Transcript of Better Call Paul | 2

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John Edwards Tiffany was fresh out of law school and working for a top federal defense lawyer in Newark. It was 1992, and he was at the bottom of the pecking order. And that meant he could get pulled into new cases at a moment's notice. Like when his boss called him into a meeting involving a lawyer who had had recently been hit with some pretty serious charges.

I didn't know anything about the meeting. I didn't know who we were meeting with. I figured it was going to be being part of preparing pretrial motions.

John dropped what he was doing, got up, and headed to the meeting.

I go downstairs and walked into the conference room.

The lawyer in question was Paul Brugren. This was the first time John and Paul met.

Paul was well-dressed. I looked at him. He got a good impression.

Paul was now in his mid-30s. He had been at his private practice for a few years, but his style and aggressiveness had not changed. As John sat there and listened, he got a sense of what Paul was up against. Paul's former office, the US attorney's office in Newark, was now accusing him of witness and evidence tampered. Specifically, they said he'd recorded an interview illegally with a witness and then forged the witness's initials on the cassette tape that Paul submitted. If the US attorney could win the case, it would ruin in Paul's career. Paul could be disbarred. Then what? Does he go back and do hotel security full-time? But if Paul was feeling the pressure, he did not let it show.

It was amazing to watch his resolve, his ability to remain calm, cool, and collective, and never, ever let anybody see his sweat.

Paul categorically denied the charges top to bottom. So John and the other lawyers got to work defending him, and he got to see Paul's warmer side.

Paul is the type of guy that he's going to be thankful to anybody and everybody who had some hand, even if it was someone down in the kitchen of the law firm cooking food on a Saturday for everybody if we're working on the case.

The case dragged on for nearly two years. It wound its way through the legal system without a resolution. But Paul said his law firm suffered hugely. No one wanted a lawyer accused of witness and evidence tampered. Then one day, Paul boss case caught a break. John and his boss were told to meet at the US attorney's office in Newark. John picked up his boss's car, and they headed downtown.

Mike had one of these old sedan Mercedes Benz. It was like a dark blue color. I drove while he sat in the seat, and he may have been making phone calls, taking notes, or getting squared away.

When they got to the US attorney's office, John waited in the car.

I don't know how long he was gone. Maybe it was a half an hour. And then he gets in the car and he says he's pretty shocked. And he said Shapiro is going to recommend for an administrative dismissal.

Paul and his legal team did not expect this. They'd been prepping for years, and now it was over. Paul would later say the case got thrown out because he'd proved his innocence. John said he had a key witness on his side who may have swayed the lead prosecutor.

I think he thought that it would be difficult for a Newark jury to get over that particular witness.

But it was done. Paul no longer had a career killing case hanging over him.

I mean, he's ecstatic.

He was also pissed because Paul suspected the true motivation behind the charges, punishment by his old colleagues for crossing the aisle. John agreed.

There was no doubt in my mind, or at least very little doubt in my mind, that this was retaliation. 100 %. This was payback.

The government had now made an enemy of Paul Burgrant. He soon make it his mission to crush them whenever he got the chance. But the vendetta went both ways. And this wouldn't be the last time the government tried to crush Paul either. From WNDYR, I'm Brandon Jinks-Jinkins, and this is Criminal Attorneys. You got crooked politicians, looking over shoulders in opposite position. Run, better run, better run, run from the bogeyman. This is episode 2, Better Call Paul. Paul Bergrin could only guess at why the US attorney's office dropped the witness tampering charges. They must have thought the case wouldn't hold, but it was a lucky break for Paul. And in the decade that followed, he built up his practice. You could say he became a bit of a legend. Paul defended cops. He defended robbers, and sometimes clients who were both, like the five police officers who stole guns from a local buyback program. And every time he successfully defended a case against a government prosecutor, it was like he scored a little piece of payback for what they put him through. There's even a rumor that Paul kept a notebook in his desk drawer, listing all of his wins.

Paul was getting a reputation for being able to win against even the most open and shut cases.

I thought, I got a great case.

In 2003, Tony Gutierrez was preparing for an attempted murder trial. Tony was an experienced attorney at the Essex County Prosecutor's office. He'd been at the Prosecutor's office for six years and worked mostly domestic violence in juvenile cases. When he read through the file on this new case, he was more than confident.

I'd say 90 or 95 % I thought I was going to win or get a conviction.

The man being tried had literally been caught red-handed. There were numerous witnesses who saw him stabbing his estranged wife. There was a mountain of evidence.

He literally took a kitchen knife from his house, led himself into her car, and tried to stab at her 8, 9, 10 times, hitting her, at one point getting the knife between two of the ribs and puncturing her lung.

The attack was brutal, but it wasn't fatal.

By some miracle, she managed to pull open the door, fall out of the car, like one foot still hanging in the car. The rest of her body is out on the street, and people are looking at this blood-covered woman thinking, Oh, my God, she must be dead or something.

The wife ended up having a collapsed lung from the stab wound. After the attack, the husband got out of the car holding the knife. One witness sprung into action and intervened.

There was an off-duty police officer who just walked right over, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, Sit down right here. And he was arrested right there in the scene.

An off-duty police officer as a witness, Tony had an unbeatable case. Right? Not necessarily when the attorney he was going up against was Paul Bergrin.

I never had any problems with Mr. Bergrin.

Tony had gone up against Paul plenty of times. He didn't expect much. In Tony's experience, Paul would could plea deals for his clients. And that's what Paul tried this time, too, to get his client a deal that would keep him out of jail. But this wasn't a low-level drug charge. This was an attempted murder. Tony had no reason to accept a deal. He was certain that he would win a trial. He also believed the husband should do jail time, significant jail time. So he said no. Paul had let Tony know that the guy he was defending, Norberto Velez, was a close personal friend of his. And one evening, Tony called Paul. Paul picked up the phone. It sounded like he was at dinner.

He said, Oh, I'm glad you're calling. I have a friend here who wants to say hello. And he hands the phone over.

The person on the other end of the line was Norberto, the man who stabbed his wife. The defendant, Tony, was in the middle of prosecuting.

And I'm like, he did not just hand the phone over to have me talk to his client. I think at that time, it might have been the first time I've ever had that happen.

Paul's next move was to try to get the trial pushed back, which is a common practice for a defense attorney. The judge denied Paul's request, but But what is less common is what Paul did next. There was a meeting set with the judge, but Paul didn't show up to it. Instead, the judge received a letter from one of Paul's partners.

A doctor's note. The doctor's note is Mr. Bergen's doctor saying that he has too much stress and too much anxiety and that he is being ordered to not exert himself. He's to rest for at least the next 30 days.

The judge had no choice but to delay the trial.

And I was like, Oh, you got to be kidding me.

A few days later, Tony said someone from his office saw Paul at the jail.

He was there, obviously, to go visit a client or something.

What was a supposedly convalescing Paul doing at work? Tony wrote to the judge who swiftly ended the delay. When the trial finally started, Tony was confident. He had strong evidence, a clear motive, and compelling witnesses. Paul, Tony, the defendant, all showed up at the Essex County Courthouse, a grand columned building in the heart of Newark. As Paul and his defendant settled in, Tony prepared to tell the jury a very simple story he felt could get him his conviction. The husband was a jilted lover. He never wanted a divorce. And in a rage, he brutally attacked his estranged wife, intending to kill her. A key witness, their 10-year-old daughter, would be there to testify for him about everything that happened leading up to the knife attack. To start, he put a physician on the stand. He asked the doctor, What are the potential consequences of someone stabbing you in the chest?

If somebody stabs at you and hits you in the chest area, you could die because it could hit a major artery or blood vessel or by the aorta and all that, and then you could bleed out. I'm like, Oh, thank you.

Tony felt it was clear. The wife could have easily died from her husband's attack. Attempted murder. Then Paul stepped up to cross-examine the doctor.

And he was like, What's the percentage of somebody dying from a collapsed lung? And he's like, Very low. I've never heard of somebody dying. I'm like, Thank you, doctor. And I was like, Man, you did a good job of cross-examining my expert. Almost made him into his expert.

Paul's version of what happened told a very different story. Paul presented the husband as a model citizen with no previous criminal convictions. Paul alleged that the wife had abused her estranged husband and their daughter. According to Paul, it was only a matter of time until he lashed out after the wife's constant threats to take his children away and never allowed him to see them again. He argued that the husband suffered from temporary insanity. But Paul could tell any story he wanted. Tony wasn't worried the jury would buy it because he still had his key witness, Caroleyn Velez, who he was certain would put her father behind bars. The young girl walked up to take the stand.

She was tiny. She probably looked more like she was eight or nine. She was very skinny, blonde hair, cute little girl. I wouldn't say she seemed scared. Probably nervous because she knew what she had to do.

Tony started off by walking her through the events of the day of the attack. She had told detectives that her mom had taken her to her father's house to pick up her backpack. Her mom stayed in the car. Her mother then drove her the short distance to school. Before the daughter walked inside, her father showed up, unexpectedly. He told her he would get her after school. She headed into her class. That's when the attack took place. They'd gone over this stuff multiple times. They just had to run through it one more time. Here in front of the judge, her parents, the jury, and Paul Bergrin.

I'm like, Oh, and then you went to your father's house to get your book or your book bag? Yes. And your mom stayed in the car? No.

Wait. What? Carolyn was now saying her mom came into her dad's house with her. Maybe she had heard him wrong. So he asked her again.

I was like, You're Mom stayed in the car, correct? And you went in? No, my mom came in also.

Now, Tony was starting to panic. What was happening with his witness?

He reminded her.

But that's not what you told my detective, do you remember? She's like, But no, she did come in. And I'm like, And then what happened next? And I was like, Oh, boy. And then she said she goes to the kitchen and she sees her doing something like putting something up her wrist to make it sound like she brought the knife.

She brought the knife, meaning that it was her mom, not her dad, who was the aggressor. It's an entirely different story and an entirely different victim.

And I'm like, But you didn't say this to my detective, right? You didn't say this. And then I'm trying to then bring out, remember when you talked to the detective and you said to the detective that you just went in and your mom stayed in the car that she never went in. She's like, No, I lied.

And in that instant, Tony's case had fallen apart. No key witness, no case. The change in the girl's testimony shifted the blame away from the husband. Now the jury might believe that the wife was actually the one who brought the knife to the scene. It didn't matter an off-toody police officer saw it go down. Paul went on to say that his client had defensive wounds on his hands, and the only reason the wife was injured was because he was defending himself. All that was left was the final verdict.

Like the drama you see in the jurors and as to the count of attempted murder, not guilty. As to the count to aggravated assault, not guilty. I'm like, I can't believe it as I'm checking off the boxes on my jury verdict sheet, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. I felt defeated.

Paul Bergrin had done it. He had won a case that should have been impossible to win. Tony kept turning the trial on the daughter's testimony over in his head. He checked in with her before her testimony to do a practice round and make sure she was okay.

And then said, Yeah, so do you want to go over it again? She said, No, I already know what I have to do.

What happened? What made her flip?

I was thinking the father must have gotten to her.

The most likely scenario? Her father had influenced made it clear that if she stuck to her story, he'd be going away for a very long time, and she'd have to grow up without him. But there was another possibility. Maybe it wasn't the father pressuring his daughter. Maybe it was his lawyer.

I guess I didn't really want to think it was Bergrind. I didn't even think about Bergrind at that point.

But Tony would have a reason to think about Paul Bergrind again. Sometime after he lost to Paul, another case came into his office.

There was one case that I do remember where my supervisor had either an aggravated assault or a robbery case, and they were getting it ready for trial.

But there was a problem with the prosecution's preparation for this trial.

The victim doesn't show up. We send our detectives from our office to go see if they can find the victim to testify.

When the detectives get to the victim's house, they knock on the door.

And there's no answer at his apartment.

They knock some more, and nothing. They start to wonder, could something have happened to the victim? Something bad?

They're worried, Hey, maybe something's wrong, or maybe the person's hiding. They get the landlord to open the door.

The detectives head inside and search the apartment, but the victim is nowhere to be found. Then they find something, a receipt for a flight the week the victim is supposed to testify. And one more clue that seemed to hold the answer.

A business card from Mr. Birdman. That's just one of the things I had heard.

The pattern of how Paul managed to get his clients out of some very tight spots was becoming known in the courtrooms, the prosecutor's offices, and out in the streets. A decade earlier, Paul was accused of witness and evidence tampered. Charges didn't stick, and he kept going. But maybe that was where the problem started, because where there was smoke, there was fire. And in one of Paul's next cases, he'd take it one step further.

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Word was getting around about Paul Bergrin and the incredible things he could do for his clients. Plenty of people in Newark knew of it, including Sean Brokos' confidential informant, Keema McRay. While Paul had been pulling off miracles for his defendants, Over at the FBI, Agent Sean Brokos had been working to get more informants in the streets. This was 2003, and the FBI was focused on reaching Newark's higher-level dealers in kingpins. Sean had been at the FBI for about seven years, and the job definitely came first.

A lot of us were on the younger side, and we would work really hard during the week. But come Friday night, we'd go have a couple of drinks at a local bar right in Newark called Bello's.

And while chemo was supplying info about those dealers, he also had some things to say about Paul Bergrin.

Kimo say, Oh, yeah, all the big guys go to Bergrin because he gets everybody off. He gets everybody off.

Every now and again, when Sean and chemo were talking in the van after one of their wired buys, Paul would come up in conversation. Chemo had a suspicion as to why Paul was winning so much.

Chemo did tell me that they would pay Bergrin all kinds of cash to do this, and that Bergrin might be able to pay people off. So from a public corruption aspect, I thought this is something we need to start looking at. Is Bergen paying off judges? Is he paying off lawyers? What's he doing?

But Sean was primarily focused on gangs and drugs. She didn't have a lot of bandwidth to get preoccupied with some lawyer.

I never really vetted that out more than to say, How is he winning all these cases? What is it that he's got going on?

So Sean, for the time being, stayed focused on in her own plan, which at the moment, involved Will Baskerville, a pretty major drug dealer. Through his hand-to-hand drug buys, chemo had lured Will into their trap.

The FBI came on November 25th and arrested me.

The sun was rising over the nice, quiet middle-class neighborhood where Will and his family lived, but it wasn't going to stay quiet for long.

Well, I was in my home, basically in bed. I heard. I started hearing somebody basically laying on my doorbell.

Will got up from bed to see who was causing all the noise.

I looked out the window and I sent a bunch of cars. I assumed that it was, you know what I'm saying, the authorities.

He assumed right. Outside his door, Sean Brokos and her team.

I basically came down and let them in. You know what I'm saying? They stormed through my house, basically, paraded through my house, whatever the case may be. I guess her and her team, they scoured through the crib or whatever.

They went from room to room. They opened the closet door and found a stash of heroin neatly packed into bricks and stacked on top of each other. There were also bundles of cash and never worn designer clothes, the price tag still hanging on them. Will was arrested immediately. They handcuffed him and put him into a cop car.

Basically, I was carter off to FBI headquarters, downtown north.

The same office where Sean flipped chemo. And just like chemo, her goal was to turn Will into a confidential informant. She offered to go get Will a coffee or soda.

I think he declined.

Then the questioning started.

Do you know why you're here? And then it's that soft approach. You're under arrest today in violation of drug conspiracy charges. We've had an investigation that's gone on for the past year. We know you've been involved in selling drugs.

After warming him up with the soft approach, Sean got a bit more direct.

She said, Well, we got you. We really got you.

We've got you. We've got you by the balls. We've been investigating you for well over a year. We have you on audio. We have you on video.

Sean kept pressing, trying to get Will to talk.

I told him we had taken both cars because both had been used to distribute and transport drugs. He was very upset about that because he wanted his wife and kids to be able to get around because they weren't part of this, and she shouldn't be affected by this. I said, Well, this is your profession you chose. Your whole family is being affected by this. And I said, Because the amount of drugs you've sold, you're looking at could be close to 20 years.

If he decided to flip, that would be huge for Sean. Even though Will was a bit of a one-man show and a big fish himself, he was still connected. He was getting his drugs from a guy named Hakeem Curry, who the feds had been investigating for a while. Curry grew up in the projects in Newark, but now he was a kingpin living in a luxury apartment, driving a Benz and a Landrover, and showing off thousands of dollars worth of custom jewelry. But he wasn't on the feds' radar simply for being ostentatious. Back then, Curry's crew ran the drug trade in Newark. In fact, Will's brother was Curry's right-hand man. So Sean was giving him the choice, help us bring down Curry and the rest of the crew or go away for a very, very long time. Sean gave Will about five minutes to decide. When the time was up, she came back into the interrogation room for her answer.

Okay, what are your thoughts? He was, No.

I don't have anything to say under the Fifth Amendment without my attorney being present.

What worked with chemo would not work with Will. His mother would not be the one sitting next to him, helping him decide whether or not to take Sean's deal.

I want a lawyer. I want a lawyer.

They gave me a call to be able to call Paul at the time.

So that's when he called Paul.

After Will got off the phone with Paul, his answer was clear. No deal. A federal agent like Sean banks on the streets talking. And thanks to that talk, she was able to arrest Will. But the free flow of information goes in all different directions, and not always the way the feds would like it to. See, Will wasn't about to talk to the FBI, at least not until he talked to his lawyer first, but he was willing to talk with someone else. That fateful exchange would become a big problem for Sean, and even more so for chemo. Around the same time, Sean and her FBI agents came looking for Will, she had been eyeing another drug dealer named Richard Hostin. Richard had been through this thing a few times before, so when he learned that the feds were looking for him, he gave into the inevitable and turned himself in. Following his arrest, the marshals stashed him in a holding cell in the federal court building, just a small room with two metal benches. Eventually, another man was ushered in to share the space with them. It was Will. The two got to chat in a bit.

They spent the night in the cell, and in the morning, were taken to court. Same courtroom, different charges. The men heard the charges against him. Will was able to read his complaint, which had a lot of information in it. Maybe too much.

We weren't so worried because he was delivered carrying crack all day long to different people, so we thought he probably can't piece this together. But in hindsight, yes, it was probably more detailed than it should have been.

Then they were returned to the small room in the metal benches. Will was trying to figure out exactly how he ended up arrested by the FBI. Who was a snitch? With more time to kill, Richard and Will chatted a bit more. Turns out they had a lot in common. Not only had they been arrested around the same time, but they'd also been arrested by the same agents. Oh, and one other thing.

I don't know how they ended up being together in the same holding facility, and I think they both talked about being jammed up, and the person they sold to was chemo.

Chemo McCray, Sean's informant. Sean knew about both of these arrests, Will and Richard. But she said in court testimony that they had done so much planning in preparation for Will's arrest, they decided not to call it off. And that's the rub. The FBI put so much time and care into the arrest, but in the end, when it came to chemo safety, they wouldn't do the same. Even delaying the arrest by a day would have made it much less likely that these two would end up together in the same holding cell, talking about who bought drugs from them. But here we are. Will put two and two together. And as soon as the two prisoners were moved to the county jail, he found a pay phone. He called Paul and gave him the name of the man he now knew had set him up. Sean practically witnessed this intel passing through the criminal transom in real-time. She was at the US attorney's office, just across the street from the holding facility.

And I'm there in a conference room, and one of the the AUSA comes in.

Ausa, Assistant US Attorney. He'd been listening in on the kingpin Hakeem Curry's phone calls via wiretape. One call in particular had just caught the attorney's attention.

Paul Berger and his talking to Hakeem Curry. They're talking about Will getting arrested and trying to piece together how this happened. How did this happen? What happened? And Paul said it was some kid by the name of Chemo.

Chemo? Paula got the name wrong, but Curry knew exactly who he was talking about.

Hakeem Curry said, Chemo? You mean chemo? And Paul said, Yeah, somebody chemo. It was definitely a panic moment.

What are we going to Chemo had been made, and at that point, they weren't worried about Paul Bregren, but maybe they should have been. Sean knew enough about Hakeem Curry's gang to know their threat level. Chemo was in serious danger.

Yeah, it's, oh, shit. Because these are the real deal. Look, this group had killed other people who had snatched on them. We knew that. They were unsolved murders. They do not mess around. They will kill people.

She had to get chemo to safety, and she needed to do so quickly.

So I called him. I said, Get yourself ready. Pack a bag. I don't know how long you'll be gone. I'm not screwing around. This is not a joke. We're going to meet you at this street corner in 10 minutes, whatever, 15 minutes. And we ended up getting him checked into a hotel room where we kept him just so we could learn a little bit more about this and what we needed to do. But the quick reaction was, get him out of pocket immediately.

From then on, Sean and Kimo could never let their guard down.

We kept saying, You can't be in this area. They're going to find you. You've got to go somewhere else. You've got to relocate. And we were able to do that for some time.

Until one day, they found him. That's on the next episode of Criminal Attorney.

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From WNDRI, this is episode 2 of 6 of Criminal Attorney. Criminal Attorney is hosted by me, Brandon James-Jinkes. This series is reported and written by Matthew Nelson. Senior producers are Chris Siegel and Stephanie Waukneen. Senior Story Editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Associate Producer is Malikai Wade. Consulting producer is David Fox, with additional writing from Neil Drumming. Fact Checking by Anika Robbins. Sound Design and Mixing by Jeff Schmidt. Audio Assistance by Daniel William-Gonzales. Sound Supervisor is Marcelino Villapondo. Music Supervisor is Scott Velasquez for FreeSansing. Senior Managing Producer is Lutta Pandia. Managing Managing producer is Heather Baloga.

Development producer is Olivia Webben.

Executive producer is Matthew Nelson. Executive producers are Najri Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent for WNDRI.

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