Being Oscar (20 page)

He wasn’t like a lot of the others who went before the board. He accused the regulators of being hypocrites, which they were. They were taking comps at the Stardust, getting rooms, seeing shows, and Rosenthal started blasting them. That’s why Civella asked me if I thought he was crazy, and I said, “No.”

In fact, I thought the things Lefty was saying, either before the Gaming Control Board or on his television show, were the truth. Now obviously, people in the underworld didn’t like all that attention, all that publicity. I think that was where he had a problem. See, Rosenthal never thought he was mobbed up. He thought the authorities were abusing him. Although I have to say, if there was such a thing as being a “dry snitch,” Lefty might have been that. You know, someone who talks to the authorities, but not because he has a deal or is an informant, but because he thinks he’s smarter than them or just wants to establish some kind of relationship.

Despite his arrogance, sometimes I think Lefty just wanted to be liked. I don’t think he ever gave authorities any damaging information. I think it was more about who he was talking to rather than what he said.

Look, I know that the guys I represented had some questionable dealings and associations. But I always thought my job was to be their lawyer, and to give them the same legal benefits any citizen deserved. There’s no question that being a so-called mob lawyer gave me the opportunity to practice law at a very high level. Every day I would wake up to some monumental issue concerning wiretaps or the Rico law, or a search and seizure, or the Black Book. I had to perform at the peak of my ability, or my clients would have been gobbled up by the system.

Tony Spilotro is a prime example. He was never convicted, but they said he was the mob’s guy in Chicago, and that he committed twenty-six murders. They were never able to prove that, so they labeled him. They called him a vicious Mafia killer and they went after him. I thought that was out of line; that they should make the case and prove the case. I was there to make sure they played by the rules. If that’s being a mob lawyer, then that’s what I was. I have no problem with that.

When Tony got killed, no one from the FBI ever asked me anything about it. Not that I would have told them anything, because I didn’t know anything. But that’s not the point. They didn’t want to solve that case; they were just happy he was gone.

We were waiting to retry the Hole-in-the-Wall case when Tony went back to Chicago to see his brother, Michael. Michael was somewhat involved in Tony’s business, and he also had a great little restaurant in Chicago called “Hoagies.”

About a week after Tony left, I got a call from his wife Nancy telling me that she was worried. She hadn’t heard from Tony in several days, and he and Michael were missing. The next thing I knew, their bodies were found in a cornfield in Indiana. They had been beaten and buried alive; just planted in the ground. Whatever happened to him had to be a surprise or an ambush. He was one tough fireplug, and he would have gone down swinging.

After he was murdered, I never heard from anybody other than the family. I had tried cases with Tony all over the country. We had appeared at grand juries in different jurisdictions, and had spent an inordinate amount of time together because he had so many outstanding issues. But nobody from law enforcement came to see me when he “went missing.” I was even more shocked when no one, especially no one from the FBI, came to see me when his body was found. Did I know anything? Had I
heard anything? Did Tony have any pressing problems? None of these questions were asked of me.

I came to the conclusion that they were happy to be rid of him. I didn’t believe them when they said they were trying to solve the murder. After Tony was killed, the media coverage shifted. Tony wasn’t the mob’s guy in Vegas anymore; he was just a street punk. Now that he was gone, there was a media campaign to belittle him.

That’s not who he was. I saw him as a human being, not some dime-store fictional character.

I went back to Chicago for the funeral, curious to see who would be in attendance. The FBI and the Chicago Police Department were there, taking notes and snapping pictures as they do at most “mob funerals.” But the thing that struck me was that several of the so-called wiseguys who Tony was supposedly representing in Las Vegas weren’t there. They saw no need to pay their final respects.

That said a lot to me about who was behind Tony’s murder. A few years ago, there was a federal investigation in Chicago that included details about Tony’s death and those who were behind it. The feds love to give sensational names to their investigations, and this one was called “Family Secrets.”

Actually, it was a fairly accurate description. A mobster in Chicago became an informant and testified against dozens of members of the Outfit, including his own father and brother. That’s how far the “men of honor” have fallen.

According to the informant, Tony and his brother were killed on the orders of James Marcello, one of the bosses back there. The Spilotro brothers were lured to a hunting lodge, beaten, tortured, and shot, and then buried in a cornfield.

I find it somewhat ironic that the government could only solve this case when a rat came forward.

At a trial in 2008, there was testimony that one of the Outfit’s hitmen had boasted that he had orders to kill Tony, his brother Michael, and me. The hitman said he planned to use an Uzi submachine gun and take all three of us out.

By the time I heard about this, of course, I was mayor and no longer practicing criminal law. I always said I never worried about my own safety when I was representing mobsters, but maybe I should have.

A
month after Tony’s body was found, and while I was still trying to make sense of it all, the House of Representatives in Washington handed up articles of impeachment against my good friend Harry Claiborne.

Harry was a federal judge who had been convicted in an income tax case. I represented him in that matter. After his conviction he was sentenced to jail, but he refused to resign as a judge. So congress moved to impeach.

Lawyers are supposed to remain above it all, detached, focused. But Tony and Harry were more than just clients; they were friends. And I took what happened to them personally. I never shied away from events surrounding either of them. My relationship with them was on a different level than most of my other clients. And just because they had been charged with a crime, I wasn’t going to stop being their friend.

The interesting thing was that while they came from entirely different backgrounds, they shared some common traits. They were fearless, honorable to a fault with me, and neither one of them ever complained about the hand they were dealt. They were fighters; they believed in themselves and they never backed down.

The fact that one was an alleged gangster and the other was a lawyer and judge was of no consequence to me. I dealt with people as I found them, not as others might describe or label them.

The move to impeach Harry was, as far as I was concerned, the last act in a vindictive, personal witch hunt.

Harry was the best defense attorney in Las Vegas when I first came out here, and I was privileged to work on some cases with him. I learned a lot about the law and about people. Harry was genuine; there was no pretense about him. He was born and raised in Arkansas, and still had a bit of a Southern drawl. He also had that Southern way about him—never flustered, never seeming to be in a hurry, but sharp as a tack. He was a master at marshalling facts and distilling information, and was a great lawyer. He was my mentor. Later, when some people compared me to him, I was honored.

He also had a dry sense of humor and a quick wit that he used to great advantage in front of a jury. We were trying a drug case together up in Reno one time. We each had a client in the case who was a privileged hippie—that’s the only way I can think to describe the two of them—who routinely had large quantities of marijuana flown in. The plane would land at a makeshift airfield in a dried-out lakebed outside of Reno. The area was called Grass Valley.

In this case, the plane had crashed, the drugs were discovered, and our clients were arrested. The sheriff who investigated the crash went into great detail for the jury about how and where all this had happened.

When Harry opened his cross-examination, he looked at the sheriff and said, “Can you tell me, sir, what was that valley called before the plane crash?” The jury loved it. We didn’t win the case, but those kinds of things help establish a relationship with the jurors. In a criminal case, even having one juror sympathetic
or empathetic can help. A hung jury is the next best thing to “not guilty.”

Over the years, Harry’s clients included Frank Sinatra when Sinatra was fighting with the gaming commission, Dean Martin, and Judy Garland. I think he even represented Bugsy Siegel back in the day. But during his career, Harry had rubbed some people the wrong way, particularly some people in law enforcement. And I think they set out to get him. Joseph Yablonsky, my FBI nemesis, was leading the pack.

Harry was well aware that he had been targeted. Even before he became a federal judge, he had developed a unique habit. He knew that in order to be charged with conspiracy, you had to agree with at least one other person to commit whatever the offense might be. So whenever he left a meeting, in addition to saying goodbye, he would add, “Count me out.” He figured if anyone was secretly taping the meeting and trying to set him up, those words would indicate that he was not agreeing to whatever conspiracy might be alleged.

It was a hell of a way to have to live, and I think it was sad that someone of his stature and reputation had to protect himself that way. But I also knew that just because he might have been paranoid, it didn’t mean the feds weren’t out to get him.

I found this out firsthand when another attorney came to me with a story about Yablonsky. This lawyer had gotten himself jammed up with some gambling problems for which he might face criminal charges. He told me Yablonsky came to him with a proposition. The FBI wanted the lawyer to attempt to bribe Harry by offering him $50,000 to fix his case. And the feds wanted him to make the offer through me. They wanted to put me and Harry in the same “conspiracy.” Instead, the lawyer told me what was going on. It just reinforced Harry’s perception that they were out to get him.

And unfortunately, they did.

It’s hard to know where to begin the Harry Claiborne story, but I think his problems started when he was appointed to the federal bench in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter. He was chosen to fill a vacancy on the District Court of Nevada. Two years later, he was chief judge, and he remained there until 1986, although his last year was spent in prison rather than on the bench.

I had tried some cases in front of Harry, and he was always fair. He understood the law, and he also understood the roles of the prosecution and the defense. Some prosecutors, who were used to judges being government proxies, didn’t like that.

But Harry had problems with the feds even before he started to hear cases. His appointment raised eyebrows in law enforcement circles because of his lifestyle and his associations. Harry was a good friend of Benny Binion, a legendary casino owner with a checkered past. Binion had come to Las Vegas in the 1950s from Texas, where he had been involved in illegal gambling and had been the target of several murder investigations.

Harry never turned his back on his friends. Some people might consider them outlaws, but he didn’t. And whether he was a lawyer or a federal judge, he was always going to be true to his beliefs.

He used to have lunch every day with Benny at the Horseshoe. Binion would have squirrel stew; you could see the squirrel’s little buck teeth and shiny eyes in the bowl. Harry had ham hocks and lima beans. Every day it was the same. I would have lunch with them once in a while. I was always on a diet, and if I was splurging, I’d get a little olive oil on a pile of lettuce and tomatoes.

Harry would look at my plate and say, “Oscar, you keep eating like that and it’s gonna make you impotent.”

Harry loved the ladies, and went out with lots of pretty women. He was divorced, and he had an eye for the girls. He
also drank. The vetting process when he was nominated by Jimmy Carter was intense. Investigators went to prisons to interview former clients of Harry’s and asked all kinds of questions about how he had represented them and how he had been paid. They were looking for ways to undermine the nomination. They weren’t able to do that, but they didn’t stop after he got on the bench. He became a target of federal law enforcement.

There was a private investigator, Eddie LaRue, who Claiborne had used when he was a defense attorney. LaRue was a character. In the television show
VEGA$
, the private investigator Dan Tanna, played by Robert Urich, was patterned after LaRue. LaRue wasn’t as good looking as Urich; he was a former jockey, only about five-foot-two. He came from Kentucky and spoke with a twang. But he was just as resourceful as the Dan Tanna character Urich portrayed in the series.

Claiborne was very close to LaRue, and Eddie would often join Harry and Benny Binion for lunch. The feds came to believe that Harry had had an electronic listening device planted in a girlfriend’s apartment because he thought she was seeing another man. Naturally, the feds figured LaRue had planted the bug. He got indicted and asked me to represent him. He said the feds were telling him that if he gave up Claiborne, they’d drop the charges against him.