Being Oscar (11 page)

In addition to my formal representation, and because of the extensive media attention, I became his “mouthpiece,” attempting to temper the animus leveled against him by the pundits in the press and on TV.

Representing Tony Spilotro catapulted me to a whole different level in the practice of criminal law. For the first time, everything I did became personal. To my opponents I was the Prince of Darkness, the anti-Christ. From my perspective, they were suborners, liars, and anti-American. It was war, and I had to win it—not only for Tony Spilotro, and not only for myself. The real issue underlying almost every battle I fought for Tony was whether the U.S. Constitution was going to remain intact and
stand inviolate. That’s the way I saw it, and that’s why I gave no quarter in any of the battles I fought.

My problem with law enforcement doesn’t have anything to do with the law. It has to do with some of the people whose job it was to enforce the law. I don’t like crusaders and true believers; I find them self-righteous and intolerant. I think they abuse the criminal justice system and undermine the Constitution.

Nobody better exemplified that than Special Agent in Charge Joseph Yablonsky. Don’t you love those titles? He was sent to Las Vegas in 1980 to head the FBI office. He had previously worked in Cincinnati, among other places, and when he arrived he made no secret of his agenda. In his mind, Las Vegas was Sin City, and he was going to change it. He told some people that he intended to plant the American flag in the Nevada desert. Clearly he was a crusader, but he didn’t care about the rules of law. He said he intended to get a white-haired senator, a little mobster, and a federal judge. That would be Paul Laxalt, one of President Ronald Reagan’s best friends; Tony Spilotro; and Harry Claiborne. In the cases of Tony and Harry, I was the guy Yablonsky had to deal with.

I hope it wasn’t a pleasant experience for him.

Tony Spilotro got to Las Vegas a few years before Yablonsky. He came to my office that first time because some of the people I had represented in gambling and wiretap cases recommended him to me. They called him “the little guy” or “the ant” because of his diminutive height. He was only about five-foot-five. But they never called him those names to his face. His name conjured up respect among a certain group of people who knew him, and among others, it instilled fear.

After selling the gift shop at Circus Circus, Tony opened a jewelry store called The Gold Rush and continued to receive lots of bad press.

Yablonsky and the crew he set loose to get Tony were only interested in making cases. Justice and truth weren’t of any consequence. The more I got involved with Tony, the more I saw how the system worked, and I was sickened by it. Yablonsky had built a reputation in the FBI working and supervising undercover operations. He considered himself the “king of sting” and brought that same approach to Las Vegas.

He sent agents in to entrap and harass any and all who associated with Tony. I was no exception, and found myself targeted by an FBI undercover agent who sat across the desk from me in my law office and told me a tale of being threatened by the FBI if he didn’t cooperate with them to “get” Tony.

Tony knew the guy as Rick Calise, but his real name was Rick Baken. He had gotten close to Tony. It was a classic FBI undercover operation; Calise was supposedly in the “diamond business” and started hanging around The Gold Rush, the jewelry store Tony had opened.

Now Calise came to my office with Tony and laid out this story about how the FBI had come to him and warned him that Tony was going to have him killed. They said that unless he cooperated against Tony, he was going to be indicted and would face serious charges. It was all bullshit, of course, but we didn’t know it at the time.

“What should I do?” he asked, holding up a
Time
magazine cover that featured a picture of a gun and the screaming one-word headline, “MAFIA.”

“Tell him what to do, Oscar,” Tony said.

I shook my head.

“Fellas, there’s no way I can give advice here,” I said. “There’s an inherent conflict of interest. I represent Tony.” I looked right at Calise and said, “And the feds want you to help them get Tony. You need an independent lawyer to advise you. Do you have one?”

“No,” he said.

“Would you like me to recommend one?”

“Yes.”

With that, I gave him the names of three of the best attorneys I knew—ethical, tough advocates. I told him any one of them would be able to properly counsel him. I would find out a little while later that he left the office and ran to his FBI supervisors, telling them I was trying to obstruct justice. Either he was lying or just plain dumb. I think it might have been a combination of the two.

I got a phone call from the Strike Force attorney who was working with the undercover agent. He told me that if anything happened to the undercover—this is how we learned the guy was an agent—they’d hold me responsible. I went nuts.

“I’m not a fucking insurer,” I screamed into the phone, “and I sure hope the bastard had a wire on him to record our conversation.”

Thank God, he did. But that’s the way these guys operated. Half-truths, entrapment, make it up as you go along—those were the rules of engagement in the war I was fighting.

I had been through this before. A few years earlier, Lewis “Brown” Crockett, the drug dealer whose charges were dropped in the murder case I had defended him in, came to my office unannounced. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. We sat down and started chatting, but then Crockett went off. He started to talk about how he needed money, and could I invest in this venture he was involved in, and on and on. I knew right away that this was a setup, and I told him as much. He finally admitted he had gotten jammed up in another drug case and was trying to work out his own problem by cooperating. The police wanted him to set me up in a drug deal.

I told him to get out of my office. I never saw him again.

The Black Book, the casino exclusion list, is another example of government abuse.

Several of my clients, including Tony Spilotro, ended up on the list and in the book. There’s almost no way to defend against an allegation that doesn’t have to be proven. Tony’s reputation was what got him excluded, and there were dozens of others just like him. And it was no coincidence that most of those names in the Black Book ended in vowels. This was a government vendetta: keep the mob out of Las Vegas. Meanwhile, they weren’t doing anything about the rampant street crime.

The media, of course, loved all of this hype. Reporters jumped on each action and allegation by any law enforcement agency. In many instances, they ignored or gave short shrift to what was really happening, and instead editorialized the event. Tony, it seemed, was the suspect in every unsolved murder in town. The myth took on the patina of truth. The gore sold papers and drove viewers to the evening news, where commentators pontificated. There were the M&M murders in Chicago, two alleged mobsters whose names started with “M” and who were tortured and killed. There was Danny Seifert, a potential witness blown away in front of his young son so he wouldn’t testify in court. There was Tamara Rand, who purportedly loaned money to Allen Glick, the alleged front man for the mob-controlled Stardust casino. Rand was found murdered in her San Diego condo.

There was also a guy called “Action” Jackson who was found dead, hung by a meat hook stuck in his rectum. His knees had been smashed and his genitals had been poked and crushed with a cattle prod before he died. On and on it went. Every sensational murder always resulted in finger-pointing at Tony Spilotro.

The irony was that they could never convict him. I never lost a case representing him. Depending on who was telling the story, I would hear about how he was involved in twenty-two gangland murders, or twenty-six mob hits. If he did all this, then prove it.
If he was the nefarious mobster, then get the evidence and put him in jail. It never happened, but government agencies and the media loved to label him.

There was even a rumor, which I believe law enforcement had started, that Tony once plotted to poison all the members of a grand jury who were hearing evidence in a case the government was trying to build against him. Before an indictment could be handed up, according to the rumor, Tony planned to bribe the chef who prepared lunch for the grand jurors to lace their food with a lethal substance. Someone had a fertile imagination, but the whole thing was ridiculous.

Inclusion in the Black Book was the mark of Cain in the desert: no proof, but punishment nevertheless. After they placed his name in the book, Tony couldn’t go in a casino. Not only could he not go in a casino, he couldn’t go into any facility that was part of a casino—a restaurant, a bowling alley, a gift shop.

At first the banishment was so broad that anyone on the list was prohibited from going into any licensed gambling establishment. If Tony was driving from Las Vegas to Reno and there was a gas station with five slot machines on a highway out in the desert, Tony wouldn’t have been permitted to stop there to use the restroom. I went to court and got that changed, but he still couldn’t enter any of the casinos or casino-hotels in town.

I’ve never understood the rationale of the Black Book concept. It would be different if you said that someone who had been caught cheating at cards, or rigging a dice game, or had been convicted of defrauding a casino was barred from gambling. That would make sense. But what crime had some of these guys committed? Even if you accepted that some of them had criminal records—these were not choirboys, after all—if their crimes had nothing to do with casino gambling, why should they be barred?

Tony’s only conviction, despite all these allegations, was for
making a false loan application. He was fined one dollar, and the sentencing judge apologized because the case was so ridiculous.

I thought, and still think, that the Black Book is unconstitutional. But that was a battle that I fought and lost. I’d do it all again without a second thought. Those guys on the Gaming Commission thought I was the devil incarnate, but I didn’t care.

Once there was a hearing when someone asked Shannon Bybee, who was chairman of the Gaming Control Board, to define organized crime. He said, “Organized crime is anyone who Oscar Goodman represents.”

I thought this was a cheap shot, and I think it said more about him than it said about me. He wasn’t a particularly bright fellow, but he was holier-than-thou. And it was very disturbing to think that he was calling the shots when it came to the Black Book, and in a position to make moral judgments based on some dime-store-novel-like stories that might have appeared in the media—stories without any evidence to back them up. I thought the whole thing was un-American.

That’s the kind of mindset that existed when Spilotro came to Las Vegas. He and the guys around him were constantly under surveillance, either by the FBI or the Intelligence Unit—talk about an oxymoron—of the Metro Police.

A few months ago, I was given a copy of an Intelligence Unit surveillance log from 1979–80. Investigators working for the unit filed these daily reports. What a waste of taxpayers’ money! It was just nonsense, following people around, going from casino to casino and reporting who was there. No one was immune from their invasive presence—judges, county commissioners, lawyers, everyday people, and, of course, Tony and anybody with whom he was in contact.

I loved the comments about me.

There was one from January 5, 1980, that read in part: “Pissed off Oscar Goodman.” I have no idea what that was about,
but on January 25 there was a second notation, “Oscar Goodman still pissed off.”

Who gives a shit? This is what law enforcement is about? They were tracking my comings and goings. “Oscar is going to the airport. . . . Oscar is back in town.”

When my daughter Cara turned 13, we had her bat mitzvah at a lodge outside of town. I invited everybody—state Supreme Court judges, senators, assemblymen, clients, family members, friends. At the bottom of the hill, Metro Police and the FBI set up surveillance. They took down the license plate numbers of every car heading for the lodge that day. It was ridiculous, like something out of
The Godfather
. And the saddest part was, some of the people I had invited turned away when they saw the authorities. Too bad for them—we had a great time. Tony was there, and so was Joey Cusumano and some of my other reputed wiseguy clients. They weren’t worried about anybody taking down their license plate numbers.

FBI agents came up to the lodge and asked whether they could come in. I told them to drop dead.