Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas

by Oscar Goodman

  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 b
y 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.

  “No further questions,” I said.

  I didn’t call another witness. It was a nineteen-minute defense.

  In summation, I tried to hammer on the same points I had made during the trial: their accusations didn’t make any sense, the government witnesses were not credible, the tapes and the “confession” were just Jimmy boasting and bragging and trying to survive. My argument lasted close to six hours, the longest I ever made.

  You hope that in a case like this, with everything stacked against you, one or two jurors will agree with you. Maybe you can get a hung jury and negotiate a plea deal for your client.

  In this case, all twelve jurors heard what I was saying.

  They found Jimmy Chagra not guilty of the murder of Judge John H. Wood, Jr.

  To this day, I still get asked about that case. Invariably someone will want to know how I felt about “helping Chagra get away with murder.” Or, “Doesn’t it make you sick to know you helped him beat the case when you knew he was guilty?” There’s no answer to that question, because whoever asks it doesn’t understand the system.

  Think about the O.J. Simpson case, in which I almost got involved. It’s the same issue and the same post-verdict question. Unpopular clients still deserve representation. Our adversarial system is set up so that the accused is presumed innocent and must be proven guilty.

  My answer to the question is that I don’t defend the guilty or the innocent; I defend our system of justice and the U.S. Constitution. People don’t want to hear that, though. They think I’m just spouting platitudes. But if you believe in this country and our system of justice, then you have to accept the truth in that old adage about how it’s better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted.

  Is it a perfect system? Of course not.

  Is it the best system on earth? Probably.

  Was Jimmy Chagra guilty? It really doesn’t matter that I don’t believe he was. Would I feel bad if I felt justice wasn’t served by the jury’s verdict? Hell no. My thoughts would be irrelevant. What I think, what I feel, is not part of the system. What matters is that “twelve good men tried and true” said that he was not guilty.

  I think the system works. Most of the people I represented were never going to get offered a deal. The prosecution wanted them convicted and in jail, or sentenced to death. I had a unique practice in that sense. Some studies suggest that 96 percent of all criminal cases are pleaded out. Guys like Chagra or Tony Spilotro were never going to be part of that statistic, because any deal the government was going to offer them wasn’t going to be palatable.

  That being said, I was still happy to work the system and fight the fight. I enjoyed presenting a case to a jury. For the most part I think jurors are serious about what they do and try to listen and understand. That’s all you can ask.

  Could the system be improved? Maybe, but only slightly. I would like a third jury option in criminal cases; what’s called the Scottish verdict. In Scotland, juries have three options: guilty, not guilty, or “not proven.” What the jury found in the Jimmy Chagra murder trial, I believe, was that the prosecution hadn’t proven its case.

  CHAPTER 8

  I NEVER REPRESENTED A RAT

  One night in October 1982, I had just finished a martini and was sitting at home relaxing when I got the phone call. I don’t remember who it was, but I’ll never forget the message. Someone had just tried to kill Lefty Rosenthal. Lefty had come out of Tony Roma’s restaurant and his Cadillac was parked in front. They planted a bomb in his car and nearly blew him away. They replayed the scene in the movie Casino. As you might imagine, Lefty was angry. The caller said Lefty had miraculously survived, and he wanted to see me.

  I lived only two miles away, so I drove right over. I remember thinking, “This kind of stuff happens in other cities, not Las Vegas.”

  When I drove up to the restaurant, there were black-and-whites all over the place. Flashing lights, yellow crime scene tape blocking the area. I never saw so many cops in one place.

  Lefty was still there. They had him on a gurney and were in the process of transporting him to the hospital. His hair was completely singed, his face was blackened, and his eyes were glazed.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Whoever did this, we’re gonna get this guy,” he said.

  His Cadillac was mangled. It looked like something from one of those World War II movies where the tanks get blown up. What a scene! All the windows in Tony Roma’s were shattered. This happened around eight o’clock at night. This wasn’t some remote location; the restaurant was right across the street from a busy shopping center. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing. If this had happened during the day, when shoppers and tourists were all over the place, there’s no telling how many people might have been killed or injured. Parts of the car were found hundreds of feet away.

  News accounts at the time said Lefty’s life was saved because of a metal plate that had been installed under the driver’s seat. The plate was put there to correct some kind of balancing problem, but it apparently served another purpose on the night the bomb went off by shielding Lefty from the explosion.

  I was told, however, that what rea
lly saved Lefty was the fact that he reached in the car to turn on the key, rather than sliding behind the wheel. Why did he do this? Who knows? Maybe he wanted to get the air-conditioning working before he got in. Maybe he was being cautious. I never asked him.

  That night he’d had dinner with Marty Kane and Ruby Goldstein, two local gamblers. He had left the restaurant intending to head home. Obviously, he didn’t make it.

  Naturally, the question was who had planted the bomb? And the follow-up was, why?

  Lefty Rosenthal was a very interesting guy. Unlike a lot of my other clients who wouldn’t say “boo” and who just listened, Rosenthal was very vocal. He fought everything; he was quoted in the papers and was always battling. When the Gaming Control Board banned him from one casino job, he would get another that didn’t require a license. Then they would cite him again. But he fought it all the way.

  Lefty had a fascinating background. He grew up in Chicago, and the resume that law enforcement put together alleged that he eventually ran one of the biggest illegal bookmaking operations in the country for the Outfit. That’s apparently where he got to know Tony Spilotro. There were also allegations that he used bribes to fix sporting events. None of this was ever proven. In fact, the only conviction he had was a guilty plea to a minor gambling charge in Florida, where he moved his operation in the 1960s.

  Shortly after arriving in Miami, he was subpoenaed to testify before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation of gambling and organized crime. I think he invoked the Fifth Amendment thirty-seven times and never answered a relevant question. His name also surfaced in point-shaving scandals amid allegations that he bribed college basketball players. But again, none of this was proven.

  He came to Las Vegas in the late 1960s, apparently to avoid the intense law enforcement scrutiny he was getting in Florida. His association with Spilotro and his reputation in the gambling underworld were what attracted the feds and the gambling regulators to him. They wanted him out of the casino industry.