Costly mistakes

A forgotten wallet leads to an error-riddled check fraud investigation. The cost to a man, his family and their community could be immeasurable.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published June 3, 2007

TAMPA -- When it was over he stood in the laundromat, by the clothing revolving in fresh-scented soap, and he sighed as he thought of the dream that washed away.

And the stain that did not.

When it started was Tuesday, Aug. 1, at the Denny's on E Hillsborough Avenue, where a young entrepreneur named Tallie Gainer III brought his four small children for pancakes and sausage and star-shaped chicken nuggets.

They finished eating and Gainer got the bill, which was barely $7 because kids eat free on Tuesday nights. He brought them here only on Tuesdays. He was saving to buy a business that would sustain them when they were grown.

As he paid at the register, he turned to see his 1-year-old daughter, Sara, toddling toward the door. He chased her down, scooped her up and walked outside, leaving his wallet on the counter.

His life turned on that moment. From there, the authorities made one small mistake after another, until Gainer was racked with debt and headed for prison.

In the end there was talk of fingerprints, of false memories from some dark cerebral canyon, and the bureaucrats ducked behind weathered blame-shields.

It would be tempting to employ another metaphor to describe what ran over Gainer: the runaway freight train, perhaps, or the cascading avalanche. These images would fall short. His suffering was not caused by unstoppable force.

Tallie Gainer's five-month humiliation at the hands of the Pasco Sheriff's Office and the State Attorney's Office proceeded even though authorities had, from the investigation's first hour, conclusive evidence of his innocence.

- - -

It would be hard to imagine someone less deserving of handcuffs, a botched prosecution worse for society.

In a place full of broken homes, Gainer was happily married to the mother of his children.

In a ZIP code where one in 12 finish college, Gainer had a science degree from the University of South Florida.

In a community where children are desperate for male role models, Gainer taught leadership in local public schools and served as youth pastor at St. John Cathedral.

In a neighborhood from which the educated often flee for the suburbs, Gainer had decided to stay.

His plan was coming together until the night he lost his wallet.

- - -

Nine days later, on the afternoon of Aug. 10, a man in a striped polo shirt and New York Yankees cap walked into the Capital City Bank in Port Richey, about 30 miles northwest of Tampa, and tried to cash a check.

The teller was suspicious. The check was for $2,465.90, purportedly issued by the New River Solid Waste Association of Raiford. The bank had recently received two fraudulent checks that named the same company.

The teller took the check to her manager, and the man fled without the cash. A deputy sheriff was summoned.

The check was made payable to Gainer. His address was printed on it. And the man who passed it used Gainer's driver's license as identification.

There are two obvious explanations. One is that Gainer was the victim of identity theft. Eight days earlier, he had reported his wallet stolen. According to a Hillsborough County sheriff's report, it contained several credit and debit cards -- on which someone charged more than $1,600 soon after the theft -- and his driver's license.

But the detective, Rodger Turnbow of the Pasco County Sheriff's Office, didn't see that report because it was in another jurisdiction. And so he believed the other explanation: that the culprit was Gainer.

To Turnbow, the man in the surveillance footage and the man on Gainer's driver's license looked the same. And when he showed several driver's license photos to Toni Quinn, a bank teller, she also picked Gainer as the thief.

An airtight case, it seemed. Except for the indisputable piece of evidence that the authorities nearly discarded.

- - -

Gainer lived on Lindell Avenue in Jackson Heights, one of Tampa's poorest neighborhoods, in a concrete-block house the color of shortbread. He'd bought it for $55,000 when it was full of garbage and the ceiling had collapsed. He and a carpenter friend spent four months rebuilding the interior, and now there was a swing set in the back yard and a sign on the kitchen wall that said:

GAINER FAMILY RESTAURANT

Serving God's People

One Meal at a Time!!

A bookshelf in the home office held titles such as God's Promises for Men, Think and Grow Rich and Russ Whitney's Building Wealth System Vol. 1: Keys to Real Estate.

Here Gainer had written a business plan that he hoped would secure his family's financial future. He was bidding to buy the Nehemiah Coin Laundry, a combination laundromat and ice cream parlor.

Gainer had grand intentions for the Nehemiah. He wanted to put in a barber shop and an office for his mortgage business.

He would set up computers where people could work on their resumes while they washed their clothes. His wife, Carla, a registered nurse, would check blood pressure and give advice on prescription drugs. His children -- Netalia, 8; Tallie IV, 5; Destin, 4; and Sara, almost 2 -- would learn the trade and eventually take over.

The asking price was $375,000. Gainer had raised about $265,000 in cash and loans and was scrambling to find the rest.

There is no guarantee he would have made the purchase. Another bidder seemed to have better financing, but Gainer hoped to win on the strength of his vision: He saw the Nehemiah Coin Laundry as a sort of community one-stop shop for health, hygiene, housing and haircuts.

- - -

It was not to be. Gainer became a wanted man on Oct. 23, 2006, when the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office charged him with uttering a forged check -- a felony that carries a maximum five-year prison term.

Hindsight reveals the flaws in the case.

Although Quinn, the teller, told Detective Turnbow that Gainer was the man she had seen, that interview took place 12 days after the incident.

"We start forgetting what we see within an hour," said Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor who specializes in police practices. "To me it would be remarkable that someone would remember a photo they saw 12 days before."

Furthermore, a deputy's initial report described the man as 40 years old and perhaps 175 pounds. Gainer was 28 and nearly 250.

Mistaken eyewitness identification is the cause of 77 percent of wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project. Among those cases, when race is known, nearly half involve cross-race identification.

Turnbow and Quinn are white. Gainer and the man who passed the check are black.

There are better methods to identify a suspect, of course.

Fingerprints, for instance.

- - -

Two days before Thanksgiving, the police came knocking.

"Are you Tallie Gainer?"

"Yes I am," he said, stepping outside.

All four children watched him being handcuffed.

What are they doing with my daddy?

The car rolled through the neighborhood, where three generations of Tallie Gainers had spent four decades building a good name. His stomach churned as they passed the Nehemiah Coin Laundry.

At every stop sign, people peered inside. Gainer saw two young men who cut his grass. In their faces he could see disappointment.

John Taylor watched, incredulous. He was 13, a neighbor, and Gainer was the last man he expected to see arrested.

What's Mr. Tallie doing in the back of that car? he wondered. He's a good person.

Someone else saw Gainer and cried out:

You've got the wrong guy!

- - -

Gainer was fingerprinted and released on $2,500 bail that night. But he spent the next five months stuck in a bureaucratic contraption of unassigned tasks, needless delays and vanishing documents.

A few days after the arrest, Gainer told his story to John Trevena, a criminal defense lawyer in Largo, who took the case at a reduced rate. Trevena quickly demanded discovery, exercising Gainer's right to see the case file. The state must provide the documents within 15 days. But more than two months passed before they arrived.

When asked why, Mike Halkitis, who oversees the west Pasco branch of the State Attorney's Office, first suggested that Turnbow delivered the report late. He also blamed Trevena for not calling him sooner to complain. He finally said someone in his own office may have lost them.

Trevena says he called both Turnbow and Assistant State Attorney Michael Kenny, trying to explain about the stolen wallet. Neither took heed.

Trevena got the discovery in mid February, nearly three months after the arrest.

As he read through the deputy's incident report, something near the bottom of Page 3 caught his eye.

The bank teller had obtained a fingerprint.

Trevena always believed Gainer's identity-theft story.

This could be the proof.

- - -

Back to Aug. 10, 2006. When the man came to the counter, the teller made him dip his thumb in fingerprinting gel and roll it on the check.

A deputy took the check into evidence that day. Incredibly, eight months passed before anyone compared the print with Gainer's.

The true reasons for this omission are buried in official contradictions. This much is clear, though: For officials in Pasco County, who were handling rising property crime and a record number of murders, this case was too small to deserve special attention.

Turnbow is known as a good, hardworking detective. He declined to be interviewed for this story. Through agency spokesman Kevin Doll, he said he sent the fingerprint to print examiner Kara Shell and that she deemed it unusable.

This judgment -- if it occurred -- would later be reversed by another print technician.

Shell said she did not recall the print. She said Turnbow usually makes written requests for print analysis; there is no such record in this case. Indeed, when Turnbow asked another technician to examine the print a few months later, he used a written form.

Even if Shell had decided the print was worthy of comparison, it would not have immediately cleared Gainer: He had no criminal record and therefore no prints on file.

Through Doll, Turnbow said he tried once to call Gainer by phone, but he got no answer and left no message.

"He did not want to do any more work," Gainer said later.

Turnbow also said he brought the check to the state attorney's investigation. But Halkitis says that's unlikely: Had the prosecutor known of the fingerprint, he would have insisted Turnbow go to Gainer and compare his prints. Without that, Halkitis said, the prosecutor would have refused to file the charge.

- - -

Meanwhile, Gainer learned the cost of being falsely accused.

There was the emotional toll, of course, the depression, the feeling that he was walking around with a contagious disease, but there was also the money.

He says it added up to more than $60,000.

He had to pay the bondsman and the lawyer. He and his wife had to miss work to attend court. A real estate deal fell through. He had to back out of teaching a class in mortgage brokerage -- the curriculum emphasized ethics.

His savings evaporated. He had to sell land and borrow money. He never got to make another pitch for the laundromat.

His competitor did. The Nehemiah deal closed in February.

- - -

On Feb. 28, Trevena called Halkitis and asked for a comparison of Gainer's prints with the one on the check. Halkitis agreed. But for some reason -- each blames the decision on the other -- they agreed to get new prints instead of the ones on file. Two more weeks passed before Turnbow rolled another set.

According to Doll, the sheriff's spokesman, a usable print usually needs seven to 13 unique points of identification. Through Doll, Turnbow said that Shell, the first print examiner, had already decided the print on the check did not meet that standard.

But Shell had retired by the time the second request came in, and the job fell to another examiner, Maritza Gutierrez, who found 20 points of identification.

Now someone had to compare the print with Gainer's. But Gainer's new prints somehow disappeared. Six more weeks passed. Gutierrez finally compared the check print with those taken the day of Gainer's arrest.

She concluded the print was not Gainer's.

The state had no choice but to drop the case.

- - -

Loose ends remain. Authorities have not caught the man who tried to cash the check, though they have confirmed he was using a fraudulent ID card. When a reporter called the Tampa Police Department to ask about Gainer, spokeswoman Andrea Davis checked the computer.

"Well," she said, looking at the arrest record, "he's a criminal."

She quickly corrected herself, saying she had misread the screen. But this sort of off-hand judgment will happen when Gainer applies for a job or asks for a loan. People will check the state database, and it will tell them he has been arrested for a felony, and the door will close.

There is a way to fix it. Sheriff Bob White can request an administrative expunction, a purging of the record. Doll, the spokesman, said the agency might do it. But Gainer would have to ask.

"What does it take for somebody to be innocent?" Gainer asked. "Is their pride that big?"

Trevena has another question.

"What if the print wasn't on the check?" he said. "He would have been convicted."

- - -

Gainer has neither a substitute dream nor money to finance one. He must pay back nearly $15,000 in debt incurred during the court proceedings. He will probably sue for damages, but it is hard to say when he will recover.

Still, he is not an angry man.

He said so on April 25, a few hours after the charges were dropped. It was a balmy Wednesday night. He had just finished teaching the St. John Cathedral youth group a lesson about courage. Now he stood in the parking lot, eating popcorn from the church kitchen, talking about the people who tried to put him in prison.

"I should probably be paying them for helping me build my character," he said, and from his left came the sound of the choir rejoicing.

Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

[Last modified June 3, 2007, 06:58:38]