Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  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.

  Eddie wouldn’t do it. “Fuck them,” he said.

  The case got moved from Las Vegas to Reno because of the publicity, and because it was decided that it would be unseemly for LaRue to be tried in the same federal courthouse in Las Vegas where Claiborne was sitting as a judge. Aldon Anderson, a judge from Salt Lake City, was brought in to hear the case. He was a staid, conservative man, the kind of person who would have taken issue with the mere fact that a federal judge like Claiborne would even associate with a guy like LaRue. So we had that problem. In addition, up until that time, a Las Vegas defendant with a Las Vegas defense attorney had never won a federal case in Reno.

  We were staying at the Pioneer Hotel in downtown Reno and would walk back and forth to the courthouse each day. It was a beautiful, relaxing walk along the Truckee River. Eddie used to play a Keno card every evening at dinner, and every day he would fill it out in the shape of an extended middle finger. It kept us laughing. That was his response to the government’s offer to cooperate and give up Harry.

  We got lucky. Eddie didn’t deny planting the bug, but said it was part of a case he was working on. He never gave up the particulars and never mentioned Claiborne. A key part of Eddie’s defense was that he had been told by a lawyer that what he had done—planting an electronic listening device—was legal. Reliance on an attorney’s advice, even if it’s bad advice, is a defense. One of our arguments was that Eddie thought what he was doing was legal, even though it wasn’t. The lawyer who had given Eddie that advice came forward and testified that he had, in fact, told Eddie he could do what he did and not be breaking the law.

  Eddie also had a state supreme court justice as a character witness. We beat the case, and to this day, I’m convinced Eddie
LaRue wasn’t the target. The government wanted him to say that Claiborne ordered him to bug a girlfriend’s home because he was jealous of other men, but Eddie wouldn’t say it.

  At the same time, we were pretty much convinced that the feds had planted a bug in Harry’s office. We couldn’t ever prove it, but LaRue was certain the FBI had been listening in on Claiborne’s conversations. That’s a pretty blatant violation of a lawyer’s privacy, but that was the kind of stuff Harry had to deal with.

  Here’s another example. After he was nominated, Harry said he stopped drinking. He had conceded that he drank too much, but said that he was now on the wagon. When he went to the Horseshoe—he used to keep money in a safety deposit box at the casino—he’d order a non-alcoholic drink or a cup of coffee. Several times after he left, an FBI agent casually walked up to the bar, picked up Harry’s glass, and smelled it to see if it had contained whiskey.

  A lot of this goes back to Joseph Yablonsky. The FBI agent wanted another notch in his gun, and he didn’t care how he got it.

  The funny thing is, Harry was a damn good judge; tough but fair. I had plenty of appearances before him and he always gave me a fair trial, but I got no favors. He called things as he saw them. He was a lot better than some other judges I know who are still on the bench.

  But the feds were determined to get Harry Claiborne, and they found a tool in Joe Conforte: liar, cheat, pimp, and whoremonger who would say whatever the feds wanted him to say.

  In December 1983, I was trying a case in front of Judge Claiborne when word came that he had been indicted. The charges were bribery, fraud, and tax evasion. He immediately declared a mistrial in the case I had before him. He said he thought it would be inappropriate to continue because of the indictment. Then he asked me if I would be willing to represent him, and I said it would be a privilege.

  The bribery charge was based on an allegation that Conforte made. Conforte and his wife Sally ran the Mustang Ranch, the famous brothel out in Storey County. A few years earlier, Conforte had been convicted of four counts of tax evasion. He owed $1.9 million, and he was looking at a minimum of five years in prison. Harry Claiborne had represented Conforte’s wife Sally at the trial, and she had also been convicted. Their verdicts were on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

  After Harry was appointed to the federal bench, he asked me to do him a favor and represent Sally at her sentencing. Sally was nothing like her husband Joe. She was a madame, but not a whoremonger. She had a tough veneer, but underneath was a pretty nice lady. A couple of weeks before the sentencing hearing, I flew up to Reno to interview her. She sent a driver to pick me up at the airport and he took me out to the ranch. It was the first time I had ever been there, and to tell the truth, it wasn’t what I expected. I went through the doorway and Sally was waiting for me. The first thing she did was introduce me to her girls.

  It was a real smorgasbord. Something for everybody—fat, thin, short, tall, all shades and colors. Each girl was wearing a peignoir or a teddy. She asked each one to tell me whether they were happy there, and whether they were treated properly. They all had positive things to say. Then she took me on a tour of their rooms, which reminded me of a college dormitory.

  There was also a pool area where some other girls were relaxing. From there I was escorted to the dining room, which was off-limits to customers. I was served a delicious gourmet meal.

  “That’s what the girls eat,” Sally said proudly.

  I happened to look out the window during the meal and saw the biggest snowflakes I had ever seen.

  “I have to get back to Las Vegas,” I said.

  “No way you’re flying out in this weather,” Sally said.

  Instead, her driver took us back to her home on Sullivan Lane in Reno. It was a huge, old home. She and Joe were estranged, and she was living by herself. At the time she was involved with the great Argentinian heavyweight, Oscar Bonavena. She showed me to my room, which was decorated in red and black. The first thing I did was call Carolyn.

  “Sweetheart, I’m stuck in Reno in a snowstorm and won’t be able to get home until tomorrow,” I said.

  “What hotel are you staying in and what’s the phone number?” she asked, two questions that she always asked whenever I was out of town on business.

  “I’m at Sally Conforte’s home,” I said.

  She paused, then told me, “Be careful.”

  The next day I got a flight back to Las Vegas. I was catching a cold, and when I got home, I was sniffling. Carolyn just gave me a look that said, “How’d you catch that?”

  The indictment against Judge Claiborne alleged that Joe Conforte had paid him a bribe to find out when the Appellate Court was going to render an opinion on his appeal of the tax conviction—and more important, what that opinion was going to be. If the court upheld the conviction, Conforte would know in advance and would take off. The Claiborne indictment also contained some income tax evasion charges, but the bribery issue went to the very heart of Harry’s integrity.

  The evidence also included a statement from now-Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was then on the Ninth Circuit. In a deposition I took of him, Kennedy said his clerk had told him that Harry Claiborne had called the office to ask when the decision in the Conforte case would be coming down. I was able to argue that even if true, the call asked “when,” not “what.” In other words, Harry wasn’t asking what the decision would be, but merely when it was going to be announced. That’s not especially uncommon or, I would argue, criminal.

  Conforte was a weasel. He had fled to Brazil to avoid prison after the Ninth Circuit upheld his conviction. Then he called the prosecutors and said he could give them Claiborne’s head on a silver platter. The government lawyers went down there with all kinds of promises to get him to come back. They told him all he had to do was testify against Judge Claiborne.

  I looked forward to cross-examining him, but even at that, I had to concede that the five-year sentence that caused him to flee was extreme. I thought it was personal. Conforte had been convicted of failing to withhold wage taxes from the girls who worked for him at the Mustang Ranch. The judge who had sentenced him was a master bridge player, and so was Conforte. They played against each other in tournaments, and this judge was apparently livid that Conforte, whom he considered a “whoremaster,” was taking part in these tournaments. So at sentencing, he hammered him.

  Justice is supposed to be blind. In this case it wasn’t. Conforte got more time than he probably deserved, but that doesn’t excuse what he did. He tried to throw Harry Claiborne under the bus to get out from under his own problems. And the feds were only too happy to buy into the story he was selling. In fact, they went all the way to Brazil to get it. Only after the government made him all kinds of promises did he agree to come back.

  Bill Raggio, a Reno attorney and Nevada’s most powerful state senator, was my co-counsel on the case. Years before, when Bill was a district attorney, Conforte tried to set him up with an underage prostitute. Raggio didn’t fall for the trap, and legend has it that after that, he personally participated in the burning down of one of Conforte’s whorehouses. Raggio hated Conforte. He asked me for a favor: would I let him cross-examine Conforte? He then ripped Conforte apart on the witness stand.

  Conforte testified that he had paid Claiborne $85,000 for the information from the Ninth Circuit. He described in great detail Harry’s apartment, where he said he had gone to deliver the cash. He described the layout to a T. The problem was, he had it backwards.

  I can only believe that the government had shown Conforte an apartment in the same complex where Harry lived, but it was a reverse layout. The rooms were opposite the rooms in Harry’s residence, as if you were looking in a mirror. It just goes to show you what means the government will go to in order to get the end that they want.

  It was a technique I was familiar with. The government gets its witness to testify, and ninety percent of what is said is the truth. The other ten percent is a lie, but the jur
y usually believes the lies as well as the truth, resulting in a conviction.

  The trial went on for several weeks. Like the Eddie LaRue trial, it had been moved to Reno from Las Vegas. This time, a judge was brought in from Norfolk, Virginia, to preside over the case.

  Judge Walter Hoffman looked like a side of beef. He was huge; half a cow at least. And by the middle of the afternoon, his mind would start to wander. After three o’clock, you never knew what was going to happen. It was very bizarre.

  One of the reasons the case was moved to Reno was because of publicity. The Las Vegas Sun, a local newspaper, was a big supporter of Harry Claiborne. Hank Greenspun, the publisher, thought Harry was getting railroaded, and the paper said it continually in front page headlines. When the case moved to Reno, Greenspun sent newspaper racks up there and had them placed outside the courthouse entrances. So every morning as the jurors arrived, they would see copies of the Las Vegas Sun screaming its pro-Claiborne headlines. Judge Hoffman went nuts. He ordered the racks confiscated and had them put in jail. I swear to God—the racks were behind bars. We finally got them released, but this was the kind of stuff that was going on.

  Most of my legal motions went nowhere.

  “Denied,” roared Hoffman. “Denied, denied, denied.”

  That’s all I heard. But you win or lose a case with the jury, and I thought we had a shot.

  Teddy Binion, Benny’s son, came up to Reno with us, and we had dinner each night during the trial. Teddy was probably the smartest and most street-wise guy I ever met. He was kicked out of every school he ever attended, but he had great insights. He came to me one day and said, “You can win this case if you tell the truth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The judge had a drinking problem and suffered blackouts,” he said. “Look at the tax returns. Some of them are written in pencil; they make no sense. He wasn’t trying to evade taxes. He was drunk when he filled out the forms. He probably had no idea what he was doing.”