Cases & Controversies: An Informant in Our Midst

            I have made it a practice not to represent government informants, particularly those who offer testimony in exchange for a promise of leniency, and, most particularly, where the extent of the leniency is made dependent upon the “breadth” and "quality" of the witness' "cooperation.” Or, as Professor Alan Dershowitz so aptly and bluntly put it, "the extent to which the witness has been taught not only how to sing, but how to compose.”

            In 1972, however, Prof. Dershowitz asked me to work with him on a case in which we were to represent Sheldon Seigel, a member of the feared Jewish Defense League (JDL), who had been indicted, along with fellow JDL members, for the death of a secretary working in the offices of the impresario Sol Hurok. Hurok had arranged for an American tour by the Bolshoi Ballet, thus running afoul of the JDL's desired boycott of all things Soviet in retaliation for the Soviet Union 's ill-treatment, and refusal to allow the emigration, of its Jewish population. The bombing had accidentally resulted in the death, but all were indicted for bombing-murder, which carried a potential death penalty.

            We gradually learned, though, that Seigel had actually been a government informant. Our client had assisted federal agents and prosecutors in both preventing acts of JDL terror and securing the Hurok-bombing indictment. At a crucial point in the case, the feds dismissed the indictment against co-defendant Seigel and turned him into a government witness instead. When Seigel balked at his witness role, claiming that he had been promised that he would not be prosecuted and would not be surfaced as a witness against his fellow JDL members, the government sought to hold him in contempt, which could have resulted in a life sentence.

            The Seigel legal team, by this time enlarged with the addition of my then-law partner Norman S. Zalkind and law student assistant (and later law partner) Jeanne Baker , went into high gear in order to avert a contempt finding against Seigel. The ground for our defense of Seigel rested in a promise made by law-enforcement officers that if Seigel would cooperate with their investigation to prevent JDL violence, he would neither be made into a witness nor prosecuted. When law-enforcement officials denied making any such promise, and further denied that they first came upon Seigel by resort to illegal wiretaps, our defense strategy emerged: If we could prove that illegal wiretaps led investigators to Seigel, we could win the contempt case and any other resulting prosecution against him.

            Our case on behalf of Sheldon Seigel was—how shall I say—aided by the fact that we learned, the night before the contempt hearing was scheduled to begin, that Seigel had been surreptitiously recording the city detective and the federal prosecutor working on his case and on the investigation of the JDL. Thus began one of the most remarkable cases in my career and in the careers of the extraordinary lawyers with whom I was privileged to work on this case. It was shocking enough that we had already discovered that our client, in what we thought was going to be a prosecution of him and others for a bombing-murder, was in fact a government informant. But it was even more shocking to learn that our informant client had tape-recorded the law-enforcement agents who were making promises to him that they might not have intended to keep.