The Mob Lawyer’s Constitution

Abstract

This article reconstructs the constitutional rhetoric of mob lawyers, as well as drug lawyers and other icons of the high-priced criminal defense bar, from the 1970s through the 1990s—the heyday of federal organized crime prosecutions and thus, of the lawyers who defended against them. Drawing upon pop-culture sources including archival television footage, magazine features, newspaper coverage, and ghost-written mass-market memoirs, the article pieces together the constel-lation of soundbites through which mob lawyers disseminated their views. As the subjects of frequent media coverage, these lawyers ad-vanced a coherent and distinctive (if crude) set of ideas about the proper relationship between individuals, the state, law, and wealth. In investigating constitutional history, legal scholars often focus on elite legal actors and Supreme Court doctrine, or, if they examine pop-ular constitutionalism, on organized litigation campaigns, rather than the more diffuse world of solo practitioners and small law firms. Bring-ing together legal and cultural history, this article contributes a new angle on these themes—looking for insights into Reagan-era constitu-tional culture not in the Department of Justice or the Supreme Court, but at Manhattan steakhouses and Miami nightclubs. The high-priced criminal defense bar advanced a highly individu-alist, libertarian, and consumer-oriented conception of constitutional rights, as well as a thoroughly suspicious orientation towards the gov-ernment generally, and towards its exercise of the prosecutorial power specifically. Against the backdrop of the post-Vietnam, post-Wa-tergate historical context, the mob lawyer fused the traditional rhetoric of constitutional rights and the time-honored rituals of courtroom ad-vocacy with late-twentieth-century cynicism about government cor-ruption and prosecutorial overreach.