That with the eye level is such a thing. In a kind of inaugural speech on the first day of the trial, Alexander Falk explained why he was wrongly sitting in the dock. Apart from the fact that he would never kill a human, he had no reason to want to kill the Frankfurt lawyer Wolfgang J. This was not with him "at eye level".
When Wolfgang J. enters hall 8 of the Frankfurt am Main regional court at 9.45 am, things have settled down at eye level. The 55-year-old pulls a pilot's suitcase behind him, stops next to the dock and says, "Mr. Falk." It does not sound like a greeting, more like a statement. Falk looks at him, the twelve months pre-trial detention can be seen. Wolfgang J. stops, turns around and sits down in the square intended for the witnesses.
Eleven years ago, on 10 September 2008, the two men saw each other for the last time. Now they are the main protagonists in a sensational trial: Falk, the heir to Germany's largest city map company, is charged with incitement to murder and dangerous assault. He is said to have handed over an envelope full of cash to a middleman in a Hamburg restaurant in 2009 and ordered the man to kill the lawyer Wolfgang J.
Targeted shot in the thigh
On February 8, 2010, Wolfgang J. was injured in front of his home in Frankfurt-Harheim with a targeted shot in the left thigh. He was on his way to his office, standing by his car when an unknown man approached him and shot him. This is how the lawyer describes it in court. "I heard the bang, then I saw the man holding a pistol, then a hole in my pants, then the blood."
He shouted loudly to startle the neighborhood, says Wolfgang J. The stranger had left, quietly. The man had turned around again, as if he wanted to check whether everything went as planned. Only then did he accelerate his pace. The act could - as usual in the milieu - have been a warning shot or the attempt to kill the lawyer. For Wolfgang J. it was in any case a "very professional course of action" and a "very controlled action," as he says.
Already in the ambulance he gave the police the hint: "I'm a lawyer, I am conducting a case against Alexander Falk, this is a Hamburg multimillionaire, please listen to his phone.
The background is a civil law dispute in 2003 for millions of claims by the British telecommunications company Energis Valk Falk, who had sold in late 2000 his company Ision AG to the Group. In the course of the legal dispute, an arrest warrant was issued against Falk amounting to 30 million euros. At that time, Wolfgang J., at that time specializing in arrest and execution, belonged to the team of a Frankfurt law firm, which had been commissioned by the British company. In court, he summarizes in detail the years between the beginning of the mandate and the attack: how Falk's entire bank accounts, business shares and luxury goods were seized.
Witness recalls "hostile" mood at meetings
It was a lucrative, high-revenue mandate, as Wolfgang J. says. But it was also complex and sometimes associated with unpleasant encounters: So the lawyer and Falk met on 10 September 2008 the bailiff. Falk had to give a federal insurance, Wolfgang J. and his colleague represented the creditors. The mood at that time was "extremely hostile", Wolfgang J. recalls in court. When he had been alone with Falk for a moment, he had looked at him "evilly". "I felt threatened by Falk for the first time, I was scared." It was the first time he had thought, "Oh shit, is he doing something to you ?!"
If you think Wolfgang J. was the beginning of a series of threats: He speaks of anonymous phone calls on his private line, a break through the dining room window, a stranger on the doorstep and a broken door in the middle of the night.
Already after the first calls, says Wolfgang J., he had seen a connection to his mandate against Falk, who as a multimillionaire had temporarily ranked 83rd on the list of the richest Germans. For him it is obvious that with these actions, but especially with the deliberate shot in the leg, he should be weakened as the lawyer, who has been in charge of Falk for seven years. He understood the shot as the last warning and withdrew from the proceedings. "I absolutely trust Mr. Falk to incite murder!"
Falk sits between his defenders Björn Gercke and Daniel Wölky, he denies the allegations. In 2008, he was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for attempting joint fraud and accounting fraud on the sale of Ision to Energis. Wolfgang J. remembers the process well. At that time, the court wrote on Falk's motivation in the grounds for the verdict: The defendant Falk had committed the act "out of craving and irrational greed for money".
He himself was not a welcome process participant in the proceedings before the Hamburg Regional Court, says Wolfgang J. "Nobody spoke to us." Whether he has greeted with Falk, the other defendants and their representatives, the presiding judge Jörn Immerschmitt wants to know. "I care to greet people," says Wolfgang J. "I even do that with Mr. Falk."
