John Lennon vs. the U.S.A. by Leon Wildes

Author:Leon Wildes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Bar Association
Published: 2016-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

14

The Hammer Falls

Frankly, we find it more than a little hard to believe that authorities could find no legal way to resolve what is after all a highly unusual set of circumstances. Further, we submit, if the law does not reflect the human equities, it is a law that needs to be changed.

—Wall Street Journal editorial, March 28, 1973

By the third week of March 1973, more than a year had passed since I’d met John and Yoko, not to mention ten months since the hearings adjourned, before Immigration Judge Fieldsteel finally reached a decision. I found out about it through a phone call from Sol Marks, who said, “Leon, I’m having a press conference at which the decision will be read. We’re inviting you and Mr. Schiano, the prosecuting attorney, to be there and comment on the decision.”

I had to wonder about my old friend Sol. He had spent almost forty years in the INS, and he’d never held a press conference before. He was strictly an enforcement officer, a position which suited him well. Sol did not appear to me to have the personality of a public relations person for the INS—I couldn’t see him in such a role. The odds seemed pretty good that he had an inside track on how the case was going to break—and wanted to make the most of it.

John and Yoko were not in New York. In an attempt to heal the strain on their relationship caused by the difficult year just past, they’d left their place in Greenwich Village, getting an apartment in the Dakota, a luxury building in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the meantime, they’d gone off to the West Coast.

I called them, however, reporting the situation and telling them where and when the press conference would take place. As for my own tactics, I explained that I would simply show up and decline to be interviewed about the expected decision of the immigration judge. But I had an idea.

In all the controversy that swirled around us, I noticed that the Lennon case attracted coverage not just by the TV and the usual print media, but in in the underground and music press, publications like The Village Voice and Rolling Stone, among many. I asked John and Yoko if reporters from these organs had credentials allowing them into the press conference, and could they contact their friends in the newspaper and magazine world to attend? Then I set about drafting questions, which John and Yoko distributed among friendly reporters, who in turn would present them to Mr. Marks. Also, I hired a stenographer to accompany me to the press conference and record every question asked—and every one of Sol’s answers.

We went to the fourteenth floor of the INS offices, the site of the press conference—the MASH room. This was an acronym for Multiple Accelerated Summary Hearings, a procedure Vinny Schiano successfully campaigned to copy from criminal court. It allowed for much more expeditious treatment of immigration cases. I have to admit, though, that I felt a little uneasy.

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