 We are so lucky to have Ali Silver from the Public Defender on the show to talk about his new book, The Mailbox Conspiracy. What is it? The greatest corruption case Hawaii has ever known or words to that effect. Welcome to the show, Ali Silver. Oh, hello, and thanks for having me. Well, I do want to talk about the book, but also the substance of the book. Let me make some introductory comments about it. I haven't read the whole thing, but I was drawn into it and I felt myself being pulled into it. For me, that is really something. This is a book that I can't not read. This is a book that is written so succinctly and, you know, it's sort of like you describe how you pull little pieces of information out of your client and you begin to form a picture of your client and develop the trust and, you know, it's like the book is like that too. Little things you learn along the way, little nuggets that you drop on the reader and after a while he is totally magnetized into that book and it's succinct, you know. People think, oh, the lawyer is way too far here too far, long questions, long answers, but no, no, no, no, no, no. This book is really succinct. Sometimes you have a sentence that says no period or you break up a sentence and the second part, the second sentence is really part of the first sentence, but it's so much more powerful that way. And events very educational, I mean, for a lawyer and for anyone else can look at this book and learn so much about what it is to be a lawyer, what it is to be committed to the defense, what it is to be in the federal system, what it is to deal with the federal rules of criminal procedure, what it is to deal with defendants who are either guilty or not guilty and it's your obligation to protect them and defend them. You stand, you can't. I mean, it is, I tell you the truth, the word script came to me. The book reads like a script, like a movie script. And if we could do the defendants, the sentence rather, you know, back a few years ago on a Hawaii story, well, surely, surely, surely we can do a movie about your, your book reads like a movie script and I really hope somebody picks it up. And I'm making this suggestion to anyone who watches this video, we've got to make a movie about this book. It is a movie in its own way. So Ali, thank you very much for, you know, sending me the link and I got it from Amazon and I'm really happy Kindle and I'm really happy I got it. It's part of my, the top of my collection, if you want to know. And thanks for coming to the show. I appreciate your comments. Thank you. Why did you write this book? I wrote it for two reasons. Number one, I really wanted people to understand that Gerard Perlana was innocent. He didn't win on a technicality. He was actually innocent and falsely accused of a crime he did not commit. So one reason to have written it is I wanted to make that perfectly clear. The second reason was this is really a portrayal of corruption. This is how corruption works. It's how insipid it is in our society. It's how the police department became corrupted by what Louis K. Loa and his wife were doing. It's how even the prosecutor's office, to some extent, got sucked into it. And so I wanted people to understand by reading the book how corruption works, because we're still in this period where we need a strong new police chief. We need ethics committee commission and we need a police commission that works. We need to have our society and our independent oversight committees work so that this type of thing doesn't happen. And so in a way, this is an expose of just raw corruption in your face so that people can understand. Well, I thought it was interesting. I mean, to me now, and I'm not in the service, I was criminal defense, criminal prosecution, and they switched back and forth in the service. So I understand a little about criminal procedure and practice. But what struck me is that in defending your client, you actually turned into a prosecutor. Now you're looking at the corruption and you had to prove the corruption case in order to defend your client, right? Absolutely. We kind of turned the tables. You know, once we started uncovering the evidence and the book walks you like a who done it through how we uncovered the evidence bit by bit and the significance of each piece of evidence and how they wove together. And so I walk you through in the first part of the book, our excitement and our investigation of how we found all this evidence. And then really the second and third part of the book is, as you say, we kind of turn the tables of taking it to the KLOAs and trying to prove not only that Mr. Pona was not guilty, but actually prove that it was the KLOAs who were guilty. So in a sense, we did become the prosecutors. And then, of course, I did present the evidence to the U.S. Attorney's Office and to the FBI. And then I worked with Mr. Wheat, the special prosecutor from San Diego. So in that sense, we were working with the prosecution on behalf of Mr. Pona because by then he was actually a victim of a crime. So we at that point were working with the prosecution to get the KLOAs convicted. You were the perfect guy to do this because you could make the distinction between somebody who is best handled by pleading guilty and the person who is really not guilty. You need somebody's experience to make that decision, to get committed on that side of it. As you describe in the book, a lot of criminal defense is pleading him guilty and getting the best deal and all that, but that wasn't the case here. At some point, click, you decided this was not run-of-the-mill. When he said he was not guilty, that he didn't do it, and that he was framed, at some point when he repeated that to you, you got it. You accepted that into your professional analysis and said, well, wait a minute, this is not an ordinary case. This is a special situation. What were the circumstances of that decision? Well, first of all, let me just say, I am a die-hard defense attorney. It's all I've ever done in my life. I believe in the rights of defendants. I've represented many, many high-profile cases and defendants in those kinds of cases. And I really believe in the justice system. I believe in reasonable doubt. Most, as you said, most defendants in federal court and over 90% of all people charged in federal court end up pleading guilty. And a lot of what my job is, is to mitigate the seriousness of the charges and to mitigate sentencing. And so when Mr. Perwana came in and started protesting his innocence, remember in the beginning, all we knew was Catherine Kahloa, high-ranking prosecutor, Louie Kahloa, the chief of police, and another police officer with a video. We're all saying, we have him on tape. That's him on the tape. He stole the mailbox. So when I first started representing Mr. Perwana, I just kind of took the position and assumed this was a guilty plea, and I was going to fight for him at sentencing. He insisted he was not guilty. And of course, a lot of my clients insist they're not guilty despite overwhelming evidence. I thought this was just another one of those types of cases, where we were gonna have to do the investigation and kind of prove to Mr. Perwana that he was guilty and he needed to plead guilty. But Mr. Perwana, for his credit, not only wouldn't hear of it, but because he had a background in security, he actually had developed on his own a lot of evidence that he was able to turn over to me, which really led us to be able to investigate and determine what was really going on. And the key piece of evidence that we uncovered rather quickly was that the Kahloas had lied about the make and model and value of their own mailbox. And that was the turning point. When we uncovered that piece of evidence, we realized something was really off in this case. Yeah, there were a lot of little tipping point things in the book where you learned, I said, gee, that it's remarkable that they stole the whole mailbox. Mailbox thieves don't do that. There's something funny bunny money going on here. And then you had, can you talk about those tip-off points where it became more and more clear that this is not what the complaining parties were saying? Well, first we uncovered that the Kahloas or Catherine Kahloas specifically had underwrote in statements to HPD claimed it was a particular type of mailbox that was stolen a value of $380. We were able to relatively quickly determine through many different sources, including Google, world, you know, internet, that the mailbox that was actually stolen was a different mailbox, a value of $180, which and the difference under state law was critical. Because at that time, anything over $300 in value was a felony theft. Anything under 300 was a misdemeanor theft. So by lying about the make and model and value of the mailbox, the Kahloas were making this a felony theft under Hawaii law as opposed to a misdemeanor theft. Because they thought this case was gonna be prosecuted in state court. You know, the HPD would control the investigation and her office or the attorney general's office would control the prosecution and it would be a felony theft. So that's what we figured out right off the bat. Then we uncovered a motive for why the Catherine Kahloas for certainly would want to get her uncle convicted of a felony crime. And not only did we develop a motive, but the motive was in writing in Catherine's own words in letters that she had written to Gerard and to his 90 year old mother Florence involving a reverse mortgage scheme that had been perpetuated by Catherine Kahloas against Florence and she had essentially lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and her home. And all of this had been done by Catherine. So we were able to develop a motive for why they were lying and then we were able to develop a series of false statements or omissions of fact in police reports throughout the HPD investigation that certainly made it look like Gerard Poana was being framed. You know, Ali, you talk just like you write. I'll try to be clear. You are. Oh, again, you mentioned this was originally an attempt to make it a felony in the state proceeding, but it wound up in the federal court. Ergo, the federal defender, you. But how did that happen? How did it get from the state court to the federal court? And I guess in looking back, that was a really good thing, wasn't it? Yeah, I mean, my office has always been referred to as the best lawyers in town that you can't hire because we only do federal criminal law. So we're really good at it. I was there for more than 20 years at that time. So it did end up in federal court. Now I can't give you an answer of how that exactly happened. I tried to find out. I asked the U.S. Attorney, Mr. Osborn, who was the prosecutor, how it came into the U.S. Attorney's office. And essentially they kind of played it off as it got referred to the U.S. Postal Inspector who referred it to the U.S. Attorney's office and they decided to take the case. Now, years later, we've learned that the U.S. Postal Inspector actually told the U.S. Attorney's office to decline the prosecution and not to prosecute the case, but the case was taken anyway. I've always had my suspicions of why this case ended up in the U.S. Attorney's office. Obviously there was Catherine's prosecutor's office who couldn't handle it because that's a conflict of interest. But then in the normal course of affairs, it would be handed off to the state attorney general's office to prosecute. Why they didn't or why they declined, I could never determine. But it ended up in our inalbol court, which was very good for Mr. Poana, I think, because we have the resources, the money, the time, the investigators to really conduct a thorough investigation into the matter. And it was out of Catherine's hand. She couldn't control it anymore. And it quickly spiraled out of control for them. You talk about Catherine and what amounted to a, what do you want to call it, a family quarrel turned federal. That's not the way to go in a local family, really, to try to get your relatives incarcerated. It isn't nice. In any event, you talk about Catherine. Was she the brains of the outfit? Because I want to explore with you exactly how this corruption thing worked. And I guess, you know, just learning from the movies, there's always one person who seems to call the shots in a corrupt cabal conspiracy. Was it her? My opinion is it was her. I, when we were investigating, and remember, we don't have the resources that the federal government has to prosecute his office at Mr. Wheat. He had a lot more resources than we did. Plus I had a very narrow scope. I'm trying to get Mr. Buona found not guilty at first. So we had uncovered a whole bunch of weird things that Catherine Kellow had done, but a lot of them had nothing to do specifically with our case. So we kind of at the end handed that off to the FBI. And a lot of, I think what later came out was a result of that. But for our focus, what we had uncovered was, you know, it's my belief Catherine Kellow really was the one who was setting this in motion and pulling the strings. She had a lot of close connections in HPD, independent of Louie, which she was using, including Mr. Sellers, her ex-boyfriend. And so I really think it was her and probably even Bobby Nguyen, who was married to her Denise part, and he was part of CIU, the secret black ops unit in HPD, who really were instrumental in this. I think what happened with Louie, in my opinion, was when he found out what was going on, I don't think he was in the planning stages, but when he found out, he just jumped in. At that point, he just said, okay, I'm going to protect Catherine. I'm going to protect my police officers. And he was all in at that point as far as I'm concerned. So, you know, as they say in many of these conspiracies, there's the crime, which seems pretty petty, but then there's the obstruction and the cover-up. And it's the cover-up, which is the huge thing that gets people just like Watergate. And that's what happened here. And we're still seeing that. You know, a lot of the prosecutions that are now being done are about the cover-up. And that's what's being exposed. Well, you know, you talk about, what is it that you call it, the biggest conspiracy, rather the biggest corruption case in Hawaii history? And it really does seem that way, but I'd like to examine with you what exactly is this corruption. I remember words you used like they were clumsy. And indeed, these steps of stealing the whole mailbox, that was clumsy because any third person just looking would say, why steal the whole mailbox if you're interested in something? What is the point of that? And arrogance is another word that you use in the book, that arrogance fed into this kind of corruption. So can you define for us the kind of looney-tunes things, the kind of elements of this corruption that made it the biggest corruption case in Hawaii? Well, so first, remember, if someone went in and just stole some mail, it's not gonna be a felony under state law because state law is about theft of an item and the value of that item. So by stealing the entire mailbox, you've got the value of the mailbox itself, which of course they lied about. So if someone had just gone in and stolen a couple pieces of paper, mail that wouldn't have been a felony. So that's number one. But number two, having represented a lot of defendants and heard this argument by the prosecution on a number of times, they got caught doing this. But this is the tip of the iceberg. How many other things for years and years and years had been going on that Catherine had been doing or HPD had been doing or the CIU had been doing, small things that add up. And to me, in investigating Catherine, because as part of my job as a defense attorney, I wanna learn about the witnesses against me so I know how to cross examine them. I talked to a lot of people about Catherine, her personality, things that she had done in the past, things that they knew about. And I had uncovered a long list of some criminal and some just outright unethical conduct by Catherine that had started long ago. And so people say, well, this is kind of like the three stooches, the keystone cops. This is so ridiculous. I think what was going on was they had been doing stuff for so long and been getting away with it. This is just one more thing. And they didn't think they were ever gonna be found out or anybody was ever gonna really look into it. So to me, this was one of those things where they just, they were so comfortable doing what they were doing, they never thought twice about it. You talked in the book about the surveillance video and the fact that an ordinary person could not recognize Puana on that video, but she could. And that strikes me as very funny that, if you couldn't and I couldn't and nobody in your office or anywhere can actually make the identification from the video and she can do that. That was also incredible, wasn't it? Well, there were gonna be three people who were going to testify that the individual, the blurry individual in the video was Gerard Puana. And that was gonna be Catherine. It was gonna be Louis and it was gonna be Bobby Nuit, all relatives, all family, who were gonna be able to say that was him. The person who stole the mailbox was dressed up to look like Gerard wearing similar clothing and part of their testimony. In fact, Louis Kahloa testified on direct examination that one of the reasons he could identify the person in the video was because of the way they were dressed. So, while no one else looking at pictures of Gerard or looking at Gerard could say that was him, these three people were gonna say it. And one of the things we know in criminal law is witness identification is one of the most misunderstood and inaccurate testimonies of any kind of testimony in a criminal trial. But this wasn't witnesses who don't know the person. This is, these are three witnesses who know a person and saying that's him. That's a little different. And so it was not clear at all that the jury would understand that they were falsely pointing them out in the video. You mentioned a minute ago that the FBI was working on this and they were working on this at your request. That doesn't happen very much if you're the federal public defender, does it? Usually the FBI is on the other side, right, Allie? That's correct. And I have a chapter in the book called meeting the FBI. And we were at odds, we are polar opposites. I cross-examine agents all the time. I attack their credibility. I accuse them of doing unconstitutional searches. We're not friends in any shape at all. And in fact, one of the things I did was I made sure that it was the U.S. Attorney's Office, not me who referred the case to the FBI. Because I knew if the U.S. Attorney's Office did it, the FBI would have to pay attention. If I did it, they would just ignore it because I'm just a federal public defender trying to smear some law enforcement people and they'd ignore me. And I describe in the book how when the FBI actually came to our office to talk with us, it was not a good meeting. It did not start off well. They wouldn't shake my hands. They made it clear they didn't wanna be there. They really kind of, I just assumed they got the short end of the straw of the two agents who showed up and they had to be there, but they really didn't wanna be there at all. So I describe in the book, it starts off kind of funny, but it was deadly serious. How we had to overcome their disbelief and the distrust of us to make them believe us. But even when the meeting was over, we still had a little run-in at the end because I still didn't believe the FBI was taking us seriously and gonna do anything. So it was a lot to overcome, but I have to say, in all fairness to the agents and to the FBI, we've seen what they did. They did take this evidence. They did run with it and a lot has come out of this. So I do give them a lot of credit for that. So you got the case in 2013. You retired from the Federal Defender in 2020. At some point along the way, there was a conclusion of this matter, I guess, in a trial, but when did that trial take place? So the trial with Gerard Poana that ended up in a missed trial when Louis Kahlo blurted out improper evidence during his testimony was in December of 2014. The grand jury, the federal grand jury didn't start until September of 2015. In 2017, the Kahlo, as in a few other police officers were indicted and in 2019, they were convicted and they were sentenced in November of 2020. So at some point, the state proceedings were over. The charges were withdrawn in favor of the federal prosecution. Right, as soon as Mr. Poana was handed over to federal authorities, the state charges were dismissed, which is the usual occurrence whenever something like that happened. So what's interesting is the FBI indirectly was working for your side of it. The U.S. attorney must have become aware, he's prosecuting the case, right? He must have become aware that there were problems in the prosecution. How did that work? Was he, whose team was he on? So I firmly believe that the U.S. attorney did not understand what was really going on when we went to trial. He had taken the word of HPD, he had taken the word of the Kahloas. I don't think the federal authorities really did much investigation of their own, nothing like we had done. And I was convinced that they really didn't know anything about what was really going on. Not even that the mailboxes were wrong. So I think they just, this was their state brethren law enforcement. These were the highest people in the state, law enforcement, they work with them all the time. They're not gonna falsify evidence, they're not gonna lie to them. So Mr. Osborn, who was the U.S. attorney in the case, I really think just believed it 100% that everything that had been fed to him was true. So, one of the reasons I write in the book that I believe Louis Kahloa through the trial was because he knew what we had. Because he knew what subpoenas we had issued. He knew what evidence we had obtained. He knew what really had happened. And it was gonna be devastating. If we were allowed to have cross-examined him, his wife and other officers and present all this evidence, it was gonna be devastating. And he had to stop it. So, in my opinion, I don't think the U.S. attorney knew anything about what was really happening. It was really caught off guard when the chief threw the trial. But in my mind, to me it was a tactical decision to prevent us from actually bringing forth the evidence we had in the hope that that would be the end of it. In most cases, that would be it. My client walks away, case over, we move on to the next case. And then nothing would ever be disclosed. None of this would have happened. But we decided, no, we were not gonna stop. We were gonna go further. So, what was the ultimate upside? Your client got off. He was acquitted. And the Kahlohas in a separate proceeding, was it? Were convicted, right? That's correct. Mr. Poana was, first it was a mistrial. And then after we presented our evidence to the government, they dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it was done forever. They then investigated and indicted and charged the Kahlohas who went to trial and they were convicted. And then they were sentenced and went to jail. So, that part of the case, the Kahloha part of the case, took years and years and years. And we all saw it play out in the news and in the press. And they were tried and convicted. I mean, they did not plead guilty. They did not admit they had done anything wrong. The jury found them guilty. I did testify at that trial as well. In the book, I talk about my experience testifying because as you know, it's very unusual for a lawyer to be a witness stand. So that was a very different experience for me. And I recount that in the book, how that felt. So, it's not over. I mean, we're still seeing the indictment against Mr. Kanashiro that just recently came out. And I expect there's going to be more indictment. What's the connection? Mr. Kanashiro, as we saw play out in when we were doing subpoenas, I served a subpoena on his office to obtain Catherine's medical records and employment records. And he wouldn't even accept our subpoena, which was a federally issued subpoena. So he started obstructing right then and there. But then when Mr. Wheat took over and started issuing his own subpoenas to the prosecutor's office, Mr. Kanashiro started filing objections and trying to prevent these subpoenas. He filed motions trying to get Mr. Wheat thrown out of the case. So I think to, you know, for whatever reason, and we don't know what that reason is yet, that for some reason, Mr. Kanashiro started stepping in and trying to block the federal investigation. We all saw at one point, Mr. Wheat raided the prosecutor's office and a Fosse municipal building to get records. You don't raid a fellow prosecutor's office. You go and ask. You say, I want these documents or I want this evidence because you're law enforcement. You work together. When you raid an office, it means you don't trust them. You think they're going to destroy evidence. And to have reached that point is really astounding. Yeah. Wow. Plenty to come here. Maybe there's a sequel to your book, huh? Or movie, as the case may be. So, Ali, I asked you before to identify a paragraph that you could read from the book. I wonder if you can pull the paragraph somewhere and just give us a flavor of your writing. So this is called Time to Meet the FBI. It's chapter 18. Hey, look, look who's at the door. It's the FBI. It's usually a bad day in the life of one of my clients when the FBI is knocking on their front door. The FBI normally greets my clients with weapons drawn, wearing flak jackets with FBI and bull, and blows across the front. And that's the good part. After that, it's the arrest, body search, handcuffs, interrogation, and imprisonment. FBI agents and federal defendants often butt heads with one another in and out of the courtroom. We routinely challenge the legality of searches they conduct and attack their credibility on the witness stand. Needless to say, this does not create a friendly relationship. And sometimes it gets personal. Alleging that an agent violated the Constitution, whether through negligence or incompetence or worse, with intent, does not win you friend. There are no softball games between our office. We don't share a beer together. I had done my fair share of discrediting FBI agents over the years and had developed a reputation as being less than friendly, but I hope a worthy adversary. In January of 2015, it was time to meet the FBI. They could not ignore the United States attorney's referral to investigate Gerard's case. We were going to have an opportunity to present the evidence we had gathered to the FBI and hopefully convince them to launch a large-scale corruption investigation into the KLOA. The meeting took place at our office. This was our ballgame, and it would be played on our home turf. Two FBI agents showed up, agents Jeffrey Feldman and Matthew McDonald. We were prepared to present our PowerPoint presentation, which had been updated and fine-tuned with more exacting details. Upon entering the conference room, the agents would not even shake our hand. Instead, they ignored us and roughly sat down. Then Agent McDonald spoke, not words of greeting, but of aggression and annoyance. He let us know in no uncertain terms that he was not happy to be here. And that, quote, the FBI did not appreciate me talking to the press and everyone knowing what they were doing, unquote. That was, he protested angrily, not how they were. And the FBI schedule was not to be a matter of public knowledge. I was initially taken aback by the comments. I had expected a more polite greeting. I responded rather defensively. I explained that I had spoken to the United States Attorney Florence Nakakuni before I had made the statements of the press and she had no problem with what I had disclosed. I thought I was playing nicely for the government, which for people who knew me was a big, big step, but obviously not a big enough step for Agent McDonald. Wow, and you seem like such a nice guy, Allie. Anyway, I wanna move to something else and that is really a good sample to read from the book. And the book, so far as I have read it is really magnetic and I think it's a terrific read and a terrific education in so many areas, not just one thing, many things, and including a look at the criminal justice system in general, both statewide and as we see on television every day, federally as well. I mean, some of the issues, events that you describe are happening in a parallel universe in Washington right now. It's so interesting. I gotta get back and watch. I gotta watch what's on C-SPAN right now. But anyway, I guess what I wanna ask you is, when you have chief of police who carries so much prestige and power and influence by virtue of that title and you have the number three prosecutor in the city prosecutor's office who's close to the prosecutor himself or herself. And these people are involved in a criminal felonious conspiracy. You begin to wonder about the criminal justice system and it makes it much worse than a simple defense of a simple crime, whether state or federal. And that's why, just my observation, that's why this is so important to understand, especially in the context of our criminal justice system today. What do you say to that? Yeah, I wanted to say two things about that. First, for those people who are listening and you're saying, oh my God, this is a law book, it's gonna be hard to read. I worked really hard and I think I succeeded in making the law very understandable for anyone. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand this. So it's very easy to read. You don't have to be fearful. My eye doctor who went to a Farrington said to me that he was scared to read it and then he read it and he loved it. They said it was easy to read. So for those of you who are fearful, don't worry about it. But to your point, I write in the book and in thinking about it, all of our public institutions are oversight committees that were supposed to prevent this, failed. All of our politicians failed. No one wanted to hear me. Nobody wanted to listen to the evidence I had. No one wanted to believe that there was anything wrong with what was happening at HPD. And if you remember the police commission in the middle of all of this, not only renewed Chief Kahloa's contract early, a year early, but when this finally broke, they let him retire in good standing and gave him a $250,000 buyout. I do remember that was such an outrage even to somebody who was not initiated. So what I describe in the book is really a resistance by the status quo and by government to listening and hearing and wanting to do anything. I mean, if you remember the mayor and HPD, their whole position leading up to even the indictment was, oh, it's all allegations, it's nothing. And then once the Kahloas were indicted, it was, well, we're not gonna rush to judgment. Let's see what happens at the trial. And then once they were convicted in sentence, what came out of HPD and the mayor's office was, well, that's in the past, we only look forward. They never looked at anything that ever happened. We still happen. And that's why I wrote the book in part, but what really needs to be done, we had an opportunity after the Kahloa conviction to really look at our institutions and make some changes and we fail. There were minor steps taken, but overall the status quo won and really nothing changed at all. We're having another opportunity now. We have all these new indictments. We have Senator English and Representative Colin who were arrested. We have the opportunity again to try to make changes that are long lasting and meaningful. And I'm hoping in some small way, my book will play a role in that, in showing people what happens when there is corruption and what happens when our institutions just don't do anything about it. And when you say it kind of mirrors Washington, it does. We had a special prostitute who actually did something. Yeah. Well, to your credit, I admire what you've done. I admire your work and your contribution to the public conversation about this. So thanks for your effort in court and representing this defendant in finding a just and fair and equitable solution that is in acquitting him and also in writing the book. Ali Silver, author, lawyer, defender, public defender and excellent cab driver back in his youth. You can find all of that in his book. Thank you so much, Ali. Thank you for having it. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.