Authors: Oscar Goodman
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 jury 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.”
Teddy, like his father, was a good friend of Harry Claiborne’s, and he thought Harry was getting a raw deal. A couple of years later, Teddy was found dead in the den of his home. It was a sensational case; his girlfriend and a male accomplice were charged with murder. The prosecution theorized that his death was made to look like a heroin overdose.
Teddy’s girlfriend and her lover were tried and convicted of murder, but on appeal, that conviction was overturned. At the retrial they were acquitted.
I didn’t think Harry would go for Teddy’s “I was drunk” defense on the tax issues, so I didn’t bring it up. But we still nearly beat all the charges. The jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in our favor on each count. We ended up with a mistrial, a hung jury.
Conforte was totally discredited. He looked like the scumbag that he was. I think even the feds realized it. Conforte got time served for the withholding tax evasion charge—what little time he had served in jail after they brought him back from Brazil. The reduction of his sentence was illegal. The government attorneys got a judge in Washington, D.C., to reduce the sentence years after it was imposed, when the time for reduction of sentences had to be within 120 days of the conviction. On top of that, his tax liability was reduced. That was his payoff from the government for ruining Harry Claiborne’s life. The feds gave him the candy store and he gave them nothing from the witness stand.
After the trial, Conforte headed back to Brazil. I don’t think he ever paid the taxes he owed. Occasionally I saw pictures of him with a big Cuban Cohiba in his mouth and what appeared to
be several teenage girls with their arms around his fat, hairy stomach.