inumumemimmow
26
Friday, May 4, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Lawyer
Continued from preceding page
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wasn't even a marginal student when
attending New York's Yeshiva High
School. He was worse. He slipped by
on C's and D's in math and F's in
conduct. He scored so well on
standardized tests that his teachers
assumed he was cheating. He was a
world-class street fighter. His future
was doubtful.
A successful career that would
take him from Brooklyn's Boro Park
was so questionable that
neighborhood girls had orders to stay
away from him. If they wanted to
marry a doctor or a dentist of the
future, there were other boys on the
block.
Dershowitz's one saving grace
was his mouth. Swift with a glib
remark, his high school principal
suggested that he become a lawyer —
"something where you can use your
mouth and don't need much brains."
Dershowitz passed the entrance
exam for Brooklyn College. He
blossomed academically and was
passed on to Yale Law School. There,
he edited the law journal and
finished first in his class. He applied
to 32 Wall Street firms for a job. He
was rejected by 32 Wall Street firms.
Dershowitz later blamed this on
anti-Semitism.
Even without Wall Street,
Dershowitz did well. He clerked for
U.S. Appeals Court Judge David
Bazelon and Supreme Court Justice
Arthur Goldberg. At '25, he was
invited to join the faculty of the
Harvard Law School.
Dershowitz lost his jurisprudent
virginity 12 years ago. He said he has
always had "a cynical and skeptical
streak" about American justice. But
he had no idea of the (system's)
outright lies and judicial distortions"
until he was asked by the father of an
old friend from Boro Park to defend
his son on a murder charge. Sheldon
Siegel, a member of the Jewish
Defense League, was charged by New
York City police with blowing up the
offices of impressario Sol Hurok. The
JDL wished to protest Hurok's
sponsorship of Russian performers
touring the United States. Hurok
was uninjured; a 27-year-old Jewish
employee was killed.
Early on, the suspicion dawned
that the police had an informer
within the JDL. Then, "a hideous
idea occured": the informer was one
of the accused. That explained whx,
the prosecutors were highly
confident and why no deals were
being offered. Dershowitz gradually
— and correctly — concluded that the
informer was his own client, an agent
provocateur planted by the police.
Siegel eventually admitted his
complicity with the police, telling
Dershowitz that he could not testify
against his best friends. Police
threats against his life, he claimed,
had forced him to squeal. Not even
his lawyer could believe Siegel's tale:
Dershowitz was still an innocent. He
still thought there was justice in the
American justice system.
Siegel wouldn't tattle on his
friends. But he would squeal on the
cops. He had hidden a tape recorder
in his car and secretly recorded
conversations with the police in
which they threatened to kill him if
he ever turned on them. They had
also guaranteed that Siegel would
beat the murder rap if he lied in
court. "An officer of the law telling ,
witness to lie on the witness stand!"
said the still-appalled Dershowitz.
The crucial conversation in
which the police ordered Siegel to
perjure himself had not been
recorded. But Dershowitz still had
the street savvy he had picked up
back in Boro Park; it had never been
intellectualized out of him in the Ivy
League. He used it to trap Santa
Parola, the cop who had gotten Siegel
to tattle on the JDL. Parola, a
detective who had investigated every
major bombing in New York, had
also come from Boro Park. A tough
Italian kid, he had lived on the other
side of the elevated tracks and made
periodic raids into the Jewish
section.
In the courtroom, it was one Boro
Park kid against another.
Dershowitz asked Parola some
questions that he knew he would lie
about and for which the true answers
were on Siegel's tapes. After Parola
lied, Dershowitz played the tape.
Parola was shocked. Then
Dershowitz asked him whether he
had told Siegel to lie and that he
would help him beat the murder rap.
Assuming that conversation was also
recorded, Parola confessed. The U.S.
Court of Appeals later ruled that the
government had illegally entrapped
Siegel and charges against all
defendants were dismissed.
"I did not participate in the
victory party that the Jewish
Defense League had," Dershowitz
said. "I sat for an hour in the
courtroom with tears in my eyes. I did
not think about Sheldon Siegel. I
thought abour Iris Cohen (the
woman who -had been killed by the
bomb in Hurok's office). It was a
terrible tragedy, but I had a job to
do."
Dershowitz's job — the job of
defense attorney — frequently puts
him in the -position of defending the
guilty: "I've had very few innocent
clients. I sometimes even root for the
other side. Anyone who wants to
spend his life defending the innocent
has to go into a different professior
There are just not enough of them . ■
go around."
"Being a criminal lawyer is very
difficult," Dershowitz admitted.
"People ask me all the time; What's a
nice guy like you defending people
like that?' Defending Nazis.
Defending pornographers.
Defending killers. It's a very difficult
role to be in. I don't enjoy defending
terrible people. I don't enjoy it any
more than would a surgeon working
on a terrorist or a leading gangster.
But a surgeon's job is to heal and cure