Meet Paul Bergrin the mother of all lawyers! Need a witness whacked?

The Baddest Lawyer in the History of Jersey
And that's saying something

By Mark Jacobson
June 5, 2011 Illustrations by Jesse Lenz

Clay D. a moon-faced man in his early thirties who, by his own matter-of-fact admission, has spent a good deal of his life “shooting at people” in and around Newark, New Jersey, was talking about his first attorney-client meeting with lawyer Paul Bergrin.

Someone got killed, and they were trying to put it on me,” remembers Clay, as he asked to be called. “First-degree murder, can’t fuck with that, so I got Paul. He was the biggest name out there. He drove his Bentley down Clinton Avenue, and it was like, ‘Don’t you punks even think about jacking that.’ Everyone said he was wide open. But I didn’t know how wide open until that day. I’m in his office two minutes. He says he’s looked at my case, and only one witness can hurt me. Then he says, ‘Okay, what are we going to do about this person? She’s a user, right? Why don’t we give her a hot shot? Just stick her.’ ”

Asked if it bothered him to hear his attorney suggest such a course of action, Clay laughed and pulled up his shirt to reveal several scars on his abdomen, the result of being shot three times with a pistol. As chance would have it, the shooter was another of Bergrin’s clients, Clay said, not that this mattered.

"Just not my time,” Clay said non­chalantly. Two of the bullets passed harmlessly through his body. Another slug lodged in his stomach muscles. “I was working out, had abs like a rock. They stopped the bullet.” This was how it was on the streets in Central Newark, Clay said, kill or be killed. East Orange and parts of Irvington were no better. You got rich one day, were blown away the next. It was a different world out there, with completely different rules.

“That’s why I needed Paul,” Clay said. “I can’t have some bullshit lawyer in suspenders and I’m supposed say thanks because he got my sentence down to twenty years. I’m paying top dollar, and I demand legal brilliance. Someone who will consider all the options. I don’t want no loser. I want a winner … Paul Bergrin was a winner. Let me tell you, whatever happens to him, there ain’t ever gonna be no other lawyer like Paul Bergrin.”

In New Jersey, nothing beats Essex County, 130 square miles of urban melodrama stretching from the now sudden-death ghetto streets of Philip Roth’s old ­Weequahic Newark neighborhood to the big-as-the-Ritz engagement rings at the Short Hills Mall. Famous crooks who have plied their trade this side of the Pulaski Skyway include Lucky Luciano, Longy Zwillman, and Richie “the Boot” Boiardo, who, legend has it, burned his enemies’ remains in the furnace of his castlelike Livingston home. Equally greedy, if less folkloric, has been Essex’s epic succession of corrupt politicians, voted in and not. Good luck to Cory Booker, everyone’s favorite walking infomercial for well-tailored municipal uplift, but the smart money is against him. The last three Newark mayors were convicted of one charge or another.

A strong candidate for addition to this list—in a twisted legalistic category all his own—is the 55-year old Paul Bergrin, Esq. who awaits trial in a federal lock-up facing charges that are a good bet to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. Advocate to killers, whorehouse proprietors, bum-check-passing beauty queens, Lil’ Kim, and a thousand forgotten street hoodlums from Newark’s bad wards, Bergrin has run the gamut of Jersey jurisprudence in his 30 years on the scene. In the early eighties, following a stint in the Army, Bergrin joined the then–­legendarily kleptocratic Essex County prosecutor’s office, where he forged a reputation as a square-jawed inquisitor of the local criminal class. In 1987, Bergrin moved up to the exalted precincts of the United States Attorney’s Newark office, where he served under both Samuel Alito and Michael Chertoff. Men like these did not stuff envelopes of cash into their pockets in parking lots; they joined the Supreme Court and ran the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. By 1991, Bergrin, whose courtroom self-presentation often included swank Brioni suits offset by a skeevy pencil-thin mustache, was in business for himself, becoming one of the most controversial, and high-billing, criminal-defense attorneys the county had ever seen. His 2009 arrest completes the possibly fated Essex full circle.

Despite Bergrin’s hopes, expressed in an e-mail, that God provide the neutral observer “the wisdom to see through this indictment and case,” the government brief against him is comprehensive. According to the 95-page document, Bergrin, in rough ascending order of immorality, (a) operated a real-estate scam that defrauded lenders of over $1 million; (b) ran a high-volume drug dealership big enough for 120 pounds of uncut cocaine to be found at a North Newark restaurant owned by Bergrin’s mistress and co-defendant, Yolanda Jauregui; and, most spectacularly, (c) set up witnesses to be murdered before they could testify against his clients.

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Why His Indictment Stunned Even The Most Jaded Essex County Observers

Angelo Prisco (left), Hakeem Curry (right). A Genovese capo in New Jersey, Prisco, known as "The Horn," is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of another capo who'd robbed Genovese gambling operations. Curry, Newark's reigning heroin kingpin in 2004, put out a hit on potential witness Kemo McCray, reputedly following Bergrin's legal advice: No Kemo, no case. (Photo: Star Ledger Prisco)

Cornerstone to the government’s case against Bergrin are the alleged events of March 2, 2004, when Kemo Deshawn ­McCray was shot in the head three times while crossing the intersection of 19th Street and South Orange Avenue in Newark. The Feds contend the murder was the culmination of a chain of events that began when McCray, a federal informant (i.e., snitch), purchased a quantity of crack cocaine from one William Baskerville, a lieutenant in the drug posse run by his cousin, Hakeem Curry, the fearsome “E. T. Hak,” Newark’s then-reigning dope kingpin.

Snagged in the buy-and-bust, Baskerville was represented by Paul Bergrin, reputed “house counsel” for Curry’s organization. It was during one jailhouse attorney-client meeting, the Feds contend, that Baskerville told Bergrin that Kemo McCray had fingered him. If so, McCray figured to be a convincing witness in any trial. According to federal wiretap evidence, Bergrin discussed the problem with Curry, who paid assassin Anthony Young $15,000 to kill McCray. The Feds maintain that Bergrin signed off on this solution, offering the succinct legal opinion, “No Kemo, no case.”

There was more. According to the indictment, in 2008, Bergrin traveled to Chicago, where he attempted to hire a hit man to rub out a troublesome informant in a case against another client, accused drug trafficker ­Vicente ­Esteves. The “hit man” turned out to be a government witness who recorded his dealings with Bergrin, including a snippet where the lawyer allegedly laid out the murder plan. “I got it all figured out,” ­Bergrin is quoted as saying. “Put on a ski mask and make it look like a robbery … It cannot under any circumstances look like a hit.”

The indictment stunned even the most jaded Essex County observers. One well-known lawyer whose career in the area goes back to the early seventies, said, “If Paul is guilty of half the things they say, he’d be the craziest, most evil lawyer in the history of the State of New Jersey. That is saying something.”

It is now two years since Bergrin’s arrest. Denied bail, he awaits his long-­delayed trial (now scheduled for October) in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where he spent several months in solitary confinement, apparently at the insistence of the Feds. “Mr. Bergrin participated in numerous plots to kill witnesses,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gay said at his bail hearing. “If he is willing to go to those lengths on behalf of his clients, he is certainly willing to do it for his own freedom.” But if Bergrin has been out of sight, he is far from out of mind, especially on Park Place, the block-long stretch in downtown Newark where many defense attorneys have offices.

This is Newark’s criminal-justice Tin Pan Alley, where the jammed-up, at least those with enough money to avoid the public defender, come to seek representation. At any one time there can be half a dozen ­breaking-and-entering men, dope pushers, and members of who-knows-how-many sets of Brick City Bloods sharing an elevator ride with cleaning ladies and misdirected guests from the nearby Robert Treat Best Western ­Hotel. Few Park Place lawyers are of the white-shoe variety. “A lot of them were cops, went to law school at night,” said one longtime observer of the scene. “They’ve seen it all and don’t care all that much whether their clients are guilty or innocent. They’re there to win cases, nothing more or less.”

Paul Bergrin, graduate of Nova Southeastern law school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a time was the biggest fish on the street. Parking his Bentley and BMW in the lot around the corner on Mulberry Street, Bergrin met his clients, people like Angelo “The Horn” Prisco, a Genovese capo­regime, and ranking Latin King coronas, in his huge office on the tenth floor at 50 Park Place. And for legal eagles who continue to work here, their fallen former colleague remains an unsettling, cautionary, obsessed-about presence.

With the trial still pending, the U.S. Attorney’s office had issued a neo-fatwa against talking about the case—no surprise since everyone knew the Feds had a particular hatred of Bergrin. How could they not? First he works in their office, then he supposedly helps murder one of their witnesses. Also galling was the fact that they’d earlier mishandled a piece of wiretap evidence, blowing a previous attempt to indict him in 2005. They weren’t taking any chances this time.

Still, it was hard to stop talking about Paul Bergrin. Almost everyone on Park Place knew him personally. Many remembered him as “a good guy,” the sort who would “give you the shirt off his back, lend you $10,000 without even blinking.” However, when it came to Bergrin’s insistence on his total innocence, eyes began rolling—especially in regard to the disappearance of witnesses.

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"'No Witness No Case' - That Was Paul's Motto"