‘Now, Do You Want to Hear the Twist?’

When Marc X. Carlos tells stories of the dramatic criminal defense cases he’s handled, he often pauses and smiles before adding, “Now, do you want to hear the twist?”

This is partly a reflection of having a lot of stories to tell. He’s taken on more than 200 jury trials and been lead counsel in 32 homicide cases, many of which have made headlines and ended up being featured in books and true crime shows.

It’s also a function of being a born storyteller with three mystery novels under his belt.

“There’s a reason true crime podcasts are such a big business,” Carlos says. “This stuff is genuinely exciting. You don’t see 20/20 episodes about a corporate merger, but you do about the kind of cases I handle.”

Sitting in his book-lined office, he is dressed in an elegant suit, with neatly trimmed black hair rimmed with white. He seems more like a dignified college professor than a man on a first-name basis with serial murderers and hitmen.

“Jurors like him,” says Hector Jimenez, a former deputy DA who faced off against Carlos numerous times. “Prosecutors respect him. He has a lot of credibility. He doesn’t waste time. He doesn’t insult people. He understands who to attack, when to attack, and how to attack.”

In 2019, Carlos represented Kellen Winslow II when the NFL star and son of the San Diego Chargers Hall of Famer was accused of raping and exposing himself to several women. During cross-examinations, one witness tried to brush off a lengthy list of public intoxication arrests by claiming she had simply consumed too much cough syrup.

“You told the jury you haven’t had anything to drink in 30 years,” Carlos said to her.

“I haven’t had anything to drink today,” the witness countered.

In the end, Winslow avoided a life sentence and accepted 14 years in a plea bargain.

“You can’t just beat witnesses down for no reason,” Carlos says. “You have to give them the courtesy and respect of being a victim—unless you think they are lying straight out of the gate.” With the woman who claimed to be 30 years sober, she started fighting, so Carlos fought back. “And I’m watching the jury because they’re getting into it. This is the stuff they wanted to see.”

“He knows how to keep a jury captivated,” says Deborah LaTouche, a former public defender and current district attorney, who interned with Carlos and second-chaired him in a criminal threat trial two decades ago. “He’s a gregarious, charming guy and a wonderful storyteller. He can really paint a picture for a jury. But he also does that in negotiations. Storytelling is just second nature to him.”

Carlos’ father was a first-generation American who was raised in Riverside and became an aerospace engineer. Some of his projects, involving top-secret satellites for the military, have only recently been declassified.

“My father was the first person in his family to go to college,” Carlos says. “We didn’t have any lawyers in the family. But I always had the natural ability to talk and argue.”

At Berkeley in the early ’80s, Carlos received a B.A. in political science and international relations. Three years later, he earned a law degree at Santa Clara. It took just three months in civil law to know it was not for him. “I worked on a summary judgment motion over the ownership of two parking spots in a Century City garage,” he says with a mixture of horror and disdain.

So he became a public defender—three years in Los Angeles, eight in San Diego. “I tried everything there was to try,” he says. “Death penalty cases, murder cases, rape cases. As a young lawyer, I was one of those guys that when something bad was reported in the newspaper, I would run to my supervisors and say, ‘Hey, can I get in on this?’”

In one such case, a father and son were accused of kidnapping and killing the young man who married the son’s ex. Carlos represented the son. “The twist,” he says, “was the mother of my client went to the press and said her son and ex-husband deserved the death penalty.”

During the penalty phase of the trial, Carlos kept glancing at his client’s mother in the courtroom. “She just hated, hated, hated me every single time I walked in the door,” he says. “I turned around and called her as a witness even though I hadn’t prepped her.”

Asked about the risk of calling such a witness, Carlos shrugs. He’s confident in his ability to work on the fly. And in the end, Carlos lured the mother into reminiscing about her son in a way that humanized him. “It was a very dramatic moment, and resulted in my client getting life without parole as opposed to getting the death penalty,” Carlos says. The father was sentenced to death.

“He’s really good at reading the vibe in the courtroom,” LaTouche says. “He always knows where he’s going, but he’s not so tied to that that he misses connecting with a jury.”

Carlos all but bristles when lawyers representing co-defendants ask to share strategies and question trees. “My preparation for cross-examination is free-flowing, so I don’t have everything written down,” he says. “When you weigh yourself down with notes, flow charts and outlines, you can really lose sight of what the case is all about. Rather than be stuck with that stuff, you can watch for what a juror rolled his eyes at when a witness was speaking.”

Jimenez recalls handling his first securities fraud case in which he felt Carlos bested him in critical areas—like jury selection. “He picked my pocket, outlawyered me, and wiped the floor with me,” Jimenez says. “I was lucky to get a hung jury. I appreciate lawyers like him because he made me a better lawyer.”

By age 35, Carlos had handled nearly 100 trials as a public defender. He knew it was time to go into private practice, but wishes he could’ve checked one thing off his list. “This is kind of morbid, but I was chasing a serial killer to defend,” he says. “I thought it would be interesting to get in their mind.”

Carlos is a bit like a tough-but-likeable crime novel protagonist: brisk, engaging, congenial, with an uncanny sense of when to go for the jugular. “There are some lawyers who thrive on the Columbo look,” he says. “Some are touchy-feely. Some are savants. I’m a professional. People know exactly why I am doing what I’m doing.”

Colleagues talk about the importance Carlos places on maintaining collegial relationships with prosecutors and other attorneys. “It takes a lot of skills to be a lawyer, and I think he’s a five-tool lawyer,” Jimenez says. “One thing he has is credibility, which makes prosecutors listen to him with an open mind.”

After three decades, Carlos still has a curiosity for deciphering the seamier aspects of human behavior. He recalls reading a 2023 newspaper story about a 22-year-old who shot his brother in the head with an arrow for no apparent reason. Two days later, the family called him to represent their son. Knowing the grisly crime had been caught on security cameras, Carlos aimed for a plea bargain.

“I worked really hard to get him a manslaughter offer from the prosecution, and was successful in getting that offer. Except the twist was the client refused to take it,” Carlos recalls. “His parents and everybody wanted him to do it, because the risk of trial was so high. I tried as hard as I could to convince him. There is a thing in our profession called ‘cracking the client.’ You spend hours with them and break them down by targeting their idea of what happened and showing how it can be shot down in trial. But he still wouldn’t take it. So he ended up getting first-degree murder.

“There are very few cases good criminal defense lawyers lose sleep over, but that’s one for me. He was a very nice kid—no record, no nothing, just something happened and we don’t know what it is.”

Carlos started writing novels both to express the stories running in his head and as catharsis for the gruesome cases he’s handled. “There’s a lot of things that keep me awake at night, and this lets it out,” he says. “I’ve had some really, really, really bad cases—where you wonder what drives these people.”

Pressed for details about the worst case, he starts to answer, then catches himself. “You don’t want to know.”

Carlos has been married twice. His first wife was a former U.S. attorney and public defender. “My second wife isn’t a lawyer, and given my specialty, it’s a good thing,” he says.

His daughter did become a lawyer, he adds: a corporate lawyer. “On at least two or three occasions she had inadvertently looked at files of mine that had bad things in them like autopsy photos. She said I gave her nightmares early, which is why she doesn’t do criminal defense.”

Here’s another good reason a person might want to avoid criminal defense. In one of Carlos’ cases, a boyfriend and girlfriend were accused of shooting a third party, and Carlos represented the woman. “At the preliminary hearing, it was clear I was going to basically dump the whole case on the boyfriend,” Carlos says. “So he was obviously upset.”

A month later, Carlos was contacted by a district attorney, who told him they had intercepted a coded message from jail showing that the boyfriend co-defendant had paid someone in jail to kill Carlos before the trial. The note included chilling details about where he lived and what his car looked like.

Carlos smiles. “Now, do you want to hear the twist?”

When they figured out who the boyfriend contacted for the hit, Carlos recalls saying, “I know that dude!” He was a former client whom Carlos helped get acquitted twice. When Carlos visited him in prison, the guy said, “I didn’t know that was you! We’ll take this guy’s money, but we won’t do a thing.”

“It was 30 days of terror, but once I found out, I knew the heat was off,” Carlos says. “High friends in low places, I guess you could say.”

Carlos went back to the DA and told him, “Don’t worry about it.”

After telling the story, Carlos leans back in his chair with a furrowed brow. One thing still bothers him about the whole affair: The contract to kill him was $10,000. “I thought I’d be worth more than that,” he says.

All In the Game

Recently, Marc Carlos signed a deal with Aethon Books for his next three crime novels, and The Apparition, due out in April, is the first. In it, a popular priest is accused of a horrific assault, which sends a young attorney (Jackson Price) and his mentor (Billy Torres) racing to uncover the motives of the accuser. “The novel is based not on one single case,” Carlos says. “The story has aspects of several cases that I have been involved in. Of course, the characters are fictional.”

In the following excerpt, Torres explains to young Price what it means to be a trial lawyer.

“As you could probably imagine,” Price said, “I wasn’t at the top of my class, and I didn’t have much time for any standout extracurricular activities.”

Torres laughed. “You probably know by now that undergraduate and law school grades don’t mean a whole hell of a lot when trying cases.”

Price felt a wave of relief.

“It’s about the game, my friend,” Torres said. “The chess game of pretrial litigation, investigation and, ultimately, trial. There are few people in this world who are given the opportunity to stand in front of twelve people and plead for another person’s life. It’s that feeling, the power and skill to convince normal people that your side should win, that drives trial attorneys.”

Price was taking it all in.

“It’s like this,” Torres said as he locked eyes with Jack. “You can stand in front of jury and tell them the sky is purple. You describe the special lavender hue. You compare it to the light hue of a pastel chalk piece. All the while, they know that the sky is not purple. Could never be purple.”

Torres smiled.

“But you know that when you are done, those jurors will walk outside and look up at the sky, just in case.”

Price nodded in agreement. “That,” he said, “is something I most definitely can do.”