COLUMN ONE : ‘Angel’ Has Devil of a Legal Cause : Linda Cox says she knew Carlos Montilla was innocent. But she couldn’t sway the other 11 jurors in his drug trial. When a second jury convicted him, she just kept fighting.

Linda Cox had never even been in a courtroom before, but the novice juror figured this would be the most routine of criminal cases--a drug bust, a simple matter of a young Latino’s word against a veteran cop’s.

“I thought he was probably guilty. So much for presumed innocence--I’ve seen ‘Miami Vice,’ ” says Cox, a bookstore owner on Beacon Hill, a quiet neighborhood of red-brick townhouses and narrow streets where many of Boston’s oldest and richest families live.

At the defendant’s table, 24-year-old Carlos M. Montilla was unable to understand much of what was going on, despite the help of an interpreter. When the accused drug dealer looked for some clue to his fate in the faces in the jury box, he got none, except from the prim, silver-haired white lady, whose unrelenting brown eyes bored into him.

“I see Linda, I think, you know, maybe she wanted me to go to jail. She was the only one who looked at me. I don’t remember the other people,” Montilla says, struggling to put his recollections into English.

She stared with such intensity, because Linda Cox was trying to decide who was telling the truth. And she was starting to think it was the fidgety young man in the flashy silk suit.

Her refusal to convict him deadlocked the panel 11 to 1, but a second jury three months later found Montilla guilty of selling cocaine and carrying an illegal weapon. He was sentenced to three years with no hope of parole and faced deportation to the Dominican Republic, which could have cost him his new family.

Of 24 jurors who had considered the case, only one believed Montilla was innocent. But Cox was determined to get him cleared. Like the Ancient Mariner of literature, she told the story over and over to anyone who would listen, and to a lot of people who wouldn’t.

Today, Montilla is a free man awaiting another trial--another chance that he owes to the doggedness of the 50-year-old bookseller whose gaze had so unsettled him two summers ago, the woman he now calls “this angel God put in my path.”

With persistence and the right contacts, Cox got one of Boston’s most high-powered law firms to take Montilla’s case for free. She raised thousands of dollars for private detectives, who turned up startling new evidence and a critical witness who had eluded police for almost two years.

In the meantime, the cop whose testimony put Montilla away has been fired and faces his own trial on charges of extorting money and sex from people he had arrested in another drug case. Court papers also show that during Officer Albert LaFontaine’s 15-year career, he has been subjected to at least 27 internal police investigations on accusations that include brutality.

After spending 18 months in prison, Carlos Montilla was freed in March, when Superior Court Judge Elizabeth A. Porada granted him a new trial, his third on the same set of charges.

The judge wrote that new evidence had cast “substantial doubt” on LaFontaine’s account. An investigator looking at the crime scene concluded that for the suspect to escape the third-floor apartment as LaFontaine testified, he would have had to risk almost certain injury by leaping from a window 30 feet above the ground.

When Montilla was arrested later that evening outside a social club 10 blocks away, he was unhurt and showed no alarm as police walked up to question him.

Most crucial to Montilla’s new trial was the additional witness, Pablo Osario, accused of dealing drugs with him. Osario has sworn in an affidavit that he had never even seen his co-defendant before. Although not the most credible witness on his own, Osario’s account could add much weight to Montilla’s version, the judge wrote.

The district attorney’s office says it fully intends to pursue another conviction, at a trial scheduled for June 14. However, it is unclear whether LaFontaine will testify; at the hearing that led to Montilla’s new trial, the officer pleaded Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

If that happens again, Montilla’s lawyers say, it will leave the prosecution without its star witness and very likely blow the case. Thus, they speculate that Montilla stands a good chance of not having to face trial a third time.

Willie Davis, LaFontaine’s lawyer, says that the officer stands by the testimony he gave at Montilla’s two earlier trials. LaFontaine pleaded the Fifth Amendment at the hearing because he feared that any comments might damage the defense in his own case, which is tentatively scheduled for trial on Tuesday, Davis said.

LaFontaine was not available for comment.

Although Cox knew nothing of LaFontaine’s record when she served on the jury, she said she did not trust the arresting officer’s account. He could not square times and places and seemed vague on many of the details. “I thought he looked like a weasel,” she said.

Tempers were short over those two days of deliberation by the panel of 11 whites and one black. It was the record-hot summer of 1988, and they were stuck in a room with a cranky old air conditioner. If they turned it up, they had to yell to be heard. So they sweltered.

Cox agonized and came up with a plan. She would be like Henry Fonda in the old movie “Twelve Angry Men,” overwhelming the others one by one with sheer force of her logic. She wrote out the discrepancies and inconsistencies on index cards.

The suspect was described as having a Michael Jackson-style hairdo with stiff ringlets, she noted, but when Montilla was arrested, his hair was short. Witnesses placed Montilla in the social club at the same time the police officer claimed he was selling drugs. Meanwhile, those who lived in the neighborhood where Montilla was allegedly dealing drugs in the open said they had never seen him there.

The other jurors, Cox recalled, focused on different details: the fact that Montilla’s girlfriend was carrying a Gucci bag in court, that Montilla had a $50 bill in his wallet when he was arrested. One juror said his main concern was getting drugs and guns off the street, while another said she had had a nightmare in which Montilla was chasing her.

And over and over, they insisted, “The cop saw him.”

Finally, Cox realized that she had no chance of convincing any of the others, but by refusing to join the majority, she could force a mistrial that could give Montilla another chance.

One of her fellow jurors tapped the classic picture of justice that had been stamped on all of their handbooks. “You’re wearing a blindfold just like she is,” he sneered.

A few days later, Cox called Montilla’s lawyer, Warren Blair III. Was she right in holding out, she wanted to know?

Blair told her she probably was. The lawyer’s sources at police headquarters had told him that LaFontaine had a bad reputation, but the judge had refused to give him access to police files. Montilla, on the other hand, had never been in trouble with the law.

Cox asked if she could help, and Blair accepted her offer to give him some of her insights as a juror. Cox suggested that Blair not accuse the cop of lying, because that pitted the word of the law against that of an accused drug dealer. Soften it, she said, by suggesting that LaFontaine was merely mistaken.

She also noted that Montilla’s address was in the ritzy suburb of Wellesley. Let the jury know he lives in a housing project, Cox warned, lest they suspect he had bought a mansion with drug profits. As she pored over trial transcripts, Cox even drafted suggestions for opening and closing arguments.

Cox talked to Montilla twice before the second trial, dishing out admonitions like a mother. Sit up straight, answer the questions firmly, and try not to show how nervous you are, she told him. Oh, and ditch the silk suit for a blue blazer and tan pants.

“The more Hispanic he looked, the more people would think of the stereotypes,” Cox said. “The defense attorney said he looked great. He looked like he was going to the yacht club.”

As the second trial started, Cox left for a long vacation in Nepal. On her return, she was devastated by the news from court: Another jury had found him guilty--acting even more quickly than the first panel had.

“They really were not fair to Carlos,” she maintains. “They never gave him the benefit of the doubt.”

Cox thought she had done all that she could, “then I went into a real depression at the thought of this innocent man in jail.” She called Montilla’s fiancee, Evelin Pagan, who said that Montilla was having a difficult time. On his second day in prison, as he slept with hundreds of other men in a hallway awaiting a cell, Montilla was robbed at knifepoint by men demanding his gold rings.

“I couldn’t give up,” Cox said. “That wasn’t an option.”

Cox, who is unmarried and has no children, was to make Carlos Montilla “pretty much the main preoccupation of my life” for the next two years. “I think the reason the fates chose me for this is I have a simple life. I was available.”

For weeks, she called lawyers, talked to reporters, did what she could to stir some interest in the case. She even wrote a column in the Boston Globe editorial pages recounting her disillusionment as a juror.

Her first big break came the day that Edward DeMore, a successful businessman with whom she had worked in neighborhood organizations, walked into her bookstore. She showed him the column she had written, and launched, once again, into her tale.

“I have great respect for Linda. She has her feet on the ground and she’s very levelheaded,” DeMore said. “It would have been quite easy to say to Linda, ‘Here’s $250, and good luck,’ but I’m a doer by nature, and when I see things that trouble me, I can’t sit still.”

“The risk was that Linda had misread the situation,” DeMore said. So he took 300 pages of trial transcripts, in which Cox had highlighted key passages and added her own comments on index cards, to his own attorney, Michael B. Keating, a partner with the law firm Foley, Hoag & Eliot.

Keating agreed that the case against Montilla had some real weaknesses, but he decided to put it to the toughest test he could think of: He handed it over to Gary C. Crossen, a lawyer he had recently recruited to the firm. Crossen had spent five years with the Suffolk County (Mass.) district attorney’s office, and another five in the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, where he was chief of the criminal division.

In other words, Crossen had made a career of putting hoods in prison. He wouldn’t be swayed by yet another one who protested his innocence.

“I’m a skeptic of the first order,” the 38-year-old attorney says. “If 23 out of 24 people thought this man was guilty, I thought he must be guilty.”

Working pro bono, Crossen quickly saw some things in the transcripts that bothered him. For one, he noticed that when LaFontaine’s partner testified at the trial, he stopped short of identifying Montilla as the suspect the two had spotted dealing drugs on the street. Crossen knew that you could count on a cop’s partner to back him up as much as he could, and that bit of missing testimony seemed to suggest some doubt.

“I wasn’t too long into the project before I believed Carlos had gotten a raw deal. But even though we all believed he should not have been convicted, we faced long odds,” Crossen said. “I didn’t want anybody’s expectations to be unnecessarily built up.”

He told Cox they had one shot, and if they did not have everything in line, they would blow it.

They hired private investigator Gerard J. Belliveau, a 15-year veteran of the Secret Service, to go back over the evidence. One look at the crime scene convinced Belliveau that things couldn’t have happened the way LaFontaine said they did.

The way the officer told it, he and his partner had witnessed Montilla and Osario openly selling drugs outside an apartment building in the run-down Dorchester section of Boston. Later that evening, LaFontaine said, he followed three men he suspected as customers into the building. As the trio negotiated with someone through the opening of a chained door of a third-floor apartment, the officer watched secretly from the second-floor landing.

One of them spotted LaFontaine and yelled, “Five-O,” the universal street code for cops. LaFontaine drew his gun and charged up the stairs as they charged down, but they escaped past him.

Belliveau contends that if LaFontaine had been standing as he said on the second-floor landing, he would have been unable to see the door of Apartment 3E. To get a look at it, he would have had to have climbed a few extra steps, putting him in plain sight of the four men. What’s more, the stairwell is so narrow that three people running down it would have found it almost impossible to slip past a man coming up--particularly one who was pointing a gun at them.

Then there was the second part of LaFontaine’s account. With the three customers gone, he says he charged the apartment, but was unable to break its heavy chain. So he stuck his gun and part of his body through the 18- to 20-inch gap. Four feet away from him was Montilla, wearing only red underwear and holding a gun of his own.

LaFontaine testified that he yelled: “Freeze! Police! I’ll shoot.” The suspect then dropped his gun and fled. The only other exit was a kitchen window, and by the time LaFontaine got there, he said, the suspect was gone, apparently through the open top half of the window.

Except, the investigator said, the window opened side to side. And anyone diving out had no choice but to drop 30 feet. “Jumping to the ground would necessarily result in serious injury,” Belliveau said in an affidavit filed in court.

Further, he said, although eight people in the apartment building said they knew Pablo Osario, Montilla’s alleged drug-dealing partner, none recognized a picture of Montilla.

Interesting stuff, but presumably that kind of information could have been made available at the first two trials. Crossen knew a judge was not going to give Montilla another chance on that information alone.

They had to find Osario--a feat, it turned out, that did not require particularly sophisticated sleuthing. Despite the fact that he had an outstanding warrant for his arrest, Osario had a valid Massachusetts driver’s license. When Belliveau went last May to the Brockton address he found in the Registry of Motor Vehicles records, he met his fugitive.

Osario said he did not even know he was wanted by the police, and he denied selling drugs.

“I do not know and never have met Carlos Montilla,” Osario swore in an affidavit. “I have never distributed cocaine, though I admit that I have used it on one occasion and have occasionally used marijuana. I was aware while living at 223 Geneva Ave. that individuals were trafficking in drugs in that building. I do not recognize Carlos Montilla as one of those individuals.”

At the time he was arrested, Osario was living in a first-floor apartment. It is unclear whether anyone was living in the third-floor apartment where the crime is alleged to have taken place.

Osario, who speaks little English, had been arrested the day after Montilla, and spent six months in jail before he was able to post bond. But he says he was not aware that he had been indicted for cocaine trafficking, so he never showed up for a court date.

Osario’s account bolsters Montilla’s and puts a dent in a key piece of evidence against him. LaFontaine, the arresting officer, testified that he had found Montilla’s pay stub in the apartment, along with Osario’s driver’s license, drug paraphernalia, money and the gun dropped by the suspect.

Montilla, on the other hand, had insisted that the pay stub--his only identification--was in his wallet when he was arrested, and that LaFontaine removed it from the wallet after he ordered the defendant to empty his pockets.

Osario tells a story that is strikingly similar to Montilla’s. He says that while he was being arrested, LaFontaine removed his driver’s license from his wallet, and then claimed to have found it in the apartment.

Osario’s account, which would not have been available during the first two trials, gave Crossen the hook he needed to take the case back to a judge and argue for a new trial.

None of this detective work was cheap. At one point, the firm paid a private investigator $150 an hour to chase down what proved to be a false lead in New Jersey. In all, the expenses for the investigation have come to $6,000. Cox and DeMore have raised all but $300 of it by soliciting donations from people they know.

Although he was hopeful that his new friends would build a case strong enough to free him, Montilla’s letters and cards to Cox, in their broken English and uneven printing, show that he was confused, and sometimes near despair.

“I seen a lot of crazy thing in here, I hope in the future it doesn’t bring me bad memory because this has been to much for me,” he wrote last July.

“Dear friend since your the only person that know all the damage that these people did to me I ask you if you see that it impossible for me, please let me know ahead of time, that way I won’t be thinking the way I’m doing.”

At other times, he was almost ebulliently optimistic. “I feel so happy that is difficult for me to find words to thank you,” he wrote in January, 1989. “This place is not for me and I’m innocent of all this, but God has put you in my life to make a chance. I will always keep you in my heart and all my thoughts. I will keep praying to our God to bless you . . . for your faith in me.”

Evelin, now his wife, has seen many changes in the brash young man who had won her heart a few months before his arrest.

They had met by chance on the street, and at first she wanted nothing to do with this guy who kept asking her out--once even following her in his battered Ford Mustang and begging her to go to a nightclub with him. Eventually, though, she decided to give him a chance.

“He was different than the guys I dated. He was younger. He was Hispanic,” says Evelin Montilla, 26, whose parents moved to Boston from Puerto Rico. “He was stylish.”

Montilla was in prison when they decided to get married. It was a tiny ceremony, with Linda Cox standing in at the last minute as maid of honor. With her husband still incarcerated, Evelin celebrated her first wedding anniversary with Cox, who showed up at the office where she works as a legal assistant to take her to lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant.

The couple now have two sons, in addition to Evelin Montilla’s son from a previous relationship. His wife says Montilla is a very different man from the one who went to prison. He avoids going out; he has lost much of his old confidence.

Although it is still unclear what Montilla’s future will be, Cox regularly assures him that he will not go back to prison.

“No?” he asks.

“No,” she says firmly.

“This is not just a victory over injustice,” Cox adds. “It’s a victory over cynicism.”