Being Oscar (22 page)

Authors: Oscar Goodman

When the government moved to retry the case, they dropped the bribery charge. They weren’t going to put Conforte on the stand again. So at Harry’s new trial, there was the income tax issue and some minor ethics offenses. The prosecutor offered us a deal. If Harry would resign as judge, they’d drop the charges. But Harry wouldn’t go for it.

“I’m right,” he said.

I wanted to use the defense that Teddy Binion had suggested. The tax returns were ridiculously prepared, and an argument that Harry was impaired would have great jury appeal.

The government theory was that Harry lived high and that after he became a federal judge, he couldn’t maintain that lifestyle on a salary of $78,000. But I knew him. He was frugal; he didn’t have a fancy car, he drove a truck. He wore the same clothes all the time, and I never saw him in a new suit. He just lived the way he always had.

There was a check, a refund from an earlier tax return. It was more than $100,000, and Harry still hadn’t cashed it. It was sitting in a drawer. This was somebody who didn’t care about money, and who obviously wasn’t paying attention to his tax preparer—who wasn’t that good, by the way. Harry would provide his accountant with all his information, sometimes written in pencil and scrawled across sheets of paper. The accountant would fill out the forms based on that information and then Harry, who may have been drunk at the time (according to Teddy’s theory), would sign his tax returns.

As someone who drinks a lot, I know how that can be. There are times where you might appear lucid and act in a manner that people around you would believe you were not inebriated, but the next day, you have no recollection of what you were doing.

But Harry was a proud man, and I wasn’t sure he would allow us to use drunkenness as a defense. First he would have to admit that he had a problem. And I think if I had suggested that defense, he would have lost all confidence in me. It was very tough, because I had such great admiration and respect for him as a man and as a lawyer.

In the end, I decided not to broach the drunken defense. Harry was convicted of the tax offenses and sentenced to two years in prison. He never flinched and never complained. He believed he was right, but he accepted the verdict. In a lot of ways, he was like Spilotro and some of my other clients who didn’t whine or complain.

Harry stayed out on bail while we appealed. We went in front of the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. The group included Harry and me, Harry’s law clerk and secretary, and Tom O’Donnell, the judge from the Crockett case. He was a good friend of Harry’s and mine. We had dinner the night before at one of Harry’s favorite restaurants and we talked about the appeal, the arguments I would make the next day, and how things looked. One of the things we discovered was that Harry had gotten mail that was intended for O’Donnell, and O’Donnell had gotten mail that was intended for Harry. The only thing we could figure is that the feds were monitoring their mail, opening their correspondences. Obviously one of the idiots had put the mail back in the wrong envelopes. So my take on that was that both judges had been targeted by the federal government, and Harry was the one they got.

We also spent time that night talking about old times, trying to keep things light.

We were going to meet for breakfast the next morning and then head over to court. I was drinking a cup of coffee when Harry walked into the restaurant and said that Tom O’Donnell
wasn’t feeling well. Harry planned to go with me to court, but now said he would meet me there after he checked on Tom.

When it was time to make our argument, Harry still hadn’t shown up, so I asked the judges if they would take another case before ours. They graciously agreed, but eventually I had to make my arguments without Harry there. After the hearing I walked out in the hallway and there was Harry Claiborne, tears in his eyes. Tom O’Donnell had had a massive heart attack while he was taking a shower that morning.

Harry didn’t want to tell me because he didn’t want to upset me before the hearing. Now he was standing there in that hallway, his future on the line, but all he could do was cry over the death of his good friend.

Harry Claiborne and Tom O’Donnell were good judges and even better men.

We lost the appeal, and Harry ended up doing his time at the Maxwell Air Force base. That’s where he was when the impeachment proceedings began. They brought him back East and kept him in the brig at Quantico, the Marine Base.

The first day he was brought into the Capitol for the Senate impeachment hearings, he was in shackles, shuffling in full-body chains and manacles. It was totally demeaning. I was able to get Senator Warren Rudman from New Hampshire to correct that. He told the marshals that this was not going to be tolerated.

But that was one of the few breaks we got from the Senate. We never really got a full hearing. The full Senate was supposed to read and review the transcript of proceedings, which were held before a committee of twelve senators. I’d wager that most of the senators hadn’t read any of it. It was a rush to judgment. If the constitution wasn’t broken that day, it surely was bent.

The senators just couldn’t understand why Harry didn’t resign. Several came to me, pleading with me to convince him to
step down. If he had, I think the impeachment proceedings would have ended. But he was steadfast, so we had to go through it.

I wanted a full-blown trial in front of the entire Senate, to which we were constitutionally entitled. This was, after all, the first impeachment proceeding in fifty years. I had a witness list of nearly sixty people. But the Senate opted for a streamlined proceeding before the twelve-member committee. They permitted us to call a dozen witnesses. The hearing lasted seven days, and then the committee issued transcripts of the proceedings that the rest of the Senate was supposed to read before voting.

During the committee hearings, they would bring him from the brig to a safe house on Sundays to prepare. When he arrived, I’d ask him what he would like to eat. I told him I’d get him whatever he wanted. You’d think he’d ask for a steak or some other type of fancy meal. But no, he just wanted a hot dog with chili from the 7-Eleven, and he wanted to watch the football games on television.

I argued as best I could in front of the full Senate, but it was like arguing in front of a juror who was asleep. Most of the senators had already made up their minds. Al Gore was convinced that Claiborne was a bad person. I looked at the copy of the report on Barry Goldwater’s desk. It looked like it hadn’t been opened. I don’t think there was anything I could have said that would have saved Harry.

The senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of three articles of impeachment. Harry Claiborne was found guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He was stripped of his judgeship and sent back to finish his prison term.

Harry just sat there as the “guilty” votes were tabulated, one senator after another. We both knew what was happening. I looked out over that crowd of senators and saw that most hadn’t
even cracked the spine of the report they were supposed to read before voting.

As the vote was being taken, Harry wrote a note in red ink that he wanted me to give to Hank Greenspun of the
Las Vegas Sun
. After the hearing, I read the note to other reporters who came up to me. This was only the fifth time in all of our history that the Senate had voted articles of impeachment, and there was obviously a lot of media attention.

Here’s what Harry wrote:

“A part of me died here today, not because of defeat, but because everything I believe in was assaulted beyond repair.”

I look at it now, and I’m still shaken by the whole process. The investigation, the indictment, the trials, the impeachment. Harry Claiborne was a marvelous judge and an even better human being. But he was targeted by a venal group of individuals. The whole cast of characters—the FBI, the IRS, the Strike Force Attorneys, the trial judge, and most of the U.S. Senate—was not interested in justice.

Harry came back to Las Vegas after he finished his sentence, and the Nevada Supreme Court restored his law license. I think that says a lot about how they felt about what had happened. He was a lawyer again, but he was never the same. The impeachment had broken him. I think he was so disappointed in the system that he lost some of his love for the law.

In 2004, in the middle of a battle with cancer, Harry Claiborne killed himself. But as he said, a part of him had died long before that.

On the gridiron at Haverford College. (Courtesy of Oscar Goodman)

Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal sits as Oscar goes over a chart at one of his many casino licensing hearings. (Courtesy of
Las Vegas Review-Journal
, reprinted with permission, photo by Jeff Scheid)