The Defense Lawyer by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 53

John Carneglia liked lawyers who yelled at judges.

Barry Slotnick was standing next to Diane Giacalone at a sidebar with Judge Nickerson. Carneglia had been recorded talking about lawyer Mike Coiro, who’d previously represented both Carneglia and John Gotti and was later sentenced to fifteen years in prison for crimes including RICO Act violations, and Giacalone was seeking to have the wiretap transcript admitted into evidence. Nickerson read Carneglia’s transcribed words aloud: “I like him, because he doesn’t just say, ‘Yes, Your Honor,’ ‘No, Your Honor.’ He gets up and yells at the judge. That’s the kind of lawyer I like.”

Carneglia, like other mobsters, sneered at the collegiality of most trials, in which defense lawyers and prosecutors, during breaks in a day’s proceedings, will banter and gossip with the same people they’d been attacking just moments before.

“We’re beginning to understand the case a little better,” Giacalone said sardonically.

The prosecutor had planned to lead off her case with one of her star witnesses, Sal Polisi. But the defense had successfully postponed his testimony, convincing Judge Nickerson that Giacalone had improperly withheld tapes of Polisi speaking with an author about a potential biography and that the defense lawyers needed time to listen to the tapes to properly prepare for Polisi’s testimony. Slotnick was thrilled: this sort of early tactical victory in a trial could knock the prosecution off its game.

Instead of starting with a bang, Giacalone’s case had begun tediously, with procedural skirmishes like this one and relatively unimportant witnesses testifying about comparatively unsexy components of the case—such as illegal cigarette dealing—involving the least known of the defendants. As a string of detectives and ex-detectives testified about these matters, the men at the defense table, sensing blood in the water, had become boisterous.

The mob was no-holds-barred when it came to legal proceedings. They would do anything to avoid prison, whether it meant fixing juries or killing witnesses or co-opting their lawyers. Some lawyers, such as Coiro, were pliable and willing to cross ethical and legal lines for their clients. Others weren’t. So the Mafia ended up having two kinds of lawyers: strategic brains such as Slotnick and the kind of guys who were willing to claw it out in the trenches. (Many of the cocounsels in this case would run into disciplinary or legal trouble in later years.)

Now, at the sidebar, Slotnick said, “I really don’t think it’s important to know that Mr. Carneglia doesn’t like high-priced sharpshooting lawyers and he likes a lawyer who yells at a judge.”

“But that’s a part of it,” Nickerson said. “I mean also, that very thing is refuted by your presence in the case.”

“I’ve become a witness in the case,” Slotnick said.

“High-priced,” Giacalone suggested Nickerson had meant.

“I mean the ‘Yes, Your Honor, no, Your Honor,’” Slotnick said.

“I haven’t heard you yell at a judge,” Nickerson said.

“I just don’t think it’s relevant to this proceeding,” Slotnick said. “I think it’s idle gossip.”

“Tell your client I’m very disappointed that you’re not shouting,” Nickerson said drily.

“He is, too, Your Honor,” Slotnick said.

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