Authors: Oscar Goodman
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.
The publicity in this case was unbelievable. Before it was moved to Florida, I was down in Texas for several pre-trial hearings, and you could almost feel the tension in the air. Everyone was talking about it. After one hearing, I was in a cab heading back to the airport and the driver surmised I was in town for the Wood murder case.
“Judge Wood was such a good man,” the cabbie said. “He always gave the maximum sentence for all those filthy drug dealers. They should take that Chagra guy and raise him on the flagpole and put honey in his eyes and ants on the honey. Who are you with?”
“I’m with the FBI,” I said.
I wasn’t about to tell him I was Jimmy Chagra’s lawyer.
Jacksonville wasn’t much better. The prosecution was loaded and ready, and this conviction was going to be the icing on the cake. They had gotten Harrelson and the others, but Jimmy was the prime target. The talk was that they had a piñata and champagne in the office, and planned a big victory party once Jimmy was found guilty.
I had to work with the evidence. There were some things that couldn’t be refuted, such as the taped conversations. The recorded words weren’t going to change. And the government also had informants and prison snitches, including a guy named Jerry Ray James, a prison inmate who said Chagra had admitted to him that he had had the judge killed.
James was a very bad guy. He had led a prison riot in New Mexico where he stuck brooms into the orifices of the guards and inmates who he knew were rats, and burned them with welding torches. But he cut a deal with the authorities where he would not be penalized if he could help them get Jimmy Chagra.
In my opening statement, I argued that the charge didn’t make sense. I told the jury to think about it. Jimmy was involved in a drug case in front of Judge Wood, and he was facing a possible thirty-year sentence. Killing the judge wasn’t going to make that case go away. In fact, it didn’t. So what was the point? And more important, Jimmy was in negotiations with the prosecution to resolve the drug case. The government wanted what amounted to a ten-year cap, and Jimmy insisted that the deal have a five-year cap.
You don’t kill a judge for a five-year difference.
In a case like this, you attempt to get the jury thinking. If you can get one or two of the jurors to at least consider your position, then you have something to work with. That’s why I always tried to pick jurors who seemed intelligent. You want jurors who have minds of their own, who aren’t going to swallow everything the prosecution tries to feed them.
Then you try to chip away at the facts and hope you bring the jury along with you.
The tapes, of course, were a problem. As they were being played, Jimmy was concerned. He kept looking at me. I had told him that before the trial started, my wife Carolyn had listened to
all the tapes. She was one of the few people I trusted, and this was one of the only times I ever asked her for help in a criminal trial. She had listened and told me I was going to win this case. I told that to Jimmy.
At the defense table, he wrote me a note.
“How the fuck does your wife think we can win this fucking case?”
I wrote him a note back that said, “Because I’m fucking brilliant.”
One of the pieces of evidence the prosecution used was a diorama of the condominium complex where Judge Wood lived. There was a witness who the government hypnotized, who had testified about what she had seen from her unit. The diorama was so specific that it had the streets and the parking spaces, and even the trees that lined the parking area where the judge was standing when he was killed.
I had fought to exclude her testimony, arguing that there was inherent unreliability in anything said under hypnosis. It would be too easy for someone to suggest something to her under those conditions. But Judge Sessions didn’t see it that way.
“Denied,” he said to my motion to bar her testimony.
Now I had to deal not only with what she said, but also with this elaborate diorama that the prosecution was using to back up her story. Something bothered me about it. I kept looking and looking. Finally, when I got a chance to cross-examine the witness, I asked the judge’s clerk if she had a pen, preferably a green one, that I could borrow. She did.
I could see Judge Sessions start to steam. I knew he was thinking, “What’s Goodman doing here, wasting my time?”
I asked whether the clerk could hand me some Kleenex. With that I began to dab the Kleenex with the pen, wad them up and place them on the diorama’s trees, which were barren of leaves.
The assassination took place in May. The trees would have been covered with leaves, so there was no way the witness could have seen what she said she had seen.
That was a small point, but nevertheless it was a way to begin raising some doubt about the prosecution’s case.
I had bigger issues to deal with than leafy trees, however. One, which Jimmy clearly recognized, was his taped comments. Another was alleged statements he had made to fellow inmate Jerry Ray James admitting his involvement in the murder. James had been transferred from the New Mexico prison to Leavenworth so he could get next to Jimmy. What I argued was that Jimmy was puffing, making it up. I tried to get across to the jury the idea that Jimmy was smart; I said he was too smart to think he could get away with killing a federal judge. But once he was in prison for the drug conviction, he needed to survive. He wasn’t a tough guy, but he could make himself out to be one by bragging that he’d had a federal judge killed.
It was a macho thing, a survival tactic. To make that point, I told Judge Sessions I wanted to subpoena over two dozen hardened inmates who were at Leavenworth, Florence, and Terre Haute, the government’s high security locked-down prisons. I wanted to put them on the stand and ask them about reputation and survival in the prison system, and whether killing a federal judge would provide an inmate with status and give him prestige.
Sessions went nuts. A federal prison official had called Sessions and said, “Is this Goodman fucking nuts? There’s no jail in the world that would hold these guys.”
“You can’t bring those inmates down here,” Sessions said. “It’s too big a security risk.”
They would have had to be housed in a county facility while waiting to be called, and the judge saw the potential for a massive
prison break. He agreed, however, to bring some of those inmates to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and allowed me to go up there and interview them.
The prison guards in Atlanta weren’t too happy with me when I went up there. I was the reason these hard cases were now their responsibility, and I think they got a kick out of putting me in a room with all of these guys. I spoke with several of them. Some only spoke Spanish. All I could say was “abogado.” I wanted to make sure they knew I wasn’t a fed.
Ultimately, I decided not to call any of them.
The old adage in criminal law, “Don’t ask a question unless you know what the answer is going to be,” kept coming up as I thought about these prisoners as witnesses. They were loose cannons. They were telling me what I wanted to hear; that killing a judge would be a badge of honor in a federal prison. That backed up my argument that Jimmy was saying this to give himself status with hardened convicts. But I couldn’t be sure what else they might say if I called them to testify.
I was putting together a surgically crafted defense. I didn’t want to run the risk of any one of them undermining what I was trying to do. So in the end, and I think to the great relief of the prosecution and prison officials, I didn’t call them as witnesses.
But another inmate provided me with a major break. A fellow from Las Vegas, Andy Granby Hanley, called me. I had known Hanley and his dad Tom, who had been charged with bombing supper clubs in Las Vegas that were non-union. At the time, I was representing the head of the Culinary Union, who was charged with conspiring with them.
It’s amazing what prisoners learn; the network of information they have and the ability they have to get that information out. Granby said that James had already been advanced some of the $250,000 reward that had been offered by the feds and the Texas Bar Association for the arrest and
conviction
of persons in
the Judge Wood murder. If that were true, I could use it to challenge his credibility.
Not only had he gotten the money, Granby told me, but he had used some of it to buy his wife a $50,000 Mercedes Benz.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’ll get you the VIN number of the car and you can check the registration,” he said.
In a couple of days he was back on the phone with the VIN. It checked out; the car was registered to Mrs. Jerry Ray James.
Amazing.
There was another part of James’s story that didn’t ring true. In addition to having Judge Wood killed, he said Jimmy Chagra had bragged about another killing. He also said Chagra claimed that he had personally murdered a drug dealer named Mark Finney.
Jimmy told me that was a lie. Finney rode with a biker gang, the Banditos, and I managed to get in contact with one of their leaders. He agreed to help me out.
When it came time to cross-examine James, I first focused on the reward money.
James did a lot of hemming and hawing when I asked him about the cash. At first he tried to deny that he had gotten any money, then he denied that he had used any of the money to buy his wife a Mercedes. When I told him I had the VIN number, he had to admit it. That raised questions about his credibility and his motivation for testifying.
When it was time for me to put on my defense, I recalled James as my first witness. The prosecution and the judge weren’t sure where I was going, but I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. My examination of James lasted about nine minutes, but it might have been the turning point in the case.
After some preliminary discussion and questions and answers about what Jimmy Chagra had allegedly told him about the
murders of Judge Wood and Mark Finney, I said to James, “Describe how Mister Chagra told you he killed Mark Finney.”
“I think he said he shot him.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I’m sure he told me he offed him.”
“As sure as you are that Mister Chagra had Judge Wood murdered?”
“That’s right.”
I looked at Judge Sessions and said no further questions. The prosecution had nothing for cross, so Sessions told me to call my next witness.
I stood up and said, “I call Mark Finney.”
The biker gang leader had helped me locate Finney. Finney had called me at my hotel a few nights earlier. I told him what I needed, and he said he would be happy to help Jimmy. Finney wasn’t on the stand very long. After I had him identify himself, I asked, “Do you know Jimmy Chagra?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding toward the defense table.
“Did he kill you?”
Finney laughed, and so did some of the jurors.