Being Oscar Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I liked that. Still, you could be the smartest guy in the world, but without a client, nobody would know it.

CHAPTER 3
WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH IN LAW SCHOOL
    I didn’t set out to be a mob lawyer—they don’t teach a course on that in law school. But I knew I wanted to practice criminal law because I thought it was meaningful.
    I’ve always looked at life in terms of David versus Goliath. I identify with the underdog. When I was a boy attending religious school, stories involving fights against injustice and oppression made a big impression on me. Anyone who’s ever read the Bible knows there are plenty of those in the Good Book.
    At this time horrific stories were coming out about the concentration camps. This was post–World War II, and Americans were finding out about the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler. Six million Jews had been slaughtered because of a maniac who spewed a philosophy of hatred and intolerance.
    All of that shaped who I was, and what kind of lawyer I would become.
    It’s no secret that I became a lawyer because of my dad. I saw him practice law, and I knew what it meant to see justice served. When I was about twelve years old, he took me to court with him one day. By this time he had left the district attorney’s office and was in private practice. He was representing a woman in a civil case. When I think about it now, it still sends chills down my spine.She had been a survivor of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. She had those horrible numbers tattooed on her arm. Some family members wanted to have her lobotomized so that she would forget the shock and terror that she had experienced.
    But she was against it. She thought it was important that people remember.
    My father had taken me to hearings held in police districts when he was with the D.A., but this was the first time he ever took me to City Hall, and the first time I was ever in a real courtroom. I was there for closing arguments in the case. I think he wanted me to understand what being a lawyer was. He was emotionally involved because of the principled position his client had taken; so involved, in fact, that he was getting physically ill.
    But when he made his closing argument, he was awesome, passionate, and eloquent. The point he made was that while those were horrific times, forgetting them would be an utter tragedy. The judge ruled right from the bench in his client’s favor. There would be no lobotomy.
    Whenever I think about that case, I remember my dad’s passion and conviction. From that point on, I knew that a lawyer—in particular, a lawyer who cared about what he was doing—was in the business of fighting for righteousness. It may sound trite, but when I was practicing law, I really saw myself as a defender and protector of the Constitution. My father had taught me that attitude, and as a result, I took my work very seriously.

    Trial law is fascinating. You never know where it’s going to take you. In one of my cases in Las Vegas, I found myself again dealing with a concentration camp survivor. Only this time I was on the other side of the courtroom.
    This wasn’t a headline case, and it didn’t involve a high-profile client. I used to get my hair cut at a barbershop owned by a young man named Dino. He was a hardworking kid, in his early twenties. Handsome in a Stanley Kowalski kind of way. In fact, he wore those sleeveless t-shirts in the barbershop. He had a girlfriend and was planning to get married. I knew his family, and they were nice people.
    One night when he was driving home from work, an elderly women stepped out of the shadows in front of his car. Dino knocked the old lady down. He panicked and continued driving. Two blocks away, he pulled into a convenience store and called his father from a pay phone. Sobbing, he told his dad what had happened. His dad told him to go back to the scene of the accident, which he did.
    When he got there, he learned that the elderly woman had died. He was