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As an Assistant United States Attorney, John Kroger pursued high-profile cases against mafia killers, drug kingpins, and Enron executives. In Convictions, Kroger reveals how to flip a perp, how to conduct a cross, how to work an informant, how to placate a hostile judge. Starting from his time as a green recruit and ending at the peak of his career, he steers us through the complexities and ethical dilemmas in the life of a prosecutor, where the battle in the courtroom is only the culmination of long and intricate investigative work.
- Sales Rank: #470909 in Books
- Brand: Kroger, John
- Published on: 2009-05-12
- Released on: 2009-05-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.79" h x 1.35" w x 5.50" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Review
“Engrossing . . . The best book about being a federal prosecutor since Jeffrey Toobin's Opening Arguments.” ―Scott Turow
“Exhaustive and fair-minded . . . Kroger's assessment of the federal prosecutor's problematic, overly powerful role in the legal system is well rendered and crisply delivered.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“A thoughtful, compulsively readable assessment of the American justice system's struggles with the greatest social evils of our time . . . [Kroger] accomplishes more in a few hundred pages than many professional journalists and legal scholars achieve in a thousand.” ―Matt Buckingham, Willamette Week
“I have read dozens of books by and about prosecutors. Kroger's is one of the best.” ―Steve Weinberg, The Oregonian
“The extraordinarily intimate account of a prosecutor's coming-of-age . . . Essential reading.” ―Terri Jentz, author of Strange Piece of Paradise
“Kroger wins here as he did in the courtroom--with simplicity and candor, passion and integrity, and a ferocious, persuasive intelligence.” ―Susan Choi, author of American Woman
About the Author
John Kroger is the Attorney General of Oregon. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, he previously served as a United States Marine, federal prosecutor, and law professor.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
Sal “The Hammerhead” Cardaci was a small-time Brooklyn car thief. Back in the 1980s, his head was blown off by a .357 fired at point-blank range. Years later we dug up his bones in a Brooklyn basement, where they had been buried under a rough concrete slab. For the last six months those bones have been in my office, sitting on my desk in a cardboard box. Today they are in evidence, back in the jury room. I am a federal mafia prosecutor, and I am waiting for a verdict.
My defendant is Gregory Scarpa, Jr., mafia capo and hitman. Before his arrest Scarpa controlled a big swath of working-class Brooklyn and Staten Island. Over the course of his career in organized crime he killed more than a dozen victims. Now he is charged with some forty federal crimes: racketeering, conspiracy, loansharking, illegal sports betting, numbers running, tax evasion. My indictment also charges Scarpa with five gruesome murders, the ones I believe we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
For fifteen years Scarpa was a major target of the FBI. Today, on this crisp fall afternoon, he finally faces justice. Scarpa sits huddled at a long oak table with his three criminal defense lawyers. A few feet away I sit with my trial partner, veteran mob prosecutor Sung-Hee Suh. For the past six months Sung-Hee and I have worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, preparing and trying this case. Together we presented more than a thousand pieces of evidence, each one painstakingly gathered from homicide crime scenes, surveillance operations, wiretaps, garbage pulls, autopsies, and raids on mafia clubs and gambling dens. We also presented testimony from three of Scarpa’s underlings, all mafia hitmen, now in the witness protection program.*
Late in the trial Scarpa took the stand and told the jury that the United States government had authorized his life of crime: that the FBI was corrupt, that he and his hitman father had been on the government informant payroll for years, and that he had worked as an FBI antiterrorism spy, complete with a miniature camera. When I cross-examined Scarpa, I ignored these stories completely, hoping the jury would conclude they were bizarre and irrelevant fantasies. Actually, many of Scarpa’s allegations were true.
The trial lasted more than a month. Now the jury is out, deliberating. For a federal prosecutor like me, waiting for a jury to decide a case is the hardest part of the job. As an Assistant United States Attorney, or AUSA, I wield considerable power. I run investigations, authorize arrests, and shape my own trial strategy. Control is second nature. Once, however, the jury gets a case, my fate—and that of my defendants—is out of my hands. All I can do is wait.
At 11:40 a.m., Jimmy, the court security officer, scuttles into the courtroom and hands a note to Eileen Levine, Judge Raggi’s courtroom deputy. Jimmy is not supposed to disclose the contents of the note to the attorneys, but he and I have a personal connection: he used to be an Army Ranger, and I was in the Marines. He looks over at me, our eyes make contact, and he silently mouths the word “verdict.” Jimmy and Eileen exit the courtroom by the back door, leading to Judge Raggi’s chambers. Two minutes later, just long enough for the judge to put on her black judicial robe, they both return. Jimmy bangs loudly on the courtroom’s solid oak door and calls out, “All rise.” Scarpa, the attorneys, and the courtroom spectators all get to their feet.
Judge Reena Raggi sweeps into the courtroom. Tall and elegant, Raggi is known for her brains and her temper. Once she got so mad at one of my colleagues he fainted right in the courtroom. Not surprisingly, I tend to treat her gingerly, like a bomb that might explode at any minute. The lawyers approach the bench and stand respectfully at their podiums. Scarpa stays seated in his chair, watched closely by U.S. Marshals. The atmosphere, quite relaxed just a few minutes before, is now electric with tension. Eileen states for the court reporter: “Case on trial, United States versus Gregory Scarpa, Junior.”
Judge Raggi silently reads the note from the jury. Then she looks up and says, in her controlled, precise patrician voice, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. In the case on trial, I have received a note from the jury, which I have marked court exhibit ten. It says: ‘Judge Raggi, we, the jury, have reached a verdict.’ I will bring them in and take the verdict from them.”
Sung-Hee and I return to our seats at the long wooden counsel’s table directly in front of the jury box. My body is trembling slightly, from both nervousness and lack of sleep. This is my first big mafia trial, and after months of constant work and immense pressure, I am physically and spiritually exhausted. As the jury files in, only a few feet away, I try to judge their demeanor. Conventional trial lawyer wisdom says that if a jury makes eye contact with the defendant, it is bad for the government. Several jurors, I note, are looking right at Scarpa as they take their seats.
In tense moments I tend to smile. I fight that inclination now. I look back over my shoulder into the courtroom gallery. It is packed with spectators: newspaper reporters, fellow prosecutors, defense attorneys, a few judges. This is the big case in the courthouse right now. I take off my glasses, place my palms flat on the tabletop, and look straight down, focused on nothing. With my glasses off, the world is a gray haze.
I pray only when I’m in a tough bind. Now I silently beg, “God, please, let me have a guilty verdict.” My desire to win this case is driven by mixed motives. Scarpa is evil personified. The FBI and the Justice Department have worked for more than fifteen years to nail him. I am 100 percent certain he is guilty. The idea that he might escape—that we might get an unjust verdict—makes me sick to my stomach. At the same time, my will to win, like that of all prosecutors, is personal and selfish. Sung-Hee and I have staked our careers on this case. If we win, we will be heroes. If we lose, no one will ever trust us with a big case again.
In television shows about cops and prosecutors, the dramatic moments are always loud: cops yelling at criminals; judges yelling at lawyers; the defendant’s family yelling at the cops. In the real world, drama walks more softly. I hear Judge Raggi talking to the jury. She is explaining the procedure by which it will deliver its verdict. I barely listen. I hear her words as if from a great distance or like a man submerged underwater. I do not refocus until I hear Judge Raggi’s voice change tone and she says, with great formality: “Madam Foreperson, I understand that you, the jury, have reached agreement on the verdict. Is that correct?”
The foreperson stands. To protect the jury from mafia violence, the jurors’ identities and backgrounds have been kept secret from both Scarpa and us. As a result, I know virtually nothing about her. Now, however, this anonymous woman is the most important person in the courtroom. She looks at Raggi and replies, “Yes.”
Raggi: “All right. I am going to be using the verdict form as a guide. Let me begin with Racketeering Act Number One. As to part ‘A,’ have you found the charge of murder not proved or proved?”
The foreperson pauses, and I wait, listening for the simple words that mean success or failure, justice or defeat. I can hear the blood pounding in my ears. Will Scarpa go to jail for the rest of his life, or will he go home to murder again?
-
federal prosecutors toil in obscurity. Most Americans know nothing about our work. None of us is on television, and none of us is a household name. If you ask the average American what an AUSA, or Assistant United States Attorney, does for a living, he will probably draw a complete blank. Even my own mother has a hard time getting it right. She always tells my relatives that I was a “district attorney,” the common title for state and local prosecutors who combat most street crime. To most AUSAs, who pride themselves on their unique role, fighting the country’s most dangerous criminals, that confusion is maddening.
The fact that no one in America knows anything about federal prosecutors is troubling, for in the United States today few people possess more power. As early as 1940 Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson remarked that a federal prosecutor has “more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America.” Since Jackson’s day, that power has only increased. In the words of federal judge (and former AUSA) Gerald Lynch, “Congress has cast the federal prosecutor in the role of God.” Hyperbole? Certainly—but a revealing comment nevertheless.
Federal prosecutors have not always had so much influence. Traditionally, crime was the responsibility of state and local governments. Federal criminal law was a sleepy and unimportant backwater. Starting in the 1950s, however, Congress passed a series of landmark crime bills that radically expanded the United States government’s role in combating crime. These bills gave federal prosecutors, for the first time in our nation’s history, the legal tools they needed to combat the nation’s most serious criminal threats: the mafia, corrupt corporate executives, gangs, and drug dealers. As a result, the federal government is now deeply involved in law enforcement in your community.
During the exact same period, Congress, the Justice Department, and the federal courts quietly revolutionized law enforcement in a second, more subtle way. Back in the old days the fe...
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
JOHN KROGER FOR THE UNITED STATES
By Hansen Alexander
JOHN KROGER FOR THE UNITED STATES
by Hansen Alexander
It was my first run in with the hot tempered Governor of Arkansas in 1992. There were smudges on the policy papers I was responsible for photocopying and he had just noticed them when visiting the Little Rock headquarters. Policy was still operated in the Washington Campaign Headquarters on this winter morning, the writing mostly done by two Yale grads, Bruce Reed and John Kroger.
The Governor was furious and the building was shaking. The only calm presence was Kroger, a former Marine. Bill Clinton's overworked campaign plane was burning through most of our cash and we did not have the funds to replace our photocopy machine. "Go downstairs," Kroger calmly told me, "and ask one of the law firms if you can borrow their copy machines to do the policy papers." I did so, going from floor to floor until a cooperative young female attorney copied the papers for me--at her personal expense.
John Kroger, soon to be moved to Little Rock, was not only the calmest person in the Washington office but was also one of the nicest. He was quiet but respectful of everybody. Like George Stephanapoulos, he was a good guy in the office who proved too pleasant to last long in the back stabbing world of presidential politics. Kroger left Washington in 1993 to go to law school after only a few months of exile at the Treasury Department, where he had been sent after speaking his mind during the transition period.
Kroger became one of the best federal prosecutors of the late 1990s and early 21rst century, helping to send hard to convict godfathers, drug dealers, and Enron executives to prison. Convictions is his story. It is the best book about fighting crime since James B. Stewart's 1988 classic, The Prosecutors.
Three effective techniques employed by Kroger make this an extraordinary book. First, he is a very effective story teller. Each major case he prosecuted was land-mined with more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie crime novel. Witnesses lie to him, veteran defense lawyers always have legal tricks up their sleeves, Mafia dons try to charm him. Honest to a fault, Kroger details his learning curve as a prosecutor.
Yet unlike George Stephanopoulos's book All Too Human, where the TV morning personality's accounts of political naivete sound false, Kroger's mistakes are obvious and real. And he doesn't make the same mistake twice.
His delightful description of his six week, cross country bike tour that culminates in seeing Portland, a city he falls in love with and decides to eventually call it home, is a bonus.
Second, because Kroger is a disciple of philosopher Emmanuel Kant, the ethics of breaking down human beings mentally to convict them wears him down because he realizes the human cost of turning witnesses, breaking men, humiliating them, leaving their dignity for dead no matter how horrible their crimes of murder, extortion, bribery, drug dealing, assault.
Because Kroger is a throwback in an age of well connected and entitled professionals, a truly self made man, he was not too removed from the ethics of the family oriented Mafia or Hispanic drug gangs. His problems come in prosecuting the upper middle class Enron executives, who felt entitled to their ill gotten riches. Kroger frankly admits he does not understand these people at all, even though many of them were from his hometown of Houston.
Third, the nerdy bookworm in Kroger remains the policy maven I remember from the 1992 presidential campaign.
He admits that the economic changes in America and the world had more to do with defeating the Mafia than his dramatic convictions in an era when Mafia members ratted on each other to an unprecedented degree, although he gives President Reagan and United States Attorney Rudolf Giuliani their due in vigorously going after the Mafia.
The Mafia's drug supply, Kroger tells us, came from Africa and the Mediterranean. Successful law enforcement efforts drove the traffic to Latin America and South America. The Italian Mafia did not speak Spanish and were therefore cut out of the action. The decline of labor unions, often infiltrated and even run by the Mafia, declined dramatically from almost 50 percent of American workers in World War II to less than 10 percent in the 21rst century. In addition, the settled Italian neighborhoods of places such as Brooklyn, the old breeding grounds of the Mafia, have broken up with the suburbanization of America and the integration of formerly working class Italian Americans into professions that they were once discouraged from entering.
And yet government does matter. The enactment of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 (RICO) federalized crimes that involved an organized group and impacted interstate commerce. Instead of easily bought off New York City cops pursuing them, the Mafia faced the FBI and all its resources.
Kroger points out that the rejection of rehabilitation as a social policy objective and with it legislation mandating required sentences without parole constrained judicial discretion and made judges less susceptible to intimidation from the Mafia. The Federal Witness Protection Program also made it easier for Mafia family members to testify against each other. Government legislation also liberalized wiretapping rules, broadening the scope of what government agents could record.
Despite his strong ethical bent, Kroger is a realist. When money is abundant, as happened during the dot com boom and the era of deregulation, there's no stopping Wall Street corruption. "Fraud is hardwired into the free market economy," writes Kroger. "All we can do is try to limit its frequency and impact."
I wish I had read this book before writing my own introductory law text, "A Tort is Not a Pastry," because Kroger is so good at explaining legal concepts and jargon for the general reader. Among them---and I'm not going to discuss them but rather urge you to discover them for yourselves in this book---are "takedown," "community prosecution," "controlled delivery," "cowboys," "superseding indictment," "comity," "the sit-down," and "smurfing."
A decade after his glory days in the court room, he admits his greatest thrill remains the simple introduction of an Assistant United States Attorney before a trial, "John Kroger for the United States."
Elected Attorney General of Oregon in 2008, Kroger has been sucked back into politics. With Kroger at least, you know what you're getting: a dedicated public servant who will work long hours, who believes in the old fashioned ideals of public service and helping people, and who has high ethical standards.
And a damn good writer into the bargain.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Unputdownable
By Colleen10014
"Unputdownable" is an adjective normally used to describe potboilers, not non-fiction books written by attorneys about their cases. Yet once you start reading Convictions, by John Kroger, it's impossible to put it down. With intelligence, insight, candor and a healthy dose of self-criticism, the former assistant US Attorney tells stories of chasing mobsters, fighting (and losing) the "war on drugs," and the arduous task of representing the US government in court. Kroger is the rare thing: an outstanding lawyer who writes like a novelist and thinks like a philosopher. This is a remarkable book; don't miss the chance to read it.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Get to Know Oregon's New A.G.
By Brian Wegener
I checked this book out of the library because I wanted to know more about Oregon's new Attorney General. Kroger put together a unique coalition of environmentalists, district attorneys and police chiefs to win election in his first campaign.
In the Democratic primary he ran against an established corporate attorney and state legislator with a good environmental voting record. He convinced a significant number of environmentalists whe were fed up with Oregon's failure to enforce environmental laws that he would devote some serious effort to retoring Oregon's long-lost reputation for environmental protection.
In the general election, the Republican party didn't bother to run a candidate against Kroger. Kroger's reputation as a strong and aggressive prosecuter had won endorsements of the vast majority of district attorneys, sheriffs, and police chiefs in the state.
A significant part of Kroger's campaign rhetoric focused on drug treatment to reduce the states child abuse and other crime. Methamphetamine has hit Oregon hard.
Kroger's book gives some insight into what has made him who he is. Clearly he is dedicated and his work habits as an Assistant U.S. Attorney left little time for a personal life. Kroger is an ex-marine raised in Texas who graduated with an ivy league degree in philosophy, an unusual combination.
I have been a great fan of the TV show Law and Order over the years, finding the most interesting stories those where moral tradeoffs are complicated. Krogers book is a fascinating self-examination of internal moral conflicts inherent in being a prosecutor. The book held my interest from cover-to-cover and leaves me eager to read more of his writing in the future.
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