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Four Wheels, No Breaks

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Grieco was angling for a sports-related job in New York, a state where he had also passed the Bar. As defense attorneys would eventually discover, Grieco also liked to skinny-dip. And he liked women with "brains and an ass." To a small group of people — perhaps Midwestern tourists who don't know their way around South Beach — Grieco displayed an alter ego. On Saturday nights at Automatic Slim's on Washington Avenue, Grieco was known as DJ ESQ.

He could be seen by the front door, in the DJ booth. He was the one in the black T-shirt worn over a white long-sleeve undershirt. The one with the stud in his ear, the chain dangling from his jeans, the sideburns crawling down his cheeks.

He was the guy spinning a playlist cribbed from a frat party circa 1988. Old U2. Old INXS. Nothing more current than an unfortunate mashup of Jay-Z's "99 Problems" and Nena's "99 Red Balloons." The tourists dug it, though. So did Taylor's defense team.

When Taylor first surrendered to the police in West Perrine, he had a lawyer named Fred Moldovan. As if he were switching sports agents, Taylor quickly changed representation to Carhart. His new lawyer prepared to defend Taylor against the one count of felony assault with a firearm and one misdemeanor count of battery. But a full seven months after the initial arrest, Grieco amplified the charges against Taylor to three counts of felony assault and the one count of battery.

"The state has had this case since June and now they're filing these added charges? It's bizarre," Carhart said.

With more charges to defend, Taylor bulked up his legal team. In addition to Carhart, he hired attorneys Larry Handfield, Richard Sharpstein, and Sharpstein's wife, Janice Burton Sharpstein. The new team, turning its attention to Grieco, stumbled onto DJ ESQ's MySpace Webpage.

The specific Webpage notes that the personality traits Grieco looks for in the opposite sex are "brains and an ass." And has he been skinny-dipping? "Yep."

What bothered the defense the most, or at least what gave the attorneys the most ammunition, was the way the MySpace page linked to stories about Grieco's prosecution of Sean Taylor, which they deemed a conflict of interest.

"The Website is clear: 'Links to my [press] coverage,'" Richard Sharpstein said. "You click on it — it's all about the Sean Taylor case. It's not about some burglary prosecuted in Overtown."

Even though Grieco quickly removed himself from the case, and subsequently resigned from the State Attorney's Office altogether, Taylor's legal team asked for a dismissal of the charges against its client.

"An uninterested, unbiased prosecutor would never prosecute this case. If Sean Taylor wasn't the defendant, this case would have been out the window six months ago," Sharpstein has said.

Be that as it may, Taylor's defense team was not able to get the case dismissed because of DJ ESQ. State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle criticized the defense attorneys and vowed to proceed with the case without Grieco.

"The desire to smear a prosecutor and affect a potential jury pool is a reprehensible trial tactic," Rundle's office relayed in a statement, adding that nothing on Grieco's Website "compromised the integrity of the Sean Taylor case."

The case, which has been delayed several times, is currently scheduled to be tried in July.

Strip away all pretrial gamesmanship and what's left is Ryan Hill. Everything hinges on Hill.

Talking outside his mother's apartment, Hill says he's changed his cell phone number because he's been receiving calls from strangers asking him to drop the case.

"I really didn't want to go through this," he says of his role in the upcoming trial. "I don't like this public stuff. It's, like, scary, 'cause that dude, he knows people that can do stuff to me. And I don't want to get hurt."

Hill says lawyers are encouraging him to sue Taylor in civil court, an option he hasn't ruled out. In the same breath, he says he doesn't want money, and he feels sympathy for Taylor, up to a point.

"When you look at it, he looks like the victim," Hill says. "His house got sprayed and then the ATVs got took. But if your ATVs got took, you don't go trying to shoot other people for something that somebody ain't do. That's wrong, man."

In a deposition, Hill's friend Maurice "Fat Boy" Williams denies he or Hill were involved in the theft of Taylor's ATVs.

"Honestly, on my daddy, we did not steal that stuff from him," said Williams, a high school dropout who describes himself as retarded.

Hill, talking outside his mother's apartment, insists he is not a criminal. He claims to have no idea who shot Taylor's Yukon. He says he's never stolen an ATV.

Police disagreed on that last claim, at least briefly.

On Saturday, March 4, of this year, at 3:10 in the morning, two Miami-Dade Police officers pulled over a 2002 Chevy pickup occupied by two black men. In the bed of the truck sat an ATV with the ignition ripped out. A check of its seventeen-digit vehicle identification number revealed the ATV had been stolen the day before.

The passenger was Maurice "Fat Boy" Williams. The driver was Ryan Hill. The pair was arrested for grand theft, but those charges were dropped a month later.

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