Being Oscar (7 page)

I didn’t think I had a shot, but we won. Better lucky than good
—
bashert!

And that’s how I became a mob lawyer.

T
he Horowitz case opened doors for me that I didn’t even know existed. Word got out—I don’t want to say in the underworld, but my name started to get mentioned in certain circles where guys worked in businesses that required criminal defense representation.

And my phone started to ring.

Life was good and getting better, both in professional terms and on a personal level.

Carolyn and I had tried to start a family, but it just didn’t happen. So we decided to go in another direction. We set up an appointment with Catholic Welfare, an agency that dealt in adoption. We met with Sister Margaret and Sister Joseph, two lovely ladies who seemed to take a liking to us. They knew we were Jewish and said they would respect that. They would find children from Jewish birth mothers for us.

In a little less than four years, we adopted four children: Oscar Jr., Ross, Eric, and Cara. No matter how well I did as a lawyer, nothing could ever compare to what those children meant to Carolyn and me.

She was an amazing mother, raising four children who were all under the age of four. The diaper changing and potty training
alone were gargantuan tasks. I spent a lot of time out of town on cases, so most of the child rearing fell to her. She’d just tell me, “Go earn.” That was my job.

When one of the kids got the chicken pox, she put the other three in bed with him. They all got it, which she knew was inevitable anyway. This just allowed her to deal with it in a compressed time period. Brilliant!

Now is as good a time as any to put this on record: Of all the decisions I’ve made in my life, and of all the things I’ve accomplished, nothing compares to marrying Carolyn.

She was a freshman at Bryn Mawr College when I was at Haverford. I had met her roommate at a mixer and the roommate mentioned me to Carolyn. She told her she had met this interesting fellow that she thought Carolyn might like.

It was not love at first sight, at least not from Carolyn’s perspective. In fact, she thought I was a conceited jerk. A couple of years later I was at the library at Bryn Mawr doing some research for a paper when I saw her again. I still remember her wearing this short, kilt-like skirt. I think I fell in love with her legs first.

I called her at her dorm. Back in those days there was a pay phone in the “smoker” room of the dormitory lobby. Whoever answered called her and told her who was on the line. As she was walking toward the phone I heard her say, “Not that jerk.”

I hung up.

But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. She ended up taking a sociology course where I was working as a teacher’s assistant. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, so I called again. After some bantering back and forth, she finally agreed to go out with me.

That night we stopped at a bar on City Avenue in Philadelphia, and I asked her what she’d like to drink. She said whatever I was having. Ever the sophisticate, I ordered up two boilermakers, a shot of whiskey washed down with a cold beer.

Despite her initial misgivings, we hit it off. That night we stopped by my house and she met my sister Ericka. They liked each other, and I think that’s when she started to see me in a different light. She got past my reputation for being somewhat arrogant and cocky and saw who I really was. We started dating, and that was it. We saw each other almost every day.

Once we had gotten serious, she said that if I wanted to marry her, I would have to ask her father for her hand. Dr. Carl Goldmark, Jr., was an imposing man. He was the OB/GYN to the stars at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He was tall, handsome, and very self-assured. And he was not too anxious to give his daughter’s hand to some cocky kid from Philadelphia.

Carolyn’s mother, Hazel Seligman Goldmark, was from New York as well. She came from a cultured family. Her father, Carolyn’s grandfather, was a full professor at Columbia and a noted scholar in the field of economics and taxation. Hazel kind of liked me. Carl, not so much.

We were walking on 75th Street when he asked me how I intended to support his daughter. I said at first I didn’t intend to. The plan was for me to go to law school while Carolyn worked.

“You’d better support her in the style to which she’s become accustomed,” her father told me, “or I’ll kick your ass from here to 76th Street.”

“If you’re big enough,” I said.

It was a rocky start, but we got past it. I spent the summer in New York after graduating from Haverford. I stayed in the Goldmarks’ home and got a job working as a janitor in a community center in Harlem. Carolyn had a job there, too, working the telephone switchboard.

I got to know her family and they got to know me. Dr. Goldmark had asked us to wait a year before we got married, so we weren’t wed until the following summer, after I had finished my first year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Our anniversary is June 6, 1962. Most people of my generation know June 6 as D-Day, the day Allied troops invaded France and the tide began to turn in World War II. But for me, June 6 has a different meaning. I look at it as the best day of my life.

Carolyn is not only my wife, but the person I most admire and trust in the world. She’s the only one whose advice I will always listen to. She cuts through the bull. She tells me what she thinks and why. She also knows me better than anyone. And despite that, she apparently loves me.

When the kids were young, we took a trip to Disneyland. Carolyn drove. When we got there, she left me with the four of them while she parked the car. As we stood in line, I suddenly felt petrified that one of them might take off. I spent days dealing with important criminal issues and fighting big legal battles, but I’d never experienced that kind of fear or anxiety.

We were waiting in line. Nothing was happening. Then Carolyn came strolling up after parking the car and said, “What are you doing?”

“Waiting in line,” I said.

She looked at me and shook her head.

“Oscar,” she said. “This is a bus stop.”

Then she pointed in the opposite direction to a sign that said Disneyland.

“The entrance is over there,” she said, taking the kids by the hands and leading the way.

Like I said, she loves me.

I was much more adept in court. And the more I worked at it, the better I became.

One day I got a call from John DePasquale, a bartender at the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. He had been indicted in
a big federal bookmaking case out of Miami. It was the first national case built around the use of the new wiretap laws, part of the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968. DePasquale was a minor player, but he had been picked up on some wires and got charged along with some fairly significant bookmakers from other parts of the country.

John was accused of using the phones to provide bookmakers information about the morning betting line. One of the big targets was Little Marty Sklaroff and his father, Jesse, a bar owner in Miami, who had been a major figure in sports betting, too. The feds were very familiar with them. The FBI had put a tap on a public pay phone at the Miami airport that Little Marty used.

Marty, a dapper, well-dressed fella with a huge pompadour, was an associate of Gil “The Brain” Beckley, who at the time was considered the number one bookmaker in the country. Beckley was based in New York City. I visited him there once. He lived in a circular-shaped apartment building on Central Park, and I was struck by the fact that every apartment unit on his floor had a pay phone. Whether each unit was part of his gambling operation was something I didn’t bother asking about. There are things that a lawyer doesn’t need—or want—to know.

Young Marty was enthralled with Beckley. You could see that he was trying to emulate the Brain in the way he did business. Whenever Beckley was in Miami, they’d go to dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab—Beckley would hold court there. He was used to being center stage. The word in the gambling world was that Beckley had sources in the locker rooms of several teams and was able to get inside information that he used to set his betting lines. He did a lot of the complex computations in his head. There were rumors that he had been able to bribe athletes and referees to fix basketball games.

Marty Sklaroff loved those stories and never hesitated to share them with me. I think he saw himself as an up-and-comer
in the business. He wanted to be Gil Beckley. There was, of course, a down side to that life and those aspirations. According to most law enforcement reports, Beckley was killed in 1970 because some people in the Patriarca crime family out of New England believed he was cooperating with the FBI. No one knows for sure because Beckley just disappeared. His body has never been found.

In the Miami case, the FBI set up surveillance from a cargo container in which they had cut peepholes. That’s how they watched the pay phone. In the middle of this investigation, a couple of airport porters came along and were moving the container. All of a sudden they heard, “Stop! FBI.”

The porters took off running, their eyes wide as saucers.

As a result of that phone tap, a dozen major bookmakers must have been indicted. John DePasquale’s indictment was returned in Miami. Little Marty was represented by a fine lawyer, Dave Rosen, whose reputation preceded him since he had also represented Meyer Lansky. Dave told Marty to tell John to hire me because Mel Horowitz had told him about my “win” in Las Vegas. I flew down there to represent John at trial.

In reviewing the case, I saw that John was hardly even mentioned in the indictment. He was clearly a small fish in the scheme of things. I argued that he should be granted a severance. I filed a motion saying that he was entitled to be tried based on the evidence against him, and that to stand trial with the other defendants, with all that the government alleged against
them
, would be unfair and would create an undue prejudice. It was a pretty standard severance argument, and in this case I think it was righteous.

After hearing two or three days of evidence without John’s name being mentioned, the judge agreed. John headed back home to Las Vegas, and he was severed from the case. Dave Rosen, who took me under his wing, asked me to stick around. I
did, but there wasn’t much for me to do, so I listened and learned.

Spending a lot of time around Marty Sklaroff was the beginning of a life lesson for me. It was the first time I was around one of the “fellas” who I came to represent over the years. And I learned that no matter how the government and its handmaiden, the media, came to characterize my clients, putting them in the worst light, the people I represented had redeeming qualities and were worthy of salvation.

Marty told me that when he was a young man, he experimented with drugs and ended up a heroin addict. I had heard how hard it was to get that monkey off your back. He told me firsthand how he did it. He locked himself in a room and made sure no one came in until he broke the addiction. He said it was like a bad case of the flu, but it could be done.

He also was a great father. He gave his daughter a confirmation party at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami, to which I was invited. These fellas had the best of everything. Each table offered the best scotch, the best gin, the best rye whiskey; you made your own drinks. His daughter made a speech about her father, how much she loved him and all that he had done for her. I realized there was more to this guy than the prosecution and the FBI were saying. I ended up thinking that way about many of my clients, and that’s one of the reasons I worked so hard to defend them.