kept his word.
He said, “Here’s the New York penal code. Pick a crime and we’ll let your guy plead out.” I picked walking a dog without a leash on the streets of New York. Marty paid a fine of $50 and beat the $100 million bookmaking case.
I’ve never been a good winner. I crowed about the victory, putting my thumb on my big nose and wiggling my fingers at the New York D.A.
When the big bookmaking case dropped, Marty asked for my help for some of his friends who had heard about our victory. It was another case built around wiretaps, and by now I had a reputation for knowing how to defend those kinds of cases. So I signed on and got involved with Lefty Rosenthal.
Marty said that Frank—no one who knew him called him “Lefty”—was facing serious charges, and it would be a feather in my cap if I was his lawyer.
The feds had made these kinds of cases into the essence of their war on organized crime. Almost every defendant’s name, aside from Rosenthal, ended in a vowel. I know we’re not talking model citizens here, but the government’s targets in reality were just bookmakers. And the Justice Department was using the wiretap statutes to bring them down.
The allegation was that all the defendants were using telephones to receive information and place or accept bets. The phone calls were from one state to another, making the communications a form of interstate commerce and creating a violation of federal law.
There were twenty-six cities where these electronic surveillances had led to indictments, and defendants hired me in nineteen of those cities. I went all over the country for preliminary hearings. A lot of the legal arguments that prosecutors used to get wiretap orders were boilerplate. But in order to comply withthe law, Mitchell, or one of his nine top assistants, had to personally sign the authorization requests. That was the only way they could be valid.
If I had had just one client, instead of nineteen clients with nineteen separate case files, I never would have found the legal jackpot that I did. I was sitting in a hotel room one night in Detroit with one of my clients going over some documents. There were papers from nineteen different cases strewn about the room, and he started rummaging through them. After a while, he said to me, “Oscar, this doesn’t look right.”
Since I was preparing for court the next day, I was only listening with one ear, but he persisted.
“You gotta look at this,” he said. “They’re the same name, but different signatures. One doesn’t look like the other.”
I started to compare one city’s paperwork to another city’s paperwork.
My client was talking about the signature of a guy named Will Wilson, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division and one of Mitchell’s top assistants. And his “signatures” on the authorizations were strikingly different. We started to check the other documents from the other cases, and we found more discrepancies. The feds were just playing fast and loose with the wiretap rules. Apparently, it didn’t matter to them.
I ended up deposing John Mitchell. I brought him to my friend Byron Fox’s law office in Kansas City. Byron had a co-defendant in a wiretap case in which one of my clients, Nick Civella, was involved. Mitchell sat down with his pipe and I questioned him. Under oath he admitted it wasn’t his signature on any of the documents, and that it wasn’t Will Wilson’s signature either. It turned out that one of Wilson’s assistants had signed his name on all the paperwork.
None of the authorizations were signed by the appropriate official. We filed motions to suppress in all nineteen cities, andevery case was thrown out. Every defendant in every city walked. And with that, my “legend” grew: apparently I couldn’t lose a case.
Now here’s my question—and unfortunately, I could ask this in almost every case I was ever involved in: Was anybody in government penalized for
He said, “Here’s the New York penal code. Pick a crime and we’ll let your guy plead out.” I picked walking a dog without a leash on the streets of New York. Marty paid a fine of $50 and beat the $100 million bookmaking case.
I’ve never been a good winner. I crowed about the victory, putting my thumb on my big nose and wiggling my fingers at the New York D.A.
When the big bookmaking case dropped, Marty asked for my help for some of his friends who had heard about our victory. It was another case built around wiretaps, and by now I had a reputation for knowing how to defend those kinds of cases. So I signed on and got involved with Lefty Rosenthal.
Marty said that Frank—no one who knew him called him “Lefty”—was facing serious charges, and it would be a feather in my cap if I was his lawyer.
The feds had made these kinds of cases into the essence of their war on organized crime. Almost every defendant’s name, aside from Rosenthal, ended in a vowel. I know we’re not talking model citizens here, but the government’s targets in reality were just bookmakers. And the Justice Department was using the wiretap statutes to bring them down.
The allegation was that all the defendants were using telephones to receive information and place or accept bets. The phone calls were from one state to another, making the communications a form of interstate commerce and creating a violation of federal law.
There were twenty-six cities where these electronic surveillances had led to indictments, and defendants hired me in nineteen of those cities. I went all over the country for preliminary hearings. A lot of the legal arguments that prosecutors used to get wiretap orders were boilerplate. But in order to comply withthe law, Mitchell, or one of his nine top assistants, had to personally sign the authorization requests. That was the only way they could be valid.
If I had had just one client, instead of nineteen clients with nineteen separate case files, I never would have found the legal jackpot that I did. I was sitting in a hotel room one night in Detroit with one of my clients going over some documents. There were papers from nineteen different cases strewn about the room, and he started rummaging through them. After a while, he said to me, “Oscar, this doesn’t look right.”
Since I was preparing for court the next day, I was only listening with one ear, but he persisted.
“You gotta look at this,” he said. “They’re the same name, but different signatures. One doesn’t look like the other.”
I started to compare one city’s paperwork to another city’s paperwork.
My client was talking about the signature of a guy named Will Wilson, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division and one of Mitchell’s top assistants. And his “signatures” on the authorizations were strikingly different. We started to check the other documents from the other cases, and we found more discrepancies. The feds were just playing fast and loose with the wiretap rules. Apparently, it didn’t matter to them.
I ended up deposing John Mitchell. I brought him to my friend Byron Fox’s law office in Kansas City. Byron had a co-defendant in a wiretap case in which one of my clients, Nick Civella, was involved. Mitchell sat down with his pipe and I questioned him. Under oath he admitted it wasn’t his signature on any of the documents, and that it wasn’t Will Wilson’s signature either. It turned out that one of Wilson’s assistants had signed his name on all the paperwork.
None of the authorizations were signed by the appropriate official. We filed motions to suppress in all nineteen cities, andevery case was thrown out. Every defendant in every city walked. And with that, my “legend” grew: apparently I couldn’t lose a case.
Now here’s my question—and unfortunately, I could ask this in almost every case I was ever involved in: Was anybody in government penalized for
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