In the past few years, virtually all the leaders of the old Mafia families have been imprisoned or indicted, and police are now targeting the new organized-crime groups that run the U.S.'s cocaine traffic. The nation's mobsters and drug racketeers never needed good lawyers more than they do today. To law-enforcement officials, some of those lawyers are as suspect as the mobsters. Last week a staff study for the President's Commission on Organized Crime charged that a small group of "renegade attorneys" helps supply the "life-support system of organized crime."
The lawyers have made themselves "integral parts" of today's complex criminal enterprises, said the report. They guide the laundering of illicit money through a maze of banks, real estate investments and other transactions. They provide up-to-date counsel on how to minimize legal exposure--for example, by drilling operatives on what to do and say when they are arrested. Using the shield of attorneyclient confidentiality, full-time Mob lawyers lend their offices as unbugged meeting places for the planning of new schemes. When lawyers commit crimes to "protect the leaders of criminal cartels," said Irving Kaufman, commission chairman and New York federal appeals court judge, "the result is not only a crisis of confidence in the bar, but a law- enforcement problem of serious magnitude."
Many ethically unsullied lawyers represent gangsters, of course. "The broad- brush effect of the term Mob lawyer is totally unfair," says James La Rossa, a prominent litigator who is counseling one of the nine men accused last month of being members of a national Mafia governing board. If no man is above the law, says Michael Rovell of Chicago's Jenner & Block, "the corollary is that no man should be below the law either. Somebody has to represent these people." But, acknowledges La Rossa, "there are lawyers who are climbing into bed with mobsters and doing things they shouldn't do." Some law- enforcement officials are suspicious when a large percentage of a lawyer's clients are gangsters. Says New York City-based U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani: "You don't make your living that way and not get involved in shady things."
Kaufman commission staff members estimate that the organized-crime bar consists of about 200 lawyers nationwide, with the most notorious numbering about 25 and based in Miami, New York, Chicago and Las Vegas. The burgeoning drug trade has spawned a new, younger group of organized-crime lawyers. "The image of the black-hat mouthpiece who can make witnesses disappear is completely out of date," says one Kaufman commission staff member. The new breed are sophisticated wheeler-dealers who help cocaine or heroin kingpins to conceal and invest their profits. They "see themselves as the Errol Flynns of their day, daring and bold," says another Kaufman staffer.
A kind of class warfare has broken out between some pricey drug attorneys and their prosecutor peers, who tend to regard such lawyers, honest or dishonest, with indiscriminate contempt. At a recent Florida meeting attended by 200 drug defense lawyers, one attorney denounced harassing prosecutors as "young scumheads." A speaker at the conference, Howard Weitzman, the highly regarded defender of John De Lorean, said that many prosecutors are simply vindictive: "You're driving the Mercedes; they're driving the Chevy Nova. You're everything they want to be and can't be."