A federal judge goes on trial in Nevada on bribery charges
Judge Harry Claiborne seemed at ease last week in Courtroom 2 of the gray marble federal courthouse in Reno. He leaned back in his chair, stroked a finger across his lips, and listened serenely to the testimony in a criminal trial. But Claiborne, 66, chief judge of Nevada's U.S. District Court, was observing the proceedings from a new perspective. He was not the presiding judge, but the defendant, the second sitting federal judge in U.S. history to be tried for offenses allegedly committed while serving on the bench. The charges against Claiborne: taking bribes, obstructing justice and filing false income tax returns.
Claiborne's defenders say that the judge is the target of a vendetta by federal authorities who are unhappy with some of his rulings. Among them: Claiborne's occasional refusal to issue search warrants and his dismissal of several cases brought before him by the U.S. Government. Oscar Goodman, Claiborne's chief counsel, says that the judge is a victim of the long-running feud between federal lawmen and the Nevada Establishment. Says he: "The feds have tried to create the picture that we're all crooks and Mafia soldiers crawling around here."
His opinion is shared by many local citizens. Asserts Hank Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun: "If you're a Nevadan, you're guilty until proved innocent." Federal investigators adamantly defend their actions. Nevada, says retired FBI Agent Joseph Yablonsky, u who headed the Claiborne probe, has too long operated like "a foreign protectorate ... We've had to plant the American flag in the desert."
Federal law officials began concentrating on the state in the 1960s when an influx of Teamster money fueled an explosive growth in Las Vegas casinos and heightened the interest of organized crime in gambling. By the 1970s, the FBI, the IRS and the SEC had all launched investigations. The federal-local battle was joined in 1979 when U.S. agents began to track Claiborne.
Appointed to the bench in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, Claiborne had been a highly successful local criminal lawyer, numbering reputed Las Vegas mobsters among his satisfied clients. A twice-divorced bachelor with a taste for young women, Claiborne owned three cars and lived in a $250,000 home. From the start, he was not overly hospitable to federal outsiders. He once threatened to jail an IRS agent and an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and publicly assailed the Justice Department's local Organized Crime Strike Force for going after "little fish." When the agents went after Big Fish Claiborne, they looked into reports that he had once used a private detective to bug illegally the home of a former girlfriend, but a grand jury failed to indict the judge. "A bunch of crooks out to destroy Nevada," said Claiborne of the investigators.