Being Oscar (6 page)

Even though it was a Sunday, I got a court stenographer to take down Hamlet’s statement, and I used it in a motion for a new trial based on new evidence. Judge O’Donnell scoffed at the mistaken-identity theory after reading my motion. I was getting nowhere, until one day when the judge met the undersheriff, Lloyd Bell. They were friends, and they would go to lunch together. O’Donnell was down there one day and he saw a familiar-looking inmate. He said, “Hi, Brown. How ya’ doin’?”

The murder trial had gone on for several weeks, and the judge looked at Crockett day after day sitting at the defense table. But at this moment, the inmate he was talking to was Floyd Hamlet. The next day, the judge granted my motion.

But my work was far from over.

The prosecution appealed and eventually the Nevada Supreme Court ruled three-to-two in my favor, granting the new trial. One of the dissenting justices, Jon Collins, asked me during the hearing, “What if Hamlet doesn’t testify? What’s to guarantee that he will?”

I couldn’t believe it. Collins’s question was puerile and, I thought, cavalier. We were talking about a death penalty case. A man’s life was literally on the line. It wasn’t time to be splitting hairs and speaking hypothetically. I sneered, looked him right in the eye, and said, “What guarantees are there in life?”

The granting of a new trial was good news and bad news, of course.

I got the word from Judge O’Donnell, who had been notified by the clerk of the State Supreme Court. The trial judge is always the first to be informed. When he called me on the phone, he sounded as relieved as I was. The burden of ordering Crockett’s execution had been lifted off his shoulders, at least temporarily. I asked the judge if he’d like to join me for a drink to celebrate. We had several, and out of that grew a lasting friendship.

I know it might sound strange—the idea of a defense attorney having a drink with a judge after a criminal case he was involved in, but I could care less. To be brutally frank, the ethical issue wasn’t something I was concerned with. It just seemed to be the right thing to do.

That night, the judge and I got completely sloshed. We ended up passed out on the living room floor in my apartment. In the morning, Carolyn came downstairs and cooked us corned beef hash and eggs. We also had a couple of beers to sober us up. From that day forward, we were fast friends.

But I still had to put the case in front of a jury. Remember, the first jury was going to convict Crockett if the woman hadn’t locked herself in the bathroom. And the second jury had buried him. Even with this new evidence, we still had an uphill battle. And there was always the question of racism. I didn’t know what Bingham, the only witness, was going to say about the likeness of Hamlet and Crockett.

The prosecutor in the case was the district attorney himself, a guy named George Franklin, and he was livid. He was a
pompous megalomaniac who really enjoyed playing the role of the top law enforcement official in the city. From his perspective, both his office and the police department had been upstaged and embarrassed by a young punk lawyer who was an outsider. Franklin was convinced that Crockett was guilty.

So there was a lot at stake, and not all of it had to do with truth and justice. Too often for the prosecution, it’s about winning. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but unfortunately that’s the reality. I was new to the game at that point—just a baby lawyer—but I could see how it worked.

So I offered Franklin a deal. I told him my client would take a polygraph, and if he passed, the prosecution would drop the charges. If not, he would plead guilty. Franklin said okay.

But I wasn’t going to use one of his polygraph experts. I brought in Leonard Harrelson, a guy with a national reputation from the Keeler Institute in Chicago. He turned out to be the uncle of the actor Woody Harrelson, who at that time was only five or six years old. Leonard was the brother of Charles Harrelson, Woody’s father, who was later found to be an underworld hit man—but that’s getting ahead of the story.

I set up Leonard Harrelson at the Fremont Hotel. He spent three days testing Crockett, and when he was done, Harrelson told me the lie detector results were pristine. Crockett passed with flying colors. He had nothing to do with the murder of Wheeler.

I took the information to Franklin, the prosecutor, thinking I’d done pretty well for my client. And the prosecutor backtracked.

“I’m not going to drop the charges,” he said. “No deal.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You son of a bitch,” I said. “You gave me your word.”

He didn’t care. He never thought Crockett would pass the polygraph, and he knew I couldn’t use it in court. So he was still going to take my client to trial. Now I was really hot.

But I was lucky.

The National Conference of District Attorneys was holding its annual convention in Las Vegas, and Franklin was the host. He loved playing that role.

And that’s when I stopped being a young lawyer, a boy, and became a man. I look back on it now as a rite of passage. Again, it wasn’t something they taught you in law school, but something you had to learn if you were going to make it as a defense attorney. I confronted Franklin.

“If you don’t honor our agreement,” I said, “I’m calling a press conference and I’m going to announce exactly what you did. I’m going to call you a liar in front of every D.A. in the country. I’m going to tell them you care more about winning cases than justice, that truth doesn’t matter to you, and that you’re not a man of your word.”

The charges against Crockett were dropped.

Interestingly, later on I heard that the jury in the second trial was torn on the identification issue and how it fit in with reasonable doubt. Would you believe it was resolved by a woman juror who examined the evidence in their deliberation room and announced to the others that when Crockett was arrested, the cuffs on his trousers matched the stitching on the drapes from the window the person carrying the shotgun came through? She said they must have come from the same sewing machine. Not in a million years do you figure a case gets decided that way, totally out of left field. Absolutely nuts! Her assumption could have put Brown in the electric chair.

Crockett and his family thought I was the greatest lawyer in the city. That’s how I started building my criminal practice.

Was he innocent? He passed the test. But he went right back into the drug underworld, and I would have another encounter with him later that wasn’t as pleasant.

In the end, you could say I won the case, but it wasn’t based on anything they taught me in law school. I didn’t get the district attorney to go along with the agreement based on the legal issues or the facts, which he should have done. That was the right thing to do. Instead, he went along because he was worried about his image and about all the negative publicity I was threatening to bring. I had to hit him over the head.

As I said earlier, sometimes you have to practice law with a baseball bat.

I did all kinds of cases back then. There was a dealer over at the Hacienda that Carolyn and I knew in our early years in Las Vegas. Carolyn would often play at his table after we had gone to dinner on my Dad’s $25. His name was Bob Butler, and I had helped him with some financial problems by filing a bankruptcy petition for him.

One day while Butler was working, the phone rang. The pit boss answered it and then cupped his hand over the receiver and asked everyone, “Who’s the best criminal defense attorney in Las Vegas?”

Butler thought of me. “I don’t know if he practices criminal law, but Oscar Goodman’s a great guy,” he said.

The pit boss got back on the phone and told the caller, “Oscar Goodman is the best criminal defense lawyer in town.”

Little did I know I was about to take my first step toward becoming a mob lawyer.

The caller was Mel Horowitz, who I didn’t know from Adam. He was a major underworld figure supposedly involved in pornography, which was a big mob money-maker back in the 1960s. He had a vast bookmaking operation in the Northeast and
Canada, and he moved around in the best of mob circles. He knew people like Meyer Lansky, who the FBI said was the financial genius behind the national crime syndicate; Raymond Patriarca, the Mafia boss who oversaw all organized crime in New England; and Fat Tony Salerno, who was head of the Genovese crime family in New York, the family originally headed by the late Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who with Lansky had set up the national organization. These were heavyweights in a world where I was clearly a novice.

Horowitz’s stepbrother had been arrested in Las Vegas driving a stolen car. He needed a lawyer. The case was pretty much open-and-shut; there wasn’t much of a defense. The car was stolen, and he was driving it. He had crossed several state lines, which was a federal offense.

I got a call and was told to go to an address on South Fifteenth Street. I was so nervous that I accepted Carolyn’s suggestion that she drive me—very brave of me. I knocked on the door, and the guy who answered handed me an envelope.

“There’s three dimes in there, kid,” he said in a hoarse, gruff voice. “You’d better win the case.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but the fellow who handed me the envelope was Bob Martin, probably the most astute odds maker in the whole country. He set the sports line that everyone in the world followed. Apparently he was tight with Horowitz.

I returned to the car, and as Carolyn drove around the corner, I opened the envelope. I had never seen so much money at one time in my life. Three dimes is street talk for three thousand dollars; thirty one-hundred-dollar bills. That was a fortune to me.

This was my first federal case, which was held at the old federal courthouse on Stewart Street. To be honest, I had no idea what I was going to do for a defense.

The case was set for February 14, Valentine’s Day. I didn’t want it to turn into another massacre. Horowitz flew into town
to meet me the night before the trial was to begin. He came to my office with Bob Martin. One look, and I immediately understood why friends referred to Horowitz as “the Professor.” He looked like an Ivy League academician, impeccably dressed. Nothing flashy. No one wore an overcoat in Las Vegas, but Horowitz wore a Chesterfield and a Homburg. And when he spoke, he sounded like a teacher. He would pause to make a point, and everything he said had a purpose. During the meeting, they reminded me again how important it was for me to win the case.

“He’s my brother,” Horowitz said.

“No problem,” I replied, again not having any idea what I was going to do.

I was a nervous wreck that night. I couldn’t sleep. The bed was soaked with sweat, at least on my side. When I went to the courthouse very early the next morning, I saw the judge’s secretary and said I wanted to have a non-jury trial. I figured I had a better shot trying to talk my way around things without a jury. But she told me the judge had summoned a jury panel for the trial, and the case would start at 9
A
.
M
. I panicked. I went outside and threw up on the courthouse steps—interestingly enough, now the site of the Mob Museum. The client was the brother of some underworld big shot, and I was told again and again that I had to win it.

The case wasn’t complicated. The prosecution called two witnesses, the owner of the stolen car and the cop who arrested the younger Horowitz behind the wheel of the vehicle. I did something I don’t do very often: I put my client on the stand, as well as his friend who was a passenger in the car at the time of the arrest. I had them both dressed like prep school kids, with rep ties, white shirts, blue blazers, and khakis. Each told a story about having borrowed the car. The prosecution witnesses, the car owner, and the cop, contradicted their testimony. That was
the entire case, which lasted only one day. The bottom line was whether the jury chose to believe the boys or the prosecutor’s witnesses.

We left the courthouse after closing arguments that afternoon and walked back to my office.

“Is it better when the jury comes back with a quick verdict, or is it better when they’re out for a long time?” my client asked me.

“The quicker they return, the worse it usually is for the defense,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, we got back to the office and the phone was ringing.

The jury had a verdict. I figured this can’t be good.

We hustled back to the courthouse.

When they announced their decision, I couldn’t believe it: Not guilty. Either the jury had enough reasonable doubt to acquit, or they might have just felt sorry for me. I could have tried that case a thousand times and would have lost 999 times, even with experience.