Source: Gatopardo via MXporFC (original version in Spanish)
Author: Emmanuelle Steels
April 16th, 2015
Translation: JB for CART / ACDV
The Other Setup: The Vallartas
Guadalupe Vallarta Cisneros has spent eight years working for the freedom of her own family. Her brother Israel — the ex-boyfriend of Florence Cassez — and five other members of her family have been accused of kidnapping, tortured and condemned by public opinion. Behind this “family of kidnappers” there hides a story silenced by the turmoil of the Cassez case.
Guadalupe Vallarta would buy new bookshelves as the authorities would detain her brothers and nephews; she would use them to store her court files. Her house in Colonia Doctores, a damp and single-story house, is full of papers. There is almost nothing else: files that overflow the shelves invade the sofa, the table and the plastic chairs; when there is space, they get stacked on the floor. Piles of documents with criminal cases against her brother Israel, arrested in 2005 and charged with leading the gang of kidnappers Los Zodiaco together with Florence Cassez, and against several brothers and nephews: René, Juan Carlos and Alejandro, captured in 2009, and Mario and Sergio, in 2012. So far, they all are still in prison, with the exception of Cassez, who went free in January 2013.
The news of the arrest of Israel surprised Guadalupe in bed, sick with dengue. It was the morning of December 9, 2005, and she was asleep. “My sister Yolanda stormed into my room and told me that they had arrested Israel and Florence,” she says. On television there were images of her brother and his girlfriend handcuffed at the Rancho Las Chinitas, home of Israel, a small property in Topilejo, on the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway. Reporters said that the couple had been caught red handed by the Federal Investigations Agency (Agencia Federal de Investigación or AFI) while they were holding three people, including an 11-year-old child, against their will in a garden cabin.
Guadalupe lived in Iztapalapa with her sister Yolanda and her parents, Jorge Vallarta and Gloria Cisneros, aged 79 and 72 respectively. “I saw Israel, crouching, with his bruised face. These images impressed me so much that I could not think. I thought it was a mistake because I know that my brother does not look like that. We didn’t know what to say to my mom about that because we thought that she would find it difficult to believe the news. By mid-morning, the family started gathering, my siblings slowly arriving at the house in Iztapalapa. We kept saying to ourselves: “It is not true, not true,” and then: “Is it true?” because it was very serious. On television everybody was saying they were hijackers. On the one hand, we knew that it was false, but, on the other hand, we had no information. My mom insisted that there was something strange in these images.”
They called Héctor Trujillo, a lawyer friend with whom Guadalupe had worked several years earlier. The priority was to find Israel and Florence. The family looked for them in the agencies of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR). René and Mario, two of the brothers, spent a couple of days sitting under the monument to the revolution, opposite the entrance of the Office of Special Investigations on Organized Crime (Subprocuraduría de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada or SIEDO). After two days, they were told that Florence and Israel were being detained there but they could not talk to them.
A few police officers who claimed to be from the AFI approached them and asked them for two hundred thousand pesos in exchange for Israel’s freedom, but the family refused to pay. “We thought that anyway he would be freed quickly.”
The authorities ordered the detention of the couple on December 10, but they refused to inform the family. A day after, the parents of Israel went to the National Commission on Human Rights (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos or CNDH) to lodge a complaint for the detention and mistreatment of their son.
They were filled with questions. “Until we do not speak with them, we did not know what to believe,” says Guadalupe.” On December 12, the Vallartas were able to visit Israel and Florence at the detention centre. Israel would drag himself. He could not walk; two inmates would carry him. He was badly beaten and completely confused. He looked lost. Florence was very scared.”
Cassez felt very alone. “His brother Sébastien, who was living in Mexico at the time, never showed up, never visited her. The French consul arrived, but hardly stayed. At the beginning it was different; the French authorities would not pay attention to her,” says Guadalupe. Her mother had to buy clothes for Cassez.
When Israel relatives heard in person the story of the tumultuous days lived by the couple, the complexity of the case crushed them. They discovered that, in fact, they had been arrested on December 8 on the highway, one day prior to the recording at the ranch. The lawyer explained to them that the matter could take a long time.
On December 13, when they returned to the family home in Iztapalapa, Guadalupe and her mother found a handwritten note on the door: “This house is ensured against kidnapping.” The house had been ransacked; everything was upside down. Items, clothing and documents had vanished. “These same documents appeared in the search warrant reports, as if they had been found them there. For this reason, very early we realized that everything was a set up,” Guadalupe says.
In the cabin at the Rancho Las Chinitas there were things belonging to Israel that came from another place, objects and photographs of Florence that were in his apartment… Policemen could be seen guiding reporters. Then, when I analyzed all the videos that are on the file, I saw images of the child laughing.”
Between late 2005 and mid-2006, René and Mario were the ones who did the most to defend Israel. Then, Guadalupe took over so that they could work and ensure the defense’s financial support.
The Vallartas are a middle class family that settled in Iztapalapa in the early 1960s, when the area had scarcely started being settled. Jorge Vallarta Sr., worked for a car dealership in the Colonia Narvarte; Gloria, the mother, was the pillar of the family and taught all of her children how to sew and cook. They had nine children: Guadalupe is a middle child; Israel, the youngest. When the eldest of the siblings, Jorge, graduated as an architect, he became the example to follow. “My parents encouraged us to complete a college education,” says Guadalupe. But several of the siblings, including her, did not finish their studies. All were married very young. René, the sixth brother, started a mechanics shop in Iztapalapa, where his brother David, the fourth, also worked. Guadalupe, Mario — the eighth — and Israel spent some time buying and selling used cars. They would go to insurance companies and buy wrecked vehicles and then they would look for parts, fix them and sell them.
Guadalupe was born in 1957 in the Federal District. She lived a few years in Colonia Portales before the family moved to Iztapalapa. She never left until shortly after the arrest of Israel when she had to sell her house. She began to study chemistry at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and married her neighbour, an accountant, at age twenty-one. They had two children, but they separated after fifteen years. Before she started buying and selling cars, she set up her own freight business: she had a 3.5 ton-truck, which she would drive throughout the city. “I always got jobs that were uncommon for women. They were challenges that I would look for.” Her mother, Gloria, suffered from Addison’s disease, a hormonal deficiency, and when her health deteriorated, Guadalupe devoted herself to take care of her.
Israel is the favourite, the youngest. Born in 1970, he lived with her family in Iztapalapa and Pedregal de Carrasco, near Perisur, where he attended high school. He started working once he was fourteen years old. He had a somewhat chaotic career. He worked as a salesman for Bardahl, an auto lubricants company; at Casa Domecq, a multinational alcoholic beverage company; in Pepsi-Cola as a supervisor and then as a sales manager, and for a restaurant chain. In 1994 he experienced his first failed marriage. Then he met Claudia, married her and followed her to Guadalajara. In 1998, he had twins: Israel and Brenda. He would always become enthused by new businesses: he started in real estate and set up an aesthetics clinic, specializing in laser hair removal and body treatments.
When he separated from Claudia, he returned to Mexico City, frequently traveling to Guadalajara. He resumed an old family tradition: buying and selling used cars. The last two years before his arrest he lived at the Rancho Las Chinitas, paying a monthly rent of 4,000 pesos. “It wasn’t a flashy place. He liked it because it had a patio where meetings with the family could be organized. Israel was attracted to business but not to money,” says Guadalupe. In the summer of 2004, Sébastien Cassez, a French friend who had sold him some appliances for the aesthetics clinic, introduced him to his sister, Florence, age twenty-nine. In her book, A l’ombre de ma vie (In the shadow of my life), published in 2011, she describes Israel as “friendly” and “charming.” The family looked with keen eye this relationship, seduced by the self-confidence of the young French woman who had chosen to live in Mexico to escape the grey atmosphere of the north of France.
“She would always tell me: ‘I’m going to take your son to France!’ Jorge, the father of Israel, remembers. I would laugh at that. The truth is that Israel would have liked to go there with her.” He was happy and in love. “They were the ideal relatives: always in a good mood, always pranksters,” Jorge, the brother of Israel, remembers.
When Florence’s parents visited their daughter in Mexico, they stayed at the Rancho Las Chinitas, where Israel offered them a warm welcome. However, the relationship was marked by breakups and reunions. Florence grew tired of Israel’s jealous, possessive, and sometimes rough attitude, as she recounts in her book. He wanted her beside him, but she left him. In the summer of 2005, she returned to France. But she did not find herself at home; she missed Mexico. Finally, she accepted Israel’s proposal, in the fall of 2005, to settle in the ranch while finding a job and a place to live.
Shortly before their arrest, the couple went on a trip to Veracruz with Israel’s parents. Then, the Vallarta family joined in to celebrate Florence’s birthday. In the days prior to his arrest, Jorge, the elder brother, spent time with the couple. He went shopping with Florence. “Israel asked me take care of her when she visited his family in Guadalajara.” Jorge was at the ranch on the 7th, when they allegedly had people kidnapped. Israel thought he had got Florence back. However, she says that they had distanced themselves. When they were detained, she was about to move to an apartment in the Zona Rosa, downtown Mexico City. The stormy nature of Israel would have been the cause for this separation. “Florence is a person of character and she would have never allowed Israel to be violent with her. She would have stopped seeing him,” says Guadalupe. In the same way, if she had seen Israel commit a crime, she would have reported him. Of that I am quite sure. They are innocent.”
After his arrest, Israel Vallarta became involved in a bizarre confession. He said that he had met someone called Salustio three years ago who had “invited him to participate in a kidnapping,” as if it were an ordinary matter. Vallarta then describes a series of characters with whom he collaborated in various kidnappings between 2002 and 2005. When his detention period ended, at the beginning of March 2006, Israel refused to recognize this statement, claiming that he was forced to sign blank sheets while they were torturing him. Dr. Gerardo Montfort Ramírez, at the CNDH, examined Israel on December 12 and certified the acts of torture that he suffered in a basement at the SIEDO. He describes different types of lesions in the body of the victim and multiple burns compatible with “injuries inflicted with an electricity transmitter object.”
The mistreatments had already been demonstrated in front of television cameras on December 9. AFI agents would beat him to make him confess to being a kidnapper. Since he refused to cooperate, they had to repeat three times the shots, and the reporter for Televisa, Pablo Reinah, became enraged and hit him to force him to act according to the expected script, as Israel told his family.
A detailed study of Israel’s file leads one to think that at the time of his arrest, when he was driving towards Mexico City at noon on December 8, there were no kidnapped persons at his ranch. The AFI did not arrest any hijacker in charge of watching the hostages in the absence of Israel and Florence, nor did they offer a coherent account of the rescue. During the TV recording, Cristina Ríos, the woman kidnapped with her son Christian, shouted to the police: “Don’t hit them! They did nothing!” every time they would raise their hand on the couple. As for Ezequiel Elizalde, the third kidnapping victim, Israel identifies his voice as that of the person that they were torturing together with him at the SIEDO the previous day. In his statement of March 2006, Vallarta tells that he heard Ezequiel say “he had kidnapped himself because he needed money.”
Since the early days, Israel understood that an acquaintance of his had organized his arrest. “You went too far with a very important son of a bitch,” the agents told Israel while they were beating him. Vallarta identifies this character as Eduardo Margolis Sobol, a businessman at Polanco, specialized in the field of security, who did business with Sébastien Cassez. Everything ended in a lawsuit for money. Margolis would have threatened Sébastien to kidnap his wife and children. Israel wanted to intervene to defend his friend. He went to see Margolis at his office; the discussion became heated and ended up in pulling and punching each other. Some months later, Vallarta was arrested. Israel said in his statements that he saw Margolis at the SIEDO on December 8 and 9, plotting the TV setup with Luis Cárdenas Palomino, Director General of Police Investigations at the AFI, and the Federal Public Prosecutor Alejandro Fernández Medrano. The morning of December 10, at the detention centre, a man approached Israel, beat him with fists and feet and told him: “Your favourite Jew says ‘good morning’ to you. You know that if you talk you and your whole family will die.”
Los Zodiaco would be a group designed to make plausible the accusation against Israel and Florence as leaders of a gang of kidnappers, motivated by the revenge of Eduardo Margolis, very close to Genaro García Luna, Director of the AFI at the time and subsequently Secretary of Public Security in the Government of Felipe Calderón. To clarify this version, we, four French press correspondents, interviewed Eduardo Margolis in May 2009. He explained to us that he was involved in the resolution of the kidnappings, working for the Jewish community of Polanco. He denied his involvement in the setup but tried to convince us of the existence of Los Zodiaco. He said that Israel was in charge of the telephone negotiations with the families of the victims. But the phoniatrics expertise of June 2006 determined that it was not the voice of Israel. The name of Margolis is in the SIEDO sign-in records of December 9, 2005. He justified it saying that he was there to sell a shielded car to an official.
Israel did not dare to denounce the setup and the acts of torture against him while he was detained, at the mercy of those who threatened to kill his family. Florence Cassez adopted a more direct defense line.
On February 5, 2006, the French woman called the Televisa program “Punto de Partida”, in which the journalist Denise Maerker had as guest Genaro García Luna, to denounce the setup of her detention. Following this intervention, the authorities maneuvered to strengthen the charges against the two alleged leaders of the gang Los Zodiaco: Cristina Ríos, the victim who had refused to identify them as her kidnappers, began to incriminate them.
Convinced that the accusations against her were a misunderstanding and that she would be released, Florence asked to be sentenced as soon as possible. In early 2007, under the recommendation of her lawyer, Horacio García Vallejo, the French woman separated her criminal cause from Israel’s. Florence had begun to suspect Israel and Guadelupe because the Santa Martha prison guards had told her that her ex-boyfriend’s sister was part of an Izatapalapa kidnapping gang. The sister and the mother of her ex-boyfriend would visit her regularly in jail to try to compensate for the fact that she did not have her family nearby. From one day to another, the French woman sealed her break with the Vallarta family by refusing to receive them.
In April 2008, Florence was sentenced to ninety-six years in prison. Led by Frank Berton, a well-known French lawyer who took her case, a media strategy was launched to denounce the “judicial farce.” Another prestigious Mexican lawyer, Agustín Acosta, joined him. From there on, Florence counted with the key support of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-French President. This support would lead to a huge diplomatic conflict when Florence’s sentence was confirmed in second instance in March 2009 and was denied the amparo in February 2011. Acosta decided to take her case to Mexico’s Supreme Court, alleging violations of her rights.
In a letter that he sent to us, three correspondents of the French press, in May 2009, Israel is critical towards Florence’s attitude: “(It was) a huge mistake for Flo to expose the setup at an inappropriate time, while we were detained, and then, upon advice, to separate her cause from mine, not to present evidence and then ask to be sentenced without listening to me in one of the hundreds of times that I tried to convince her to seek other opinions, preferably at her embassy.” Today mistakes hurt! And my burden became heavier for seeking to prove our innocence.”
Over the eight years that he has been behind bars without judgment, Israel has presented hundreds of pieces of evidence in his favour. From 2008 to 2009 he entrusted his defence to the lawyer Alejandro Cortés Gaona. When the process was stalled, he decided to defend himself, and then accept a court-appointed lawyer who has been with him since then.
In January 2009, his transfer to the maximum-security prison “Altiplano,” in the State of Mexico, was ordered, claiming that he was a highly dangerous individual, despite the constant reports of good conduct. In 2010, as the press was investigating the case and that the official version about the gang of kidnappers was weakening, another victim was added to Israel: somebody named Shlomo Segal, who had been kidnapped seven years earlier.
In March he was granted a change of venue so that he would not have to face the judge Olga Sánchez, who had sentenced Cassez and had denied all his evidence requests “for being frivolous and inadmissible.” His file ended up in the hands of a Toluca judge. The opportunity to defend himself opened up for him then.
Guadalupe Vallarta set about finding all possible witnesses that could provide evidence of the innocence of Israel. “Some showed up, but others did not because they were threatened by the Feds,” she says.
Ángel Olmos Morán and Alma Delia Morales always had the keys to the ranch, near their small fast-food restaurant in Topilejo. Ángel would mow the lawn at Israel’s house and he would allow them to use the garden for their “parties.” “We would go there any day,” tells the couple, sitting in their restaurant on the edge of the highway. A few days before the setup, Ángel put away his tools in the cabin. “There was nothing there.” On three occasions they went to repeat their testimony in court.
Another neighbour, Mónica, observed the night of December 8, how AFI agents came to the ranch and arranged the furniture, before the reporters’ arrival. In court, in 2006, these testimonies irritated Luis Cárdenas Palomino, in charge of the AFI who is seen leading reporters on the images. He came to Ángel and threatened him: “We can put more people in the gang.” Ángel and Alma did not give in: “We are telling the truth and we will continue doing it whenever we are asked.”
Guadalupe Vallarta describes the attitude of the Feds during these hearings: “They were very arrogant, would threaten witnesses with detaining them, would make indecent hand signs to us and follow us in the street. To avoid that, Israel urged the judge to attend the hearings, but he refused.”
At that time, Guadalupe felt they were closing in on her. One of the victims mentioned a lock of blond hair coming out of the balaclavas of the female kidnapper. In the hearings there was someone who said that this description fit more Guadalupe than Florence. The woman was at risk of being arrested. “It hurt me, but it seemed so inconsistent that it will be in evidence that this was nothing more than a grotesque setup.”
Guadalupe was trying to fight with a cool head; she would dig in the files, detect contradictions, clues and hypothesis. “They never imagined that we were going to fight so much. They thought that we were going to remain silent. In retaliation, the AFI attempted to involve Alejandro Mejía Guevara, a man that Guadelupe had a relationship with years before. They made such a big thing, but in reality there is no consistent investigation. It is only after the arrest of Israel that they manufactured evidence to involve people in the gang and to justify how the AFI arrived at the ranch.”
Regarding the testimony of Valeria Cheja, the young woman who at the beginning of December 2005 would have led the AFI to Israel Vallarta, Guadalupe says: “They used her to point out Israel, making believe that she had recognized him by chance in the street and had identified him as her kidnapper.” Israel showed that he was in Guadalajara on the date of the kidnapping of Valeria, in August, and that he had no beard, contrary to what the young woman had stated, offering as evidence the visa application that he had made that day at the Consulate of the United States in that city. However, this and other kidnappings, which coincidentally Eduardo Margolis was in charge of resolving, were attributed to the gang allegedly led by Vallarta.
Another clue leads to the brothers José Fernando and Marco Antonio Rueda Cacho. In their first statements, several victims accuse them, without mentioning Israel and Florence. At the beginning of the investigation, arrest warrants against them were issued, but they were never executed. In an interview, a former police officer who investigated the alleged gang of Los Zodiaco considers that this gang does not exist and that the Ruedas Cacho are behind some of these kidnappings: “They are the kings of crime in Iztapalapa. At home they have fifteen phone lines. But they are protected.”
According to the official version, Los Zodiaco only included Israel and Florence, but the incongruities of the investigation came to light and France’s diplomatic pressure reached its peak in 2009: a judge had ratified the conviction of Florence Cassez, President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Mexico in March of that year and insistently requested her transfer to France invoking the Treaty of Strasbourg, which would allow her to purge her sentence there.
“It is exactly at that time that they began to watch us. They would station themselves in front of the house,” says Yolanda, the second of the nine Vallarta siblings. She then used to live in Iztapalapa, in the house of Guadalupe, with her son Juan Carlos. The son of René, of the same name, remembers that time: “Police would come to my dad’s mechanic shop and pretend they were customers. Innocently, my father would say that he was not afraid of them, that he would not hide because he had not done anything wrong.”
On May 9, masked men dressed in black and others as civilians, who arrived aboard trucks without plates, broke into Rene’s workshop, age 54, and took him and two of his nephews, Juan Carlos and Alejandro Cortes Vallarta, now 40 and 38. Jorge Sr., who was present, had a weapon pointed at him. Gloria, the mother, at the time age 77, was forced to lift her skirt up and cover her head to prevent her from witnessing the scene. “Corrupt officials are already fulfilling their threats to involve my family for the mere fact of defending myself,” wrote Israel in the letter that he sent to us just after this capture.
David Orozco, a witness who claims to have been tortured, stated that they were involved in kidnappings along with Israel and Florence. The victims incriminated them. Cristina Ríos accused them of raping her in a number of occasions. However, these relatives of Israel never hid and were always present at the trial hearings, where the victims did not identify them.
Admitting the contradictions, in 2011 a judge overturned the testimony of Cristina Ríos and her son Christian, but the defendants remain in jail, in the maximum-security prison of Tepic, Nayarit, for the kidnapping of Ezequiel.
Relying on this decision of the case, Felipe Calderón rejected Florence’s transfer to France. Rather than in diplomatic frictions, the Mexican president was more interested in getting an electoral advantage of this decision in the congressional elections of July 2009.
In 2011, the family was devastated by the death of Mrs. Gloria. She was very active in the defense of her children and grandchildren, assisting to all official instances to denounce abuses, torture and threats.
In April 2012, when the Supreme Court was deliberating on the possible release of Florence, another blow took place. Mario, Israel’s brother, 48, and Sergio Cortés Vallarta, another nephew, 34, were arrested and taken to the maximum-security prison in Puente Grande, Guadalajara. At that time the media released a statement from Mario where he confessed to being part of the gang along with Florence and Israel. This statement does not exist; it is not included in the file. The two are accused of having committed kidnappings different from those of the other detainees. Mario was identified as the leader of the organization, when this role had already been attributed to Israel, Florence and, later on, René. Also it is striking that the two brothers of Israel who sat opposite the SIEDO in 2005 waiting for news of their detained relative be accused.
The Vallarta family has spent, among them all, twenty-five years in prison. The PGR’s medical opinions show that the six were tortured. Three of them, René, Juan Carlos and Alexander underwent the Istanbul Protocol, which established a trauma related to the acts of torture. Guadalupe remembers her brother Mario: “When I saw him the day after his arrest the skin on his back was raw and he would convulse. They busted his eardrum. He refused to be taken to the hospital because police officers had told him that, sometimes, they would go overboard with the anesthesia.” In February 2007 they let a dog loose in Israel’s cell. The bites were profound but medical care was denied to him. It was a punishment for having reported the previous threats and abuse. When he would try to communicate with journalists, they would punish him by depriving him of visits and phone calls for several months.
In May 2009, in an interview, Luis Cárdenas Palomino flatly denied the existence of the CNDH report that certified Israel’s acts of torture: “There is no proven torture. Nothing, nothing, nothing!” On the television images the same police officer can be seen squeezing the neck of Vallarta, who writhes in pain, to force him to confess to the kidnapping in front of reporters.
Alejandro and Juan Carlos Cortés Vallarta are waiting for a ruling on the kidnapping of Ezequiel. Their files are filled with letters of recommendation from their former employers, showing that they do not have a criminal profile. The first one was in Akumal, Quintana Roo, in October 2005, at the time of the kidnapping. He worked in the construction of a hotel, as the judicial inspection, which moved to the Riviera Maya, certified it. When he was detained, in 2009, his wife, Ana Irma Luna, was pregnant: “I had such a serious crisis that the delivery came early.” Juan Carlos is a lawyer, and at the time of the kidnapping of Ezequiel, he worked for the Grupo Plateros, which organizes events for the government. For Yolanda, the detention of her third son, Sergio, was the coup de grace: “In court, policemen would scoff, tell me that if Alejandro and Juan Carlos are released, Sergio still will be with them.”
For the Vallartas the mockery of justice has reached the point of having to ensure their own defense after the accumulation of scams and abuses that the lawyers, convinced they would profit defending a few prosperous kidnappers, put them through. When they exhausted their financial resources, even after selling their property, and when their defense lawyers defected, disappointed by the small fortune their unlucky customers had accumulated, they were assigned ex officio lawyers. René is the only one who has kept as of today a private lawyer. “Florence had the support of her government. But who help us?” says his son, in despair.
The gang of Los Zodiaco appears to be a fictitious organization that the authorities were placing at their convenience. In his letter to the media, Israel asserts that these authorities “are the true organized crime with a badge, which in recent years has damaged Mexico so much.”
The decision of the Supreme Court to set Florence free filled the Vallarta family with great emotion; Israel felt very happy for her and is convinced that the resolution will also benefit him some day.
But some people do not cease in incriminating them. In the weekly Proceso of January 19, an interview with Florence was published, where she quotes excerpts of a phone conversation with Eduardo Margolis after her release. The brain behind the setup would have accused the Vallartas to be a “family of kidnappers.” Guadalupe replies: “These are fallacies coming out seven years after he appeared at the hearings, where he never said anything in that sense. What we have is substantiated evidence, with legal value. This man can say a thousand things; they will remain completely immaterial statements. If Israel were guilty, he would have no evidence to present and he would have already asked for judgment.”
In France, the press sentenced him, saying that Florence had fallen in love with “the wrong person.”
However, this “wrong person” still has the opportunity to prove his innocence.
