Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  Don’t get me wrong—I was paid well. And while we’re on the subject, let me point out that I always charged a flat fee. I’d quote a price to a client based on what I thought was involved, how much time, how much research, how complicated the issues in the case were. Other lawyers might charge by the hour, but that wasn’t the way I did it.

  It usually worked out fine. If, for some reason, a case settled quickly or a trial took less time and effort than I had anticipated, I made out really well. On the other hand, I once quoted a client a fee for what I thought was going to be a six-week trial. I hadn’t factored in that this was one of the judge’s first cases. He was a “virgin” and was feeling his way along. The trial lasted six months.

  I never gave a fee back if a case wrapped up quickly, and in this instance, I never asked for more money. I just had to take my losses. That’s the economics of practicing criminal law. Overall I did very well and, as a result, my family and I lived very well.

  I was a high-profile criminal defense attorney, a go-to guy in a world that people wrote books and movies about. It was a heady experience and I loved almost every minute of it. The strategy, the battles, the clash of wit—all were an adrenaline rush. I loved being center stage and that’s what a courtroom was. The stakes were high, and that made it all the more exciting.

  One of the greatest thrills in the world is, after a long, contentious case, to hear a jury say those two lovely words, “Not guilty.” As a defense attorney, it’s a euphoric experience. Almost as good as sex.

  But at the same time, I don’t want to glamorize organized crime figures. The criminal underworld can be a dark, uncaring, and inhumane place. Some of my clients lived and died there. But when I could, I tried to look at my clients from a different perspective.

  First, under the law they were entitled to legal representation, and I was going to give them that. Second—and not everyone might agree with this—they lived by a certain morality that you and I might not be a part of. But I respected the fact that they had a code.

  That was never made clearer to me than when I headed to Boston to represent Vinny Ferrara in a big mob case up there. Vinny was the antithesis of Phil Leonetti.

  In 1990, Vinny was indicted along with six other reputed members of the Patriarca Crime Family, including Raymond Patriarca, Jr., and J. R. Russo. The charges included murder and extortion. One key piece of evidence was an FBI tape of a mob-making ceremony in a home in Medford, Massachusetts.

  A classic line from Vinny was picked up on that tape. After the induction ceremony had ended and the guests were heading home, he said, “Only the ghost knows what really took place here today.”

  The ghost and the FBI, it turned out.

  Vinny, who was nicknamed “The Animal,” hired me to represent him. I also helped out J. R. Russo, who was acting as his own attorney. I liked both those guys because they were genuine. They didn’t pretend to be anything other than what they were, and they lived by the code.

  Vinny was a graduate of Boston College and had a degree in accounting. He certainly was no fool, and he had a presence about him. When he walked into a room, people knew he was there, and they waited to see what he had to say. He was like the E. F. Hutton of the underworld. He also was charming, and we shared an interest in sports.

  I didn’t know much about the Boston mob other than the name Whitey Bulger, the Irish-American gangster on whom the Jack Nicholson character is based in the movie The Departed.

  The making ceremony tape was a classic; the FBI must have had an orgasm when they heard it. I can just imagine the looks on the agents’ faces while they were sitting in a van down the street listening in. The ceremony had taken place in the house of the aunt of a Boston mobster. The feds had gotten a tip and had the place wired for sound. They apparently got it all, even the preliminary stages where mobsters were arranging seats and planning the menu. It sounded like the Paris Peace Talks; everyone had to be seated in just the right spot. Then they discussed what kind of wine and what the temperature should be on the pots of gravy (tomato sauce) for the pasta.

  Finally there was the induction ceremony itself. There was a gun and a knife and a holy card that each proposed mob member had to hold in his hands while it was set on fire. While it was burning in his cupped hands, he had to swear allegiance to the family, promising to burn in hell like the holy card if he betrayed the family’s trust. He was then told that he had to come whenever he was called, even if he was at his own mother’s deathbed. This new family he was joining, this crime family, came before everything else.

  Pretrial, I had a discussion with Vinny and J. R. about that tape. I said we could probably try to work around it, but the thing that would hurt us the most if the tape was played for a jury was the line about leaving your mother’s deathbed. Jurors would find that repulsive, and they wouldn’t understand it.

  Vinny looked at J. R. and said, “Next time, let’s leave that part out.”

  He was a very candid fella and, like Tony Spilotro, he was a realist. There were thirty-five counts in the racketeering case; just about everything you could think of. One of the key charges was the murder of a guy named Jimmy Limoli. Vinny kept telling me, in that thick Boston accent, that he had nothing to do with the Limoli hit.

  “Oscah,” he’d say, “we may have done this and we may have done that, but Oscah, I didn’t kill Jimmy Limoli. I would nevah kill Jimmy.”

  The pretrial discovery evidence indicated that the government had a statement from another mob informant claiming that he saw Vinny order another mobster to kill Limoli. Vinny insisted that wasn’t true.

  We were fortunate that the case was in front of U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf, probably one of the smartest and fairest judges before whom I’ve practiced. During pretrial hearings, the judge demonstrated that he was a caring individual who recognized that while the defendants were portrayed as mobsters by the prosecution, they were also American citizens who were entitled to fair treatment.

  There was an issue about transportation to and from court. The judge made sure the prison transport vans were safe, and the defendants, in handcuffs and ankle shackles, were not bouncing around in the back of some tin can on wheels. In fact, he rode in the back of one of the vans himself to determine what the ride was like. Extraordinary!

  At another point, one of Vinny’s co-defendants complained that they weren’t being served “live” food. None of us knew what he was talking about (this was before I had moved my mother to Las Vegas, where she, too, made the same argument). But he explained that the potatoes were powdered and the vegetables were canned and chemically preserved. The judge helped straighten that out.

  A few weeks before we were to go to trial, I got a call from the judge’s office. It was Martin Luther King weekend, and he said if we were going to work out a plea, it had to be now. If not, the trial would move forward. I flew out to Boston and convinced Vinny to take a plea. The statement of the cooperating witness putting him in the murder and the mob induction tape were just too strong. He was forty-five, and he was looking at a life sentence if convicted. The prosecution was offering twenty-two years in a plea deal. Vinny thought long and hard, and finally told me to make the deal, but to make sure that he couldn’t be charged in any other jurisdiction for the murder or any of the other offenses. We worked out a global plea that guaranteed that Vinny wouldn’t face any related charges in state court.

  The federal prosecutors I had to deal with were exceptionally arrogant. When I first got involved in the case, they went out of their way to extol the power of that making ceremony tape while mocking me. They asked me what I was going to do now, since in almost every mob case I had been involved in, I would attack government witnesses who claimed to have been formally inducted into the Mafia. With the tape, they said, there was no way I could raise that argument. They were right about that; I just didn’t like their smug attitude. Now getting Vinny and his co-defendants to plead guilty only made them worse.

  At sente
ncing, they looked like cats licking their paws after catching the mice. Both Vinny and J.R. were told that if they admitted they were members of the Mafia, they might get a year or two knocked off their sentences. Neither would do it; they stood firm, and they each got an extra year. But that’s the code they lived by. You have to respect that. I left Boston feeling as if I had saved Vinny’s life. At least he had a chance to come home from prison. He thanked me, never complained, and went off to a maximum security prison to serve his time.

  We stayed in touch. Years later, after I had become mayor and was no longer actively practicing law, there was a hearing in another case up in Boston. Information came out that the witness who had implicated Vinny in the Jimmy Limoli murder had recanted that statement. The prosecution knew about that when we were about to go to trial, but had never told the judge or the defense.

  What’s more, a police detective testified that the witness had been told he’d get a break if he helped the feds get Vinny. The detective said he took both the first statement from the witness, in which he implicated Vinny, and the second statement, in which he recanted. The detective said he turned both those statements over to the prosecution. We never heard about the recantation.

  When Judge Wolf heard about this, he ordered a new hearing and established that the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Auerhahn, had altered the witness statement and had never turned over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense.

  Vinny applied for a new trial. He was represented by my former law partner, David Chesnoff, and by Marty Weinberg, who had a practice in Boston. Their legal argument was that had Vinny known about conflicting witness statements, he never would have pleaded guilty to the murder charge. Had I known, I never would have recommended that he take the plea deal. I filed an affidavit supporting Vinny’s application, stating that had I known about the recantation, I never would have allowed my client to plead to the murder.

  Judge Wolf directed the Massachusetts Bar Association to take up the issue and consider sanctions against Auerhahn for violating a basic tenet of the criminal law practice and procedure. The prosecution has to turn over all evidence to the defense; it’s part of due process.

  Instead of a new trial, Judge Wolf reduced Vinny’s sentence to seventeen years. It was a long time, but it allowed him to come home. Nothing ever happened to Auerhahn, which, if you’ve been paying attention to my story, shouldn’t surprise you. Everyone is equal under the law—except federal prosecutors, who play by their own rules.

  PART THREE

  CITY HALL

  CHAPTER 11

  FROM MOB LAWYER TO MAYOR

  For decades, the mob cases in Philadelphia and Boston kept me busy and kept my name in front of the media. But my job was becoming very repetitive. Now it seemed with every new case, one of the first questions I was beginning to ask was how much could I charge. Could I get more for this case than the last one? Sure, I was making plenty of money and probably could have just put things on cruise control and continued for another ten or twenty years, but that didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t feeling satisfied.

  My wife Carolyn was busy with the Meadows, the school she had founded. It was the first pre-K-through-12 non-profit, non-denominational college preparatory school in Nevada. Our kids were educated and making it on their own.

  And here I was, going to work every day and doing the things I always did. I realized I didn’t like this person I was becoming. I didn’t like who I saw in the mirror. This wasn’t the reason I became a lawyer. This wasn’t what the law was about. Most important, it wasn’t who I wanted to be.

  It’s a funny thing when you say it out loud, but I always liked myself. I always liked who I was and what I was doing. It wasn’t just the mob cases and all the attention. I enjoyed that; don’t get me wrong. I’ve said this before, but I really felt what I was doing had a purpose. It was something good.

  They called me a mob lawyer or the mob’s mouthpiece, but I wore that with pride because I knew what the stakes were and what I was fighting for. It’s why I became a lawyer. But I started to feel as if I had done everything I could do as a lawyer. I had represented high-profile mobsters, a federal judge in an impeachment hearing before the United States Congress, and a drug dealer accused of assassinating a federal judge. I had spent years running around the country. A prosecutor once said you could drop Oscar from a plane anywhere in the country, and he’d say the same thing and do the same thing, no matter where you put him.

  There was some truth to that; maybe I was getting bored. There was a void in my life, and the law wasn’t filling it. It wasn’t the “jealous mistress” that Justice Holmes had said it would be. I had lost the joy of practicing law, of doing something important, of accomplishing something that I knew was good, and now was mostly doing it for the money.

  I would think back and remember better times, like a day back in the early 1990s when a young woman showed up at my law office. My secretary said she had come in without an appointment, but really needed to see a lawyer. She wanted to talk about a civil suit. I said that’s not the kind of case I handle, but my secretary said, “You’d better see this lady.”

  Her name was Jo Ann Allison. She came with her son Tommy, who was about five years old. He was in a wheelchair. He was blind, spastic, deaf, and mentally retarded. It’s sad to say, but he was a vegetable. Yet I could see how his mother loved him and how she was caring for him. It broke my heart.

  She told me her son had contracted encephalitis when he was 17 months old, after being given the compulsory vaccination for measles, mumps, and rubella. The drug, MMRII, was manufactured by Merck. She wanted to sue—she told me that a lawyer down the street thought he could probably get her $5,000. I said I didn’t do that kind of work.

  I looked at that little boy and thought that $5,000 wasn’t going to do him or his mother any good. She was on welfare and didn’t know what else to do. My heart went out to her. I knew, and I knew she knew, that her son was never going to get any better. But she loved him. To me, she was like an angel. It was remarkable to see someone who can care for and love a child in that condition.

  So I said, “Let me do some research.” I ended up filing a lawsuit against Merck under the product liability law, arguing that Merck had not given the parent adequate warning about the potential dangers, and that the parent’s decision to have her child vaccinated was made without full knowledge of the risks.

  Merck had a team of high-priced lawyers, and they were ready to fight the case. At a pre-trial conference, the judge put a zero value on my claim. There was no way Merck could be liable, the judge said, since the vaccine was recommended by the health department. Children had to be vaccinated. The judge issued a summary judgment in Merck’s favor, throwing out our claim.

  I appealed and ended up taking the case all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court. And in the end, we won. Here’s part of what the high court said in a decision, Allison versus Merck, that has become one of the standards in product liability law:

  We conclude that Merck may be liable to Thomas Allison by reason of its strict liability as manufacturer if Thomas can prove that the vaccine in question is the cause of his disabilities. In addition, we conclude that Merck may be liable to Thomas and Ms. Allison for failing to provide a proper warning regarding the vaccine. Accordingly, we reverse the summary judgment in favor of Merck and remand to the trial court for a trial on Thomas’ strict liability claim and on Thomas’ and Ms. Allison’s failure-to-warn claims.

  The lawyers for Merck knew they could be in real trouble if we went in front of a jury with Tommy propped up in his wheelchair. He was a special little fellow, and they knew there was nothing they could say or do in court that would be as powerful as the image of that little boy. After that, we worked out a multi-million dollar settlement.

  Under the terms of the settlement agreement, I’m prohibited from saying how much, but Jo Ann Allison was able to care for her son for the rest of his life without any worries. Tommy e
ventually passed away, and I spoke at his funeral. That case was one of the most satisfying in my career. It’s what the law is really all about.

  The settlement gave me a lot of satisfaction. It wasn’t the kind of case where you went out and partied in celebration, but it was the kind of case where I knew I had done something good. Justice had been served, and to me, that was what being a lawyer was all about. I smile even now when I think about it, and I shake my head when I remember how Jo Ann Allison told me another lawyer said he “might” be able to get her $5,000.

  Those were the kind of people and circumstances I was thinking about when I decided to run for mayor. I could probably have continued practicing law and made even more money, but I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I needed a new challenge. I needed to look in the mirror and like who I saw.

  It wasn’t about the type of clients I had or the criminal law I was practicing. I had just reached a point where I had done everything a criminal defense attorney could do. I’d had a rich and rewarding career as a lawyer, but I wasn’t getting the same satisfaction out of what I was doing. And I didn’t want to be the kind of lawyer who evaluated every case based on how big a fee he could charge. That wasn’t what I was about when I started practicing law, and it wasn’t what I wanted to become.

  Toward the end of 1998, I took the family on a cruise and told them I was thinking of running for mayor. The kids all voted against it. I think they were worried about the things that would be said about me, since they knew how the media treated me. They had grown up hearing and reading about their father, “the mob mouthpiece,” and had heard the snide remarks about how my law office was the “house that crime built.” In addition, they thought there was no way I was going to win.

  “Dad, you’ve got more baggage than a skycap at the airport,” they said.