The Dark Anniversary That Is July 18

Roy Crogan was cooperating with the enemy. I did not know it that day, but given the amount of debt Roy had at the time, I am not surprised to have later learned he was running intelligence to the very person against whom I had blown the whistle for committing judicial fraud.

Roy needed money, and he was an easy mark. He once admitted he ‘had larceny in his heart’, as he used to put it. He was the perfect tool for James Joseph Howard, Jr., who was well attached to the Broward Sheriff’s Office via his family’s helicopter company, which provided flight training to a pilot or two in the BSO aviation unit.

To this day, I have no idea how much Roy or any of his compatriots, including one particular individual of the female persuasion, managed to ‘earn’ from Jim while feeding him information about me, the comings and goings of my attorneys, conversations overheard, copied emails, and the like. It would take about 17 months before we learned the truth of his duplicity. I would continue working with Roy for another 10.

Blowing the whistle had happened at the end of May, with my split from Jim Howard and the helicopter hangar happening over the Memorial Day weekend in 2008, and in the days that immediately followed.

For over ten years, Jim had been variously a colleague, client, friend, and recently, a legal compatriot-in-arms in a pair of substantial cases against Westwood One Radio Networks and its subsidiary, Metro Networks, a former employer of mine, and a former client of Jim’s helicopter business.

As my head had been clearing from my decade-plus long drug addiction, my ethics had been clearing as well. My participation in what was, essentially, a lavishly-deceptive legal complaint, had no longer been sitting well with me, and I finally walked away, rather noisily, I would add.

July 18 marked a point about six weeks into what would become a sordid, years-long affair, but I certainly did not expect what came that day.

I suppose I should have presumed such a thing could happen. I had already been beaten, when it was discovered I had blown the whistle, but what was coming in the next few minutes, on that day, still caught me off-guard.

I had been working in the photo and graphic production area of Crogan Studios, a place I also happened to be living, since I was still in deep financial chaos, myself, in the aftermath of a long-running drug addiction.

“Danny?!” Roy’s voice chimed from the front of the shop, an office and an ante-room, of sorts, where people would gather before being brought into the studio for their photo or video shoot. “Danny? There’s a couple guys here who want to talk to you.” His voice was laced with a faded upstate New York accent, and he was not particular about grammar.

As I walked toward the front of the building, I saw there were, indeed, two guys. Both were adorned with uniforms from the Broward Sheriff’s Office. My heart began pounding hard in my chest, and I felt my breath catch in my throat. Why were they here?

One of them, a tall and bulky figure, standing closest to the door separating the front office and the larger studio, asked the question, “Are you Mister Pryor?” It was clear by his inflection that this was merely an early, and obvious, litmus test. Will I lie and say, ‘no’?

I have no high regard for police officers and sheriff’s deputies, particularly those in the South. I find a substantial percentage among their ranks to be sociopaths, and not particularly bright sociopaths, at that. They are primarily just dangerous, as far as I am concerned.

Attempting to put such feelings aside, I tried to conceal my irritation as I replied in the affirmative, emerging fully into the front office. Then the hammer fell quickly.

“We have a warrant here for your arrest,” the bulky, tall man continued. “Do you know Jim Howard or … ?”

He started reviewing his notes on a small pad he kept in a shirt pocket, but he continued quickly, as though he suddenly recalled the name or was just acting a show; I was not sure which applied.

“Did you used to work up at Helicopters of America?”

As the taller deputy asked the question, the second deputy moved around us into the doorway to the studio, a position that was clearly designed to block me from returning to the back offices, or out the back door.

I had no plan to run, but I still did not know the specific charge or charges that had been leveled against me.

Since working with Jim and being at the helicopter hangar was hardly a secret, and scarcely incriminating, it seemed, I answered in the affirmative once more, an annoyed “Yeah!”

The bulky deputy began to move around my right side, ordering me to turn via a circular gesture with a balled hand, with the index finger pointing downward, as a stylus drawing in the air.

“Are you aware there are cameras at that hangar recording everything that goes on there?” he asked. “Mr. Howard says you stole some property and took things out of the hangar that didn’t belong to you.

“We have you on video walking out of there,” he continued.

Before turning fully to be handcuffed, I had to interject a touch of realism into this rather surreal moment. “Are you aware I am testifying against Jim Howard for fraud?”

Neither deputy answered, so I broke their silence as I continued.

“Did it occur to you to check out the story,” I began asking, “or did you simply take his word for it and come here?”

The larger of the two deputies had me turned fully toward the other officer, and as the cuffs zipped tightly around my wrists, the smaller of the two offered his own remark.

“Well, our investigation shows you committed a grand theft,” he said.

My response was an immediate retort. “You didn’t do a very good job of investigating then, did you?”

There was no verbal reply, but from the smaller of the two deputies, there was a barely perceptible and brief nod, almost like a tightly-sprung bobblehead had been bumped.

That nod could have meant anything, I suppose, but it was all the evidence I needed, in that moment, to know there had, in fact, been no investigation. Jim had likely simply shown them camera footage of me leaving the building, telling them the I had stolen goods in my possession.

I would later learn the footage was of me leaving the building in late May carrying a portable safety box. That was the so-called evidence.

I owned the safety box, having just purchased it at a Lowe’s hardware store only a few weeks earlier. I had been using it to keep written passwords and notecards with Metro and Westwood case information on them organized in a safe place.

The acquisition of the hangar’s camera footage, and a sworn statement there had been stolen goods in a box seen on that footage, had been the extent of the investigation.

Time would prove my surmise correct, but my immediate future involved taking a ride to a secure building downtown. I would post bail and get released from jail around 5 a.m. the following morning.

I met an attorney friend, Donnie Goodwin, who has since become my life partner, for breakfast at Fort Lauderdale’s infamous “Flo”, The Floridian, an old diner that has become a landmark on Las Olas Boulevard, between Fort Lauderdale’s downtown and the beaches.

It was still predawn, and being a Saturday, there was scant traffic. I remember being relieved to eat something other than a jailhouse bag of cereal for breakfast. I ordered pancakes, with all the traditional artery-clogging accoutrements I could imagine, for a super-fat breakfast. There was plenty of coffee.

It would take another ten months for Roy Crogan and I to part company, and during that time he was providing information to Jim Howard, all while pretending to be a business partner in a new online venture with Donnie and I. It is the very business that today has become Turnpikes.com.

In the intervening months, civil subpoenas would be issued, the criminal case would be dropped, and then refiled - I came very close to committing suicide when it was refiled, and I have a long scar on my left arm to show for it, although I was sobbing so profusely at the time, I could not keep pressure on the blade as I moved it up my forearm. I earned a short visit to a special hospital ward over that incident.

What I did not know at the time, but would learn about two months later, was that Jim had been indicted by a grand jury seated in the U.S. District Court. He was charged with three federal counts related to the international sale of a helicopter he did not own.

Broward County did not relent in its case against me, however, for over two years. Even after we produced the receipt for the purchase of the safety box, the prosecution continued its case against me.

It did not matter the circumstances surrounding the instant offense they say I committed; it also did not seem to matter to them that Jim had been indicted for the very same kind of behaviors for which I had blown the whistle, myself. It also did not seem to matter to them that the U.S. Attorney’s office had subpoenaed me to testify in the federal criminal case, against Jim.

The entire affair was coated in a rancid film of corruption, it seemed to me. The Broward County State Attorney’s office, under the auspices of long-time office-holder Michael J. Satz, persisted in its prosecution. Jim’s effort to block my testimony, through any and all means available to him, involved making a mockery of the judicial system in Broward County.

I bought the domain name, MikeSatz.com, to specifically tell my story and bring attention to the SA’s actions, under the leadership of Mr. Satz, and how that office was, literally, prosecuting a whistle-blower for getting the evidence needed to blow the whistle.

The effort provided no legal traction, although it did make Satz and I clear enemies in the public eye. We had certainly become enemies, so far as I was concerned, and we remain so. He was a political hack, in my opinion, who had stayed in office 25 years too long.

It was only after a federal jury convicted Jim Howard that Broward County finally elected to dismiss the prosecution case, but not immediately. They announced a ‘nolle pros’1 only on the morning my trial was supposed to start.

Jim Howard was never prosecuted for filing a false criminal case. He was never prosecuted for attempting to use coercion to intimidate a witness. He was never held to account for anything he did in Broward County’s legal system, in fact.

Even after Jim’s federal conviction, the state’s case against me was pressed because, as another one of my attorneys, Joseph Pappacoda, told me, the state attorney prosecutes based on their certitude in winning a case. If they believe they can get a conviction, he told me, they will prosecute. They will do so, he said, even if there is only a fifty-fifty chance of a conviction. Being guilty or not-guilty, he said, is not entirely relevant.

It was an interesting revelation, to be sure.