The Gotti Wars by John Gleeson

Author:John Gleeson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22 THE ARRESTS

When the old Strike Force units were eliminated, all their lawyers were given the option of becoming Assistant U.S. Attorneys. This wasn’t limited to being an AUSA in the district where their Strike Force office was located—they could work as AUSAs anywhere. The New Jersey Strike Force had a young lawyer from Queens who’d been hired straight out of his clerkship. In October 1989, shortly after his arrival in Newark, the chance to be an AUSA in Brooklyn came his way, and he jumped at it. Which is how I ended up with George Stamboulidis.

Had he applied directly, he probably wouldn’t have gotten the job. He had no prosecutorial experience and his credentials on paper were ordinary; he’d gone to Temple Law School and clerked for a district judge there in Philadelphia. But Bob Stewart, the widely respected Strike Force chief in Newark, had seen great potential in him and hired him right off the clerkship.

The potential lay in the combination of several striking characteristics. Stamboulidis was supremely confident without the slightest whiff of arrogance. Even when he wasn’t sure what he was doing, which was not infrequent, he acted like he owned the place. But he was guileless, and pulled it off without offending anyone. And he impressed everyone with his earnestness, willingness to help, and good cheer. These qualities also made him very teachable, and he worked hard to make sure he was taught.

I learned early on that I needed to be clear in what I asked him to do. He came to our office to take on organized crime work, but he knew hardly anything about how to be a prosecutor, so we treated him like any new AUSA and assigned him to some minor cases in the General Crimes Section to cut his teeth. After he’d put in a year there, I took him into the Organized Crime Section. When he sat down in my office for the first time, I asked him what baggage he’d brought with him, and he said he still had a handful of cases to finish up.

“Well, get rid of them,” I said. “We have real criminals to chase here.” I wanted him to plead out his current workload, with favorable plea bargains if necessary, so I could get him involved in our work as soon as possible.

A couple of days later he told me he’d cleared all his cases. I was pleased, but slightly surprised, as I’d thought it would take him longer to arrange the deals. When I asked him how he’d managed it so fast, he said he’d presented the cases to the grand jury and got them to “no true bill” them.

“You did what?”

“I got them to refuse to indict.”

This was bad. “No true bills” are rare in the federal system. The easiest part of the job is getting an indictment, and it’s embarrassing to fail even once in a career, let alone on multiple cases simultaneously.

“Why did you do that?”

“You told me to get rid of my cases.

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