It started in Bronx Supreme Court, with 26 defendants and almost two years worth of wiretaps.  The wires captured plenty of chatter, including a call from me to my mother to wish her happy birthday on my ride home from an arraignment.  I was using my client’s cellphone because the battery was dead on mine.  In the course of my day’s work, I had forgotten all about my mother’s birthday, and my experience was that this was a very bad thing to do.  So I borrowed the phone and called.  She was very happy I did.

In the transcripts, I was noted as “criminal lawyer” and Mom was “unidentified female.”  The call bore the notation “possible code for narcotics.”  What a laugh I got out of that one.  The judge too.  He had a mother as well.

I represented the lead defendant.  We were able to find lawyers for all 26 defendants in the case, and the lawyers all knew each other.  While there were numerous big names on the case, they were all happy to let me do the heavy lifting and ride my coattails on the wiretap motions.  We held the group together, united in the belief that we could beat the case.  Not one defendant flipped.  Not one lawyer suggested that their client should flip.  They were facing 25 years to life, but they held firm.

Of the 26 defendants, one had a few grams of coke on him when he was picked up.  He got a bullet (local slang for a year).  The rest, including my lead defendant, walked.  It was a glorious outcome, and was the product of two things:  Hard work and the fact that the defendants stuck it out.

A year later, the defendants had a reunion.  Not at a nice hotel catering hall, but in the marshals’ holding cell at Foley Square.  The feds took the conspiracy, under the reverse silver platter doctrine, since they could.  It would have been a terrible shame to let all those perfectly good eavesdropping warrants go to waste.

This time, the defendants in the case were tapped out.  The cost of defending in the Bronx, and the loss of income during the course of the case, left most of them without the wherewithal to retain that exceptional group of lawyers who had done so well for them the first time around.  So, lawyers were appointed to represent them.  Others hired inexpensive lawyers with their limited funds. 

By the arraignment, a few defendants were missing.  By the next appearance, a few more.  Within a few months, there were only 3 of us left in the well.  We looked at each other with the recognition that what the government couldn’t do to our clients, their friends could.  We were sunk.  There was nothing left.

After getting a huge win on a motion to sever, I was able to create some real leverage for my client.  But he was a smart client and understood that the trial would be a parade of his closest and most trusted friends, all working for the other side.  He asked me, and I told him, that the only reasonable thing to do with his newfound leverage was to save himself.  He knew that I wasn’t the lawyer to do it, and thanked me for my efforts.  A new lawyer took over the case from me within a few days and when the judge asked me why I was seeking to be relieved, I explained that the defendant had chosen a different direction.  She graciously understood.

Would we have beaten back the conspiracy a second time in federal court?  Who knows.  But we never got the chance to find out.  The case was deeply flawed.  The eavesdropping was problematic.  There was little regard for the Constitution.  But none of this mattered once the defendants got on line outside the US Attorney’s office.

From what I’m told, this group of 26 defendants produced more than 100 prosecutions.  Some drew in friends and relatives of others.  Some included individuals who were innocent or peripheral to the claimed conspiracies.  It doesn’t matter.  Once swept into the net, fear overcomes their will to challenge.  I don’t know how many generations of prosecutions grew from this original group of 26, but it could easily include 1000 other defendants, or more. 

I wonder how many constitutional violations were ignored in the process.  After all, the government need not worry to much about the Constitution, or even the proof, when they have a long line of defendants outside their office waiting to talk.