I guess you could say I had it all—the short and tall, the alpha and omega of criminal jurisprudence.
I never had a problem accepting these cases. We had a saying in my office, “Where there’s a fee, there’s a remedy.” There was more to practicing law than that, of course, but my practice was also my business. It was the way I supported my family. I didn’t bring moral judgments into my decisions about accepting cases or defending clients. I was providing a service, and they were willing to pay for it. I was also honoring the Constitution. For me, it was a win-win.
These were all high-profile cases. They kept me busy and, unfortunately, often kept me away from home. Carolyn and I had developed a routine, however, that seemed to work.
Growing up, I don’t think our kids had any real concept of what kind of criminal law I was practicing. And that’s probably as it should be. When I had a big case out of town, I would usually leave on a Sunday night and return Friday evening. For my kids, that was just Daddy’s job.
On Sundays Carolyn would cook breakfast, and everyone got their favorite. Pancakes. Eggs. Cereal. Even hot dogs and spaghetti, which was Eric’s choice. I’d be gone all week, so Carolyn had the responsibility for the kids. I’ve said this before, but I can’t say it enough: she did an outstanding job. I would convince myself that I was providing quality time with my family, rather than quantitative time. That was the reality of my work schedule.
I’d come back home on Friday nights and Carolyn would pick me up at the airport. She’d have a babysitter at the house and we’d go out to dinner, usually to The Bootlegger, a local pizzeria. It was a date night for us, and in some ways that hectic schedule kept the spark going in our marriage. We made the best of the time we had together.
Saturdays were always devoted to the kids. I went to soccer games, viola recitals, plays, whatever they had going. Then we’d all go out to dinner together. Even when they were young, we took them out. They were all well behaved—again, thanks to their mother’s influence—and we never hesitated to bring them to a nice restaurant, never worried about them acting up or causing problems that might upset other customers.
After dinner on Saturday night we’d head home, put the kids to bed, and just relax. I’d usually have a martini or two. Carolyn might join me. Then Sunday morning we’d get up and start the routine all over again.
Sometimes the kids might meet one of my clients, and without exception, the clients always went out of their way to make the kids feel comfortable. I think they got a kick out of them. My clients were seeing a different side of me, and I think it made my job easier. They knew I was more than just a mouthpiece looking for a legal fee.
Chris Petti, supposedly the mob’s guy in San Diego, used to refer to the boys as “Huey, Louie, and Dewey,” the Disney duck characters. Kansas City mob boss Nick Civella called Oscar Jr. “Grunt” because the first time he met my oldest son, he was just a baby. We were at the Venetian restaurant eating dinner and Oscar was napping. He was grunting as he slept, and Nick always remembered that.
Joe Blasko, a rogue Metropolitan police officer in Las Vegas who got tied up with the mob, taught my son Ross how to pitch. Joe had played minor league baseball before taking his life in another direction. Jack Binion, the son of legendary casino owner Benny Binion, once took my son Eric on a three-day ski trip.
All my clients and friends were great with my children, and I think they and the kids all benefited from the relationship. I had degrees and higher education, but I still learned a lot from my clients.
Prosecutors and FBI agents might label them criminals.
I saw them as people.
There was one client, however, who had an influence on me like no other—Tony Spilotro.
Talk to the feds and they’ll tell you “Tony the Ant” was sent to Las Vegas by the guys who run the Chicago Outfit. He was there to look out for their interests. His background, from the resume the FBI put together, included nearly two dozen murders. One particularly gruesome killing allegedly involved placing his victim’s head in a vise and tightened it until the guy’s eye popped out, not to mention part of his brain matter.
That was Tony’s rep, although I didn’t know any of that when he walked into my office one day and asked me to go over one of his contracts. Tony had purchased a gift shop at Circus Circus from a guy named Willie Cohen. Willie was friends with Jack Gordon, who later married La Toya Jackson, Michael Jackson’s sister. I have her photograph in my office, autographed “La Toya Gordon.”
I had represented Jack Gordon in a prostitution case in California. He had some massage parlors there, and he also had one of those shops where you could get a quick oil change for your car. Turns out if you used your credit card at the massage parlor, it would show up as an oil change. I guess that gave new meaning to the term “lube job.”
When Spilotro took over the gift shop, he changed its name to “Anthony Stuart’s.” Stuart was his wife Nancy’s maiden name. It was a legitimate business as far as I could tell, and the contract was strictly on the up-and-up.
Tony showed up at my office dressed very professionally in a jacket and tie. I looked over his paperwork. The meeting only lasted fifteen minutes. To me it was not a big deal, but people in law enforcement were watching Tony’s every move. This was just the start of a ten-year run where it seemed like every day I was fighting some battle on his behalf.
The gaming regulators were putting pressure on Jay Sarno, the owner of Circus Circus. They told him he had to get Spilotro out of the place or Sarno would lose his casino license.
Sarno was a visionary. Prior to Circus Circus, he created Caesars Palace, and probably had as much to do with shaping the modern theme-oriented Las Vegas as Steve Wynn or Howard Hughes. But he also was a libertine in his tastes and habits. He was a gourmand. He ate, womanized, and gambled to excess. He always wanted more. And as a client, he wouldn’t listen.
I had represented Sarno in a bribery case that was a clear case of entrapment by the IRS. We beat it, but it was a struggle—not because of the evidence, but because of my client. He and I were constantly banging heads during the trial. He tried to tell me what questions to ask and how to cross-examine witnesses. I guess he was just used to being in charge. He would get angry and red in the face and start to sweat, and when he did, his toupee would start to slide off his head. Several jurors noticed and couldn’t help themselves. They started to laugh. Maybe that helped us in deliberations; you never know. Maybe they felt sorry for him.
Because of his experience in that case, I knew that Sarno was leery of law enforcement. It’s a shame that an individual has to feel that way. Most citizens never come in contact with the law, and they have this image of G-men as upstanding, honest, and all for God and country. A lot of agents are like that, I’m sure. But many of the ones I had to deal with were cut from a different cloth.
Sarno was a creative genius, but he still had to deal with the pettiness of the state gaming regulators. When they threatened his license because of Tony Spilotro’s gift shop, Sarno had no choice but to buy him out. I think Tony paid $70,000 for the gift shop, and I believe Sarno had to pay $700,000 to buy him out. Not a bad profit for Tony. For me, it was the start of a fascinating relationship.
While I was representing Tony, he was a target of the Federal Organized Crime Strike Force, the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS, the Metropolitan Police Department, Nevada gaming regulators, and the media. It seemed to be a tacit conspiracy in which they literally “created” this nefarious organized crime figure, this hit man and extortionist who wielded unbelievable power in an underworld that stretched from Chicago to Las Vegas. At least that was their version of who Tony was. That they couldn’t prove any of this didn’t seem to matter. As a result, Tony’s problems became a big part of my criminal practice. Indictments, grand jury appearances, Gaming Control Board and Commission hearings, searches and seizures gave me a forum to litigate serious constitutional issues in courts and other legal forums.
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p; 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 hea
ring 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.”
Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas Page 7