Daud Descending

Publicly, of course, he vowed to keep fighting. "I really in my heart believe I'm innocent," he told reporters after his one-count conviction. But now he tells me how, during the trial, he contemplated suicide. "I thought my life was over with," he says. "It didn't matter whether I was convicted or not. I realized that thirteen years of my life was void. What a phony existence I had. My God! Thirteen years of your life and you look back and you can't wait to get away."

At first he'd intended to shoot himself with a .38 revolver, one of the few belongings he'd held on to. "I was going to kill myself in my house. I'd written my will, set up everything. But it was amazing. A friend of mine came over, out of the blue. He never called to tell me he was going to stop by. I kept trying to get rid of him but he decided to spend the night. I didn't want to kill myself with him present," Daoud concludes the tale, "because I thought he'd blame himself."

Several weeks later, as the jury deliberated yards away, he nearly threw himself off the eleventh-floor balcony of the U.S. District Court building. "I had been waiting for the verdict all alone," he recounts. "Nobody around me, wife left me, child wasn't there, mother dead, nobody comforting me. I was leaning over the edge of the balcony, getting closer, but I realized there were people down there in the courtyard. And I said to myself, 'Wouldn't that be horrible, my last act would be to jump and kill somebody down there, probably some mother with her child.'" At that moment, he adds, he experienced an epiphany of sorts. "A small picture of my son, which I was carrying, poked itself out of my breast pocket. It had never done that before. I looked down and saw my son. It was a message I couldn't ignore.

"All of this," he goes on, "will be in the book."
In some retellings of the myth, the death of young Icarus goes unnoticed; even as he plunges downward, his father -- and the rest of the world -- flies on. Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel's famous painting of the event, in fact, depicts a plowman, a fisherman, and a shepherd all going about their daily business while a boy's legs, nearly indiscernible in the background, quietly vanish into the sea.

"As he drove to his sentencing, the defrocked politician contemplated the shambles of his life," Alex Daoud narrates as he grips the wheel of his monstrous, aging Cadillac Sedan de Ville and speeds across Seventeenth Street toward the causeways and the mainland. His sentencing is scheduled for 1:30 this afternoon, September 8; it's already 1:10. "But for all his popularity, for all his election successes, he drives to his sentencing alone. Maybe it was fitting that he end his political career in a manner that befits politics. Politics loves a winner. It loathes a loser."

He's not nervous, Daoud assures me; he's relieved that he'll finally be going to jail so he can get on with his life. He complains about soreness from the morning's workout and an ankle he twisted during an aerobics session. He ogles a woman on a bicycle ("Oh my God, what's this up here, this little tidbit?"). He wants to know whether I think he looks strong or just "kind of roly-poly." But beneath this surface of jocularity, he's undeniably tense. Back at the apartment he was a bundle of insecurities. "Does my hair look all right?" he'd asked as he dressed. "Does it look okay? Does this tie match this suit?" The brown ensemble was decidedly undapper. The tie was too short and looked as though it had been borrowed from a much smaller man. His white Oxford shirt was wrinkled.

"Do you think I'm going to cry?" he asks, slaloming through the MacArthur's midday traffic. He smiles. "Do you think they'll put me in chains right there? They could, you know." He's turned nervously eager, like a youngster heading off to camp. "Hey, d'ya think I can take a basketball? D'ya think I can take a tennis racquet? How 'bout my boxing gloves?" It is Daoud's last day as a lawyer: his suspension from the Florida Bar takes effect tomorrow.

I ask him how he left it with his son. "That was the toughest part," he replies. "I just told him that I was going away for a while but that I'd see him soon and after that we'd go to medical school together." Daoud has been teaching the boy the names of all the bones in the body. "He knows I'm going to prison. He's been singing me a little song. It goes: 'Bad boy, bad boy, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the law comes for you?'" Daoud clenches his teeth, repeats the words in a slow, hushed tone, ominously. "'Bad boy, bad boy, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the law comes for you?' So," he quips, "you think they're going to lock me up right there?"