As the trial of Mollie Fry and Dale Schafer entered its first day of evidence, the prosecution made the bold move of leading with its most controversial witness – a young man named Paul Maggy whose disclosures had established the foundation of the government’s case. Extensive cooperation with the feds had not won him many friends amongst the defendants’ supporters, but it did win him a police escort to protect his movements. In all likelihood, Maggy faced nothing more than dirty looks from courtroom observers, but the fear of reprisal was still strong. This was the prosecution’s star witness, and they weren’t taking any chances.
In addition to the habitual snitching, Maggy has been at the heart of many of the difficulties the defendants have experienced in this case…the most recent of which was a motion that almost cost them their lawyers.
During the final year leading up to trial, the prosecution used Maggy in an attempt to get rid of defense counsel Tony Serra and Laurence Lichter. Since a lawyer who worked in the same office as Serra and Lichter had once represented Maggy, the prosecution claimed this created a conflict of interest that disqualified the attorneys. A lengthy evidentiary hearing was devoted to scrutinizing the question of whether an office shared by lawyers constitutes a de facto law firm. In the end, Serra and Lichter were allowed to stay on the case, but only after careful consideration by two federal judges. This was just a single episode in a series of pre-trial hearings that involved Maggy, who was featured so prominently in the 600-page case discovery that he seemed to become larger than life.
As this star witness took the stand, all eyes were fastened upon him, studying every detail. His suit appeared a bit too large for his slender figure, making the 35 year-old look boyish even beyond his naturally youthful good looks. His black hair was shaved short, and his dark eyes were framed by arching eyebrows. A thin goatee was sprouting along the jaw line of his tan face, completing the representation of a slick but slightly malicious look.
In spite of the intensive visual scrutiny, Maggy appeared calm and confident. He looked both Fry and Schafer unflinchingly in the eye as he pointed them out for the court record. If he had qualms of conscience about testifying against his former friends and employers, they didn’t show in the least. To the contrary, Maggy displayed perfectly poised posture as he began his testimony.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Anne Pings handled the direct examination, which revealed little more than the bare facts of the witness’s involvement with the defendants. Maggy testified to meeting Fry and Schafer in the fall of 1999 during a seminar he attended in Lake Tahoe with his former girlfriend Traci Coggins. Maggy was already in trouble with the law at this time, fighting cultivation charges that he would ultimately resolve by providing information on Fry and Schafer in exchange for leniency. But the case against their new friends didn’t raise a red flag for the doctor and lawyer, and instead the two couples hit it off right away. Coggins quickly became Fry’s personal assistant, and shortly thereafter, Maggy was hired in the same capacity for Schafer. From this vantage point, the witness observed the activities of his employers close-up…and this is exactly what Pings was relying upon in her questioning.
Dr. Mollie Fry
Maggy described a flourishing business related to “marijuana recommendations,” which began in the small town of Cool and quickly expanded to Oakland, Lake Tahoe, and various other locations where the defendants would rent space for the purpose of holding clinics. During his seven months of employment, Maggy reported, his bosses saw an estimated 100 customers per week.
But Pings was less interested in the patients who came for recommendations, and focused instead on questioning Maggy about other transactions he witnessed in the offices of the defendants. To this end, Maggy was happy to comply, and described a series of so-called “drug deals” arranged by Schafer.
The first of these occurred in February or March of 2000, at which time Maggy said that Schafer bought 3 pounds of high-grade marijuana at a price of $3700 per pound. According to the witness, Schafer then divided up the marijuana into smaller baggies and kept them in a blue duffel bag in his office so that he could sell them to the customers that visited him and his wife.
Dale Schafer
Maggy also claimed that Schafer deposited marijuana at the Tahoe home of Matt Egan, who was instructed by Schafer to deliver the marijuana to local customers at a price of $45 for an eighth of an ounce. In this arrangement, Maggy reported, Egan was allowed to keep $5 off the top and the remaining $40 went back to Schafer. A successful objection from the defense was the only thing that kept Maggy from stating how much money this arrangement would net Schafer per pound, leaving jurors and courtroom observers doing the math silently in their heads.
Satisfied that she had produced evidence of the sale of processed marijuana, Pings moved on to address sales of what the prosecution referred to as “clones” or “starter plants.” As she questioned Maggy, the witness detailed various areas of the defendants’ home where he had seen marijuana growing: in a garage grow room, on a hill behind the house, and in a concrete room under the hill that was referred to as “the bunker.” Maggy testified that Schafer told him the plants were for people who came into the office, but didn’t specify whether they would be sold or given away. The plants growing at the defendants’ home, according to Maggy, originally came from marijuana clones purchased elsewhere.
Maggy told the court that he was sent by Schafer to arrange such purchases and to inspect the facilities of those who would be supplying clones. One of these inspections, the witness said, was with a man named Donald Riniker, whose garden supplied a standing order of a hundred clones per week to Schafer. After that, Maggy recalled a specific order by Schafer to provide $1000 for the purchase of 100 clones from a couple in Calaveras County by the name of Rick and Sue Garner. Maggy also claimed to have knowledge of a transfer of 500 clones from the Garners to Schafer, but few details were supplied on this alleged sale and it ultimately amounted to little more than a mention.
One of these clone exchanges, according to the witness, went in the reverse of the established order. Specifically, Maggy testified that he had seen Schafer give 40 clones to a glass-blower named Sean Cramblett and commonly known as “Nacho.” In exchange for the clones, Maggy said, Schafer received a number of glass pipes.
It was then that the visual portion of the examination commenced, and jurors were given a slide-show presentation guided by the prosecutor’s questioning. The content came from photos law enforcement officers had taken during their raid of Fry and Schafer’s property in September 2001, and included views of the house, garage, hill and bunker room. Although Maggy had not been present on the day the pictures were taken, he described their contents meticulously, from the grow equipment in the garage and the bunker, to the plants growing on the hill. He was unable to give any guess about the amount of plants shown on the picture of the hill, but testified that they were, to his knowledge, marijuana plants. Aside from a close up on some of the buds, this hill shot was the only photo in this series that depicted plants. The rest featured only growing equipment, but a seemingly endless array of it: exhaust fans, lighting tubes, aerators, reflective insulation, plant nutrients, rock wool cubes, trays and flats. By the time the lights came back on in the courtroom, the audience had heard several tedious lists of these materials.
But the recitation of records had only just begun. The prosecutor’s next focus was on lists of customer names that had been gathered at the Fry/Schafer office. These lists were sign-up sheets for a program called Home Health Horticulture Research (HHHR) that Maggy identified as an incarnation of Schafer’s desire to help his customers grow marijuana for themselves. Maggy admitted to doing the research for HHHR and developing the prototype “kit,” which cost $400 each and consisted of lights, plant nutrients and 6 marijuana clones ranging in height from 8 to 12 inches. He continued by saying that customers would sign up for these kits after emerging from their consultations with Fry. At the end of each week, Maggy said, it had been his job to process the lists and divide the customers up by region in order to facilitate delivery of the requested grow kits. He referred to this process as “dispatching.”
The direct examination had nearly ended at this point, but, in true fashion, Maggy would not be finished until he had implicated a few other individuals. To this effort, he named several people involved in the assembly and delivery of the kits: Schafer’s semi-permanent houseguest Mike Harvey, Schafer’s son Jeremy, and Randolph Gambourie, a former boyfriend of Schafer’s daughter Heather.
Pings then wrapped up the loose ends, asking Maggy why he left Schafer’s employment. “I was afraid – things were getting crazy,” the witness said soberly. When asked how this was different from the marijuana club that he later set up on his own, Maggy began to state that a doctor ought not to be a provider of medicine. However, he tripped over himself in the middle of the thought, no doubt considering the court’s restriction on using the terms “medical” and “medicine” when referring to marijuana. “I just didn’t see writing a recommendation and then providing what the recommendation was for,” was the explanation he finally settled upon.
And for the final happy ending, the audience was treated to a verbal snapshot of Maggy’s current life – the witness described running a flooring business in Florida, where he’s married and the proud father of twin babies. “I’m looking to move up,” Maggy said with a cautious smile, before being turned over to Serra for cross-examination.
Dr. Mollie Fry, husband Dale Schafer and defense attorney Tony Serra
If Pings had navigated into the doldrums with her questioning, Serra was the perfect man to steer the proceedings back on course. Once the defense attorney took the floor, the conversation was instantly livelier, and the hotly contested objections soon began streaming in.
Serra’s first triumph came as he redirected Maggy to the photograph of plants growing on the hill behind Fry and Schafer’s house. “Is this photo similar to how it looked when you were there?” he asked the witness.
After Maggy affirmed the similarity, Serra had a new request. “Will you, in your expertise as an expert grower, point out what is a plant?”
“I’m not an expert grower,” Maggy grumbled.
Undaunted by the witness’s resistance, Serra moved right on with his strategy. Using a laser pointer, he circled one of the plants in the photo. “This looks like a plant,” he said cheerfully. “Is it?”
Maggy agreed, following Serra through the same procedure for identifying all of the plants shown in the picture. At the end of the exercise, the defense attorney asked the witness to concur with a count of four or five plants, and Maggy obliged. Serra’s tactic appeared to produce its intended effect of making the plant count seem rather trivial. This clearly defined count, topping off at a total of five, sounded far smaller in scale than the former portrayal of a whole hill of marijuana plants.
Continuing to diminish perceptions of the harvest yield, Serra scored from the witness a number of concessions regarding the large amount of unusable material in each marijuana plant. Adding in the ravages of a high mortality rate, Serra painted an extraordinarily bleak picture of his client’s cultivation efforts. He questioned the witness about plagues of spider mites, epidemics of root-rot, lethal effects of over-watering, and feeding frenzies of deer and rodents. By the end of the series of inquiries, the defense attorney had created the impression that the survival of a marijuana plant in Schafer’s garden was indeed a rare and miraculous event.
Maggy, however, was not entirely willing to go along with the assessment. Once the witness voiced his opposition, Serra got down to specifics. “While you were in the employ of Mr. Schafer, didn’t a large number of plants suffer from over-watering?”
“I don’t remember,” Maggy replied. “I was just asked to come and look at them because they were turning yellow.”
Serra, glowing with confidence, asked Maggy to recall an interview he had with Pings and another government agent. “Do you remember telling them on that occasion that you observed Riniker’s marijuana plants at the defendants’ house and recalled that most had died because they were over-watered?”
“I didn’t say that,” Maggy insisted defiantly.
Serra swung around to eye the prosecutor. “She told me you didn’t lie,” he said of Pings. “And I know it’s not a lie – it’s a police report!” There was more than a little sarcasm in Serra’s quip, but the fact of the matter was that he produced the contested document in a flourish and put it squarely into the witness’s hands. “Do you now concede that you told officers most had died because they were over-watered?” he asked after Maggy had looked over the report.
The witness admitted his error with an expression of defeat, but Serra was compelled to draw just a little more attention to Maggy’s inaccuracy. “This is not a false police report, is it?”
“I don’t believe so, no,” Maggy said meekly, beginning to lose his footing.
Moving to another topic, Serra asked the witness if, following his debriefing that morning, he had spoken to anyone connected with the case. Maggy initially said that he had not done so, but when Coggins’ name was mentioned, he affirmed that he had spoken to her earlier that day. In a similar pattern, Maggy at first denied that he had spoken about anything relating to his testimony, but once confronted with specific questioning, revealed that he had asked Coggins to refresh his memory about how much he earned and by whom he was paid while employed by Schafer. These were indeed matters Maggy had testified about on the stand, and his deceptive evasiveness under Serra’s questioning contributed to the slow crumble of his credibility.
Remaining on the topic of collusion with Coggins, Serra began to address the patient lists and blank recommendation forms that were discovered in the couple’s house. At first, Maggy tried repeatedly to deny that he had possessed these forms, coyly acting as though he had no idea what Serra was talking about. Eventually, however, the defense attorney established that these documents had been found in a home shared by Coggins and Maggy while they were living as fugitives, but even then, the witness tried to pin all responsibility on his ex-girlfriend.
“You had them because you took them from Dr. Fry and Dale Schafer,” Serra uttered a typically ambiguous hybrid of a question and an accusation.
“I believe these were copies Traci had to keep with her everywhere she went,” the witness attempted, playing on his former girlfriend’s role as a notary. However, Maggy’s claim deflated when faced with the fact that these documents were seized long after the couple left the employment of Fry and Schafer.
“Isn’t it true that you spread a rumor all over northern California that Dr. Fry and Dale Schafer were no longer able to provide medical marijuana to people, and you were taking over the patient list, and you were soliciting for the possible transfer of marijuana to them!?” It was a mouthful of an allegation, but Serra managed to deliver it all skillfully in a tone of escalating outrage.
The witness denied it without comment, but the defense attorney had already made his point. Now it was time for him to use his incisors. “Isn’t it true that you thought you would be arrested and so you split to Arizona, and you picked up a moral turpitude charge for theft because you took money for a bike and then you did not provide it back, either in money or in bicycle?”
Maggy admitted this, and also verified that he had been convicted on this charge. Serra then asked him if he had also been charged with a felony for impersonating his brother to a police officer, and Maggy again confirmed the truth of the description. “And, obviously, you’re a felon, as you sit there,” Serra said in summary.
“Yes.” Whether sincere or simulated, the witness did an excellent job of sounding disheartened.
But the mention of Maggy’s felonies was not meant merely to illustrate the details of his criminal past, but also to expose his motivations for cooperating with the government and for offering himself as an informant. To this end, the defense attorney brought Maggy’s memory back to his testimony with the grand jury and to the meetings he had with the government after he decided to cooperate. Serra wanted to know how the witness had been restrained during these encounters, and so Maggy described being shackled the entire time in metal handcuffs, chains and leg irons.
Having circled a bit during the cross-examination, Serra finally went in for the kill. “You were facing a 5 year sentence – isn’t that why you cooperated?” he asked pointedly.
The witness responded like a boy scout. “I cooperated because I wanted to put this behind me and accept responsibility for my part of this.”
Serra poked at the façade of innocence. “But didn’t you testify so you could get out of a mandatory minimum?”
“I just told you why,” Maggy said, a hint of agitation showing through. “I wanted to put it behind me. I wanted to take responsibility for what I had done.”
Watching a look of distress begin to emerge on her witness, Pings objected on grounds that the question had already been asked and answered. Judge Damrell appeared to agree, telling Serra flatly, “Counsel, he answered your question.”
“Ah, but from my perspective, that’s wiggling out of a question,” the defense attorney clarified, before turning right back to Maggy. “You’re saying you cooperated out of patriotism, not to get out of a sentence?”
“I knew what I did was wrong,” Maggy shot right back. “I was taking responsibility for it.”
With growing exasperation, Pings made another objection, this time claiming harassment. The judge ordered Serra to move on, and this time there was the sound of a rattlesnake’s tail in his tone. The defense attorney submitted, at least for the moment, addressing a few less relevant matters before eventually circling back to the issue of Maggy’s motivation for testifying.
“So you’ve indicated that you weren’t interested in a downward departure?” Serra asked the witness in a manner that was deceptively casual.
“I didn’t say that I wasn’t interested,” Maggy tried to explain. “I said that isn’t why I cooperated.”
“But you didn’t tell it that way to the jury, did you?” Serra asked, pouncing. “You said, ‘Oh, I’m not doing this to reduce my sentence. I just want to get it behind me. I’m just patriotic.’”
As expected, Serra’s cartoon-voiced ridicule of the witness’s testimony was met with an objection and an interruption by the judge. The defense attorney then resumed, but from a different direction. “You walked when you were sentenced, didn’t you?” he asked the witness.
Maggy admitted that this was true, and also verified that he had violated the terms of his supervised release on numerous occasions. By the defense attorney’s account, after Maggy had tested positive for marijuana and gotten caught with marijuana in his car, he threw himself on the mercy of the court and begged for drug counseling. His request was granted, but he was quickly thrown out of rehab for developing an “inappropriate relationship” while in the program. The defense attorney extracted these tidbits, but focused most intensely on dramatizing Maggy’s pleas for leniency. Serra said that Maggy had “violated a promise to the court to obey all laws and conform to the rules of supervised release,” but was repeatedly given another chance. Mocking Maggy’s request for drug counseling, Serra made the ceiling shake with his theatrical recreation of the feigned tearful appeal. “‘I am a marijuana addict! Put me in rehab! I am so addicted to marijuana!’”
Pings, visibly annoyed, broke in, “Your honor, can we lower the decibel level in here?”
“Oh, that’s my nature,” Serra apologized with a humble lowering of his head. “I didn’t mean to intimidate the witness.”
It was a clever choice of words on Serra’s part. The defense attorney played a card that stirred Maggy’s machismo, and it worked like a charm. “I’m not intimidated,” the witness declared.
“You don’t look intimidated,” Serra conceded amiably. Then the defense attorney began to skillfully play out his hand. “But you were scared when you were arrested, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” the witness answered cautiously.
Serra detailed the conditions of Maggy’s experience: a young man, bound in handcuffs and leg irons, was interrogated persistently about crimes for which he faced years and years in prison. As he described each element of the situation, the drama of Serra’s portrayal continued to rise. At its climax, he bellowed at the witness, “You were scared as hell, weren’t you!?”
Maggy could give only a simple response. “Yes.”
“And you did that because you were a coward and you didn’t want to pay your own dues,” Serra shouted, referencing Maggy’s cooperation with the government. This time, the defense attorney was escalating his intensity at an even faster rate. “You would snitch out anyone – even your own mother!”
Maggy’s denial was drowned out as Pings shouted back an objection, calling Serra’s questioning argumentative.
Serra pushed his rhetoric forward immediately, not even pausing for the judge’s decision. “But you snitched out your girlfriend, didn’t you, to save your own skin?” he hissed at Maggy.
Pings was taken aback by Serra’s relentlessness, this time reiterating her objection in tune with the frenetic energy of the room.
It was a dramatic moment to choose for the trial’s first weekend break, but Judge Damrell demonstrated a fondness for cliffhanger endings and cut off the testimony at this suspenseful spot. With the instruction to discuss the case with no one and expose themselves to no related media, jurors went home for three days of reflection. Serra’s accusations remained fresh in memory, his vivid images burned into the retina of the mind’s eye and the tones of his theatrical voices echoing in the ear. Eager to hear more tales of a snitch who would rat out his own mother, courtroom observers salivated over the resumption of the cross-examination. Paul Maggy, no doubt, spent the weekend dreading it.
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