Murder case against rap stars’ NJ lawyer puts focus on criminal defense practices

NJ murder case puts lawyers’ conduct in spotlight

NEWARK, N.J. — With his expensive suits and slicked-back hair, Paul Bergrin fit the stereotype of the flashy defense attorney willing to go to any length to help his clients beat a rap.

How far the former federal prosecutor actually went to do that lies at the heart of a federal indictment unsealed last week that alleges Bergrin used threats, bribes and even murder to discourage witnesses from testifying.

In a broader sense, the case shines a spotlight on the balancing act criminal defense attorneys must perform when they represent clients for whom violence and witness intimidation are accepted means of doing business.

“The line between a vigorous defense of your client and becoming complicit in criminal activity is something that any defense lawyer has to be very vigilant about,” said Robert Mintz, a Newark defense attorney who worked alongside Bergrin in the late 1980s as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office. “Most criminal defense lawyers, given their familiarity with the criminal justice system, are well aware of exactly where that line falls.”

Bergrin, 53, is charged with murder on suspicion of passing the name of a federal informant to associates of William Baskerville, his client in a drug case. The informant, Deshawn McCray, was shot to death on a Newark street in 2004.

Bergrin’s veteran New York lawyer, Gerald Shargel, whose former clients include the late mobster John Gotti, said Bergrin’s actions were within ethical boundaries.

“The defense lawyer’s obligation is to put the government’s case in the worst possible light,” Shargel said, quoting from former Supreme Court Justice Byron White’s opinion in a 1967 case. “How do you do that? You talk to people with knowledge, and perhaps you talk to other criminals. If a lawyer learns, or a client suggests, that a particular person is a witness in a case, then that lawyer is duty bound to gather as much information about the witness to try and discredit that witness.”

More troublesome for Bergrin are conversations taped by a government informant last year that prosecutors say caught him telling the informant to kill a potential witness and “make it look like a robbery.”

During oral arguments at Bergrin’s bail hearing this week, Shargel said the excerpts of the tapes released by the government give a one-sided and incomplete account of the conversations. The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the case Friday.

Bergrin has been held at a federal detention facility in Philadelphia since his arrest last week. In a decision issued Friday night, U.S. Magistrate Madeline Cox Arleo denied Bergrin’s request to be released on bail and subject to home confinement.

The indictment has sent shock waves through the northern New Jersey legal community, whose members knew Bergrin as a tough, street-savvy prosecutor whose background as an Army major and county-level prosecutor set him apart from many of his colleagues in the federal prosecutor’s office who had clerked for federal judges or worked at large law firms.

“He was a guy who was good on his feet and not one to back down from a challenge,” Mintz said. “Someone who savored the chance to fight it out in the courtroom.”

As a defense attorney, Bergrin frequently represented defendants accused of violent crimes or drug trafficking. He also represented rap stars Naughty By Nature, Lil’ Kim and Queen Latifah and Sgt. Javal S. Davis, an Army reservist charged in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse case. Bergrin also has defended police officers and politicians accused of misconduct.

“In so many ways he has had an exemplary career,” Shargel said at the bail hearing. “He has taken on cases that so many lawyers would have run away from. Yes, he has represented murderers. Yes, he has represented gang members. That doesn’t make him part of any gang.”