A True Legal Thriller

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: How often do we say it? Wow. You cannot make this stuff up. My dear pal Mike Avery--an astonishingly good lawyer and an astonishingly good person, talented and funny and wise--has spent his life doing good things. Winning big cases, and small ones, and all on the side of the good guys.

You will see one particular story about that below. It will take your breath away.

But then, after retiring from practicing and teaching, and when he  just as easily  might have rested on his considerable laurels (look at that bio!), he decided to write a book. Well, a novel, since he'd written groundbreaking non-fiction before.

And being Mike, he did not do it the easy way. He did it the right way. 

           
North End Justice
  by Mike Avery
 One afternoon in January 2007, I was standing with my client Peter Limone, admiring the Boston Harbor from the hallway of the U.S. District Court in Boston. The courthouse sits on the bank of the harbor and massive windows, a few stories high, showcase the boats drifting by and the Boston skyline. We were in court trying Peter’s case against the United States government, seeking compensation for the thirty-three years he’d wrongfully spent in prison. 

As the court ultimately found, Limone, who’d been a numbers runner before he was arrested, was framed by the FBI for a murder of which he was completely innocent. Federal agents covered up the fact that the murder was committed by Jimmy Flemmi, an FBI informant.

  For over thirty years the FBI was in partnership with stone cold killers in Boston, including Joe (The Animal) Barboza, Steven (The Rifleman) Flemmi, and the infamous Whitey Bulger. With the explicit approval of Director J. Edgar Hoover, the agents made deals, including sanctioning murders, with gangsters, mostly Irish, to go after gamblers and loan sharks, mostly Italians. It was one of the most corrupt chapters in the history of law enforcement in America.

Limone and three other innocent men were convicted in 1968 on the testimony of Joe Barboza, who committed the murder with Jimmy Flemmi, Steven’s younger brother. The FBI agents were warned of the murder the night before it took place by an informant, who confirmed a day later that it had gone down. 

The agents recorded all this in written memos, which never mentioned Limone or the other innocent men, but which identified the true perpetrators. These memos were buried in the FBI files. In the 1990’s Steven Flemmi was finally prosecuted on racketeering charges and defended himself on the ground that the FBI had assured him that he could commit crimes with impunity. The federal judge ordered the FBI to turn over its informant files and a special assistant U.S. Attorney furnished the relevant memos to Limone’s attorneys. Peter was finally freed in 2001.

 Peter swept his arm across the view of the water and turned to take in the courthouse and all of South Boston where it was located. “When they divided up Boston,” he said, “the Irish got all this. What did the Italians get? We got the North End.” He was saying the Italians had been cheated. But I knew he loved the North End. 

Down a side street you’ll find a square named after his brother Ninny. My son David and I joined the Limone family there one evening to celebrate St. Anthony’s Feast, held every summer. It came to me in the courthouse corridor that the North End would be a good setting for a novel, and the FBI’s criminal activities could be the basis for a plot.

 I’d always wanted to write a mystery novel. In my early years I read Mickey Spillane, Eric Ambler, Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, and many others. More recently I enjoyed Robert Parker, Scott Turow, Patricia Cornwell, and Dennis Lehane. 

I wondered if I had it in me.

           

In 1998, after nearly thirty years trying cases as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer, I’d closed my practice and become a professor at Suffolk Law. I had time to write. But between the law review articles for tenure, the legal treatises about evidence law and police misconduct litigation that I’d written for years that required annual updates, and two books about law and politics that I felt compelled to do for political reasons, there was no time for fiction. I managed a few awkward chapters, then set my fantasy of writing a mystery aside.

When I retired from the law school at age 70, my goal was to get better at writing non-fiction. The two books I’d attempted to write for a general audience were overly dense and technical. A friend told me about the low residence MFA writers’ program at Bennington. I applied and was accepted in the non-fiction genre. I was the oldest person in my class—the youngest was 25. 

I paid for my tuition with Social Security checks.

 Bennington let MFA students switch genres for one semester and on a lark, I moved over to fiction. I was so unprepared it was embarrassing. When I submitted a chapter of a potential novel to the workshop, everyone said, “You’re constantly jumping around and changing the point of view.” “Uh,” I said, “what’s ‘point of view’?” Fortunately, I had wonderful teachers and one of them, Stuart Nadler (Wise Men, The Inseparables) worked with me for over a year after that semester and went through the drafts of my novel twice.

 I used what the FBI had done to Peter Limone as a starting point. At first, I thought I was writing a story about a burned-out lawyer, Bobby Coughlin, who took court appointments to make a living and got in over his head in a high-profile murder case. 

I gave him a law student intern, Susan Sorella, with the idea that she would embarrass him into shaping up and eventually he would reform and save the day. That started to feel like a cliché. 

As I wrote, however, Susan took over the investigation into the murder and then took over the book. She was unstoppable. Susan became a real person to me as I struggled to get into her head. She developed a relationship with the mob boss, Frank Romano, who helped her battle with the FBI. Things got more interesting. Eventually I figured out how to end the story and then began the long and painful process of rewriting.

 This has been a difficult but rewarding journey. Starting a new career so late in life was hard but seeing the novel in print was a moment like no other. When I finally held my published book in my hands, I had to sit down to keep from falling over. These days Susan Sorella has passed the bar and is practicing law, still going to Frank Romano when she needs help. If The Cooperating Witness is well received, I’ll create a series based on her cases.


HANK: So you all know the feeling. A dear pal sends a book.  Want to read this? they ask. 

Ahhhhh, sure.You say. But in truth?  This is terrifying. What if it's terrible?

But yay. And whew. This book is terrific. Robert B. Parker meets John Grisham and that is no hyperbole. It's a gem.

So tell us--what's your favorite legal thriller? Or legal story? The best trial you ever watched? The most surprising thing you've heard about the law?

And ooh. What questions do you have for Michael? If you're writing a book with legal elements--lucky you. This is your guy. Ask away!






THE COOPERATING WITNESS

Suffolk Law student Susan Sorella is tending tables at her father’s restaurant in Boston’s North End when the head of the local mob pays her a surprise visit. What he tells her sends her on a mission to save an innocent man accused of gunning down the mob’s accountant.

Susan’s an intern for Bobby Coughlin, a burned-out defense attorney who cops his clients out faster than they can sign his retainer agreement. The judge, having dropped the accused trigger man in Bobby’s lap, is pushing for a quick guilty plea. Bobby wants to supply it before he has a nervous breakdown.

Susan has to battle Bobby’s fear of failure, his sexism, the State’s Attorney, crooked FBI agents, their homicidal informants, and a cooperating witness to get to the truth. She’s not a lawyer yet, but with her knack for digging up evidence and the wise guys on her side, she’s racing to get to the truth before an innocent man goes to jail.

Michael Avery is a freelance writer who lives in New Orleans. He writes nonfiction about law and politics. He produces fiction on a broader canvass and is interested in the problems of contemporary America.

Beginning in 1970, Michael enjoyed a career as a civil rights and criminal defense attorney over four decades, representing clients in jury trials and arguing cases in federal and state appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. His principal specialty was law enforcement misconduct. Michael and a team of lawyers obtained the largest award ever against the FBI for wrongful convictions, securing damages of $102 million for the families of four innocent men who were framed on murder charges by the Bureau. In 1998, he joined the faculty of Suffolk Law School in Boston, where he was a tenured professor, teaching Constitutional Law, Evidence, and related courses. In 2014 Suffolk awarded him the status of professor emeritus.

Michael graduated from Yale College in 1966 and Yale Law School in 1970. In 1968-1969, he was an exchange student at the University of Moscow, Recently, he returned to school and received an M.F.A. from Bennington College in January 2017.

He was the editor and a contributing author to We Dissent: Talking Back to the Rehnquist Court (NYU Press), a critical review of civil liberties and civil rights cases from the Rehnquist Court, and co-author of The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals (Vanderbilt U. Press). Prof. Avery is co-author of Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation (West), a leading treatise on civil rights law, co-author of the Handbook of Massachusetts Evidence (Aspen), the leading treatise on that subject, and the author of the Glannon Guide to Evidence (Aspen), as well as several law review articles.

Michael has been politically active since the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement of the sixties and seventies. From 2003-2006 he served as president of the National Lawyers Guild.

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Follow him on Twitter: @profavery1