Sal Gabrini: His House of Cards (10 page)

“It’s going
to be guilty, ladies,” Attorney Mark Price proclaimed.
 
“I saw those jurors’ faces.
 
They couldn’t wait to get in that jury room
and throw the book at our client.”

“I say an
acquittal,” said a second attorney.
 
“I
saw their faces too.”

But Mark
couldn’t believe it.
 
“Not guilty?
 
Are you joking?”

“Where’s the
evidence, Mark?
 
The prosecutor didn’t
present any evidence.
 
Just a lot of
innuendo.”

Mark ignored
the second attorney.
 
“What do you think,
Gem?” he asked instead.
 
“Guilty or not
guilty?”

They were
walking out of the courthouse after a trial that had just wrapped, and they
were now on verdict watch.
 
All three had
been appointed by the judge to work the case, with Gemma being appointed chief
counsel.
 
But although she privately
agreed with Mark’s assessment, she never speculated publicly.
 
“We’ll see what the jurors say,” she
said.
 
“No sense in guessing now.”

“I’ll be
shocked if they find that boy not guilty,” Mark said.
 
“We didn’t have a good enough explanation for
that gold chain evidence.
 
But stranger things
have happened.”

“Yeah,” the
second attorney said, “like the three of us winning a case.”

All three of
them laughed.
 
They handled a lot of
criminal cases.
 
Which meant there was a
lot of plea bargains and predetermined punishments.
 
But their current client refused to cop a
plea.
 
Now they were in recess, waiting
for the verdict to come in, and were walking to their cars.
 
The judge promised to give them an hour’s
notice when the verdict came in, which would give them plenty of time to get
back provided they were no more than a half hour away.
 
Gemma’s law firm was ten minutes away.
 
She would rather wait there.

But as she
and her colleagues stood in the parking lot and continued to talk about the
case, and what went wrong and what went right, she saw something odd in her
periphery.
 
Although they were in a sea
of cars, in a parking lot, one car stood out.
 
It seemed to stop at the far end of the lane, directly in front of them.
 
Sal had taught her how to be observant, so
she turned her head and looked.
 
As soon
as she did, she saw what appeared to be a shotgun come out of the car’s
window.
 
And she didn’t hesitate.

“Get down!”
she screamed frantically to her colleagues, and all three of them dropped to
the ground as bullets whizzed past them.
 
Then they heard the car burn rubber speeding away.

Gemma looked
up.
 
Both of her colleagues were
fine.
 
But she suddenly heard cries of
pain behind her.
 
When she looked back
she quickly realized that another colleague, who had been walking behind them,
wasn’t so fortunate.
 
At least one of the
bullets whizzed past them, but struck her.
 
Gemma rushed to her aid.

The
conference room was packed with Sal’s senior management staff.
 
His all-white, all-male senior management
staff.
 
They were all department heads
and there were twelve departments.
 
Sal
sat at the head of the table.
 
He did not
beat around the bush.
 
It had been four
days since those discrimination allegations.
 
Although the lawsuit was ultimately dropped, the corporation, at least
the Vegas headquarters that he was responsible for, was still reeling.
 
Because that lawsuit, trumped up though it
had been, exposed an unsettling truth.
 
Diversity was non-existent in the Vegas office.
 
And it was all Sal’s fault.

“There will
be more expansion, as you already know,” he said to his senior staff.
 
“That plan has been in the works since we
opened this location.
 
So there’s going
to be room to hire new faces in that respect.
 
But there’s going to be a reorganization of our current structure
too.
 
Some of you will retain your
positions, some will be reassigned, and some will be demoted.
 
It all depends on how well your respective
departments have fared under your stewardship.
 
And I’ll be honest with you.
 
I
wasn’t going to make this review until the end of the year.
 
But that lawsuit, even though it was nothing
but a pack of lies, did reveal a problem.
 
It revealed our lack of diversity in the upper ranks.
 
I’ve hired an all-white senior staff, and
you’ve hired an all-white mid-management staff.
 
There is not one minority manager in this building.
 
Not one.
 
We have minorities in front line positions.
 
We have an excellent mix there.
 
But we have no black managers here.
 
At the higher levels.
 
That has got to change.”

“The problem
is,” one of his managers interjected, “is finding minorities with the kind of
qualifications we need.”

“Bullshit,”
Sal shot back.
 
“And you know why I know
it’s bullshit?
 
Because it was the same
bull I was telling myself.
 
We couldn’t
find qualified applicants because we weren’t looking for qualified
applicants.
 
A position comes available
and it’s word of mouth about this guy or that guy and we hire based on what our
friends tell us about them.
 
We keep it
all in the family and the family just so happens to look like us.
 
But I’m serving notice today that that’s
changing.
 
There will be extremely
qualified African Americans in the highest reaches of this organization.
 
Some of them might even be your bosses.
 
So get used to it.
 
The old way is out.
 
I’m only ashamed I didn’t toss it out long ago.”

“I never
knew you to be reactionary, sir,” another one of his managers said.

Sal looked
at him.
 
“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The manager
swallowed hard, but he did not back down.
 
“It’s not just that lawsuit, is it, sir?
 
Didn’t that video on YouTube have something to do with this sudden need
for us to fix what isn’t broken?”

“Of course
that’s not it!” a third manager proclaimed, and some of the others nodded their
agreement as if their only focus was not about improving the company, but about
staying in Sal’s good graces.

But Sal
wasn’t going along as they had thought he would.
 
“He makes a good point,” Sal admitted.

They glanced
at each other, unsure where Sal was going with this.
 
He wasn’t usually this open to criticism.

“That video
is despicable and I’m ashamed to have harbored that kind of hatefulness,” Sal
said.
 
“But I was that person.
 
I was awful.
 
I was worse than even that video captured.
 
It shamed me, but I had already realized,
when that reporter asked me about my percentage of minority managers, that we
had a problem.
 
And I disagree with
you.
 
I’m not fixing what isn’t broken,
because it is broken.
 
We are not the
best we can be if we have no diversity of opinion or experiences.
 
This train is leaving the station with you or
without you.
 
But it’s leaving,” he made
clear.
 
“Are there any further
questions?”

The room
door opened as Sal waited for another question, and one of his assistants
walked in.
 
As one of his managers began
to speak about whether or not demoted managers will be allowed to keep their
same salaries, Sal’s assistant whispered in his ear.

“There’s
been a shooting at the courthouse, sir,” she whispered.

Sal’s eyes
stretched in shock and he looked at his assistant.
 
“My wife?”

“She’s fine,
sir.
 
She called to tell you that she’s
fine.
 
But she was one of the ones in the
line of fire.”

Sal
immediately jumped up from the table while his manager was still asking his
question. “This meeting’s adjourned,” he announced, and hurried out.

All of his
staffers looked at each other.
 
They
didn’t quite know what to make of this new direction Sal was forcing them to
take.
 
Who was this guy?
 
He was changing before their very eyes!
 
They knew that lawsuit and video had
something to do with this change in him, but they were willing to bet that that
wife of his was the main culprit.
 
She
was driving this sudden need for diversity that wasn’t even an issue a week
ago.

But some
knew the writing was on the wall.
 
They
had to get onboard or, as Sal made clear, get left behind.

Others
weren’t willing to stick around at all, and were making phone calls to other
major corporations even as they were leaving the meeting.
 
The writing was on the wall for them
too.
 
Their departments were
underperforming and Sal’s reorganization review was going to bear that
out.
 
They decided to get out while they
still had a senior management title to tout.

Still others
were in a wait and see mode.
 
Because Sal
was changing.
 
He was becoming more
businesslike and less gangster with every passing day, and this meeting only
confirmed it for them.
 
He was different
now.
 
But only time would tell, they
decided, if this differentness would last.

For their
sakes, they hoped not.

Gemma was
standing in the parking lot, near the cordoned-off crime scene, when Sal’s
Porsche pulled up.
 
Because Sal was well
known around the courthouse as Gemma’s husband, he was able to get past the
tape and over to her.
 
When she saw him
coming her way, she hurried to him.
 
And
they hugged vigorously.

Sal pulled
back.
 
“You didn’t get hurt?”

“I’m
alright,” Gemma said.
 
“Just a bruised
elbow.”

Sal quickly
looked at the elbow.
 
He looked so
serious that Gemma felt a need to reassure him.
 
“It’s okay,” she added.

“What
happened?” he asked.

 
“I saw this car pull up and somebody pointed a
shotgun our way.
 
I yelled for everybody
to get down, and I got down too.”

“Did you get
a look at the guy?” Sal asked.

Gemma shook
her head.
 
“I didn’t see him.
 
I just saw the gun.”

“Did anybody
get hurt?”

“One
attorney did.
 
But the paramedics said
she should be okay.”

“And you’re
okay?” he asked again.
 
Gemma looked
flustered to him.

But she
continued to put on the brave front.
 
“I’m fine, Sal.
 
I promise you I
am.
 
I wasn’t the target.”

Sal
frowned.
 
“Says who?”

Gemma looked
at him.
 
“They didn’t hit me.”

“Because you
saw it coming!”

Gemma stared
at Sal.
 
“This is a courthouse, Sal.
 
There were plenty of attorneys around.
 
They could have been targeting any one of us
or all of us just because we were attorneys.
 
The police seems to think it was the latter.”

“That they
were targeting everybody?”

A courthouse
public relations director came over to Gemma. “That’s their working theory,”
she said.

But it
wasn’t Sal’s working theory.

“Excuse me,”
the PR Director said, “but we need you for a press availability, Gem.
 
If you don’t mind?”

She did
mind.
 
Sal could tell she really didn’t
want to discuss the matter any further, let alone to the press.
 
But she knew it was her civic duty and if Sal
knew anything, he knew Gemma never skirted her duty.