them from loss due to battery failure, or from any other unforeseen problem resulting from the limitations of the equipment, the audio files were dumped down to my home computer. The original files that resulted from this process still exist. However, the date stamp is rewritten every time a file is opened and closed. Therefore, the date stamps cannot be relied upon.

Some errors were made when the transcriptionist phonetically typed what she thought she heard. Some of these were sub-audible on the recording or garbled in delivery. Most of the time, I remembered exactly what was said, or it was obvious by the context. For example: one such occasion was a description of someone passing out fliers, in which the transcriptionist erroneously thought I said pliers. In as many of these I could catch, I substituted the correct wording. I don’t believe I missed any, but if I did, I apologize and ask the readers' indulgence.

I edited for language and grammar and removed scores of audible pauses such as uh and um, which Cheney is inclined to use incessantly. Sometimes, I edited for slow pace or condensed portions that were too fragmented or unwieldy, occasionally using comments on the same subject from different interviews. There was never any attempt to use these techniques to change the tone or meaning of what had been said. To the contrary, I used them only to expound and clarify. I removed some names and descriptions that I thought might be inflammatory or defamatory toward certain individuals or were, for whatever reasons, inappropriate. Many of these omissions were out of deference to Cheney and his standing in the legal community, which, as I stated, he values highly. Some, for example, involved personal slurs against other attorneys, judges and other participants in this and other trials. I would rather not make these public, if I can help it. Of course, if my recordings are subpoenaed in any court action arising from the disclosures in this book, I will obviously have no choice.

There is a non-disclosure agreement between Cheney and myself. However, there is a basic concept in law, backed by statutes and numerous decisions in Florida law, that says that a contract to commit or facilitate an illegal act is illegal. As I will elaborate upon in later chapter(s), I believe that the primary intent of this non-disclosure agreement was to obscure bankruptcy fraud - to prevent Casey Anthony’s creditors and the bankruptcy court from knowing the true value and plans by Casey Anthony and/or Cheney Mason to exploit and profit from her life story to the tune of millions of dollars. I have first hand knowledge of these plans, since they were revealed to me well in advance of their execution, and I believe it is my duty to the public and the courts to disclose them in the most effective way possible. That is the purpose of this book.

Two years to the day after she was acquitted of the murder of her two year old, Casey Anthony successfully negotiated the rights to her own story from the bankruptcy court for a paltry $25,000. A number of issues were raised in those negotiations:

• That a compromise was necessary to avoid protracted litigation over whether or not the Trustee could legally force Anthony to sell her memoirs.

• That the concept that Anthony’s life story was novel, and that neither side was able to find law or precedent on which to base either value or ownership.

• The parties also acknowledge that each side has made plausible arguments and that each bears some risk of losing the legal questions raised by the trustee’s motion.

• Bullet points are mine.

However, as you will see, overriding all of these considerations were Anthony’s assertions that she was living on the kindness of strangers, had no income, and no prospects of selling her story. The court was persuaded that it was accepting $25,000 for an almost certainly worthless asset, perhaps, as some media reported, it was merely to keep the story from being published at all. From my conversations with Cheney Mason, I believe that these assertions were clearly deceptive, and that Casey was living on a well orchestrated plan by Cheney Mason to invest in and sustain the value of her life story for his personal enrichment, in violation of the rules of the Bankruptcy Court and the rules and canons of ethics of the Florida Bar.

~Dedication To Caylee Marie~

By the time you get to be my age, you measure the passage of time in decades, rather than in years as you have since childhood. Instead of mere blocks of time, whatever their size, you see the past as a series of milestones, events, styles, cars, music, TV and movies. For a child of the 1950's, I remember like it was yesterday when Howdy Doody and The Mickey Mouse Club were on TV every afternoon, and almost every baby boomer watched. The only President we’d ever known was named Eisenhower until we had to get used to a new President named Kennedy, only to be appalled and traumatized by his sudden and totally unexpected assassination. I recall riding free as the wind with the top down in Sid Spiegel’s turquoise '55 T-Bird or sunken in the plush luxury of my uncle’s Cadillac with those enormous fins. Like most of my generation, I remember the Beatles; Vietnam; Hippies; Easy Rider; Woodstock; VW Microbuses; High School proms, homecomings. There were local bands from around here whose names you may even know – The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Outlaws and many others. I was lucky and proud to have been a member of that music scene as a radio personality and concert promoter. I was there when AM Radio made way for FM Stereo. I have vivid memories of college, marriage and the birth of my children and grandchildren. These are but a few of the images that defined my life.

Caylee Marie Anthony will never have a life. She