BADFELLAS: REFLECTIONS ON A LIFE IN THE HALLS OF JUSTICE

by Thomas G. Roth

2023 · Xlibris Corporation

“Badfellas” takes the reader behind the scenes to reveal what it is like to be a trial lawyer in justice’s great arena, the courts of America. Mr. Roth writes from the vantage point of an attorney who had been a prosecutor, defense attorney and civil litigant for more than 40 years. His “badfellas” include drug traffickers, organized criminals, terrorists, murders, a pimp, a pedophile priest, and a TV talk show villain. He chooses 7 of his most intriguing cases and trials to tell his compelling story: • “The Smuggler and the Terrorist Prince”: The prosecution of America’s most wanted drug smuggler who became a hostage aboard an airliner hijacked by Pakistani terrorists. • “Welcome to Palermo”: The prosecution of the first Sicilian Connection heroin importation case, where the top echelon of an entire international smuggling operation was dismantled in coordinated trials in New York and Italy. • “The Charity That Wasn’t”: The trial of a gang of incorrigible criminals and murderers which used a charity as a front for their drug organization. • “Hush Money”: A lawsuit involving a pedophile priest and the Catholic’s Church’s unsuccessful attempts to conceal the clergyman’s crimes. • “The Mouth That Roared”: The defense of a popular television personality who was charged with assaulting a gay rights activist on his show. • “Tony Montana and the Bird Dog”: The defense of an Atlantic City pimp accused of laundering money for a 25-year-old crack kingpin who fancied himself the “Tony Montana” of Queens. • “The Bad Side of Mansfield”: A DEA Agent who faced the travails of a modern-day Job, all orchestrated by a rogue drug informant whose deceitful conduct turned the criminal justice system upside down.

The Gentleman Boss

by Thomas Reeves

2013 · Knopf

“ ‘Chet’ Arthur President of the United States. Good God!” was perhaps the most pithy contemporary reaction to the accession of the twenty-first Chief Executive. It has certainly been the most enduring, even though Arthur himself has remained an enigma—in large part because this shrewd, secretive New Yorker saw to it that many of his private papers were destroyed shortly before he died. Drawing on a wealth of newly discovered documents, Thomas Reeves has no written the definitive, full-scale biography of Arthur, revising our inconsistent assumptions about both him and his era. He gives us, for the first time, the unknown facts about Arthur’s early life: how, before he entered the boss-dominated Republican Party under the tutelage of men like the notorious Roscoe Conkling, this son of an itinerant minister was a model of nineteenth-century youthful idealism, first as a beloved schoolteacher, then as a young lawyer directly involved in the abolitionist struggle, and finally, as a conscientious and honest Quartermaster General for New York during the Civil War. Reeves assiduously plots Arthur’s consistently successful career as a master dealer in patronage and electioneering as a survivor among connivers—a career that culminated in his nomination as James Garfield’s Vice-President and, when Garfield was assassinated, his own White House inauguration, in spite of the great scandal attending his removal from the directorship of the New York Customhouse and the revelation that Garfield’s assassin claimed to be an Arthur supporter. As Reeves makes abundantly clear, this spoilsman supreme, who personified the worst gaudy excesses of the Gilded Age, administered the laws of the land honorably and even disinterestedly—to the chagrin of his fellow bosses and henchmen. Attacked by both Republican friends (the Stalwarts) and Republican foes (the Half-Breeds) and weakened by the fatal Bright’s disease (a fact that was only made public by Reeves himself in 1972), Arthur worked to eliminate extravagant government expenditures, enacted and enforced civil service reform (thus undermining the basis of his own public life), assisted in the birth of a modern navy, and initiated an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy that set precedents for later administrations. Above all, Reeves concludes, Arthur provided calm and reassurance to a nation shocked by Garfield’s murder and beset by recurrent economic depression. Beyond its illuminating portrait of the life and fortunes of Chester Alan Arthur, Gentleman Boss gives a telling account of the politics and politicos that shaped Arthur’s world—the corruption of the Grant, Hayes, and Garfield administrations, as well as Arthur’s own; the civil service reform movement; the internal wars fought within the GOP and the government between the factions led by the vain, caustic, and arrogant Roscoe Conkling and his unrelenting competitor for “office and plunder,” James G. Blaine, the Plumed Knight from Maine—a world where “men manipulated, plotted, and stole for power and prestige and the riches that bought both.

The Enemy Within

by Michael Thomas Smith

2011 · University of Virginia Press

Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of corruption in the Civil War North provide a unique window into Northern culture in the Civil War era. In The Enemy Within, Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandals—including those involving John C. Frémont’s administration in Missouri, Benjamin F. Butler’s in Louisiana, bounty jumping and recruitment fraud, controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department, government contracting, and the cotton trade—to deeper anxieties. The massive growth of the national government during the Civil War and lack of effective regulation made corruption all but inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nation’s wars and in every period of the nation’s history. Civil War Northerners responded with unique intensity to these threats, however. If anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption and the party campaign fundraising with which it tended to intertwine was tiny compared with that of later eras, following the growth and consolidation of big business and corporations. Nevertheless, Civil War Northerners responded with far greater vigor than their descendants would muster against larger and more insidious threats. In the 1860s the popular conception of corruption could still encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which citizens’ definitions of corruption manifested their specific fears: of government spending and centralization; of immigrants and the urban poor; of aristocratic ambition and pretension; and, most fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rational concerns about government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into irrational suspicions of corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminate Northerners’ most cherished beliefs and values.