Defending the Mafia

ON APRIL 3, 1991, Ger­ald Shargel, a crim­i­nal lawyer con­sid­ered quite pos­si­bly the finest of his gen­er­a­tion, a man of ele­gance in the court­room, who has said he mod­els his ora­to­ry on Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., awoke to bad pub­lic­i­ty. The front page of the News report­ed that he had run into trou­ble with the mafioso John Got­ti. In brief, Got­ti had threat­ened to kill him. The head­line blared, “SHADDUP.” An F.B.I. micro­phone hid­den at the Raven­ite Social Club, in Lit­tle Italy, a year and a half ear­li­er had dis­cov­ered Got­ti rag­ing against Shargel for talk­ing too much to a News reporter. A tape of Gotti’s tirade was kept under seal, and the News had just caught wind of its con­tents. Shargel rep­re­sent­ed sev­er­al mem­bers of the Gam­bi­no crime fam­i­ly, and Got­ti, the boss of the fam­i­ly, had noticed that Shargel’s clients appeared to be get­ting favor­able treat­ment in the News, while “every­body else is bad.” One day, Got­ti said, “I’m gonna show him a bet­ter way than the ele­va­tor out of his office!”
     Once again, col­leagues of Jer­ry Shargel shook their heads and won­dered why so out­stand­ing an attor­ney, who, as one of them put it, could have been a ven­er­a­ble cor­po­rate lawyer—“the Arthur Liman of his generation”—had instead cho­sen so dif­fer­ent a career path. Time and again, his pen­chant for Mafia clien­tele had placed him in jeop­ardy, less so from the mob­sters them­selves (Got­ti has an oper­at­ic way of express­ing anger, and it was unlike­ly that he tru­ly con­sid­ered toss­ing Shargel out of his thir­ty-sec­ond-floor win­dow) than from the gov­ern­ment. For the real dan­ger lurk­ing in Gotti’s tantrum was that it played per­fect­ly into a pros­e­cu­tion the­o­ry about Shargel—that he was not per­mit­ted to put the inter­ests of his indi­vid­ual clients ahead of those of the crime fam­i­ly as a whole.
     Shargel’s fel­low-lawyers were equal­ly aston­ished to learn that he had vis­it­ed the Raven­ite club sev­er­al times, where he had been picked up on F.B.I. bugs talk­ing legal strat­e­gy with Got­ti. It seemed a ter­ri­ble error in judg­ment for a lawyer to appear at a Mafia head­quar­ters; it fos­tered an image of sub­servience. The day after Got­ti lashed out against Shargel, for instance, Shargel went down to the club and made amends. The con­ver­sa­tion was not record­ed, but Got­ti was over­heard talk­ing about it the fol­low­ing day: “Jer­ry said, ‘Lis­ten, John. You know I got one love—you.’”
     In truth, Shargel, who is now forty-nine, does not con­vey even the out­ward appear­ance of a Mafia lawyer. He is over six feet tall, bald on top, with black hair around his ears and a trim black beard. In court, where he wears chalk-striped Polo suits with pock­et squares, he is soft-spo­ken and def­er­en­tial. Out of court, he is youth­ful and full of fun. The son of the pro­pri­etor of a paint-and-wall­pa­per store in small-town New Jer­sey, Shargel has been mar­ried to his col­lege sweet­heart for twen­ty-six years. They sent their daugh­ter and son to the Dal­ton School, live off Park Avenue, and rent a sum­mer home in East Hamp­ton. Shargel used to teach law at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, and on high holy days he is an ush­er at the Park Avenue Syn­a­gogue.
     Bruce Cut­ler, who is Gotti’s per­son­al attor­ney (he was also tape-record­ed at the Raven­ite club), has always made more sense as a Mafia lawyer; he has nowhere near the range of Shargel. This became appar­ent even to Got­ti when in ear­ly 1990 he stood tri­al in New York state court with one of his Gam­bi­no sol­diers, Antho­ny (Tony Lee) Guer­ri­eri, on a charge of order­ing the shoot­ing assault of a union offi­cial. Cutler’s bul­ly­ing of witnesses—an approach that was dubbed “Brucification”—was not work­ing and was exas­per­at­ing the judge. (“The record shall reflect that Mr. Cut­ler threw Exhib­it W,” he not­ed.) By the sec­ond week of tri­al, Got­ti had demot­ed Cut­ler, leav­ing Shargel, who offi­cial­ly rep­re­sent­ed Guer­ri­eri, in charge of the case. The pros­e­cu­tor, Michael Cherkasky, says that he was unpre­pared for Shargel’s “bril­liance,” which he believes had a lot to do with Gotti’s sur­prise acquit­tal.
     The acquit­tal made Gotti’s ear­li­er tirade about Shargel savor of ingrat­i­tude, but there was much worse to come when the con­tents of sev­er­al oth­er Raven­ite tapes were made pub­lic. It seemed that when­ev­er Got­ti was not dis­cussing mur­der or labor rack­e­teer­ing he was com­plain­ing about his attor­neys. Shargel and Cut­ler were “Muck and Fuck,” his “high-priced errand boys,” whom he paid “under the table,” and paid too much (three hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars to Shargel in one year to defend oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers, he said). “Was it you that put me on this earth to rob and make you rich and me poor?” he com­plained. “Gam­bi­no crime fam­i­ly? This is the Shargel, Cut­ler & What­taya-call-it crime fam­i­ly!”
     To a cer­tain fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor, these pro­nounce­ments were no joke. John Glee­son is chief of the crim­i­nal divi­sion of the Brook­lyn Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office, and, apart from an incon­clu­sive inves­ti­ga­tion of David Dink­ins for alleged stock fraud, most of his work has been in the field of orga­nized crime. John Got­ti, who lost his most recent case to Glee­son in 1992, called him a “bum” and a “rat moth­er­fuck­er” and a “fuck­ing Irish fag­got” and—equally inapt­ly, because Glee­son is a dull dresser—“Lord Fauntleroy.” Now forty, Glee­son is con­sid­ered an excel­lent lawyer but some­thing of a zealot. He is tall and trim, and looks like an angry Clark Kent. Glee­son took Got­ti at his word—that he did pay the legal bills for the mem­bers of his crime syn­di­cate, because the lawyers were actu­al­ly work­ing for the syn­di­cate. “The real­i­ty,” Glee­son has writ­ten, “is that attor­neys are as inte­gral a part of the Gam­bi­no Fam­i­ly as any of its oth­er mem­bers.”
     The term that Glee­son uses to describe Shargel and Cut­ler, and oth­er men he per­ceives as enter­prise lawyers, is “house coun­sel.” (Not consigliere—Italian for “counsellor”—a posi­tion in the admin­is­tra­tion of a Mafia fam­i­ly for which a law degree is scarce­ly a require­ment. The mis­per­cep­tion about the mean­ing of “con­sigliere” prob­a­bly stems from the char­ac­ter of Tom Hagen, the fam­i­ly lawyer in “The God­fa­ther.”) “House coun­sel” is a label that Shargel deeply resents, but it did not orig­i­nate with John Glee­son. In 1984, Shargel was accused of hav­ing accept­ed a paper bag con­tain­ing a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand dol­lars in cash from the Gam­bi­no cap­tain Roy DeMeo to defend two of DeMeo’s asso­ciates. Shargel was sum­moned before a grand jury, where he tes­ti­fied that the bag had con­tained only two thou­sand dol­lars, and that the mon­ey was to defend DeMeo. Shargel was unable to sub­stan­ti­ate this claim, because he kept very few finan­cial records—deliberately, he said, in order to pro­tect his clients. No charges were brought against Shargel, but Judge Abra­ham Sofaer, in a vit­ri­olic opin­ion, dis­qual­i­fied him from rep­re­sent­ing one of DeMeo’s crew­men and ques­tioned the pro­pri­ety of his record­keep­ing prac­tices.
     Short­ly after Got­ti was indict­ed in Decem­ber, 1990, John Glee­son wove sev­er­al Raven­ite con­ver­sa­tions in which Shargel and Cut­ler and a third attor­ney were men­tioned, or were actu­al­ly present, into an eighty-nine-page brief request­ing that they be barred from rep­re­sent­ing Got­ti and his co-defen­dants at tri­al. They should not be allowed to sit in the court­room as defense attor­neys, he argued, because the gov­ern­ment was plan­ning to por­tray them to the jury as par­tic­i­pants in the enter­prise. Judge I. Leo Glass­er grant­ed Gleeson’s motion. It was the sec­ond time a fed­er­al judge had dis­qual­i­fied Shargel from a tri­al on the house-coun­sel the­o­ry, and, to make it worse, Glass­er was Shargel’s for­mer law pro­fes­sor.
     Ever since the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion of Shargel and Cut­ler from the Got­ti case, Glee­son has threat­ened to bring crim­i­nal charges against the two lawyers, for obstruc­tion of jus­tice or tax fraud. He seems to believe, for instance, that Got­ti meant it lit­er­al­ly when he said he paid his lawyers under the table. In addi­tion to the Raven­ite tapes, Glee­son has anoth­er resource—the coop­er­a­tion of Gotti’s for­mer under­boss and one of Shargel’s for­mer clients, Sal­va­tore (Sam­my Bull) Gra­vano. Last year, Gleeson’s grand jury issued sub­poe­nas to Shargel and Cut­ler for finan­cial records. (Mean­while, last month, Cut­ler was con­vict­ed of crim­i­nal con­tempt for mak­ing cer­tain state­ments to the press in vio­la­tion of a judi­cial order; he has not yet been sen­tenced, but he could face up to six months in jail.)
     Bring­ing an indict­ment against a lawyer as promi­nent as Shargel would be a dras­tic step, but then there are few pros­e­cu­tors as sin­gle-mind­ed as Glee­son. Shargel denies any wrong­do­ing, and says he is pre­pared to defend him­self vig­or­ous­ly. Even if no con­vic­tion result­ed, an indict­ment would prob­a­bly destroy his prac­tice. As it stands, his name has been tar­nished by two fed­er­al judges. How had so tal­ent­ed and intel­li­gent a lawyer allowed him­self to get so close to a Mafia family—so close that John Got­ti saw him as an errand boy and John Glee­son as a con­spir­a­tor? Didn’t he know there would be consequences?

SHARGEL is a man of immense charm. He has a soft chuck­le and the sooth­ing voice of a bartender—a job he once had in col­lege. In inter­view ses­sions, Shargel stretch­es out his long legs, which are occa­sion­al­ly clad in cow­boy boots, puffs on a cig­ar (defense attor­neys are great con­sumers of cig­ars), and seems the pic­ture of con­tent­ment. He smiles a lot. Despite the beard and the bald top, he has a boy’s demeanor. His con­ver­sa­tion is sprin­kled with “cool” and “neat” and “sucks.” Jef­frey Licht­man, a twen­ty-eight-year-old asso­ciate, recalls Shargel once run­ning up to show off a pair of hard-to-get Knicks tick­ets, declar­ing, “Aren’t these neat?” Licht­man says, “Under the sur­face, Jer­ry is a twelve-year-old. He’s such a sweet, fun­ny, self-dep­re­cat­ing guy. You can tease him. It’s amaz­ing his ego is not big­ger.”
     Shargel is proud of his equa­nim­i­ty. Many attor­neys, he sug­gests, would have “crum­bled” under the pres­sure of Gleeson’s inves­ti­ga­tion. He has sel­dom been busier in more than two decades of prac­tice, despite the fact that many of his recent clients have had to sign waivers acknowl­edg­ing their aware­ness of the inves­ti­ga­tion. He pos­sess­es a trait that is enor­mous­ly use­ful in a crim­i­nal lawyer: the abil­i­ty to ban­ish unpleas­ant thoughts. And some­thing else: a refusal to be intim­i­dat­ed.
     Relaxed and hap­py as he seems, Shargel is a per­fec­tion­ist, who works sev­en days a week and suf­fers from insom­nia, espe­cial­ly when he is try­ing a case. Some­times he gets up in the mid­dle of the night and, not wish­ing to dis­turb his wife, Ter­ry, scrib­bles furi­ous­ly in the dark. The only time he appears to be in tor­ment is when he believes he has made a mis­take. A few months ago, in his sum­ma­tion in a rather rou­tine assault case (the son of a for­mer client had gashed a man’s fore­head with a beer mug at a pool bar), he for­got to men­tion a seem­ing­ly minor detail about the victim’s bruise. He went out for a drink while await­ing the verdict—an acquit­tal, on self-defense grounds, it turned out after some four hours—and spent the whole time brood­ing and mak­ing him­self mis­er­able. It caused him to relive a low moment in the Got­ti assault tri­al of 1990, when he had two slight­ly dif­fer­ent tran­scripts of the same tape read into the record, to demon­strate that tran­scripts can be unre­li­able. It turned out to have been a bril­liant ploy, but at the time he believed he had made a trag­ic error, since both tran­scripts were damn­ing. “Give me your gun,” Shargel recalled telling Got­ti. “I’m gonna shoot myself.”
     Shargel is so dis­arm­ing that one must remem­ber to be wary of his shrewd­ness. The pool-bar-assault tri­al pro­vid­ed an illus­tra­tion. The pros­e­cu­tor, a twen­ty-sev­en-year-old woman in the Man­hat­tan D.A.’s office, was so out­matched by Shargel that Shargel feared the jury would sym­pa­thize with her, and he took every oppor­tu­ni­ty to belit­tle him­self. At one point, he asked the judge’s per­mis­sion to read from a doc­u­ment labelled Exhib­it F. The judge was puz­zled. Was Shargel sure it said Exhib­it F? “It might say some­thing dif­fer­ent if I put on my glass­es,” Shargel said. “Ah! Exhib­it B.” The jurors laughed, vis­i­bly charmed. But Shargel’s weak eye­sight was an act—and one he had used before.
     “You have to be care­ful with Jer­ry,” says Michael Cherkasky, the pros­e­cu­tor in the Got­ti assault tri­al, who is friend­ly with Shargel. (The two were spot­ted some months ago hav­ing lunch at Forlini’s, an Ital­ian restau­rant near the Man­hat­tan D.A.’s office.) “I like him enor­mous­ly, he’s very endear­ing. But he’s so smart and manip­u­la­tive that you always won­der if he’s cal­cu­lat­ing the next move. Is his sen­si­tiv­i­ty real or is he try­ing to get an edge?”
     At times, one sus­pects that Shargel is elu­sive even to him­self. To defend a pub­lic ene­my and delight in get­ting him acquit­ted, a crim­i­nal lawyer must bond in some way with the crim­i­nal. Defense attor­neys can sel­dom account for this quirk of per­son­al­i­ty, and Shargel is no excep­tion; when he is pressed, he speaks lame­ly of “anti-estab­lish­ment” lean­ings. Shargel is the kind of guy who con­sid­ers it hip to quote Bob Dylan, Bruce Spring­steen, or the Rolling Stones at every oppor­tu­ni­ty. (After win­ning a bribery case on Long Island, he turned to a reporter, tossed off some Dylan lines—“I’m going back to New York City / I do believe I’ve had enough”—and then sped away in his Jaguar sedan.) “You can’t do what I do and be an estab­lish­ment per­son,” he said one after­noon in his office. “You have to be the kind of per­son who wants to defy con­ven­tion.” As he spoke, he was dressed in his trade­mark navy chalk-striped suit, with a white pock­et square, and he ges­tured with his cig­ar.
     Shargel would be eas­i­er to fig­ure if he were more out­ward­ly uncon­ven­tion­al, a William Kun­stler or a Bruce Cut­ler. He does have an irrev­er­ent sense of humor, and it shows in the trap­pings of his office. There are a pair of shoes in cement, and there is a piece of folk-art sculp­ture of an angel in a tug-of-war with the Dev­il, whose tail is wrapped around a tree stump. The walls are cov­ered with Sec­ond World War posters cau­tion­ing secre­cy. One shows a Ger­man offi­cer read­ing a book embell­ished with a Union Jack, and it says “don’t keep a diary—it might get into the enemy’s hands.” Shargel added that one to his col­lec­tion after destroy­ing his diaries, to avoid the threat of hav­ing them sub­poe­naed by the gov­ern­ment.
     Last month, Shargel relo­cat­ed his office to a suite occu­pied by Duk­er & Bar­rett, a civ­il-lit­i­ga­tion firm. Some see the move as an effort to gain respectabil­i­ty, but Shargel says it was done to reduce his over­head, and that he has no inten­tion of cut­ting down on his Mafia work. Shargel does not try civ­il cas­es. White-col­lar crime, how­ev­er, has always con­sti­tut­ed a large part of his prac­tice; over the years, he has defend­ed peo­ple such as the Bronx Demo­c­ra­t­ic boss Stan­ley Fried­man and the real-estate tycoon Nor­man Dansker.
     In the past two years, Shargel has been in court defend­ing mafiosi, and numer­ous non-Mafia clients, on charges as diverse as hero­in smug­gling, assault with a dead­ly weapon, mur­der, vehic­u­lar homi­cide, mon­ey laun­der­ing, real-estate fraud, insur­ance fraud, and tax fraud. The rea­son he is so much in demand, despite all the con­tro­ver­sy, is that in the upper ech­e­lons of the crim­i­nal bar there are tri­al lawyers and there are “law per­sons,” but Shargel is among a very few lawyers who excel as both. The tri­al lawyers are the born actors, expert at demol­ish­ing wit­ness­es and cap­ti­vat­ing juries but, as a class, often bare­ly capa­ble of writ­ing briefs and argu­ing motions. The law per­sons, their brainier but less the­atri­cal coun­ter­parts, han­dle those chores and, increas­ing­ly often, sit at the defense table through­out the tri­al as intel­lec­tu­al sup­port. Shargel began as an appel­late expert, and his knowl­edge of case law is ency­clo­pe­dic. The most schol­ar­ly judges treat him as an equal. For five years, he taught crim­i­nal appel­late prac­tice at New York Uni­ver­si­ty Law School. He stud­ies every slip opin­ion issued in a crim­i­nal case by the Sec­ond Cir­cuit Court of Appeals.
     He is also one of the best pure tri­al lawyers in town, known for the excep­tion­al skill of his cross-exam­i­na­tions and for his phys­i­cal­i­ty. Though he is far less flam­boy­ant in pri­vate than many of his col­leagues, some­thing hap­pens to him when he is in a court­room. Tall and grace­ful, he acts with his entire body, and makes a point of always mov­ing around the floor. It sends a mes­sage that “the court­room is yours,” he says, and forces the jury to watch him. “It’s like act­ing, and the more crowd­ed the court­room is, the more I let loose. I love to use my body. I for­get every­thing except the role I’m in. In a sum­ma­tion, I’ll talk about what a wit­ness said, and I’ll jump up and I’ll sit in the wit­ness box: ‘You remem­ber, he sat right here!’” When Shargel address­es a jury, his voice quakes with pas­sion, and there is an iter­a­tive rhythm to his words which he has picked up from lis­ten­ing to tapes of Mar­tin Luther King’s ser­mons. After Shargel won an acquit­tal for Bill Banks, a for­mer cam­paign aide to David Dink­ins, on charges of grand lar­ce­ny, a black juror said of him, “He must have gone to a Bap­tist church, because he sure can preach.”
     Shargel exudes so much hap­pi­ness in pri­vate that it always comes as a sur­prise to observe his angry, aggres­sive alter ego in the court­room. Like most good tri­al lawyers, he can man­u­fac­ture hatred for gov­ern­ment wit­ness­es. The moment the pros­e­cu­tor fin­ish­es his direct exam­i­na­tion, Shargel leaps up from the defense table and projects his first ques­tion before reach­ing the lectern (to con­vey to the wit­ness, he says, “Fuck you, you can’t hurt me”). There is, he points out, an “ele­gant wrap­ping” to his attack, but cross-exam­i­na­tion is invari­ably a cru­el sci­ence. “You’ve got to smell the weak­ness,” Shargel says. “Where is this per­son vul­ner­a­ble?” He is mas­ter­ly at what tri­al lawyers call “control”—damaging a witness’s cred­i­bil­i­ty while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­fin­ing him to short answers, so that he can­not make harm­ful speech­es about the defen­dant. Shargel rarely rais­es his voice; his weapons are wit and sar­casm. (“You sold drugs, right?… You did drugs, right?… You worked in gam­bling par­lors, right?… Would you lie to get out of jail?… Nev­er?… Because you wouldn’t stoop to some­thing like that, would you?”)
     One of Shargel’s proud­est achieve­ments was a mer­ci­less two-day cross-exam­i­na­tion, in Feb­ru­ary, 1992, of Ronald Rivera, the key wit­ness in Peo­ple v. Gam­bi­no. On behalf of the Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attorney’s Office, Rivera, a state troop­er work­ing under­cov­er, ran Chrystie Fash­ions, a gar­ment fac­to­ry in a loft on the edge of Chi­na­town. While his “employ­ees” sewed children’s jeans, elas­tic pants, pleat­ed skirts, and oth­er gar­ments for var­i­ous cloth­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers, Rivera gath­ered evi­dence that the sons of the late Car­lo Gam­bi­no, Thomas and Joseph, had tak­en extor­tion­ate con­trol of truck­ing in the New York gar­ment indus­try. Shargel, who rep­re­sent­ed Joe Gam­bi­no, com­mit­ted Rivera’s dai­ly reports to mem­o­ry, and he made a fool of Rivera by con­tin­u­al­ly cor­rect­ing his tes­ti­mo­ny: “Look at your report of Sep­tem­ber 7, 1988.… Does that refresh your rec­ol­lec­tion?… Look at Sep­tem­ber 30th.… One p.m., if you can’t find it, Troop­er Rivera.” By the end of his cross, Shargel had thor­ough­ly humil­i­at­ed the state’s star wit­ness. (“How can I be accu­rate?” Rivera final­ly plead­ed. “There’s too many details.”) Less than two weeks lat­er, the Dis­trict Attorney’s Office agreed to an unusu­al dis­po­si­tion: Tom­my and Joe would plead guilty to antitrust charges, pay sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars in fines, and agree to sell part of the Gam­bi­no truck­ing fleet and, in return, they would face no jail or pro­ba­tion. Shargel is still glee­ful about his maul­ing of the troop­er, but today he does not even remem­ber the trooper’s name. “I don’t have any feel­ing one way or anoth­er toward that cop,” he says. “He had a job to do, and I had a job to do, and I just did it bet­ter.” He laughs.
     The Gam­bi­no deal is one of the coups for which Shargel is best known, along with the Got­ti acquit­tal, but he has won oth­er sur­pris­ing vic­to­ries. In his 1992 defense of the real-estate devel­op­er William Romano, he played on the dis­trust that jurors often feel toward law offi­cers. Romano had been arrest­ed at Kennedy Air­port by a cus­toms inspec­tor, after the inspec­tor and anoth­er cus­toms offi­cer claimed they had dis­cov­ered more than three pounds of hero­in strapped to his body. The first wit­ness was the arrest­ing offi­cer. (“He was sweat­ing a lot.… I removed the bulge from his back. It was a pack­age in brown tape.”) The oth­er offi­cer cor­rob­o­rat­ed his tes­ti­mo­ny. The hero­in was shown to the jury. Shargel argued that his client had been framed. He pound­ed on the fact that no pho­to­graph was tak­en of Romano wear­ing the hero­in. He por­trayed the arrest­ing offi­cer as greedy for a pro­mo­tion. He called nine char­ac­ter wit­ness­es for Romano, includ­ing a pas­tor. “Only if you accept with blind faith… that cops will nev­er lie” could there be a con­vic­tion, he told the jury. Romano walked.
     Shargel does not like to set­tle cas­es, although his rep­u­ta­tion as a tri­al lawyer often enables him to strike good deals, even in the face of over­whelm­ing evi­dence. One of his clients, the real-estate exec­u­tive Robert Gold­berg, tried to have his wife mur­dered so that he could run off with a Kore­an pros­ti­tute. On Octo­ber 1, 1992, at the main branch of the New York Pub­lic Library, Gold­berg met with Thomas Bel­traz, a pri­vate detec­tive who said that he would arrange the hit in exchange for eleven thou­sand dol­lars; Bel­traz in fact was work­ing under­cov­er for the police. Dur­ing the meet­ing, Gold­berg gave Bel­traz a down pay­ment of twen­ty-five hun­dred dol­lars, and sug­gest­ed that the hit man stalk his wife and her best friend at the shop­ping mall, and kill them both, to make it look like a rob­bery. He asked that the assas­sin wait a week, until after the Jew­ish holidays—because “there’s gonna be a lot of friends and fam­i­ly around”—and said of his wife, “Look, the last thing I want is for her to be in pain.… I might hate her guts, but it’s a human being.” The entire meet­ing was cap­tured on video­tape and audio­tape. Shargel was eager to try the case; he for­mu­lat­ed what he called his “nerd defense”—that Gold­berg was too pathet­ic to be a cal­cu­lat­ing killer. Last sum­mer, how­ev­er, Gold­berg decid­ed to plead guilty, and Shargel nego­ti­at­ed a sen­tence that could have him out of prison in three years.
     Shargel often takes unwinnable cas­es, and, not sur­pris­ing­ly, does not win them; even the best defense attor­neys lose a lot of the time. His defense, in 1987 and 1988, of Jim­my Coo­nan, the leader of the West­ies, the Irish mob that oper­at­ed in Hell’s Kitchen, end­ed in con­vic­tion and a sev­en­ty-five-year sen­tence for Coo­nan, although Shargel still counts it as one of his best efforts. Coonan’s mot­to was “No cor­pus delic­ti, no inves­ti­ga­tion,” and it was his prac­tice to dis­mem­ber the bod­ies of his mur­der vic­tims and dis­pose of the parts in plas­tic garbage bags. By the time his case came to tri­al, a num­ber of West­ies had turned infor­mant. One, Bil­ly Beat­tie, described how Coo­nan took a ser­rat­ed kitchen knife to the corpse of a loan shark and “whacked his head off.” Anoth­er, Tony Luci­ch, tes­ti­fied that Coo­nan gave him a plas­tic bag con­tain­ing the sev­ered hands of a rubout vic­tim, to store in the freez­er, so that the fin­ger­prints could be plant­ed on a mur­der weapon. The star wit­ness was Coonan’s for­mer No. 2 man, Mick­ey Feath­er­stone, a para­noid schiz­o­phrenic who once tried to stran­gle his wife while hal­lu­ci­nat­ing that she was a Viet­cong agent. Feath­er­stone said he had com­mit­ted mur­ders on Coonan’s behalf.
     “One of the best sum­ma­tions I ever gave was for Jim­my Coo­nan,” Shargel says. “It had a great end­ing. I thought of it in the show­er as I was get­ting ready to go to court. The idea came to me from lis­ten­ing to Mar­tin Luther King’s kitchen-epiphany ser­mon. You know, King is despon­dent, and he’s sit­ting in his kitchen late at night, and he hears the voice of Jesus: ‘He promised nev­er to leave me, nev­er to leave me alone, no, nev­er alone.’ In the West­ies tri­al, there was such a focus on Mick­ey Feath­er­stone, and his crazi­ness, and how he kept hear­ing voic­es. So I said, right at the very end of the sum­ma­tion, ‘Let me share some­thing with you. Mick­ey Feath­er­stone hears voic­es call­ing him back to Viet­nam. Jim­my Coo­nan hears voic­es, too.’ Every­body went silent. What?”

     Jim­my Coo­nan hears voic­es, too.
     He hears the voice of a Bill Beat­tie, say­ing, “I don’t want to go to jail for life.” Those are the voic­es that he hears.…
     And he hears the voice of a Tony Luci­ch, who says, “You left me here on Tenth Avenue. I got prob­lems with a drug case that has noth­ing to do with you.… You left me behind. You promised nev­er to leave me.…”
     He hears those voic­es.…
     And he hears the voice of a Mick­ey Feath­er­stone, say­ing, “I loved you once but now I hate you.…” He says, “Jim­my, I’m drown­ing. I’m drown­ing. My life is going before me.… I need you because you are my tick­et out of here. I loved you once and now I hate you. And you promised nev­er to leave me!”
     These wit­ness­es are reach­ing out from their prison cells, their cesspools of per­jury… and they are try­ing to drag Jim­my Coo­nan down. They won’t let him live.
     And I am ask­ing you to let him live.

     “I had jurors cry­ing,” Shargel recalls. “I had tears in my own eyes. I loved it. Didn’t work, though.”

ATTORNEYS are not an admired species: in opin­ion polls, they rank some­where below jour­nal­ists. Even peo­ple who believe firm­ly in the right to coun­sel often begrudge lawyers like Shargel what they do for a liv­ing. It seems far too cyn­i­cal. A crim­i­nal tri­al is a search for truth, yet the defense attor­ney does his best to con­found that search even when he knows that his client is guilty. He takes the prosecutor’s nice, order­ly sto­ry about the defen­dant and attempts to obfus­cate it with doubt and reduce it to chaos. He tries to make a wit­ness who is telling the truth appear to be a liar. If he does his work well enough, the guilty par­ty goes free.
     Crit­ics tend to for­get that in our adver­sar­i­al sys­tem it is defense counsel’s pre­scribed role to be disin­gen­u­ous if it will help win an acquit­tal for his client. Supreme Court Jus­tice Byron White wrote, in Unit­ed States v. Wade, “Our inter­est in not con­vict­ing the inno­cent per­mits counsel…to put the State’s case in the worst pos­si­ble light.… In this respect…we coun­te­nance or require con­duct which in many instances has lit­tle, if any, rela­tion to the search for truth.” If the aver­age per­son finds this pre­cept hard to swal­low, he can take solace in the fact that many pros­e­cu­tors, and even many judges, can­not accept it, either.
     Of the vari­eties of defense attor­ney, the Mafia lawyer pre­sum­ably ranks among the very low­est in pub­lic esteem. By Shargel’s esti­mate, there are, at most, fif­teen lawyers in New York state who con­sis­tent­ly defend major orga­nized-crime fig­ures. In attempt­ing to account for his mem­ber­ship in this small corps, Shargel speaks exult­ing­ly of “the action.” He is at a loss to under­stand why Jay Gold­berg, anoth­er top tri­al lawyer, rarely takes on a mob case and has spent far more time han­dling civ­il lit­i­ga­tion, for the likes of Don­ald Trump. “Jay made more mon­ey than any of us,” Shargel says. “But he missed the action.”
     Not that Shargel doesn’t make good mon­ey. He has a rep­u­ta­tion for charg­ing high fees. When he is paid on an hourly basis—a prac­tice he discourages—he bills at what he calls a “nor­mal” rate of around four hun­dred dol­lars an hour. For the most part, he com­mands flat fees of five or six fig­ures, depend­ing on the case. He will not give details. By the typ­i­cal workingman’s stan­dards, Shargel is sure­ly a rich man, but he is only occa­sion­al­ly osten­ta­tious about his wealth. (A friend recalls, “I once went over to Jerry’s apart­ment for piz­za, and he couldn’t pay the piz­za man, because all he had was hun­dred-dol­lar bills.”
     But Shargel appears to be telling the truth when he says that the action, rather than the mon­ey, is what moti­vates him. One of his for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences occurred when he was six­teen. By lying about his age, he land­ed a job as a soda jerk and bus­boy at the Lido Hotel, in Lido Beach, Long Island. Up to then, his social life had revolved around a Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter in New Jer­sey, but at the Lido he was exposed to gam­blers, politi­cians, gar­ment-cen­ter tycoons, and what his child­hood friend Bernie Dia­mond, who worked with him at the Lido, calls “Damon Run­y­on char­ac­ters.” Dia­mond says, “Jer­ry seemed to have an addic­tive fas­ci­na­tion for the seamy.”
     This fas­ci­na­tion remains the best expla­na­tion of why Shargel has found him­self at the Raven­ite, and also at numer­ous pri­vate gath­er­ings with mobsters—at the wed­ding of Nino Gaggi’s daugh­ter, at Tony Lee Guerrieri’s wake, sip­ping cap­puc­ci­no in Lit­tle Italy with Joseph (Joe Butch) Cor­rao. When the sub­ject of Shargel’s prox­im­i­ty to his clients was broached, he at first took a bel­liger­ent, I’m‑not-in-business-to-satisfy-the-government atti­tude. “I could nev­er be John Gleeson’s ide­al of a crim­i­nal-defense lawyer,” he said. “The government’s atti­tude is absurd—they’re say­ing I should dis­tance myself from my clients. I’m not inter­est­ed in dis­tanc­ing myself. My wife always says I fall in love with my clients. It imbues me with some serum to go into court and fight for a guy and have pas­sion in my voice. You don’t get that by say­ing, ‘I’ll meet you, but only between nine and five in my office. I’ll speak to you, but I won’t come to your wed­ding. I’ll defend you, but if a mem­ber of your fam­i­ly dies I won’t come to the wake.’ What kind of retain­er is that?”
     How­ev­er, Shargel also admit­ted to a vis­cer­al thrill in being close to the pow­er­ful and dan­ger­ous. “Sure, there’s a thrill involved,” he said. “Don’t you think Bernie Nuss­baum is thrilled to be in the car with Bill Clin­ton? If you are a person’s lawyer, you pro­vide coun­sel at the high­est lev­el, whether the client is John Got­ti or Mick Jag­ger. The guy who feels most impor­tant at a rock con­cert is the lawyer in the third row with the back­stage pass clipped to his belt. Peo­ple were crit­i­cal of me for going to the Raven­ite Social Club. ‘You’re a lawyer. Why’d you go down there?’ I went to the Raven­ite Social Club because I loved to go to the Raven­ite Social Club. I loved the idea. I love the fact that when you rep­re­sent some­one you are auto­mat­i­cal­ly ele­vat­ed to that person’s lev­el. So if John Got­ti sits in the back at the round table at the Raven­ite you can just walk in and walk past every­body and sit down at his table. You’re ele­vat­ed. If I was on Mul­ber­ry Street hav­ing din­ner, I would want to go there; I’d look for­ward to going there; I was anx­ious to go there.” He added, “Some­times I would step back and imag­ine I was in a movie. Going to the Ravenite’s cool because it’s like a movie.”
     Ter­ry Shargel does not share her husband’s fas­ci­na­tion. “I real­ly had no inter­est in going to the Raven­ite,” she said one evening over din­ner at the Shargels’ apart­ment. She used to social­ize with Jerry’s Mob clients, and once attend­ed a Mafia wed­ding (“I couldn’t believe their names—Joe Butch and Dan­ny Boy and Lucy Girl!”), but she stopped some­time in the mid-eight­ies. Ter­ry is five feet four, auburn-haired, attrac­tive, and tense. She deals in antique adver­tis­ing posters, and the walls are cov­ered with them. The apart­ment takes up an entire floor, but it is a mod­er­ate size for a cou­ple with two chil­dren. Johan­na was born in 1971, and David is five years younger. Shargel took his daughter’s name from Dylan’s “Visions of Johan­na.” She recent­ly grad­u­at­ed sum­ma cum laude from Yale, and was accept­ed to Yale Law School, though her ambi­tion is to be a jour­nal­ist. David is study­ing for a pilot’s license and, at six­teen, was already fly­ing a Cess­na, to his father’s delight. The Shargels’ cook, Bea, who served din­ner, is one of their few extrav­a­gances. Besides rent­ing the East Hamp­ton sum­mer home, they have two Mer­cedes-Ben­zes and a small boat called Defense Rests. “Jer­ry has always earned lots of mon­ey by my stan­dard,” Ter­ry says. “We real­ized our dreams very young. Maybe our dreams weren’t big enough.”
     The Shargels have a strong mar­riage. “They real­ly love each oth­er,” Johan­na says. “They still dream togeth­er, and move for­ward togeth­er. He makes her laugh. She sup­ports him a hun­dred per cent.” They are remark­ably oppo­site in tem­pera­ment, how­ev­er. Ter­ry says, “Jer­ry is friend­ly and sun­ny and out­go­ing; I make peo­ple uptight.” Shargel, unlike his wife, is inca­pable of hold­ing a grudge. His younger sis­ter, Judy Shargel Green­berg, who oper­ates a health-care agency, points out a qual­i­ty in Jer­ry that is imme­di­ate­ly dis­cernible: he wants peo­ple to like him, and he will go to extra­or­di­nary lengths to repair a rift. One can­not help think­ing that it must have been excru­ci­at­ing for Shargel to learn that Got­ti was enraged at him. Yet when the sub­ject of the “SHADDUP” inci­dent came up at din­ner Shargel was dis­mis­sive. “Was I ner­vous or upset when Got­ti talked about throw­ing me out the, uh, not at all,” he said. “I think I saw it for what it was—a momen­tary expres­sion of anger. It wasn’t some­thing any­one would take seri­ous­ly, except gov­ern­ment agents with­out a sense of humor.” And of Gotti’s com­plaint that Shargel was over­paid he said, “It would only have both­ered me if it pushed a but­ton: the guy’s right, I can’t per­form in a court­room, and I charge too much mon­ey. But I heard that tape after I played a major role in win­ning a case for Got­ti, so I cer­tain­ly didn’t feel it was right. In large mea­sure, I found it amus­ing.”
     Ter­ry said noth­ing then, but in a sub­se­quent con­ver­sa­tion, out of earshot of her hus­band, she made her feel­ings known. “I wasn’t fearful—that was just non­sense,” she said. “But I had to ask, ‘Why are we in this pic­ture? Why are you defend­ing this man who has noth­ing nice to say to you? Isn’t there any­thing bet­ter than “shaddup”?’ It’s so typ­i­cal of John Got­ti. Most of Jerry’s clients adore him—they come up to me and hug and kiss me, because they’ve nev­er had a lawyer who cared about them so much. I’ve met John Got­ti, we’ve had cof­fee togeth­er, and he’s very charm­ing and wit­ty and fast on his feet. But I’m not quite as fas­ci­nat­ed as Jer­ry.”
     “SHADDUP” was not the only head­line that the Shargels had to con­tend with. In the sum­mer of 1991, seg­ments of the Raven­ite tapes were dis­closed in court doc­u­ments, and the tabloids had a field day. The News weighed in with “MY LAWYERS ARE ‘RATS’” (one of Gotti’s numer­ous put-downs) and, trum­pet­ing Gleeson’s inves­ti­ga­tion of Cut­ler and Shargel, “THE BOYS & THE HOOD.” Terry’s biggest con­cern was the effect of the pub­lic­i­ty on David. “My son was a vul­ner­a­ble age, thir­teen or four­teen,” she said. “He’s a closed per­son and he doesn’t dis­cuss his emo­tions, so I real­ly don’t know even now how much he’s affect­ed, or if the kids in school are gos­sip­ing about his father.” Shargel had tak­en his son to hear his open­ing state­ment in the Got­ti assault tri­al, and then had tried vain­ly to coax a reac­tion from him (“So, what did you think of your father? Was he great? Or was he a pota­to?”). But late­ly, Shargel says, David is begin­ning to ques­tion him. “He’ll see a news sto­ry on TV, and ask me, ‘Would you defend that per­son?’ Not just once but over and over.”
     Johan­na has found it dif­fi­cult to be the daugh­ter of a Mafia lawyer. Her prob­lem, she says, is not so much with the clientele—to whom she has been exposed since the age of one, when her par­ents took her to an Ital­ian restau­rant in Brook­lyn to have lunch with act­ing Colom­bo boss Joseph Brancato—as with “the neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty, and peo­ple regard­ing my father as doing some­thing wrong, and look­ing down on him. I felt my own rep­u­ta­tion was some­how dam­aged.” At Yale, she says, the fact that her father had defend­ed Got­ti was “the first thing a lot of peo­ple knew about me, includ­ing my boyfriend.” When the inves­ti­ga­tion of her father hit the news­pa­pers dur­ing what she rue­ful­ly calls “the Got­ti sum­mer” of 1991, Shargel did not dis­cuss it with her in any detail. “He’d just give me a five-sen­tence sum­ma­ry,” she says. “He doesn’t like to talk about unpleas­ant stuff.”
     Shargel admits this. He says he is most com­fort­able social­iz­ing with oth­er defense coun­sel, so that he doesn’t have to con­tend with the usu­al cock­tail-par­ty ques­tion about how he is able to defend bad peo­ple and keep from mak­ing judg­ments about them. “I know the question’s com­ing, and I try to avoid it at almost any cost,” he says. But after din­ner, when the con­ver­sa­tion con­tin­ued in the liv­ing room, Shargel warmed up to the top­ic, as Ter­ry lis­tened in, with amuse­ment.
     “A lot of clients tell me they’re inno­cent, because they think I’ll work hard­er for them,” he said. “That’s not true. It’s irrel­e­vant. The ques­tion is: Can the State prove its case? The guy can be guilty as hell, but if I win an acquit­tal it means a for­tiori that there was some­thing infirm or wrong with the prosecution’s case, and they weren’t enti­tled to the con­vic­tion. I am intel­lec­tu­al­ly sat­is­fied and I am moral­ly sat­is­fied, because the sys­tem worked. I think I served soci­ety. On anoth­er lev­el, I’m in it to win it. I was in a con­test, and I won the con­test. So, of course, I’m elat­ed.”
     Did he ever feel com­pas­sion for the vic­tim?
     “No. I don’t think about it. I’m detached. I’ve seen death of every kind and descrip­tion, and it sim­ply does not affect me. I once han­dled a mur­der case in Nas­sau Coun­ty. They showed col­or pho­tographs of a young woman who had been stabbed mul­ti­ple times, and her body was found lying in a bath­tub. That’s as bad as it gets. I can look at those grue­some pic­tures with the cold eye of a sur­geon. I just get to work. I have to be divorced from the under­ly­ing acts, because a man who’s charged with not only killing some­one but dis­em­bow­elling the per­son or cut­ting the per­son up into lit­tle pieces—it’s a hor­ren­dous, hor­ren­dous act. Would prob­a­bly make some peo­ple of weak stom­ach vom­it. But if my mind is influ­enced by that act then I can’t be a for­mi­da­ble advo­cate for that per­son. I mean, I guess I’ve had din­ner with peo­ple who are per­fect­ly charm­ing, and I don’t think, Geez, this guy was out slaugh­ter­ing peo­ple.”
     Was this a con­scious deci­sion?
     “No, just the oppo­site. I think it’s prob­a­bly sub­con­scious. If it were con­scious, it would mean that I fil­ter out the thought and push it aside. I don’t do that. The thought nev­er gets to that process.”
     Ter­ry said, “It’s like we can’t sit around think­ing about peo­ple starv­ing in India, because if we did we’d all be dys­func­tion­al.”
     “Don’t you see?” Shargel said. “I would start think­ing, If I get Client X acquit­ted, he’s almost cer­tain to go out and com­mit a vio­lent act again, because of his his­to­ry. What would that mean? I can’t sleep at night, I can’t eat because, Jesus, I’m fight­ing for this guy, and he’s gonna get out. That would have to affect the way that I work, and my sum­ma­tion or cross-exam­i­na­tion might not be that vig­or­ous. Not only does that sell out my client but, on a broad­er scale, it sells out the sys­tem. And you know what real­ly sucks? Prob­a­bly many of the peo­ple who call them­selves crim­i­nal-defense lawyers judge their clients. I go in and fight as hard as I pos­si­bly can, and I don’t wor­ry about what’s going to hap­pen next. Because if I do, I’ll lose my effectiveness.”

SHARGEL gets his hap­py dis­po­si­tion from his father, Leo, whose paint-and-wall­pa­per store was in Somerville, New Jer­sey, ten miles from New Brunswick. That is where Shargel was born, on Octo­ber 5, 1944, and where he grew up, with his younger sis­ter, Judy. Although Leo did not go to college—Shargel was the first in his fam­i­ly to do so—he loved books, and Shargel’s friends con­sid­ered Leo an intel­lec­tu­al because he read the Times. Shargel’s moth­er, Lil­lian, was “the plan­ner and orga­niz­er in the fam­i­ly,” accord­ing to Judy. (Both par­ents are still liv­ing but declined to be inter­viewed for this account; Judy says they were bad­ly shak­en by the neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty in 1991.)
     Shargel did not get good grades in school, and he says his par­ents nev­er pushed him. Judy recalls that “he always knew he would be suc­cess­ful, and go places with his charm and per­son­al­i­ty.” Shargel claims his ten­den­cy to defy author­i­ty began in school, where he was “a dis­ci­pline prob­lem” and “a wise-ass.” When he reached the tenth grade, he was bused to Bound Brook High School, as one of per­haps a dozen Jew­ish kids in a class of two hun­dred and fifty. His best friend at the time, Ed Steck­el, recalls the Ital­ian boys as “work­ing-class tough guys who drove big Mer­curys and wore black leather jack­ets,” and who picked on Shargel in the school bus and the lock­er room. “A num­ber of years ago,” Steck­el says, “I said to Jer­ry, ‘Isn’t it god­dam iron­ic? The very guys who used to fuck with you are now your clients.’”
     In 1962, despite his poor grades, Shargel gained admis­sion to Rutgers—just bare­ly, because his moth­er worked there as a sec­re­tary. He majored in his­to­ry, became the rush chair­man of his fra­ter­ni­ty, and drove a motor scoot­er. In his senior year, he got his job as a bartender—an expe­ri­ence as edu­ca­tion­al, he says, as any­thing he learned in class. By then, he was pinned to Ter­ry Krapes, a speech-pathol­o­gy major at Dou­glass Col­lege whom he had met at a school mix­er. Reflect­ing fond­ly on the action at the Lido Hotel, Shargel saw him­self becom­ing a maitre d’, but Ter­ry nixed the idea. “I tried to explain that it wouldn’t work, me being the wife of a hotel man­ag­er,” she recalls. “I was too art­sy for that—I wore black and hung out in cafes in Green­wich Vil­lage and smoked cig­a­rettes. I fig­ured I should at least be mar­ried to a pro­fes­sion­al man. And, since Jer­ry had no apti­tude for math or sci­ence, the only option was law.”
     Shargel enrolled at Brook­lyn Law School in 1966. Ter­ry, a year younger, was com­plet­ing her senior year at Dou­glass, and Shargel lived alone in the spare room of a Man­hat­tan brown­stone. He hun­kered down and, for the first time, became an A stu­dent. The pro­fes­sor who taught him prop­er­ty law, Leo Glass­er, was then, as he is now, iras­ci­ble, a bril­liant schol­ar of the law, and a pedant. A quar­ter cen­tu­ry lat­er, as a fed­er­al judge, Glass­er would brand Shargel a Gam­bi­no-fam­i­ly house coun­sel and dis­qual­i­fy him from the most recent Got­ti case. “I remem­ber he gave me an A in the course,” Shargel says. ”He grad­ed me more harsh­ly in the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion motion.”
     In July of 1968, dur­ing the sum­mer before his final year of law school, Shargel worked as a stu­dent assis­tant in the Brook­lyn Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office—the only time in his life he has sat at the gov­ern­ment table. He had a chance to observe a num­ber of leg­endary crim­i­nal defend­ers of the day, such as Hen­ry Singer and Mur­ray Edel­baum. When a pros­e­cu­tor he assist­ed, John Leone, tried a rou­tine truck-hijack­ing case against the defense attor­ney James LaRossa, Shargel looked long­ing­ly in LaRossa’s direc­tion. ”John Leone was a good pros­e­cu­tor, but in my heart I was bond­ing with LaRossa,” he says. “I would have much pre­ferred to be sit­ting at his table. The grass looked green­er over there—no pun intend­ed. I’m not talk­ing about mon­ey. The pros­e­cu­tion table was drab and humor­less, while the defense table seemed styl­ish and alive.”
     In Jan­u­ary of 1969, Shargel joined LaRossa’s law firm as a stu­dent clerk; he did legal research, wrote briefs, and parked LaRossa’s Cadil­lac. By Decem­ber, he had been admit­ted to prac­tice law, and was made an asso­ciate. Shargel soon devel­oped into LaRossa’s law per­son, becom­ing an expert at appel­late work—a desk job that involves por­ing over the tran­script of a tri­al that has end­ed in a con­vic­tion and writ­ing a brief to the Court of Appeals argu­ing why the con­vic­tion should be over­turned.
     Once in a while, Shargel would get a chance to try a case—usually if LaRossa had a sched­ul­ing con­flict, or if a client couldn’t afford LaRossa’s fee. Shargel’s first tri­al involved coun­ter­feit cashier’s checks. He lost. The sec­ond con­cerned a bank heist. “They showed that my guy was almost des­ti­tute and that short­ly after the rob­bery he went on a trip around the world,” Shargel recalls. “I got him acquit­ted.”
     In 1974, LaRossa made part­ners of Shargel and an old­er asso­ciate, Ronald Fis­chet­ti. LaRossa was gain­ing in promi­nence, helped in part by the pros­e­cu­tor Mau­rice Nad­jari, who had a habit of indict­ing judges and pub­lic offi­cials, then los­ing the cas­es or hav­ing the con­vic­tions reversed. LaRossa suc­cess­ful­ly defend­ed the judge Ross DiLoren­zo and the New York City tax-com­mis­sion pres­i­dent Nor­man Levy.
     By 1976, Shargel and Fis­chet­ti had grown tired of labor­ing in LaRossa’s shad­ow, and they quit to form their own part­ner­ship. The wounds have since healed, all three men agree, but they were painful at the time. “I guess my ego was hurt that they decid­ed to leave togeth­er,” LaRossa says. As it turned out, Fis­chet­ti & Shargel last­ed only two and a half years; in ear­ly 1979, they split to become solo prac­ti­tion­ers.
     Shargel was still bet­ter known as an appel­late lawyer, and in June of 1979 he made nation­al news in that capac­i­ty when the state Appel­late Divi­sion over­turned the mur­der con­vic­tion of his client Antho­ny (Tony Pro) Proven­zano, and ordered a new tri­al. A sus­pect in the dis­ap­pear­ance of Jim­my Hof­fa, Tony Pro had been con­vict­ed of killing the Team­sters boss Antho­ny (Three Fin­gers) Castel­li­to. Shargel argued suc­cess­ful­ly that the tri­al judge should have dis­missed a juror who had a per­son­al acquain­tance with the pros­e­cu­tor, rather than force the defense to elim­i­nate her by using up a peremp­to­ry chal­lenge.
     Shargel came into his own as a tri­al lawyer in 1981, when he defend­ed Nicholas Bar­ba­to, the for­mer Repub­li­can boss of Smith­town, New York. Bar­ba­to was accused of tak­ing $267,500 in kick­backs from Bowe Walsh & Asso­ciates, an engi­neer­ing firm, in return for help­ing the firm win a sew­er con­tract. Shargel por­trayed Bar­ba­to, whose fam­i­ly owned a large veg­etable stand, as an hon­est, sim­ple farmer—“a man with soil under his fingernails”—but a for­mer Bowe Walsh exec­u­tive, Edward Hig­gins, tes­ti­fied that he him­self had with­drawn mon­ey from a slush fund and deliv­ered part of it to Bar­ba­to per­son­al­ly. In a clos­ing state­ment that Shargel still con­sid­ers one of his finest, he ridiculed Hig­gins’ demeanor on the stand, not­ed grave incon­sis­ten­cies in his tes­ti­mo­ny, and, in a King-like per­ora­tion, said of his client, “This is the sys­tem that he worked for, this is the sys­tem that he believes in, and this is the sys­tem that will set him free.” Bar­ba­to was acquitted.

SINCE Shargel’s first high-pro­file tri­al was a white-col­lar case, he might eas­i­ly have devel­oped a prac­tice geared toward non­vi­o­lent crime. A lot of peo­ple view LaRossa as a Mafia lawyer, and assume that Shargel became one by hav­ing worked for him. The fact is that although LaRossa has rep­re­sent­ed a num­ber of Mafia figures—including Paul Castel­lano, who ran the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly until Decem­ber, 1985, when Got­ti had him murdered—he has rep­re­sent­ed many more judges and lawyers. LaRossa is among the peo­ple who have been most crit­i­cal of Shargel’s vis­its to the Raven­ite. “I can’t defend Jerry’s appear­ance in that god­dam place,” LaRossa says. “O.K.? I love him like a son, and I’d like to stran­gle him for doing it. I said, ‘If you do it again, I’ll come after you with a base­ball bat.’ And I would. Out of love. Jer­ry tried that case with Got­ti, and he start­ed to eat it up. He got intox­i­cat­ed. It’s as sim­ple as that. Stu­pid. Stu­pid.”
     The man who describes him­self as Shargel’s oth­er men­tor, a lawyer named Michael Coiro, sees noth­ing wrong in such visits—he has made sev­er­al himself—but Coiro is in no posi­tion to give advice. In 1989, he was con­vict­ed of acts of racketeering—obstruction of jus­tice and help­ing to stash the prof­its of a hero­in deal—on behalf of the Gam­bi­no crime fam­i­ly. He got fif­teen years—later reduced to eleven—then nine months more for per­jury. To John Glee­son, who suc­cess­ful­ly pros­e­cut­ed him, Mike Coiro is the very mod­el of a house counsel—living proof of his the­o­ry about the way the Mafia can cor­rupt its lawyers. That Shargel has remained loy­al to Coiro and pro­vid­ed him with free legal assis­tance has been inter­pret­ed as sin­is­ter by Glee­son.
     Coiro, who is now six­ty-three, is being held at the Fed­er­al Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tu­tion in Allen­wood, Penn­syl­va­nia. This past fall, in a visitor’s room there, dressed in a kha­ki uni­form and sneak­ers, he rem­i­nisced about the days before he got into trouble—days when he was a defense attor­ney with a boom­ing prac­tice, and Jer­ry Shargel was a promis­ing young man he had tak­en a shine to. Coiro looks a bit like the for­mer Yan­kee short­stop Phil Riz­zu­to. As a lawyer, he was known for slap­ping his clients’ backs and address­ing every­one as “Gen­er­al.” Jail has left him wist­ful but not bit­ter. “I’m not going to protest my inno­cence,” he said. “I’m here.”
     Coiro, who grew up in the Bor­ough Park sec­tion of Brook­lyn, among sev­er­al of his future Mob clients, won a remark­ably high per­cent­age of his cas­es. “I had a knack with jurors,” he said. “They just loved me.” Shargel con­curs, say­ing, “You could be caught in the cab of a stolen trac­tor-trail­er with two guns in your pock­et, and Coiro could get you acquit­ted.”
     Shargel was twen­ty-five, work­ing for LaRossa, and liv­ing on Clin­ton Street in Brook­lyn, near the crim­i­nal courts, when he met Coiro. Though mar­ried, Coiro had no chil­dren of his own, and he could show pater­nal affec­tion for young peo­ple he liked; Jer­ry Shargel was one of them. Because Coiro had moved to Long Island, it was often dif­fi­cult for him to appear in night court for arraign­ments; Shargel hap­pi­ly stood in for him. Before long, Coiro was rec­om­mend­ing Shargel to his clients for appel­late work if they should be con­vict­ed. (Among the refer­rals was Jim­my Burke, of the Luc­ch­ese family—the man por­trayed by Robert DeNiro in “Good­Fel­las.”) “Mike was real­ly my first source of busi­ness,” Shargel says.
     Coiro also gave Shargel his entrée into the milieu of mob­sters. “I said, ‘Jer­ry, you sit in your ivory tow­er too much. I want you to see what the clients are real­ly like,’” he recalled. “So we made the cir­cuit. I brought him to Queens, and Brook­lyn, and Man­hat­tan, and opened up a whole new world for him—night clubs, sup­per clubs, the race­track. There was a club on Queens Boule­vard called The Suite, and I think it was the first time Jer­ry had been in a place like that. I intro­duced him around. At first, the fel­las said to me, ‘You know, Mike, he’s an able guy, this Mister Shargel, but he comes on like an assis­tant U.S. Attor­ney.’ I think I helped loosen him up a great deal. You have to remem­ber, the fel­las like to meet and talk with lawyers out­side the office. They get a feel­ing of camaraderie—you’re not afraid to sit in a bar and have a drink with them. ‘Hey! This is Mike Coiro—he’s my lawyer. This is Jer­ry Shargel.’ The gov­ern­ment frowns on that. They think it means you’re becom­ing one of them.”
     One of the “fel­las” that Shargel met was John Got­ti. Got­ti lat­er employed a favorite put-down to describe Shargel in those days: “I remem­ber Jer­ry when Jer­ry was an ambu­lance chas­er.” Got­ti was not such a big shot him­self at the time—he was an act­ing captain—but, for all the myths that have grown about him, he was cer­tain­ly charis­mat­ic. And a thug. It was dur­ing this peri­od, he lat­er recalled, that he broke a man’s legs, ankles, and jaw, then pried a gun into his mouth and taunt­ed him: “You wan­na play any­more?”
     As Gotti’s lawyer, Coiro had served him well. In the late six­ties, Got­ti was bust­ed twice for truck hijack­ing, and a charge of kid­nap­ping was thrown in the sec­ond time, but Coiro man­aged to work out a plea that involved no addi­tion­al jail for the sec­ond case. Got­ti was nev­er long on grat­i­tude, how­ev­er. One day in 1979 or 1980, while Coiro was din­ing at the Vil­lag­gio d’Italiano, a Mob-owned restau­rant in Queens, with Jim­my Burke, Got­ti walked in, and Coiro failed to greet him. Enraged, Got­ti returned to his near­by hang­out, the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club, and sent for Coiro. Accord­ing to the tri­al tes­ti­mo­ny of James Car­di­nali, who did menial jobs at the Bergin, Got­ti threat­ened to “stuff” Coiro “in the fire­place,” but instead assault­ed him ver­bal­ly: “I found you, you were a fifty-dol­lar ambu­lance chas­er! You are a piece of shit! You’re sup­posed to run when you see me! You sit there with Jim­my Burke, don’t get up to say hel­lo to me, I’ll kill you!” Coiro took it meekly—“I’m sor­ry, Johnny”—and, Car­di­nali relat­ed, “that was the end of it.”
     Gotti’s crew, which includ­ed his broth­er Gene, a sol­dier named Ange­lo Rug­giero, and Ruggiero’s broth­er Sal, traf­ficked in hero­in. Sal had been a fugi­tive from three indict­ments since the mid-sev­en­ties, and on May 6, 1982, his char­tered Lear­jet crashed off the coast of Geor­gia, killing him and his wife. Fed­er­al agents found Sal’s hide­out in New Jer­sey, and began watch­ing Gotti’s crew mem­bers more close­ly. It was dif­fi­cult for them to sell hero­in, and Ange­lo was wor­ried because Sal’s in-laws had been sub­poe­naed by a grand jury and he did not trust them.
     Short­ly after the plane crash, Mike Coiro was called in to help sort out these prob­lems. He and Gotti’s crew­men sat around the kitchen table of Ange­lo Ruggiero’s home, in Cedarhurst, Long Island, nev­er sus­pect­ing that the kitchen was being bugged by the F.B.I. Coiro man­aged to obtain through bribery a con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ment from the Nas­sau Coun­ty D.A.’s office—“Forewarned is fore­armed,” he said—and he was pre­pared to coach Sal’s in-laws, who, as Coiro put it, were not “peo­ple like us,” on how to lie to the grand jury.
     On May 12th, Gene Got­ti addressed Coiro. “We don’t make out… that you’re our lawyer,” he said. “You’re not our lawyer. You’re one of us as far as we’re con­cerned.”
     “I know it, Genie, and I feel that way. That’s a hon­or.”
     On May 21st, Coiro and Rug­giero once again con­ferred in Ruggiero’s kitchen.
     “I got this fuck­ing tail on me, Mike—it’s unbe­liev­able,” Rug­giero said. “I can’t go noplace, cause I’m being fol­lowed.… I might as well put hero­in in my fuck­ing hands than the mon­ey.” Would Coiro hide the cash until the heat was off?
     “O.K., no prob­lem,” Coiro said.
     On August 23, 1983, Mike Coiro and sev­en Gam­bi­no sol­diers, includ­ing Ange­lo Rug­giero and Gene Got­ti, were arrest­ed on hero­in and obstruc­tion-of-jus­tice charges. Coiro was led, hand­cuffed, to his arraign­ment. His lawyer, Ger­ald Shargel, refused to accept a fee for his services.

IN JANUARY OF 1984, Shargel took on a part­ner. Judd Burstein was the very image of a law person—barely thir­ty years old, he had reced­ing curly hair and a high fore­head, and wore big round glass­es. His moth­er was a judge. A schol­ar of the first rank, Burstein took care of writ­ing briefs, so that Shargel could con­cen­trate on his tri­al prac­tice. In March, Shargel threw a lav­ish par­ty at the Har­monie Club to com­mem­o­rate the part­ner­ship.
     That month, Shargel was hit with a grand-jury sub­poe­na. Wal­ter Mack, a pros­e­cu­tor in the Man­hat­tan Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office, was inves­ti­gat­ing a fac­tion of the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly which had been head­ed by a short, fat for­mer butcher’s appren­tice named Roy DeMeo. The DeMeo crew spe­cial­ized in mur­der; DeMeo was the Mafia’s favorite gen­er­al con­trac­tor for jobs in which bod­ies had to dis­ap­pear. A Brook­lyn apart­ment served as a slaugh­ter­house: dead vic­tims were dragged into the bath­room, bled dry in the show­er, stretched out on a swim­ming-pool lin­er in the liv­ing room, tak­en apart, and neat­ly pack­aged in card­board box­es tied up with string. “Mur­der Machine,” a recent book by Gene Mus­tain and Jer­ry Capeci about the DeMeo gang, esti­mates that there were more than two hun­dred vic­tims. DeMeo dis­ap­peared on Jan­u­ary 10, 1983, and was found a week lat­er in the trunk of his Cadil­lac, shot to death. Wal­ter Mack learned that Shargel had been the lawyer for DeMeo and sev­er­al mem­bers of his crew. If DeMeo had paid Shargel’s fees on behalf of those crew members—what are known as “bene­fac­tor payments”—that was evi­dence of the exis­tence of DeMeo’s crim­i­nal enter­prise. Shargel was ordered to tes­ti­fy and to pro­duce finan­cial records. He moved unsuc­cess­ful­ly in dis­trict court to quash the sub­poe­na, then appealed to the Sec­ond Cir­cuit.
     It was all too much for Judd Burstein, and with­in a few months he quit. Ter­ry Shargel was furi­ous, but Jer­ry, unable to car­ry a grudge, cal­cu­lates that he has since direct­ed over a mil­lion dol­lars in busi­ness to his for­mer part­ner. Today, Burstein is one of the lead­ing law per­sons of the New York crim­i­nal bar, and more than half of his prac­tice is in civ­il lit­i­ga­tion. He says he is baf­fled that Shargel’s prac­tice is so much nar­row­er than his own. “Jer­ry doesn’t care about being called a Mob lawyer,” Burstein says. “I would. I don’t want to be a Mob lawyer. I asked him once, ‘You have the tal­ent to be one of the lead­ing lights of the bar—doesn’t it upset you to be stig­ma­tized?’ He said no, because he likes what he does. It’s almost para­dox­i­cal for some­body who is so great an artist—and Jer­ry is one of the finest tri­al lawyers I’ve ever seen—to have such rel­a­tive­ly small hori­zons.”
     On August 13, 1984, the Sec­ond Cir­cuit ruled against Shargel, forc­ing him to answer the sub­poe­na. A week lat­er, he appeared before the grand jury, refused on Fifth Amend­ment grounds to answer Wal­ter Mack’s ques­tions, and declined to pro­duce any records. Two days lat­er, he returned to the wit­ness box with immu­ni­ty, and pre­sent­ed pho­to­copies of check stubs—with dates and fig­ures but no names—and three doc­u­ments. One of the doc­u­ments was a sales receipt for a.12-gauge shotgun—a gift from DeMeo after Shargel had men­tioned feel­ing unsafe at night in a sum­mer home in Quogue. (DeMeo advised him to be care­ful with the gun, because “if any­thing hap­pened to you, I couldn’t live with myself.”) Shargel tes­ti­fied that he was almost always paid in cash by his Mafia clients, and that he kept no records of who had paid him what. As for his appoint­ment diaries, he had destroyed them short­ly before receiv­ing the sub­poe­na, he said, in response to a Supreme Court deci­sion, Unit­ed States v. Doe, which pro­vid­ed no guar­an­tee of priv­i­lege for such diaries.
     Shargel did remem­ber that in Octo­ber of 1981 DeMeo had hand­ed him a paper bag in front of Ferrara’s, a pas­try shop in Lit­tle Italy.

     Q.: What was in the bag?
     A.: Mon­ey.
     Q.: How much mon­ey?
     A.: I think some two thou­sand dol­lars.…
     Q.: What was that mon­ey received on account of?
     A.: Con­tin­ued legal ser­vices in con­nec­tion with… Mr. DeMeo.
     Q.: And it’s your tes­ti­mo­ny to us that no mon­eys received on that occa­sion were… for any ser­vices ren­dered… to Mr. Dordal, Mr. Gag­gi, or any­one else? [Paulie Pin­to Dordal and Nino Gag­gi were two asso­ciates of DeMeo who were also rep­re­sent­ed by Shargel.]
     A.: That’s right.

     This was very dif­fer­ent from grand-jury tes­ti­mo­ny giv­en five months ear­li­er by Fred­dy DiNome, a for­mer drag rac­er employed by Roy DeMeo as a chauf­feur. After DeMeo’s death, a police detec­tive and an F.B.I. agent had suc­ceed­ed in “flip­ping” DiNome—making him an infor­mant. He remem­bered dri­ving DeMeo to Lit­tle Italy and wit­ness­ing the inci­dent with the paper bag.

     Q.: Could you tell the grand jury what you recall about that?…
     A.: We seen Jerry’s car, Shargel, the lawyer. He had a… white Jaguar, four door… parked right in front of Ferrara’s.
     Q.: And what hap­pened?
     A.: Roy hand­ed him a big bag of mon­ey.
     Q.: And did you hear any­thing said between the two?
     A.: Well, they were talk­ing about Nino’s case and they would also talk about Paulie Pinto’s appeal.… He said, “I just gave [Shargel] a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand dol­lars. Between [Nino] and Paulie, they’re break­ing me.”

     The grand jury returned indict­ments against twen­ty-four peo­ple in the mass-mur­der case, and the defen­dant who was rep­re­sent­ed by Shargel was a crew mem­ber named Richard Mas­trange­lo. In a brief sub­mit­ted to Abra­ham Sofaer, the Man­hat­tan fed­er­al-dis­trict-court judge hear­ing the case, Wal­ter Mack moved to have Shargel dis­qual­i­fied from the tri­al. He argued that Shargel had become house coun­sel to the DeMeo crew, that his alleged receipt of bene­fac­tor pay­ments was evi­dence of a crim­i­nal enter­prise and so made him a poten­tial wit­ness, and that he might be less than vig­or­ous in defend­ing Mas­trange­lo, because he faced pos­si­ble crim­i­nal charges him­self, includ­ing per­jury.
     Judge Sofaer issued his first opin­ion on March 5, 1985. He was large­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to Shargel, and called dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion a “dras­tic step.” Sofaer sched­uled a hear­ing lat­er that month to clear up the mat­ter. At the hear­ing, Judge Sofaer per­son­al­ly ques­tioned DiNome, and on May 1st he issued a sec­ond opin­ion, dis­qual­i­fy­ing Shargel from the tri­al in lan­guage that can best be described as scathing. Sofaer had mea­sured the cred­i­bil­i­ty of Ger­ald Shargel, mem­ber of the bar and for­mer law pro­fes­sor, against that of Fred­dy DiNome, a fourth-grade dropout and pot­head who had once chopped off the head of a neighbor’s dog to set­tle a dis­pute. Evi­dent­ly, he found DiNome more cred­i­ble.
     DiNome admit­ted that he had nev­er seen the mon­ey inside the bag, and he had altered his story—now the amount was only a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars. “That DeMeo actu­al­ly passed $100,000 in cash to Shargel in a paper bag… may be unlike­ly,” Sofaer wrote. “Yet a jury may con­clude that Shargel’s sto­ry of hav­ing received only $2,000 at that time is also unlike­ly.… Shargel’s lack of any records of his income, and the man­ner in which he claims he is paid and keeps track of his mon­ey, may make jurors skep­ti­cal as to his verac­i­ty in gen­er­al.” A jury could find that Shargel’s prac­tice of not keep­ing records was “adopt­ed at the behest of his clients,” he wrote, so that they “could receive legal ser­vices the val­ue of which clear­ly exceed­ed their income from legit­i­mate sources.”
     Sofaer was also trou­bled by a sto­ry that DiNome told about the time he was incar­cer­at­ed, before he agreed to flip for the gov­ern­ment. Dur­ing an unso­licit­ed vis­it, the sto­ry went, Shargel had tried to find out whether DiNome was coop­er­at­ing with the gov­ern­ment, and had said he’d arranged for a lawyer to rep­re­sent DiNome at no cost to DiNome. (Shargel sug­gest­ed to Judge Sofaer that he had meant that DiNome’s broth­er was going to pay the legal bills. DiNome scoffed at that: “My broth­er couldn’t even pay atten­tion.”) Crew mem­bers were com­pelled to “use the lawyers that they assign to you,” DiNome said. “This way, if you’re doing any­thing wrong, they would know about it.”
     Sofaer wrote, “By pick­ing a crew member’s attor­ney, in addi­tion to pay­ing him, a crew leader can require him to use an attor­ney who will… seek to keep his nom­i­nal client from coop­er­at­ing, or from oth­er­wise harm­ing the crew’s inter­ests.” More­over, Sofaer not­ed, a sec­ond coop­er­at­ing wit­ness had cor­rob­o­rat­ed DiNome’s claims about bene­fac­tor pay­ments to Shargel. In con­clu­sion, he wrote, “Shargel’s con­duct rais­es a cred­i­ble appear­ance of impro­pri­ety.”
     In ear­ly 1986, Fred­dy DiNome, who had been renamed Fred­dy Mari­no and deposit­ed in San Anto­nio, Texas, as a pro­tect­ed wit­ness, hanged him­self.
     Shargel nat­u­ral­ly has bit­ter mem­o­ries of the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion, but he recalls that Wal­ter Mack, unlike John Glee­son, was just doing his job, and that it nev­er got per­son­al. Mack con­firms that he and Shargel are friend­ly today, and that “we even joke about” the lit­i­ga­tion. As for whether Mack ever seri­ous­ly thought of pros­e­cut­ing Shargel, he says sim­ply, “It wasn’t con­sid­ered after Fred­dy died.”
     Shargel sug­gests that Judge Sofaer got tak­en. “That whole sit­u­a­tion about bene­fac­tor pay­ments turned on the word of unsa­vory scoundrels who sold them­selves to the gov­ern­ment and told pre­pos­ter­ous sto­ries,” he says. And, no doubt reflect­ing on Sam­my Bull Gra­vano, now in John Gleeson’s hands, he adds, “One of the most dan­ger­ous aspects of this prac­tice is that every client you ever have is a poten­tial enemy.”

GRAVANO was appar­ent­ly a born killer, though his homi­ci­dal nature is hard to fig­ure. His fam­i­ly, in Ben­son­hurst, Brook­lyn, owned a dress busi­ness that employed fif­teen peo­ple, and his ear­ly ambi­tion was to be a hair­dress­er. But by the end of 1990 he had done nine­teen murders—ten of them for his boss, John Got­ti. In 1978, he killed Nick Sci­bet­ta, who was his broth­er-in-law: Scibetta’s sis­ter, Deb­bie, was Sammy’s wife and the moth­er of his daugh­ter and son. Gra­vano claimed that the mur­der was done on Mob orders, because Sci­bet­ta had become an infor­mant, but there were per­sis­tent rumors of more per­son­al motives. Scibetta’s body was cut to pieces, and only one hand was recov­ered. It was buried at a funer­al ser­vice attend­ed by Gra­vano, who vowed to find the killer.
     Gra­vano had first hired Shargel to defend him in a bizarre tax case that stemmed from one of his mur­ders. In June of 1982, Frank Fiala, the boss of a Yugoslav crew, threw him­self a birth­day par­ty at the Plaza Suite, a Brook­lyn dis­co owned by Gra­vano, who also had title to the build­ing and land. Fiala offered to buy the prop­er­ty for a mil­lion dol­lars, and he put down six hun­dred and fifty thou­sand; then, when he attempt­ed to with­draw the rest from for­eign bank accounts, the deal stalled. On June 27th, Sam­my Bull walked into his office, in the Plaza Suite build­ing, and found Fiala, armed with a machine gun, behind his desk. Fiala ordered Gra­vano to be “nice” and make sure the deal went through; he had killed Colom­bians, he said, and “grease­balls” like Sam­my would be “easy.” That night, as Fiala left the dis­co, Gravano’s crew­men ambushed and killed him. Gra­vano kept the six hun­dred and fifty thou­sand dol­lars, and on his 1983 tax return he explained sim­ply, “Deal was abort­ed by pur­chas­er.” He was indict­ed for defraud­ing the I.R.S. by fail­ing to declare the income in 1982, and went on tri­al in August, 1985.
     The jury was not to learn that Fiala had been killed—merely that he had died. The tri­al was assigned to Judge Glass­er. Shargel described the late Fiala as a “nut” and a “whacko,” who rode into town and offered an absurd amount of mon­ey to his unsus­pect­ing client, for whom the deal was “a dream come true… like the Lot­to,” and he explained, “Sam Gra­vano is from Stat­en Island… he didn’t know about for­eign bank accounts.” Maybe Sam made a mis­take on his return, Shargel said, but he was rely­ing on the advice of his tax attor­ney. The attorney’s tes­ti­mo­ny sup­port­ed Shargel’s the­sis, and Gra­vano was acquitted.

IT MAY HAVE SEEMED MISGUIDED to go after a man like Sal­va­tore Gra­vano with a sim­ple tax case, but the prac­tice had a his­to­ry; even Al Capone had been tak­en down on his tax­es. In the eight­ies, pros­e­cu­tors began to wake up to the real­iza­tion that far more effec­tive weapons against the Mafia had exist­ed for years. In 1968 and 1970, Con­gress had hand­ed pros­e­cu­tors two nuclear war­heads, which had large­ly remained unused in their silos. The first was the Omnibus Crime Con­trol and Safe Streets Act, which gave author­i­ty for court-approved elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance. The sec­ond was the Orga­nized Crime Con­trol Act, which includ­ed RICO, the Rack­e­teer Influ­enced and Cor­rupt Orga­ni­za­tions statute. RICO enabled the gov­ern­ment to attack the very struc­ture of the Mob, by link­ing togeth­er even pet­ty offens­es, such as gam­bling and loan-shark­ing, as “pred­i­cate acts” in a “con­tin­u­ing crim­i­nal enter­prise.”
     One thing that the eight­ies will be remem­bered for is the rise of RICO and elec­tron­ic eaves­drop­ping, which began the decline of the Amer­i­can Mafia. Anoth­er is a dra­mat­ic wors­en­ing of rela­tions between pros­e­cu­tors and crim­i­nal lawyers, espe­cial­ly in New York. Per­haps there was a con­nec­tion: per­haps, as pros­e­cu­tors began to look at crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tions as a whole, instead of focussing on iso­lat­ed crimes of indi­vid­u­als, they came to see defense attor­neys as more active parts of the equa­tion. No one knows the rea­son for sure, but the cli­mate today is nasty, and it used to be col­le­gial.
     In this new, tense envi­ron­ment, John Glee­son, who became a pros­e­cu­tor in 1985, appears to be a man for his time, whose rise, thanks to his com­bi­na­tion of legal tal­ent and right­eous­ness, could have been fore­told. The crim­i­nal bar’s per­cep­tion of him is best summed up in five words of Jim­my LaRossa’s: “You can’t make him laugh.” In defense cir­cles, Gleeson’s nick­name is the Jesuit. Shargel says he thinks that when Glee­son went to cat­e­chism class and heard the first Psalm, “Blessed is he who has not walked in the coun­sel of the wicked,” he mis­heard it as “he who has not coun­selled the wicked.”
     If John Glee­son is a devout Catholic, it is one of many things he keeps to him­self. Those who get to know him dis­cov­er, often to their sur­prise, that while he looks clean-cut—he has dark, wavy hair, and he wears V‑neck sweaters under his suit jack­ets, and tor­toise­shell glass­es that seem a size too large—he talks like an Irish cop: peo­ple he pros­e­cutes are “mopes” and “pieces-a-shit.” Glee­son was born in the Bronx, the sev­enth and last child of an Irish-immi­grant father, Patrick, who moved his fam­i­ly to Westch­ester Coun­ty when John was an infant. Patrick had nev­er fin­ished high school, and worked as a clerk for the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Life Insur­ance Com­pa­ny in New York. In a recent let­ter, Glee­son not­ed that “dis­crim­i­na­tion against the Irish was overt and at its zenith” when his father arrived in New York, in the late twen­ties, and added that “although it took decades,” Met­ro­pol­i­tan Life final­ly awoke to Patrick’s “nat­ur­al abil­i­ties” and moved him into man­age­ment.
     John Glee­son excelled in high school as a schol­ar and an athlete—playing bas­ket­ball, soc­cer, and golf—while earn­ing mon­ey as a cad­die at a local coun­try club. His fel­low-stu­dents vot­ed him “cutest.” He went on to George­town Uni­ver­si­ty on an aca­d­e­m­ic schol­ar­ship, majored in Eng­lish, and met his future wife, Susan, a nurs­ing stu­dent. After grad­u­a­tion, in 1975, Glee­son spent two years paint­ing hous­es in the vicin­i­ty of Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and then stud­ied for a law degree at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia. He and Susan lived in Louisville for a year while he clerked for Judge Boyce F. Mar­tin, Jr., of the Sixth Cir­cuit Court of Appeals. Glee­son dis­cov­ered dur­ing his clerk­ship that he longed to be a pros­e­cu­tor, but he took an indi­rect route, first accept­ing a job as an asso­ciate at the dis­tin­guished New York law firm of Cra­vath, Swaine & Moore.
     Glee­son applied to the Man­hat­tan Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office, then head­ed by Rudolph Giu­liani, but he had to make do with a job offer from the Brook­lyn office. He joined in 1985, tak­ing a dras­tic cut in pay, to some­thing less than forty thou­sand a year, and moved into an apart­ment in Brook­lyn.
     He was imme­di­ate­ly teamed up with a pros­e­cu­tor named Diane Giacalone on a mul­ti-defen­dant RICO case called Unit­ed States v. Del­lacroce. Neil Del­lacroce was the under­boss of the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly, and one of his co-defen­dants was a cap­tain, John Got­ti. The case was a hodge­podge of crimes dat­ing as far back as the sixties—mostly acts of truck hijack­ing, gam­bling, and loan-shark­ing. In Decem­ber of 1985, before the case came to tri­al, Neil Del­lacroce died of can­cer, and two weeks lat­er John Got­ti had the Gam­bi­no boss Paul Castel­lano mur­dered to set­tle an inter­nal dis­pute. The case became Unit­ed States v. Got­ti, and the lead defen­dant was the most famous crim­i­nal in Amer­i­ca. John Glee­son was thir­ty-two and Diane Giacalone was thir­ty-five.
     Giacalone liked Glee­son, although she con­sid­ered him “the world’s worst dress­er.” As she recalls it, “he owned three suits, all shiny and too small.” Apart from that, he impressed her. “No one works hard­er than John,” she says. “I worked as hard as he did, but not hard­er. He is absolute­ly com­mit­ted.” Lau­rence Shtasel, anoth­er assis­tant Unit­ed States Attor­ney at the time, recalls, “Night after night, I’d leave the office, and he’d be sit­ting there with head­phones on, going over tapes of hard-to-hear con­ver­sa­tions until he had them mem­o­rized.” The intense work took its toll. “There were times we near­ly killed each oth­er,” Giacalone says.
     Giacalone believed that Glee­son, who had nev­er tried a crim­i­nal case, should acquire some expe­ri­ence before the Got­ti tri­al start­ed. Arrange­ments were made for him to pros­e­cute a few small­er cas­es, the first of which pit­ted him against Ger­ald Shargel. Shargel’s client, Gio­van­ni Maz­zo­la, was accused of being an inter­me­di­ary in a hero­in sale, but Shargel pre­sent­ed him as an unwit­ting Ital­ian trans­la­tor who believed he was involved in the sale of gold. Glee­son told Shargel that this was his first tri­al, and repeat­ed­ly asked how he was doing. He soon found out: Shargel won an acquit­tal.
     Glee­son nev­er again tried a case against Shargel, but their next encounter formed the basis of his belief that Shargel was sub­servient to Got­ti. Shargel had been retained to rep­re­sent Armond (Bud­dy) Del­lacroce, Neil’s son, in Unit­ed States v. Got­ti, but after his father died Bud­dy decid­ed to plead guilty to one count of rack­e­teer­ing. Bud­dy was thir­ty years old, a drunk, and a cocaine addict; Giacalone unwise­ly agreed to rec­om­mend bail in return for his guilty plea, and he van­ished before his sen­tenc­ing date. (Three years lat­er, he was found dead of a drug over­dose.) When Giacalone gave her open­ing state­ment at the Got­ti tri­al, on Sep­tem­ber 25, 1986, she end­ed by promis­ing to offer com­pelling proof of the exis­tence of the Gam­bi­no Mafia family—Buddy’s guilty plea. There was an uproar at the defense table. With­in days, Shargel filed an affi­davit with the court, assert­ing that he and Giacalone had an agree­ment that Buddy’s plea could not be used as evi­dence. Giacalone and Glee­son coun­tered with affir­ma­tions call­ing Shargel’s affi­davit false. In Gleeson’s view, Shargel had been brought to task by an angry John Got­ti, and ordered to swear to a false state­ment. Shargel calls that “pre­pos­ter­ous,” and says, “I’ve nev­er sub­mit­ted a false affi­davit to a court in my life.” Chris­tine Yaris, a Shargel asso­ciate at the time, also insists that there was a deal, and that she was on hand when Giacalone agreed to it. There was no hear­ing to deter­mine whether Giacalone or Shargel was telling the truth, because the judge, Eugene Nick­er­son, ruled that even if there had been a deal it had become void when Bud­dy jumped bail.
     If Gleeson’s view of Mafia lawyers was taint­ed by Shargel’s affi­davit, that was noth­ing com­pared with the expe­ri­ence of the tri­al itself. For any­one read­ing the tran­script of the tri­al today, it is hard to fath­om how Judge Nick­er­son allowed it to become what he him­self called “a cir­cus.” Per­haps Nick­er­son believed that Got­ti would be con­vict­ed any­way, and want­ed to guar­an­tee the appear­ance of a fair pro­ceed­ing, but in fact, there was nev­er any chance of a con­vic­tion, because, as was lat­er learned, a juror had been bribed.
     Gotti’s lawyer was Bruce Cut­ler. He had been intro­duced to Got­ti in 1985 by Mike Coiro, whose own legal prob­lems made him unable to con­tin­ue rep­re­sent­ing Got­ti. Cut­ler, who is almost entire­ly bald and has a big, bulging, bench presser’s body, once said he felt like “a can­dy ass” com­pared with his client, whom he called “a man’s man,” along with oth­er rap­tur­ous praise. Cutler’s style could hard­ly be more dif­fer­ent from Shargel’s: he does not con­trol wit­ness­es so much as bul­ly them, and he seems to go out of his way to make ene­mies of judges and pros­e­cu­tors. Cutler’s antics at the Got­ti tri­al have been well documented—slamming the indict­ment into a waste­bas­ket, refer­ring to Giacalone as a “tramp” and a “slut,” and, in one of the weird­est episodes ever to occur in fed­er­al court, call­ing a thor­ough­ly dis­rep­utable wit­ness mere­ly to humil­i­ate Giacalone and Glee­son.
     The wit­ness was Matthew Traynor, a bank rob­ber and self-described “liar and a dope fiend” from Ozone Park, Queens, the heart of John Got­ti ter­ri­to­ry. Giacalone and Glee­son had once vis­it­ed Traynor in jail, and found him in need of med­ical care; Glee­son then arranged for Traynor to see a doc­tor at Beth Israel Med­ical Cen­ter, where Gleeson’s wife, Susan, was a nurs­ing super­vi­sor. Ulti­mate­ly, Giacalone and Glee­son had deter­mined that Traynor was too awful to put on the stand as a wit­ness against Got­ti, but Cut­ler called him as a defense wit­ness in Feb­ru­ary, 1987, six months into the tri­al. In bla­tant­ly per­jured tes­ti­mo­ny, which grew odd­er as he went along, Traynor said that Giacalone had asked him to “frame” Got­ti and the oth­er defen­dants, because she, too, had grown up in Ozone Park, and Ital­ian men from the neigh­bor­hood “had ridiculed her about being skin­ny.” Traynor went on to say that Giacalone was keep­ing anoth­er of her wit­ness­es high on hero­in, and he want­ed to be “blocked out” on Val­i­um and codeine (which hap­pened to be the med­ica­tion pre­scribed for him at Beth Israel). He also want­ed to “get laid,” although Giacalone could not help him with that; instead, Traynor said, she tossed him a pair of her panties and told him to “facil­i­tate” him­self.
     Through­out Traynor’s tes­ti­mo­ny, Giacalone had sat qui­et­ly, scrib­bling notes. She asked John Glee­son to cross-exam­ine him, and he did so with the con­trolled anger that is his hall­mark. Traynor did his best to unnerve Glee­son, berat­ing him for “ask­ing stu­pid ques­tions,” call­ing him “a meek lit­tle mouse” and a “lowlife,” and not­ing that “there are peo­ple prob­a­bly got a nicer suit on than you.” Glee­son unwise­ly brought up the panties sto­ry, and then Traynor hap­pi­ly heaped on more detail: “She… told me, sniff them and jerk your­self off in the bath­room… and they smelled like deep-fried scal­lops.”
     Glee­son was dealt the low­est blow when defense coun­sel, hop­ing to prove that Traynor’s med­ica­tion was obtained improp­er­ly, served a sub­poe­na on Beth Israel for the job records of Susan Glee­son. Judge Nick­er­son imme­di­ate­ly quashed the sub­poe­na, pro­nounc­ing it “off the wall,” but Glee­son was livid. “The sub­poe­na on his wife—that was it,” Jef­frey Hoff­man, one of the defense attor­neys, recalls. “I had a good rela­tion­ship with Glee­son up until that point, and because of that I was des­ig­nat­ed as the guy who dealt with the pros­e­cu­tion. Even though the sub­poe­na was quashed, I couldn’t talk to him after that. He was just… gone. Noth­ing. Ceased.”
     About sev­en months after jury selec­tion had begun, both sides final­ly rest­ed and gave sum­ma­tions. The defense attor­ney Richard Rehbock accused Glee­son of fil­ing a false affi­davit to obtain the med­ical care for Traynor, and in his rebut­tal Gleeson’s self-con­trol final­ly cracked: “You should take that accu­sa­tion,” he told the jury, and “shove it down the throat of defense coun­sel.” On March 13th, the jury announced that it had reached a ver­dict. As Diane Giacalone and John Glee­son stared into space, the jury fore­man pro­nounced “Not guilty” four­teen times, free­ing each defen­dant on each of two counts. The Brook­lyn Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office was stunned. Giacalone soon left the legal pro­fes­sion for a job in the pri­vate sec­tor; Glee­son stayed.
     “I don’t think John or I would ever look at the world exact­ly the same way,” Giacalone says now. “It was a les­son for both of us—that some peo­ple are will­ing to do any­thing. You’ll nev­er be inno­cent again after some­thing like that, nev­er be inno­cent again.”

SHARGEL’s REPUTATION as a tri­al lawyer con­tin­ued to grow, and in 1988 he became the lawyer for the Bronx Demo­c­ra­t­ic boss Stan­ley Fried­man. Fried­man, a thick-waist­ed man with a goa­tee and a nasal Bronx accent, had already lost a fed­er­al RICO case, and been sen­tenced to twelve years for improp­er­ly induc­ing the Park­ing Vio­la­tions Bureau to buy hand-held com­put­ers in which he had a finan­cial inter­est. Now he faced a state indict­ment for brib­ing a gen­er­al in the New York Nation­al Guard to rec­om­mend his com­put­ers to the Guard.
     When Fried­man hired Shargel, he was head­ed for the fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiary in Spring­field, Mis­souri, a rel­a­tive­ly con­ge­nial set­ting com­pared with pris­ons in New York, such as Atti­ca and Rik­ers Island. The Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attor­ney made Shargel an offer: if his client plead­ed guilty, he would not face any state time. Fried­man mulled the offer, but he could not take it. “It would have been the only time Stan­ley Fried­man stood up and said, ‘Yes, I did it,’” Fried­man says today.
     Shargel tried the non-jury case in front of Judge Marie San­ta­ga­ta, who reject­ed Shargel’s cen­tral thesis—that the bribe was in fact a legit­i­mate lob­by­ing fee—and found Fried­man guilty. By now, Shargel and Fried­man had grown fond of each oth­er, and Shargel’s voice cracked with emo­tion as he plead­ed with San­ta­ga­ta to reject the Dis­trict Attorney’s demand for more jail: “Stan­ley Fried­man is a bro­ken man—shamed, dis­graced, and humil­i­at­ed. He is a man who is say­ing, ‘I showed com­pas­sion in my life, and I am enti­tled to it now.’ But what does he get instead? ‘Hit him more! Hit him again! Give him more!’“ Judge San­ta­ga­ta was unmoved; she sen­tenced Fried­man to the max­i­mum term—two and a third to sev­en years—to be served con­sec­u­tive­ly with his fed­er­al time. Shargel appealed. The con­vic­tion was upheld, but the con­sec­u­tive sen­tence was vacat­ed as “undu­ly harsh.”
     Fried­man was paroled in 1992, after serv­ing four years. “A lot of peo­ple say, ‘He got twelve years and he only served four,’” Fried­man says. “I shud­der when I hear ‘only.’ Unless some­one served time, they shouldn’t say ‘only.’”
     Fried­man is unstint­ing in his praise of Shargel: “A lot of lawyers would feel, This is not a major case—even if I win it, the client doesn’t get to go home. Jer­ry fought for me as if my whole life was rid­ing on it. He read every doc­u­ment, he knew what the law was, he summed up ter­rif­ic, and we got buried. The deck was stacked against us. That judge, it was very lucky that the statute didn’t pro­vide for the death penalty—she would prob­a­bly have giv­en me that. Before the tri­al start­ed, the D.A. brought me from Spring­field to Rik­ers Island. I spent nine­ty-one days there, and it was more trau­mat­ic than the four years in fed­er­al prison. It’s a ter­ror camp. Peo­ple walk around with razor blades under their tongues, so they can give you a quick slash if the occa­sion aris­es. The bus­es you ride back and forth to the cour­t­house are death traps ready to explode any minute. And it’s degrad­ing and tor­tur­ous for vis­i­tors. Jer­ry would come to vis­it me at least once a week at Rik­ers, and it cost him prac­ti­cal­ly the whole day. And, even though he nev­er said this to me, he knew I was tapped out, and I know I got a tremen­dous break on his nor­mal prices. We are now friends.”
     Like Shargel, Fried­man was an attor­ney edu­cat­ed at Brook­lyn Law, but he says he can under­stand it if Shargel is also friend­ly with his Mafia clients. “The gov­ern­ment put me in with the Fat Tony Saler­nos of this world for four years, and I played boc­cie with them, and I saw them in the hos­pi­tal when they were sick and dying, and you estab­lish a rela­tion­ship, because they’re human beings who cry when they’re hurt­ing, and who have wives that vis­it them. Some­times cir­cum­stances dic­tate your friends.” Shargel’s attrac­tion to Got­ti makes par­tic­u­lar sense to Fried­man. “From the begin­ning of time, pow­er is sexy,” he says.

IN JANUARY, 1989, Got­ti was indict­ed by the Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attorney’s Office for alleged­ly order­ing the shoot­ing assault of John O’Connor, a car­pen­ters’ union offi­cial. The F.B.I., which had only a periph­er­al role in the case, placed a num­ber of bugs in and around the Raven­ite Social Club. On five nights dur­ing the win­ter of 1989 and 1990, short­ly before the assault tri­al began, Got­ti cau­cused in an apart­ment two sto­ries above the Raven­ite with his under­boss, Sam­my Gra­vano, and his con­sigliere, Frank (Frankie Lo) Locas­cio, as the F.B.I. lis­tened in. There were about a dozen con­ver­sa­tions record­ed in the pri­vate hall­way behind the back door of the club, and many more record­ed in the club itself.
     On Novem­ber 8, 1989, a legal prob­lem had arisen. The late Car­lo Gambino’s son Tom­my, a cap­tain in the fam­i­ly, was about to go on tri­al for per­jury and obstruc­tion of jus­tice, and Got­ti and two of his cap­tains, Joe Butch Cor­rao and George (Fat Georgie) Rem­i­ni, had been sub­poe­naed to tes­ti­fy. As far as Got­ti was con­cerned, this was bla­tant harass­ment. It was against his rules to tes­ti­fy, so the three of them would sim­ply have to “do a con­tempt” and go to jail. Got­ti seemed more upset that Bruce Cut­ler, Jer­ry Shargel, and Mike Rosen, the lawyer for Tom­my Gam­bi­no, had failed to under­stand that this was the only accept­able course of action. The three lawyers had met, he said, and deter­mined that Tom­my Gam­bi­no should plead guilty, to spare Got­ti the “aggra­va­tion.”
     That evening, Got­ti sat in the club with a group of his men—Joe Butch, Frankie Lo, Jack­ie Nose, Joe Watts, and two who were unidentified—and expound­ed on a favorite theme, the per­fidy of lawyers. “I hate them,” Got­ti said. “You know why I hate them? They don’t give a fuck about us seri­ous­ly.… Oth­er­wise, they wouldn’t live on Park Avenue. They’d live down on Hous­ton Street.”
     Bruce Cutler—or, as Got­ti called him two days lat­er, “this imbecile”—should have known bet­ter than to sug­gest that Tom­my plead guilty, Got­ti said. (Got­ti appar­ent­ly sanc­tioned guilty pleas only for what he called “mali­cious mopery”—minor offens­es that had noth­ing to do with the exis­tence of La Cosa Nos­tra and did not affect oth­er mem­bers of the fam­i­ly.) Got­ti relat­ed that he had told Cut­ler, “Now, you tell Tom­my to fight it. Break their fuckin’ holes, like he, I know he could. And don’t wor­ry about us going to jail. Me No. 1! I like jail bet­ter than I like the streets.” Lat­er, in the hall­way, he added, “Get my cell ready! Get Joe Butch’s cell ready! And get Fat Georgie’s cell ready! And nobody is tak­ing the stand! Tell them to go fight!” Cut­ler, he said, had protest­ed that his duty was to pro­tect Got­ti but had been told, “No, your duty is to lis­ten!”
     Got­ti was also dis­ap­point­ed in Jer­ry Shargel. Fat Georgie Rem­i­ni, a loan shark and num­bers run­ner, who owned a Stat­en Island fruit-and-veg­etable stand called the Top Toma­to, was Shargel’s client, and he did not want to go to jail. Got­ti relat­ed a con­ver­sa­tion in which Shargel tried to con­sid­er oth­er options for his “friend.”
     Got­ti claimed he had told Shargel, “Minchia! Show some com­pas­sion. Show some inter­est. Think about it before you talk. Go for a walk or some­thing. Maybe you ain’t the fastest-think­ing guy in the world. Then come back. ‘Lis­ten,’” he said, mim­ic­k­ing Shargel, “‘I wan­na talk to my client, and my friend. These are my friends, and beside being my client.…’ Who the fuck are youse? Who you work­ing for? Did I tell you to do this?… If Georgie’s on the case alone, you on a case by your­self, it’s a mali­cious mop­ery, drunk­en-dri­ving case, you’ll get six­ty days, you wan­na take a plea? Take a plea. You got no right and—and jeop­ar­dize oth­er peo­ple. Who the fuck are youse?”
     Three weeks lat­er, Rem­i­ni appeared in court with Shargel, refused to tes­ti­fy, and got six­teen months. Got­ti has since been con­vict­ed of obstruct­ing jus­tice in the Rem­i­ni mat­ter, and John Glee­son clear­ly sees Shargel as a con­spir­a­tor. Shargel, he has writ­ten, “was in fact imple­ment­ing Gotti’s desire to cor­rupt­ly pre­vent Remini’s tes­ti­mo­ny.” If this is the basis of Gleeson’s would-be obstruc­tion case against Shargel, it seems weak. Rem­i­ni did not need Shargel to explain to him a soldier’s duty to the enter­prise. On Novem­ber 10, 1989, he got his instruc­tions direct­ly from Got­ti: “Do what I tell ya.” But the Novem­ber 8th tape offers unequiv­o­cal proof of Gotti’s state of mind. In his per­cep­tion, at least, the enter­prise as a whole was Shargel’s client, and not George Rem­i­ni, and a year and a half lat­er Judge Glass­er focussed on the damn­ing phrase “Who you work­ing for?”

MICHAEL COIRO’s tri­al began on Novem­ber 14, 1989—seven years after a bug caught him schem­ing with John Gotti’s crew­men in Ange­lo Ruggiero’s kitchen. Coiro’s case had been delayed by com­plex legal motions. Shargel had been his lawyer all along, but now Shargel was in the mid­dle of anoth­er tri­al, and Judge Joseph McLaugh­lin refused to post­pone Coiro’s tri­al any fur­ther. Coiro says that he turned to Got­ti for help, and that Got­ti got him Bruce Cut­ler. (Cut­ler denies that Got­ti was involved.)
     The pros­e­cu­tor was John Glee­son, but a very dif­fer­ent John Glee­son from the hec­tored junior assis­tant in the fed­er­al Got­ti case. Two and a half more years of tri­al expe­ri­ence had left him sea­soned and con­fi­dent. Bruce Cut­ler was the same Bruce Cut­ler. “My yelling days are over,” he assured Judge McLaugh­lin just pri­or to his open­ing state­ment.
     “You were doing a pret­ty good imi­ta­tion right there,” McLaugh­lin said angri­ly.
     Glee­son addressed the jury: “We’re here because Mike Coiro was com­plete­ly and thor­ough­ly cor­rupt. He became one of them.” Nine­ty per cent of the proof in the case, he said, would come from gov­ern­ment tapes.
     The tri­al went bad­ly for Cut­ler, who is at his best in cross-exam­in­ing infor­mant wit­ness­es. When it came time for Cut­ler to put on his defense case, he hand­ed the judge more than a hun­dred pages of tran­script, all out of order, of tapes he wished to play. For the next four and a half hours, the jury was kept wait­ing as McLaugh­lin gave Cut­ler a dress­ing-down. Cutler’s tapes were “irrel­e­vant junk,” he said, and the tran­scripts should have been giv­en to him “far ear­li­er than today.”

CUTLER: Your Hon­or, maybe I am miss­ing what you are say­ing.
JUDGE: You are miss­ing a body of knowl­edge called the law of evi­dence.… I sug­gest you take a course.…
CUTLER: Judge, I didn’t know you want­ed all of these things done before­hand.…
JUDGE [boom­ing]: Are you accus­tomed to keep­ing juries sit­ting out there for three or four hours?

     Cut­ler was left with no defense case apart from two short stip­u­la­tions. Glee­son, in his sum­ma­tion, encap­su­lat­ed his theme: “Just because you’re a crim­i­nal lawyer, you can’t be a crim­i­nal?” Ear­li­er, Cut­ler had described Coiro as hav­ing “an unusu­al prac­tice, a full-ser­vice prac­tice,” and Glee­son delight­ed in taunt­ing Cut­ler with his own words: through­out his sum­ma­tion, he referred to Michael Coiro as “our full-ser­vice lawyer.”
     On the fol­low­ing day, Novem­ber 29th, the jury was still delib­er­at­ing Mike Coiro’s fate, but at the Raven­ite Social Club, Got­ti was con­cerned with his own. His tri­al in the O’Connor shoot­ing-assault case had not even begun, and now a cor­rupt police detec­tive had passed him the news that both fed­er­al and state pros­e­cu­tors want­ed to try him for the mur­der, four years ear­li­er, of Paul Castel­lano.
     Got­ti stood in the pri­vate hall­way behind the club with Joe Butch. “Why don’t you call Jer­ry out?” Got­ti said.
     “Jer­ry!”
     From inside the Raven­ite club, Shargel stepped out into the hall­way.
     “Say the state want­ed to go after me…for mur­der,” Got­ti said. “But the feds want to for the same thing. Does that make sense they would do it at the same time? Do the same charge, two dif­fer­ent places?”
     “They’ve done it,” Shargel said. “They’ve done it in, uh, Stan­ley Fried­man.”
     The next part of the con­ver­sa­tion was only part­ly audi­ble, but Got­ti appar­ent­ly won­dered what statute the feds might use against a hypo­thet­i­cal “guy like myself…I’m not say­ing me” who had killed a per­son for advance­ment.
     “There’s a statute called ‘com­mit­ting mur­der in fur­ther­ance of your posi­tion,’” Shargel said. Then he asked, “Who was the guy?”
     “Nobody,” Got­ti said.
     There was laugh­ter on the tape.
     “Fur­ther­ance of your posi­tion, huh?” Got­ti said. “That’s nice.”
     Shargel said he would check to see “if that statute was in effect in Decem­ber ’85”—the month Got­ti had Paul Castel­lano killed.
     “Yeah… I’m curi­ous,” Got­ti said. “Not for myself.”
     The next day, Coiro was con­vict­ed on all counts. Although he was released pend­ing sen­tenc­ing, he did not go home after hear­ing the guilty ver­dict; instead, Cut­ler escort­ed him straight to the Raven­ite club. Coiro walked upstairs to the apart­ment for a pri­vate meet­ing with John Got­ti, Frankie Locas­cio, and Sam­my Gra­vano, and three hours after Coiro was con­vict­ed of obstruct­ing jus­tice Got­ti was ask­ing him to obstruct jus­tice again.
     “Mike,” Got­ti said.
     “Yeah, John.”
     “First, you know, we’re sor­ry.”
     “Thank you.”
     “I don’t have to tell ya how sor­ry we are.”
     “Oh, John.”
     Gra­vano found Coiro a seat, and Got­ti said, “I think he’s gonna give you ten years. And maybe look for you to do three or four.”
     “I’ll do it, John.”
     “So, you know, Mike, you got no choice.”
     Present­ly, Got­ti moved on to his own prob­lems. “I’ve been told by a source that that pinch is com­ing down. It’s gonna be a joint pinch”—both the feds and the state. “I think that the thing is immi­nent.” Got­ti under­stood that Coiro had a cor­rupt source of infor­ma­tion in law enforcement—“I nev­er once asked you who he is,” he point­ed out—and he hoped the source could pro­vide the names of Gam­bi­no cap­tains also slat­ed for indict­ment. “Can you see this guy—pronto?”
     “Tomor­row.”
     Coiro went back down­stairs, leav­ing Got­ti alone with his under­boss and his con­sigliere.
     “Fuckin’ heart­break, you know why?” Got­ti said, and then he explained why: Here was a lawyer, not even a made man, fac­ing jail more calm­ly than some of his cap­tains. “Fat Georgie, did four­teen hours in jail, cry­ing fuckin’ bum!”
     Got­ti had under­es­ti­mat­ed Coiro’s sen­tence by five years, and John Glee­son would see to it that Coiro got even more time. A year lat­er, Glee­son sub­poe­naed Coiro to tes­ti­fy before a fed­er­al grand jury inves­ti­gat­ing the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly. He asked Coiro repeat­ed­ly if he had ever gone upstairs to any of the apart­ments above the Raven­ite to con­fer with Got­ti, and Coiro denied repeat­ed­ly that he had. Con­front­ed with the apart­ment tape, Coiro plead­ed guilty to per­jury, and got twen­ty-sev­en addi­tion­al months, which was lat­er reduced to nine months.

GOTTI was a rich man, with an ille­git­i­mate year­ly income run­ning well into the mil­lions, but on Jan­u­ary 4, 1990, sit­ting in the Raven­ite apart­ment with Sam­my Gra­vano and Frank Locas­cio, all that Got­ti had to say about his lawyers was that they were too greedy.
     “You know, these are rats, er, Sam. And I got­ta say, they all want their mon­ey up front. And then you get four guys that want six­ty-five, sev­en­ty-five thou­sand apiece, up front. You’re talk­ing about three hun­dred thou­sand in one month, you cock­suck­er!”
     The night before, Got­ti said, he had stood in the hall­way with Jer­ry Shargel, dis­cussing Shargel’s fee for rep­re­sent­ing Tony Lee Guerrieri—Gotti’s co-defen­dant in the O’Connor case, which was sched­uled to begin in two weeks. “You know what it felt like? You, stand­ing there in the hall­way with me last night—and you’re pluck­ing me! ‘How are you?’ Tony Lee’s lawyer, but you’re pluck­ing me. I’m pay­ing for it.… Where does it end? Gam­bi­no crime fam­i­ly? This is the Shargel, Cut­ler & What­taya-call-it crime fam­i­ly!”
     “They wind up with the mon­ey,” Gra­vano said.
     “They’re over­priced, over­paid, and, and, under­per­formed,” Locas­cio said.
     His lawyers could not win cas­es, Got­ti said, because of “a bull­shit agree­ment” that he believed exist­ed between them and the pros­e­cu­tors: “They don’t fuck with youse, and youse don’t go all out in court.”
     “You know and I know that they know that you’re tak­ing the mon­ey under the table,” Got­ti said. “Every time you take a client, anoth­er one of us on, you’re break­ing the law.… If they wan­na real­ly break Bruce Cutler’s balls, what did he get paid off me?… I paid tax on thir­ty-six thou­sand dol­lars. What could I have paid him?”
     Got­ti said he told Shargel that the least he could do was find out when he was going to be arrest­ed for the mur­der of Paul Castel­lano.
     “I say, ‘Go find out information—what’s going, when, when the pinch is com­ing, you cock­suck­er! We’re mak­ing you an errand boy—high-priced errand boy. Bruce, worse yet!’ They got a rou­tine now, the two lawyers. Muck and Fuck, I call them. When I see Bruce: ‘Hi! Jer­ry loves you!’ he says. ‘He’s in your cor­ner a hun­dred per cent!’ When I see Jer­ry: ‘Hi! Bruce loves you! He’s in your cor­ner a hun­dred per cent!’ I know youse both love me.” There was laugh­ter. “Dumb fucks, you know?”
     “They must real­ly like ya,” Gra­vano said.
     “Sure, Sam­my. What’s not to like about us?”

MICHAEL CHERKASKY, the chief of the rack­ets bureau of the Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attorney’s Office, found a dra­mat­ic ges­ture with which to open Peo­ple v. Got­ti. Tall and rail thin, Cherkasky had won forty felony jury tri­als and lost one in his career as a pros­e­cu­tor. He now explained the government’s the­o­ry of the case: The car­pen­ters’ union offi­cial John O’Connor had sent van­dals to wreck Bankers & Bro­kers, a restau­rant then owned by the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly and built with non-union labor. Mem­bers of the West­ies, act­ing on behalf of the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly, had shot O’Connor four times in the legs and but­tocks. Cherkasky marched over to the defense table, point­ed his fin­ger, and said, “This man, John Got­ti, the head of the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly, ordered that assault.”
     To prove it, Cherkasky was going to put infor­mants on the stand and also play tape-record­ed con­ver­sa­tions. A few of the tapes were high­ly incrim­i­nat­ing but suf­fered from a seri­ous drawback—poor audi­bil­i­ty. The key tape cov­ered a con­ver­sa­tion between John Got­ti and Tony Lee Guer­ri­eri on Feb­ru­ary 7, 1986, at an annex to the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club. O’Connor was dis­cussed by name, and then Got­ti sup­pos­ed­ly said, “We’re gonna—gonna bust him up.” But unless one had faith in the state’s transcript—and it was the defense strat­e­gy to under­mine that faith—there was room for doubt.
     Shargel and Cut­ler, who remain close friends today, had nev­er before tried a case togeth­er. But John Pol­lok, the law per­son at the defense table, had worked with Cut­ler, and the expe­ri­ence was not a pleas­ant one. He and Cut­ler were an odd cou­ple: in con­trast to Cut­ler, with his weight lifter’s physique, Pol­lok was a round, jovial appel­late spe­cial­ist who wore pol­ka-dot sus­penders and seemed to be always munch­ing on snacks. They had rep­re­sent­ed dif­fer­ent defen­dants in Unit­ed States v. Tuti­no, a nar­cotics-con­spir­a­cy case, and had near­ly come to blows when Pol­lok filed a motion for a sep­a­rate tri­al, on the ground that Cutler’s judge-bait­ing had prej­u­diced his client. Got­ti had read a tran­script from the Tuti­no tri­al and now spoke to Pol­lok about rein­ing Cut­ler in. “He made it clear that one of my roles was to make sure that Bruce didn’t do that again,” Pol­lok says. “I have come to like Bruce, I enjoy Bruce, and I think he’s a nice fel­low. But our strat­e­gy was to keep Bruce qui­et, to keep him away from the judge.”
     Cut­ler and Judge Edward McLaugh­lin (not relat­ed to Joseph McLaugh­lin, the judge in the Coiro case) clashed any­way. A num­ber of times, McLaugh­lin sus­tained objec­tions and Cut­ler ignored him and bar­relled on ahead. “Do I have to talk over you for the rest of the after­noon?” McLaugh­lin demand­ed irri­ta­bly.
     By the sec­ond week of the tri­al, Got­ti, too, had lost patience with Cut­ler. Despite his best efforts, Got­ti had been unable to rig the jury, and the Raven­ite tapes revealed that he believed he could be con­vict­ed of the charges, which could bring him a sen­tence of twen­ty-five years to life. “From ten feet away,” Cherkasky says, “I could hear Got­ti say­ing some­thing like, ‘What the fuck is Bru­cie doing?’“ And Pol­lok says, “As the tri­al wore on, Bruce became a more and more remote sec­ond to Jer­ry in terms of respon­si­bil­i­ty. Jer­ry did nine­ty per cent of the cross, and Bruce would mop up.”
     Shargel con­sid­ers his cross-exam­i­na­tion of the first wit­ness, Vin­cent (Fish) Cafaro, one of his best. A slight, part­ly bald man in glass­es who had been a cap­tain in the Gen­ovese fam­i­ly, Cafaro had orig­i­nal­ly agreed to flip after being arrest­ed for rack­e­teer­ing in 1986, but then he had changed his mind, and two dis­ap­point­ed fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors had him sent to “the hole”—a small iso­la­tion cell at Otisville prison, in upstate New York, where con­di­tions were abom­inable. Shargel pro­posed that after his ordeal Cafaro would say any­thing to please the gov­ern­ment.
     At the defense table, Shargel had thou­sands of pages of doc­u­ments on Cafaro, includ­ing all his pri­or sworn state­ments, and he caught Cafaro in numer­ous incon­sis­ten­cies. Dur­ing the cross, Cherkasky kept ris­ing to object, and was repeat­ed­ly over­ruled; final­ly, he stood up and was momen­tar­i­ly speech­less. “Is he leav­ing?” Shargel asked. Cafaro, in his direct exam­i­na­tion, had described his induc­tion cer­e­mo­ny into the Mafia, and had men­tioned that there was alco­hol on the table. Shargel asked what it was for. “When they prick your fin­ger, it bleeds, and you use the alco­hol to stop the blood,” Cafaro said. Shargel gave him a Jack Ben­ny look, and said, “In oth­er words, you were going to get into the Mafia, but you didn’t want to infect your fin­ger?”
     Shargel made Cafaro revis­it the tor­ment inflict­ed on him by fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors, and when he was through Cafaro sound­ed like a bro­ken man.

     Q.: You hat­ed those pros­e­cu­tors, didn’t you?
     A.: I still do.
     Q.: You wished they’d get lep­rosy, didn’t you?
     A.: Yeah.… Small holes. And get big­ger and big­ger.…
     Q.: Month after month, you were in this six-by-eleven cell, right?… These two men, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Unit­ed States government…were tor­tur­ing you?… There were times in the win­ter when you were freez­ing to death?… And they didn’t give you prop­er clothes?… Just a jump­suit?… You didn’t even have socks?… And your feet were cold?… That was in the win­ter, but then the sum­mer came…you’re in that cell…and the door is closed, and the guard’s say­ing, “Lock down! Lock down!,” and you can’t breathe because there is no air?
     A.: Right.

     Shargel came up with sev­er­al ploys for attack­ing the tapes, and one was par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive. Edward Wright, a police inves­ti­ga­tor, had reviewed the tape tran­scripts, and he had revised one of them after repeat­ed lis­ten­ing over the years, adding the name Jim­my Coo­nan. Shargel set out to prove that the revi­sion was the prod­uct of wish­ful think­ing. He walked over to the black­board and wrote “Psy­chic.” He asked Wright to define the word, erased the board, and wrote “Side­kick.” Then he sprang his trap: “Do you under­stand that I just pro­nounced ‘side­kick’ and ‘psy­chic’ exact­ly the same?… Is it not true, Inves­ti­ga­tor Wright, that you may hear what you want to hear when you’re lis­ten­ing to that tape?”
     The jury delib­er­at­ed three days and acquit­ted Got­ti and Guer­ri­eri on all counts. Sev­er­al jurors told Man­hat­tan Lawyer that they were sure the defen­dants were mob­sters but that the unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of the tape tran­scripts had giv­en them rea­son to doubt the spe­cif­ic charges.
     “When we were going to tri­al, our whole focus was on Bruce Cut­ler, because he had made the pre­vi­ous Got­ti tri­al into a cir­cus,” Cherkasky says. “We suc­ceed­ed in defang­ing Bruce, and then found we had to deal with Jerry’s bril­liance and sar­casm, which we weren’t pre­pared to do. In ret­ro­spect, we should have tried Got­ti alone and just had Cut­ler there.” Cherkasky shakes his head when the sub­ject of the crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion of Shargel comes up. “It’s a shame. The guy is just so talented.”

ON MARCH 29, 1990, John Got­ti and Bruce Cut­ler spoke in the hall­way of the Raven­ite Social Club. Got­ti was wor­ried. One of the back­up shoot­ers in his mur­der of Paul Castel­lano was a sol­dier named Antho­ny (Tony Roach) Rampino, who had been arrest­ed in 1987 for sell­ing hero­in and sen­tenced to twen­ty-five years to life. Got­ti had learned that Rampino was under sub­poe­na to appear before a fed­er­al grand jury inves­ti­gat­ing the Castel­lano homi­cide, and, while he believed that Rampino would com­mit con­tempt rather than tes­ti­fy, he want­ed Cut­ler to meet with Rampino’s lawyer, David DePetris, just to make sure.
     “He feels he wants to take the con­tempt,” Got­ti said. “But still you—you wake him up, open his eyes.…”
     “I under­stand,” Cut­ler said.
     “Tell him we don’t need anoth­er pho­ny junkie bat­tin’ against us. O.K.?”
     “I under­stand.”
     The dis­cus­sion turned to Ray­mond Patri­ar­ca, Jr., the head of the Patri­ar­ca crime fam­i­ly, of Rhode Island. Got­ti said that if he need­ed to com­mu­ni­cate with the fam­i­ly Cut­ler and Raymond’s lawyer could act as inter­me­di­aries. “So I’m gonna send him a mes­sage, that if I ever wan­na get a mes­sage through to them, or from them, we’ll do it through you,” Got­ti said.
     “O.K.”
     Five days lat­er, Rampino refused to tes­ti­fy and was held in contempt.

JOHN GLEESON was giv­en his chance for a rematch with Got­ti in late 1990, when the Jus­tice Depart­ment award­ed the Raven­ite-tape case to the Brook­lyn Unit­ed States Attorney’s Office. By then, Glee­son had been pro­mot­ed to head of the office’s orga­nized-crime-and-rack­e­teer­ing sec­tion. On Decem­ber 12th, Got­ti was arrest­ed, along with Sal­va­tore Gra­vano and Frank Locas­cio, and charged with, among oth­er things, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the mur­der of Paul Castel­lano.
     At that time, fed­er­al judges were usu­al­ly assigned to cas­es at ran­dom by hav­ing their names pulled, like bin­go balls, from a wheel in the clerk’s office. The judge select­ed to hear the Got­ti case was Shargel’s for­mer law pro­fes­sor, I. Leo Glass­er. Shargel learned the news from Glee­son in a late-night phone call. “I was elat­ed,” Shargel recalls. “Glee­son was bummed out.”
     There were sev­er­al rea­sons for this. Shargel had defend­ed Sam­my Gra­vano in front of Judge Glass­er once before, to an acquit­tal. It was no secret that Glass­er treat­ed Shargel like a favorite pupil in a Tal­mud class: when­ev­er Shargel tried a case in his court­room, Glass­er kept him late to dis­cuss arcane points of law. Beyond that, Glass­er had a rep­u­ta­tion as a lib­er­al: in a civ­il RICO case against the Bonan­no crime fam­i­ly, he had lashed out against the gov­ern­ment for overzeal­ous­ness.
     Glass­er, who is six­ty-nine, is con­sid­ered one of the most schol­ar­ly judges on the fed­er­al bench, and also one of the most can­tan­ker­ous; he is con­stant­ly pulling off his glass­es and forc­ing a pained smile to reg­is­ter impa­tience. He was appoint­ed a fed­er­al judge in 1981, after five years as the dean of Brook­lyn Law School and, ear­li­er, eight years as a Fam­i­ly Court judge. Tough as he is on lawyers, he gen­er­al­ly finds it excru­ci­at­ing to have to impose long prison terms.
     On Jan­u­ary 18, 1991, John Glee­son sub­mit­ted to Judge Glass­er the long, indig­nant brief in which he quot­ed exten­sive­ly from the Raven­ite tapes and moved for the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion of Ger­ald Shargel, Bruce Cut­ler, and John Pol­lok from the Got­ti tri­al on the ground that they were all house coun­sel to the Mob. Glass­er grant­ed the motion, and hand­ed down his opin­ion on August 1st. The lan­guage of the opin­ion was almost as angry as Gleeson’s, and some read­ers thought they detect­ed the anger of a man who felt betrayed. (Glass­er insists, how­ev­er, that he “intend­ed noth­ing per­son­al against Shargel,” whom he calls “per­haps one of the best crim­i­nal-defense lawyers I’ve ever seen.”) Glass­er wrote that “the only con­clu­sions to be drawn are that the lawyers rep­re­sent not mere­ly an indi­vid­ual client, but the enter­prise with which that indi­vid­ual is asso­ci­at­ed and receive instruc­tions cal­cu­lat­ed to fur­ther the inter­ests of that enter­prise.” The tape excerpts “reflect Gotti’s resolve that the lawyers under­stand that their con­cern must be not only for their client, but that they ‘got no right [to] jeop­ar­dize oth­er peo­ple’ by their rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” and Glass­er quot­ed Got­ti as ask­ing Shargel, “Who you work­ing for?”
     Glass­er found evi­dence that Got­ti had paid all three lawyers to rep­re­sent peo­ple oth­er than him­self, writ­ing, “That bene­fac­tor pay­ments have indeed been made to Shargel, Cut­ler and Pol­lok is a con­clu­sion the jury can read­i­ly and jus­ti­fi­ably reach.” On Jan­u­ary 4, 1990, Got­ti spoke of pay­ing Shargel to defend Tony Lee Guer­ri­eri, and else­where on the tape he claimed he had told Shargel, “I gave youse three hun­dred thou­sand in one year. Youse didn’t defend me. I wasn’t even men­tioned in none of these fuck­ing things.” Got­ti also spoke of pay­ing “thou­sands of dol­lars” to John Pollok—or, as he called him, “this fuckin’ Pollok”—to han­dle the appeals for two Gam­bi­no-fam­i­ly mem­bers. The only evi­dence Glass­er cit­ed that Cut­ler got bene­fac­tor pay­ments came not from the tapes but from an asser­tion by Michael Coiro that he had nev­er paid Cut­ler to defend him.
     Glass­er agreed with Glee­son that Gotti’s state­ment about pay­ing his lawyers “under the table” was admis­si­ble evi­dence to sup­port the tax-fraud charge in Gotti’s indict­ment. He wrote, “A jury might well con­clude… that the lawyers aid­ed and abet­ted Gotti’s tax fraud by not report­ing the mon­eys he pays them. The clear impli­ca­tion that they, too, were com­mit­ting crimes—‘Every time you take a client, anoth­er one of us on, you’re break­ing the law’—gives rise… to a seri­ous poten­tial for con­flict which jus­ti­fies dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion.”
     Glass­er ignored a few of Gleeson’s charges. Glee­son described Shargel as a “con­duit of infor­ma­tion to John Got­ti,” with­out cit­ing any infor­ma­tion that had been obtained ille­git­i­mate­ly. Glee­son also alleged that Got­ti and Gra­vano “placed” an attor­ney in Shargel’s firm. Shargel hired Nicholas Gra­vante, Jr., the son of the tax lawyer who tes­ti­fied at Gravano’s 1985 tax tri­al, after Gra­vano and Got­ti men­tioned that Nick, Jr., was look­ing for a job. Gleeson’s sug­ges­tion of some­thing sin­is­ter in Gravante’s hir­ing seems friv­o­lous. Gra­vante grad­u­at­ed with hon­ors from Duke and Colum­bia Law School, had been offered a job as an assis­tant Unit­ed States Attor­ney by Rudolph Giu­liani, and, when Shargel hired him, was an asso­ciate at Cra­vath, Swaine & Moore—Gleeson’s for­mer law firm.
     Bruce Cut­ler says that it would be unwise for him to dis­cuss the disqualification—“Don’t start me off, because I have strong feel­ings about it”—but he does con­tend that he was nev­er paid by any­one to rep­re­sent Coiro. “I did it because it was the right thing to do,” he says.
     John Pol­lok also denies receiv­ing bene­fac­tor pay­ments; regard­less of what Got­ti said on tape, Pol­lok asserts, “he nev­er paid me for any­thing.” He is angry for sub­ject­ing him­self to the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion in the first place. “As the law per­son, I could have opt­ed not to sit in the court­room, but my ego got the bet­ter of me,” he says. “In one short, swift affi­davit by an assis­tant U.S. Attor­ney who didn’t even know who I was, and one deci­sion by a court, my rep­u­ta­tion was destroyed.”
     With­in three months of Shargel’s dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion as Sam­my Gravano’s lawyer, Gra­vano decid­ed to turn infor­mant. Gravano’s defec­tion remains a source of anx­i­ety for Shargel. One after­noon, while hav­ing a drink with the attor­ney Jeff Hoff­man, Shargel sud­den­ly asked, “How long do you think Gra­vano was in the gov­ern­ment offices before the sub­ject turned to me? Fif­teen min­utes?” Shargel has an addi­tion­al rea­son to lament Gravano’s coop­er­a­tion agree­ment. Lawyers are not per­mit­ted to cross-exam­ine their own for­mer clients, so Shargel can­not par­tic­i­pate in numer­ous cas­es in which Gra­vano is a sched­uled wit­ness. “This guy has cost me a small for­tune,” he says.
     Shargel admits that he expect­ed all along to be dis­qual­i­fied but says he was stunned by the “tenor and tone” of Judge Glasser’s deci­sion. “I told myself, He won’t do it like Judge Sofaer; he’ll just gen­tly ease me out the door. Instead, he kicked my ass down the stairs.” Shargel says he has nev­er had a full oppor­tu­ni­ty to answer the charges in the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion, and will not do so now, because, in the event that he is indict­ed, it would be fool­ish to give away his defense.
     If Shargel is indict­ed for tak­ing mon­ey under the table, or for some oth­er crime sug­gest­ed in the Raven­ite tapes, he can prob­a­bly be expect­ed to chal­lenge the reli­a­bil­i­ty of Gotti’s pro­nounce­ments. Got­ti is not always to be tak­en lit­er­al­ly. To give one exam­ple, in the tape dat­ed Jan­u­ary 4, 1990, Got­ti com­plained about Shargel “pluck­ing” him the night before for his fee to defend Guer­ri­eri. But the Jan­u­ary 3rd con­ver­sa­tion was also record­ed, and when Shargel named his fee—seventy-five thou­sand dol­lars for the two-week trial—Gotti seemed to won­der if that was enough. “That’s for the whole ball of wax?” he asked, and then added, “Win the fuckin’ case, I’ll buy ya a house. I got mon­ey.”
     Still, Shargel has nev­er raised a cred­i­ble defense against the charge of being a house coun­sel. Whether or not he was pluck­ing Got­ti, he was being paid by the boss of the fam­i­ly to rep­re­sent one of his sol­diers, and so was lend­ing cre­dence to Gotti’s claim that he paid Shargel to defend oth­er sol­diers. And in return for this sup­ply of busi­ness Got­ti clear­ly expect­ed Shargel to place the inter­ests of the enter­prise first. Shargel is unwill­ing to acknowl­edge the obvi­ous con­flict of inter­est, and his ratio­nale is uncon­vinc­ing: “If I rep­re­sent the trea­sur­er of a cor­po­ra­tion, and he wants to do what the C.E.O. says, then I’m try­ing the case the way the trea­sur­er wants.” But what if the under­ling does not want to obey the boss? “I’ve nev­er had that sit­u­a­tion,” Shargel says.

AT STUB’s BAR & RESTAURANT, in Brook­lyn Heights, John Glee­son drank a mug of beer, watched a Knicks game out of the cor­ner of his eye, and chatted—cautiously at first, then more and more animatedly—with a mem­ber of the press. After the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion, Glee­son had gone on to win the case against Got­ti and send him to prison for life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. Fol­low­ing the con­vic­tion, Glee­son turned down numer­ous requests for inter­views; he does not seek pub­lic­i­ty. He just want­ed to do his job, he said, and con­tin­ue the fight against the Gam­bi­nos, the Luc­ch­eses, and the Colombos—a fight that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment appears to be win­ning. “From a pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al stand­point, we’re slaugh­ter­ing ’em,” Glee­son said. “We’re kickin’ ass and takin’ names.”
     After anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion at Stub’s, sev­er­al weeks lat­er, Glee­son agreed to a for­mal inter­view at his office. On the appoint­ed day, he apol­o­gized for being late, but he had been tied up with Zachary Carter, the new Brook­lyn Unit­ed States Attor­ney. He failed to men­tion that Carter had just pro­mot­ed him to head of the entire crim­i­nal divi­sion. Gleeson’s office was messier than one might have expect­ed. “Read any­thing on my desk and I’ll kill you,” he said, in such a way that it was not quite fun­ny. He lis­tened to the first ques­tion, pon­dered it for a long time, then announced that the inter­view was over. He said he did not care to be dragged into a debate about house coun­sel, because it might “dig­ni­fy” the views of those who are house coun­sel. He made it clear that he regret­ted the frank­ness of his con­ver­sa­tions at Stub’s, and that he would pre­fer to be left out of this account alto­geth­er.
     Even at Stub’s, Gleeson’s most per­sis­tent top­ic had been his dis­trust of the news media to “get it right.” He went on at some length about a news-paper col­umn by Mur­ray Kemp­ton that had described John Got­ti as “a states­man.”
     “Don’t get me wrong,” Glee­son said. “I don’t care that much. I’ve got my job, and I love what I do—it’s pub­lic ser­vice to the max. But, you know, I walk to sidebars”—conferences with the judge that are out of earshot of the jury—“and John Got­ti is call­ing my wife a junkie and my moth­er a whore and me a fag­got. I mean, I’ve pros­e­cut­ed a lot of pieces-a-shit. And nev­er have I pros­e­cut­ed any­body with less class than John Got­ti. Just a com­plete­ly class­less thug. And the press doesn’t want to see it. When he got con­vict­ed, he was a ‘states­man.’ He took it nobly. I mean, he is some­thing unique—I’m one of the first to admit that. He had a lev­el of charis­ma and a way of com­mand­ing atten­tion, not just with­in the Mob but with­in a court­room. But he’s a punk, you know?”
     On a sim­i­lar note, it had irri­tat­ed Glee­son to read over and over again that Bruce Cut­ler had won an acquit­tal for John Got­ti in the case that Glee­son had tried with Diane Giacalone. After all, he point­ed out, a juror had since been con­vict­ed of tak­ing a bribe. “Bruce is an inter­est­ing guy,” Glee­son said. “He’s a ter­ri­ble fuckin’ lawyer. Just ter­ri­ble. I mean, the irony of the whole dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion thing is that it was per­ceived as a tac­ti­cal effort to get Bruce out of the case. All along, we thought, If tac­tics were the guide here, we’d be get­tin’ Jer­ry out and leav­ing Bruce in. The press? It’s to get Bruce out. We were dyin’ to get to con­vict John­ny with Bruce at his side. Who wouldn’t be?”
     Glee­son agreed that the dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion motion had been a gam­ble, because of Judge Glasser’s fond­ness for Shargel. “Oh! Jer­ry walked on water in that court­room. One of the risks of that motion was that someone—it was gonna be either Jer­ry or me—was gonna lose a lot of cap­i­tal in that court­room once that motion was filed. And a lot of peo­ple were bet­tin’ it was gonna be me. But the thing that nobody appreciated—and I don’t mean this in a demean­ing way—is what a slave Judge Glass­er is to the law.”
     Noth­ing seemed to upset Glee­son more than to hear him­self described as a zealot by mem­bers of the crim­i­nal-defense bar. What they real­ly were try­ing to say, Glee­son claimed, was that he refused to com­pro­mise his stan­dards in the name of col­le­gial­i­ty. “There are pros­e­cu­tors who are com­mit­ted to pub­lic ser­vice, and there are pros­e­cu­tors who envi­sion them­selves three years from now being a col­league of these peo­ple,” Glee­son said. “I’ll nev­er be a fuck­ing col­league of these peo­ple. I don’t want to be. So I don’t real­ly give a shit what they think. Maybe it was the case five or ten or fif­teen years ago, as part of some broth­er­hood thing, that pros­e­cu­tors wouldn’t apply the facts of the law and seek the relief that was appro­pri­ate. Maybe there was enough col­le­gial­i­ty so that even though Jer­ry has tak­en a lot of mon­ey under the table, accord­ing to his client, the pros­e­cu­tor would look the oth­er way. I sup­pose there are pros­e­cu­tors now who are gonna say, ‘O.K., Jer­ry. Fine.’ But I don’t hap­pen to be one of them. It’s not that I don’t like Jer­ry. I like him a lot. But the law’s the law. And the facts are the facts.”

HOW DID I ALLOW THIS to hap­pen to me?” Shargel says. He con­sid­ers the ques­tion. “I guess it comes with the ter­ri­to­ry. You can’t be in this busi­ness if you’re timid or afraid. I’m not timid and I’m not afraid. Have I been will­ing to do things that oth­er lawyers are unwill­ing to do? Absolute­ly. Have I been will­ing to go the extra yard for a client? Absolute­ly. And am I will­ing to engage in con­duct that may be sub­ject to a neg­a­tive inter­pre­ta­tion? Yeah, absolute­ly. Clients hire me because I’ll do any­thing that the law will allow, with­out con­cern for how it’s gonna make me look. So if you’re ask­ing me, Why has so tal­ent­ed and able a lawyer put him­self in these com­pro­mis­ing positions?—that’s why. Because I think I’m doing what a real crim­i­nal-defense lawyer should do. I don’t prac­tice law by cov­er­ing my own ass.”
     For his own part, Shargel insists that his noto­ri­ety has not come at too great a price. “Ter­ry once asked me an inter­est­ing ques­tion,” he says. “If some­one came to me and said, ‘We can turn back the clock, and you were nev­er involved in the 1990 Got­ti case, and there­fore you were nev­er on those tapes or in those head­lines, and you nev­er suf­fered the indig­ni­ty of Judge Glasser’s opinion’—would you take the offer? And, even with the lux­u­ri­ous ben­e­fit of hind­sight, the answer is no. It was too excit­ing to be in that case. And I’ll tell you some­thing else. If John Gotti’s con­vic­tion were reversed, and he were sit­ting in the Raven­ite club six months from now, I’d go there again.”
     When asked about the price of his noto­ri­ety for his chil­dren, Shargel grows reflec­tive. “I think about that,” he says. “And when I do think about it it both­ers me, because I cher­ish the rela­tion­ship I have with my kids. I don’t believe they are, at bot­tom, ashamed of me. Things have hap­pened that are painful, but that’s life. And, in a cer­tain sense, I think it builds strength and char­ac­ter. I grew up in a bucol­ic New Jer­sey set­ting, in a typ­i­cal fifties tract house, with a Chevro­let, and plas­tic on the fur­ni­ture. I didn’t know any­one in my entire child­hood who had ever been to jail. I nev­er even knew any­one who had been divorced. My father was as steady and con­ven­tion­al a man as you could ever find. He’d nev­er do some­thing that would embar­rass me. And, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I ben­e­fit­ted from all this. I don’t think a Beaver Cleaver child­hood is some­thing I want­ed to give to my kids. Maybe you can say I have a screw loose. Maybe it says I’m not the per­fect father or the per­fect hus­band, because I’ve brought some degree of grief or anx­i­ety to my fam­i­ly. But I would do it again. I’d do it again.”

THE WEEKEND after John Glee­son was pro­mot­ed to head of the crim­i­nal divi­sion, the Shargels relaxed at their sum­mer home in East Hampton—an airy post-and-beam con­struc­tion, of unfin­ished wood. A Neil Young tape was play­ing on a boom box. Jer­ry Shargel was dressed in shorts and Top-Siders, and was jaun­ty, as usu­al. Ter­ry wore a black one-piece swim­suit, and was ner­vous, as usu­al. The pre­vi­ous morning’s News was lying on a side table, and a sto­ry on page 3 report­ed that Bruce Cutler’s can­celled checks and bank records had just been sub­poe­naed by Gleeson’s grand jury, and those of the “high-pow­ered attor­ney” Ger­ald Shargel would not be far behind.
     Shargel made light of it, and Ter­ry did, too, but Glee­son seemed almost to hov­er over them, and present­ly they fell to talk­ing about him. Ter­ry said she was wor­ried about “the way Glee­son ticks” and “what he has to prove.”
     Shargel tried to reas­sure her: “I don’t think Glee­son could with­stand the embar­rass­ment of los­ing. If he allowed him­self the pos­si­bil­i­ty—”
     “Glee­son is so self-right­eous, can his mind accept the pos­si­bil­i­ty that he might lose?” Ter­ry said, inter­rupt­ing. There was a pause, and then she touched her husband’s hand and said, “You’re alive.”
     Shargel left to run a few errands, and Terry’s anx­i­ety over­flowed: “Can I con­ceive of Jer­ry being indict­ed? I can talk about it. Jerry’s indict­ed today—how will I wake up tomor­row morn­ing? It’s very dif­fi­cult. But I know we can han­dle it. Nobody’s going to die. The worst thing that could hap­pen is that Jer­ry and I would be sep­a­rat­ed. Maybe that’s denial, but I don’t know any oth­er way to live.” ♦