in a row house on 21st Street, N.W., in Washington, D.C. Police entered the house next door and drove a spike into the common wall between the houses. The spike, part of an electronic listening setup, was inserted into a duct, turning the entire heating system into a sort of microphone. The police gathered records of scores of conversations involving betting transactions. The gamblers were convicted and sentenced to long terms in prison. Williams took over their appeal and argued before the Supreme Court that the eavesdropping had been ''more subtle and more scientifically advanced than wiretapping," and constituted gross violation of the rights of the defendants against unreasonable searches and seizures. Williams insisted the tactic differed little from the police crashing into a house in the middle of the night without a search warrant. The Supreme Court agreed and threw out the convictions.
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Williams long spoke out against the extension of congressional investigative committees' powers, to what he considered "the legislative lynch." He said, "When Estes Kefauver first ran roughshod over the rights of hoodlums in 1950, the country was amused. Then the leftist intellectuals, who didn't spring to the defense of the hoodlums, found that their turn was next. While this was going on, labor thought it was funny, but they soon discovered that they were being clobbered."
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Once, after Robert Kennedy, a longtime friend of Williams, became attorney general, Kennedy went after Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. He was so confident that he said he'd "jump off the Capitol dome" if he lost the case. After Williams got Hoffa acquitted, Williams offered to provide Kennedy with a parachute. It marked the end of a beautiful friendship.
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Many federal prosecutors despised Williams for thwarting their attempts to jail organized-crime figures. Williams's supporters see his role as being the defense attorney who is vital not so much to his client, but to the entire criminal justice systema defendant without the best possible protection weakens the entire structure of justice.
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This view was countered by Rudolph Giuliani, who as a federal prosecutor for Manhattan in the 1980s spearheaded the general federal assault on the Mafia. He said in a newspaper interview: "I don't socialize with mob lawyers. When I was in private practice, I wouldn't represent mob people. I didn't mind representing businessmen who might be charged with something. That's someone who has a largely legitimate aspect to their lives, and if they get in trouble, whether innocent or guilty, there's still some good to them. Organized crime figures are illegitimate people who would go on being illegitimate people if I got them off."
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Williams's positionall defendants deserve equal opportunity of legal representationand Giuliani'sthe defense lawyer serves as a sort of judge of his clientsare the philosophies between which all students and practitioners of the law must make a choice.
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Wilson, Frank J. (18871970): Secret Service Capone nemesis
In the late 1920s, neither the local police nor the FBI under the nervous leadership of J. Edgar Hoover could think of any reason to put America's most infamous gangster, Al Caponewho masterminded bootleggings, hijackings, gambling and scores of murders across state linesbehind bars. The task remained instead for Frank J. Wilson, a treasury agent.
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Elmer I. Irey, chief of the Internal Revenue's enforcement branch, came up with the idea for convicting Capone under a 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the government to collect income tax even on illegal income. It was an idea not easily implemented. First it was necessary to determine that Capone's gross income exceeded the standard exemption of $5,000 for each of the several years he had filed no return. Capone had no bank accounts, signed no checks. He never signed a receipt for anything and had no property in his own name. Thus Wilson, assigned to the case by Irey, had to analyze the Big Fellow's "net worth" and "net expenditure."
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Wilson managed to plant agents on the periphery of the mob's activities and, finally, within it. Soon Capone, who sneered at any number of lawmen, began to quake whenever Wilson's name was mentioned. By comparison, he regarded the activities of the much-publicized Eliot Ness and his Untouchables as petty annoyances. Finally the heat became so intense on Capone that an informer reported: "The Big Fellow's eating aspirin like it was peanuts so's he can get some sleep."
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Against the advice of his top lieutenants, Capone ordered five gunmen be brought in from New York to hit Wilson. Government agents got wind of the plan and tried to pressure Capone to call off his killers, but Capone vanished from sight with the contract in effect. Capone had been tipped off by corrupt local police officials that the feds were looking for him. Stalled in their efforts to seize Capone, the agents turned to Johnny Torrio, Capone's old mentor, who was in Chicago at the time. Torrio was informed that if the hit men were not pulled out within 24 hours, federal agents would start stalking them, and there would be warfare in the streets. Torrio explained to Capone that with the assassination plot exposed it could not be put into effect. Capone had no choice but to cancel the rubout order.
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