Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  In fact, I wasn’t even there when the verdict was announced. I had to fly to Kansas City for the start of jury selection in a case against Nick Civella. My co-counsel, a local attorney from Lexington, called me when the verdict came in. To tell the truth, I couldn’t believe it.

  Anyway, in appreciation, the Chandler family invited me to the Derby. I went with my friend Billy Walters, a legendary gambler. We were treated like royalty, and that’s how I got to see the Colonel Winn Room.

  While we were there, we went to a party and I met Phyllis George, the former Miss America who was married to the governor of Kentucky. I also ran into George Steinbrenner. We sat next to each other to watch the race. Lee Chagra, in all his sartorial splendor, probably fit right in with the Derby crowd. I didn’t meet him until after this, but I could see how he would be in his element. I clearly wasn’t in mine. But that didn’t stop Billy Walters and me from having a great time.

  The Chagras had plenty of money. The government, of course, implied that it came from drug dealing, even insinuating that Lee, who was a lawyer, had a role in his brother Jimmy’s drug network. That was never proven.

  The allegation was that Jimmy had a pipeline into Mexico and South America, and that he was a major distributor—a supplier to the suppliers—of marijuana and cocaine. Some speculated that he had direct ties to the Colombian cocaine cartels.

  Lee Chagra had contacted me sometime in 1977 or 1978. He wanted me to represent him in a civil rights suit against a federal judge, John H. Wood, Jr., “Maximum John,” they called him. Lee had tried several cases in front of the judge, and he was convinced Wood harbored bias and that he wasn’t giving Lee’s clients, and other clients for that matter, a fair trial. To many in the defense bar, Judge Wood was viewed as a second prosecutor in the courtroom.

  Wood seldom ruled in favor of any defense motions, and at sentencing, he could be brutal. I went down to El Paso, which is where Lee practiced law, and I met him to discuss the civil suit. I had been in enough courtrooms to know how the game was played, and like Lee, I had tried cases where I felt as if the deck was already stacked against me. Lee represented drug dealers; I represented mobsters. But both groups of clients got the same kind of treatment.

  Lee also thought that Judge Wood didn’t like him personally, and that that had an impact on the way the judge dealt with his clients at trial and at sentencing. Lee Chagra was one of the best defense attorneys in Texas. He could be colorful at times, and he certainly was fearless and controversial. But in a courtroom, he knew what he was doing.

  I didn’t know Jimmy at the time, but I knew of him. He was a regular in Las Vegas and had a reputation as a big-time gambler. He loved to throw his money around, and he had a lot of it. He would come into town with suitcases full of cash, check into the Frank Sinatra Suite at Caesars Palace, and gamble all his money away. Even if he won in the casinos, he was a sucker on the golf course. Guys would line up to play him. He’d lose $50,000 or $100,000 playing a round of golf, and be right out there the next day playing again. Then he’d hang out at the country club and get involved in a high-stakes rummy game where he’d drop even more cash.

  Clearly he was a guy who liked the action. I could appreciate that, but the amounts he bet were staggering. He used to go to Binion’s Horseshoe all the time because he liked to shoot craps without any betting limits, and they’d let him do that there. One night, after I had gotten to know him, he asked me to go with him.

  “Jimmy, I don’t play craps,” I said. “And I have no desire to learn. I lose enough with the vices I have, betting sports and the horses. I don’t need another outlet.”

  “Come with me,” he said, “just for luck.”

  So I went and I watched. By the end of the night he bet $700,000 on one roll of the dice. That kind of betting doesn’t make sense to me, but money didn’t seem to have much value to him. I’ll bet $5,000 on the Super Bowl or maybe $1,500 on a football game, but to bet nearly three-quarters of a million dollars on one roll of the dice? It was nuts.

  Even though he lost that roll, Jimmy did really well that night. As a “thank you” when he cashed out, he gave me $25,000.

  “Is this a retainer?” I asked.

  “No, it’s for you. You brought me luck.”

  And I guess in a way I did. That situation with Tony was one example of Jimmy benefiting from an association with me. But I wasn’t always able to keep him out of harm’s way.

  I can say with certainty that while I was Tony Spilotro’s lawyer, he was never convicted and never spent any time in jail. I can’t say the same for Jimmy Chagra, although you could make the argument that I saved his life at least twice.

  Plans to file the civil law suit on behalf of Lee Chagra ended on December 23, 1978, when two men made their way into his law office and killed him. It was apparently a robbery gone bad, as reports said the shooters made off with about $450,000.

  The murder occurred while the Sun Bowl was being played in El Paso. I’ve always wondered about the circumstances. Lee’s office was impenetrable, with state-of-the-art security and surveillance. You had to be buzzed in, so Lee must have let them in, but why? The murder occurred while the game was being played. They shot him with a .22, and the bullet bounced off his clavicle and nicked his aorta so that he bled to death. They put cocaine in his mouth and took cash out of his safe.

  The murder of Lee Chagra was just part of a murky Texas underworld that I wasn’t familiar with. Some people thought Lee was the brains behind Jimmy’s drug operation, but I don’t think that was the case.

  Did Lee keep some of Jimmy’s money in his law office safe? I don’t know, but if people thought that he did, it would explain why he was robbed. The Chagra brothers were portrayed in some law enforcement circles as a crime family; their own little Lebanese-American Mafia. It was an easy way for the government to label people and to affix blame, even when there wasn’t enough evidence to make a case. The Chagras came up several times in an investigation into the attempted murder of a federal prosecutor a few years earlier, and Jimmy’s name would come up again in the notorious assassination of Judge Wood.

  It’s funny how things overlap. I represented the relative of a friend of one of my bookmaker clients who was wanted for questioning in the Lee Chagra murder case. I brought him to the grand jury down in Texas. He was cleared of any involvement, but while I was there outside the grand jury room, I first met Jimmy Chagra.

  Jimmy had moved from El Paso to Las Vegas with his wife Liz, a former fashion model, and their kids. They happened to move to the same street where Carolyn and I were living at the time, Viking Road. In fact, at one point he talked to me about wanting to buy another house on the block for his maid. The funny thing was, the house he was describing was our house!

  In February 1979, Jimmy got indicted in Midland, Texas, in the cocaine and marijuana case that he knew was coming. He hired me to represent him. I got a $250,000 retainer, and I earned it. Bail was set at $1 million. We were able to get it knocked down to $400,000, and he was released pending trial. Eventually the government expanded the indictment to include a Continuing Criminal Enterprise charge. That made the potential penalties even higher.

  It came as no surprise when the case was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge John H. Wood, Jr. There was speculation that the U.S. Attorney’s Office brought the indictment in Midland, rather than another Texas jurisdiction, because they wanted Wood as the trial judge.

  I filed dozens of pre-trial motions, including a motion to have Judge Wood recuse himself because I had been planning to file the civil rights suit against him on behalf of Lee Chagra. Every motion was denied, but for some reason I felt comfortable in his courtroom. His staff seemed to like me.

  I’m not sure why, but several members of the office were nice to me in a motherly kind of way. I got the impression that they saw me as a nice guy who was about to be cut in half by the buzz-saw that their boss, the judge, was operating. No one figured I had a chance to win the case, so I gu
ess they felt sorry for me.

  When I went down there for the pre-trial hearings, I would stay at the Hilton Hotel near the courthouse. They had a restaurant called “Oscar’s,” which I took as a good sign. I still have a matchbook from the place. I had gotten a continuance; the trial was supposed to begin in May, but I got it put off until July. And the judge also granted a request to move the venue to Austin.

  I knew that it was going to be a David vs. Goliath battle. Jimmy was considered a major drug kingpin, and the government had several witnesses who had worked for him in the drug business. Prosecutors also had flipped a major player who had agreed to cooperate and testify against Jimmy.

  On May 29, everything changed. That morning, Judge Wood walked out of his condo in San Antonio and into the line of fire of a rifleman who was hiding nearby. Two shots hit him, and he died instantly.

  The murder attracted national attention. It was the first time in more than a century that a federal judge had been killed. Because of the kinds of cases Judge Wood heard, those in the drug business became the prime suspects. And of course, Jimmy Chagra was at the top of that list.

  Jimmy was in Las Vegas at the time. He had an alibi, since he had been to see his pretrial service officer that day. I went over to his house to talk with him. To be honest, deep down inside, I had mixed emotions. I wanted to believe that because he had two brothers who were lawyers, Jimmy had a certain respect for the law. I also thought that because of the way his brother had died, Jimmy knew what it felt like to lose a loved one that way and wouldn’t have been part of an assassination.

  On the other hand . . .

  The drug case got reassigned to Judge William Steele Sessions, who would later become head of the FBI under President Ronald Reagan. Sessions had a pretty inflated opinion of himself; he thought he was one of the finest judges in the land. To me, he wasn’t as genuine as he would have liked people to believe. Prior to the start of the trial, I had some discussions with the prosecution, but we couldn’t work anything out.

  We went to trial, and the evidence was devastating. There was testimony from witnesses who said they worked for or with Jimmy. They talked about staggering amounts of money and drugs. They described a network for the importation of tons of marijuana and cocaine using boats and planes. From a defense perspective, we were looking at a potential disaster.

  My best shot was a strong closing argument, but I wasn’t sure that would be enough. The night before I was to sum up, I was in my hotel room going over what I planned to say when the phone rang.

  It was my wife Carolyn. My father had died.

  It’s hard to describe how I felt. All I can say is, it was one of the saddest days in my life. My father was one of my best friends. He was just a great guy. Even though it took him a while to acknowledge that I had gone to Las Vegas, after I had established myself, he and my mother came out to visit. I think he was proud of what I was doing when he saw me in court.

  My dad was a wonderful lawyer, and he loved the law. He had spent a career in the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia and had hoped to become a judge. He was very active in the Republican Party and when a spot on the federal court opened up, he expected to get the position. But the political machine people told him he’d have to donate $10,000 to the party in order to have their support. He wouldn’t do it; he felt he had earned the right to sit on the bench.

  “I’m not going to buy it,” he said.

  I think it broke his heart. He left the district attorney’s office after that and went into private practice. He was very successful and highly respected, but he was disappointed in the whole process.

  I thought about all those things that night, and about all that he had meant to me. I couldn’t believe he was gone. The next day I told Judge Sessions that I couldn’t make my closing arguments. I asked for a delay so I could go to Philadelphia to bury my father. We’re Jewish, I said, and our tradition is to have the burial the next day.

  “Judge, I have to have a continuance,” I said. “To be honest with you, I don’t even know where I am.”

  “Oh, no,” Sessions said. “You’re a professional. We’re going forward. You make your closing. Motion denied.”

  I made my closing argument to the jury that day, but I have no idea what I said. My mind was a million miles away from where it was supposed to be as a lawyer. I was a shell.

  The closing argument in any trial is usually one of my strong points, but I doubt I did Jimmy Chagra any good that day. The jury was out for about two hours and came back with a guilty verdict.

  Jimmy was unbelievably kind to me. He arranged for a private plane to fly me up to Philadelphia, and I left immediately. Maybe Sessions felt guilty because of what happened, because he allowed Jimmy to remain free pending sentencing. Jimmy was looking at thirty years.

  I headed to Philadelphia and Jimmy went into hiding. He took his wife and kids and went on the lam. They settled somewhere in Kansas, got some phony identification with new names, and started to live a new life.

  Despite all the flamboyance, Jimmy was a pretty simple guy. What he liked to do most was watch sports on TV. In Kansas he had his satellite dish and all the games he wanted. He was happy as a pig in mud.

  He called me once or twice, and as a lawyer, I had to tell him to come back. He didn’t take my advice, but eventually he surfaced. Evidently, TV sports weren’t enough. He got the itch and decided he was going to come back to Las Vegas. He had called a plastic surgeon and was going to slip into town and have some work done. The doctor tipped the FBI agents, who were looking for him.

  But before the feds could move in, Jimmy gave himself up. A police car had pulled him over for some reason when he was driving in town. He got out of the car and said, “I give up.”

  In the backseat, stuffed in a half dozen diaper bags, was thousands of dollars in cash. I don’t know if that was money for the plastic surgeon or for the craps table; maybe both. But instead of rolling the dice, Jimmy ended up at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth doing a thirty-year sentence for the drug conviction.

  It’s hard to believe, but his troubles were just beginning.

  One of my other clients, Nick Civella, the mob boss from Kansas City, was also in Leavenworth at the time and was the focus of an ongoing investigation. The feds had the visiting room at the prison bugged with audio and video, because they wanted to know what Nick was saying and who he was saying it to.

  The assumption the feds made was that he was still running his crime family from behind bars. One of the issues that the feds were really focusing on was a rumor that Nick had influence in the prison system and was going to help one of his nephews, also an inmate, get a transfer to a prison camp.

  Jimmy Chagra knew nothing about the waiting room being bugged, and he had the misfortune of having some pretty candid discussions with his wife and his brother Joe, who both visited him there. One of the topics they discussed was the murder of Judge Wood.

  The feds were already targeting Jimmy for that murder. A low-life named Charles Harrelson, who as I mentioned earlier was the father of the actor Woody Harrelson and the brother of the polygraph expert I had used in the Crockett case, had been making noise about the judge’s murder. Harrelson was in jail on other charges, and was apparently trying to work a deal.

  In addition to the conversations Jimmy was having with his wife, Liz, they were also passing notes back and forth. This was picked up on the surveillance cameras, and the feds eventually installed a trap in the sewer line from the visitor’s room women’s bathroom. Liz Chagra would take whatever note Jimmy gave her, read it, rip it up, and then flush it down the toilet.

  The feds got the pieces of paper, put them back together, and had what they contended was even more incriminating evidence.

  Eventually Jimmy, Liz, his brother Joe, Harrelson, and Harrelson’s wife got indicted for conspiracy and murder in the assassination of Judge Wood. The two women were allegedly the conduits for the passing of money—supposedly $250,
000 in cash—that Jimmy was accused of paying Harrelson to kill the judge.

  Liz Chagra, who in her day was a beautiful woman, ended up in jail awaiting trial and apparently found Jesus while she was there. She had been born again. She wrote a letter to Judge Wood’s widow asking for forgiveness and acknowledging her guilt. Among other things she wrote that her husband forced her to make the delivery, telling her she was the only one he could trust.

  I felt sorry for Liz, and I knew a little about their relationship. Although she was his wife and the mother of his children, Jimmy wasn’t shy about partying with other women. When he was out at the casinos or in the clubs in Las Vegas, he’d always be surrounded by an entourage of sexy ladies.

  And Jimmy could be a domineering guy. So if you accepted the government version of the case, at worst what Liz Chagra did was deliver a briefcase. That was the extent of her involvement in this murder conspiracy.

  But she and everyone involved faced insurmountable odds. First of all, the judge was William Sessions, the same judge who had sentenced Jimmy to thirty years in the drug case. Sessions had delivered the eulogy at Judge Wood’s funeral. Second, the trial was to take place in the federal courthouse in San Antonio, which was now the John H. Wood, Jr., Courthouse, memorial plaque and all.

  Talk about a stacked deck.

  Liz Chagra’s letter and her attempt to cut a deal didn’t do her any good. She went to trial with the Harrelsons. They all were convicted; she got thirty years, and Jo Ann Harrelson got twenty-five years. Charles Harrelson got two consecutive life terms.

  Joe Chagra had pleaded guilty before the trial to a conspiracy charge and was sentenced to ten years. He also lost his law license. His plea agreement stipulated that he would not have to testify against his brother.

  I had gotten a severance for Jimmy because of the letter his wife sent to the widow, among other things. And I was fortunate that Judge Sessions also agreed to a change of venue. Jimmy was to be tried in Jacksonville, Florida, rather than in the John H. Wood, Jr., Courthouse. This was our first break.