Melissa Bailey Photo
Morris Olmer leaving federal court.
HARTFORD — On the witness stand, an 82-year-old disbarred lawyer and one-time elected official stood up, cleared his throat and launched a last-ditch attempt to convince a judge to toss a damning interview he gave to federal agents during a surprise visit to his Whalley Avenue office.
“Excuse me, You’ll have to speak up a little,” Morris Olmer offered as he took his oath before the judge. “I don’t hear too good.”
Chief Judge Alvin W. Thompson heard his story last Thursday in U.S. District Court in Hartford, then turned down his request.
Olmer, a former New Haven alderman and state representative who still lives in Beaver Hills, is now going to have to face a high-stakes legal battle on March 14, when jury selection begins for his criminal trial.
Olmer was one of 15 people — some of them prominent local figures (including a West Haven police commissioner)—arrested last June. He was accused of taking part in a mortgage fraud that cheated taxpayers, cost lenders (including the government) some $3 million to $4 million, and helped plunge some New Haven neighborhoods further into blight.
After his arrest, Olmer maintained his innocence and defended his conduct at length in an interview with the Independent.
As his case heads to trial, the former lawmaker has been trying to get the court to toss out key evidence against him gathered in a surprise visit from the feds last May 13 at his office building at 419 Whalley Ave. in New Haven.
Olmer asked that notes from a three-hour interview he gave in a third-floor office on that date should not be admitted in the trial, because he was technically “in custody” of law enforcement and no one read him his Miranda rights. The prosecution argued the interview was voluntary and a reasonable person in that situation would know he was free to go at any time. Click here for a back story outlining both sides’ arguments.
Olmer showed up in the South Courtroom of the U.S. District Court in Hartford Thursday afternoon wearing a black pin-striped suit, his white hair combed back, to make a final pre-trial pitch on that topic.
He leaned back in a leathery swivel chair as his lawyer, Audrey Felsen, and prosecutor Susan Wines took turns asking questions of the first witness, John Keeney, a special agent with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General.
Keeney sipped from a styrofoam cup and breathed heavily into the microphone between questions. He testified that he waited in the lobby of Olmer’s office building at 419 Whalley Ave. from 7 a.m. on May 13 until Olmer show up at work around 8 or 8:30 a.m. When Olmer walked in the door, Keeney informed him that he couldn’t go to his second-floor office because federal agents were conducting a search warrant there. Keeney asked if Olmer would be interviewed in a vacant third-floor office.
Keeney said Olmer willingly complied. “He indicated that he wanted to come with me.”
They walked into the room, which was furnished with only one table and one chair. Keeney said he let Olmer take the chair, while he kneeled on one knee and scribbled notes on a notepad for about three hours.
During the conversation, Olmer was allowed to eat, drink and use his phone. He never asked to leave, Keeney said. To the contrary, at the end of three hours, Olmer wanted to keep talking: He offered to take a polygraph and meet with the prosecutor, according to Keeney.
In addition, Keeney said he made the ground rules clear: “I advised him that he was not in custody and that he was free to leave.”
That’s not how Olmer told the story when he got his chance to speak.
At 1:55 p.m. Thursday, Olmer got up, buttoned his jacket, and walked toward the witness stand.
During his half-hour in the box, he spoke with his hands clasped, at times indicating he couldn’t hear the questioner, even when it was his own lawyer.
He recounted a morning of “interrogat[ion]” at the hands of intimidating men with guns. Besides Keeney, there were two other federal agents in the room at different times, each of them armed.
Olmer said he walked into his office building at 419 Whalley Ave. with a croissant, a cup of coffee and a copy of the New Haven Register, just as he had been doing for the past 10 years. After saying hello to the friendly security guard, he encountered two federal agents waiting for him, Keeney and a colleague. They asked to interview him.
“Fine, let’s go up to my office,” Olmer recalled saying. The two agents said “no you can’t, we’re searching your office,” he said. Olmer claimed he stepped toward the direction of his office, but he found the two agents standing shoulder to shoulder in his way.
“They blocked my path,” Olmer charged.
The agents informed him they could speak to him in a vacant third-floor office.
“Come with us,” Olmer recalled one of them saying in a “commanding voice.”
“They marched me into the room,” Olmer said. The room had only one table and one chair. “They pointed to the desk and said, ‘Sit down.’ I sat down.”
Looking out into the blue-carpeted courtroom, he indicated where the agents were sitting who interviewed him.
Keeney “leaned over the desk and interrogat[ed] me,” Olmer testified. “I didn’t think I was free to leave.”
At one point, another agent took off his jacket, revealing a “big gun sitting on his side.”
“I didn’t think I could go anyplace,” Olmer said.
As he spoke, the judge listened quietly from his perch in front of a large, gold-plated backdrop with 13 gold stars. At one point, he asked if Olmer was nervous during the interview.
“I was wrecked,” Olmer said.
Bit by bit, prosecutor Wines picked at his story. She opened by noting that Olmer was suspended from practicing law for failing to provide accurate information on a real estate form for the sale of a house. Standing in high-heeled boots, she took a stern tone with her target.
“Did I ask you if it was in the lobby?” she chided at one point.
“No — I volunteered it,” came Olmer’s somewhat sheepish reply.
She questioned if Keeley had really used a “commanding” tone.
Olmer replied that his tone varied. “At one point we were yelling at each other.”
“What upset me,” Olmer offered, “was the idea that they said I had received cash payment for illegal work.”
At this point, the exchange got so heated that the court reporter lifted her hands. “Woah,” she protested. “One at a time.”
Olmer said he requested a polygraph, “to prove the truth” of his statements. He also picked up his cell phone and put his son on speaker phone, to ask if his son had ever received cash payments, he said.
Wines argued that having someone kneel on one knee across the table from you is hardly intimidating. Indeed, it’s a position of “subservience,” she said.
In closing remarks, she said Olmer was “allowed several freedoms” — such as biting into the croissant and answering the phone — that are “inconsistent” with how someone would be treated when taken into custody.
Wines described Olmer as a willing participant — “he had a lot to say. He wanted to keep talking.”
Under the circumstances, she argued, a reasonable person — let alone a lawyer with over 50 years’ experience — “would think he is free to leave,” she concluded.
Olmer’s attorney, Felsen, put in a last word for her client. She said he was in the bottom of a power dynamic, where he “was not calling the shots.”
Judge Thompson promptly called the last shot for the day’s proceedings.
“I’ll write something up,” he said, “but the motion is going to be denied.”