William Lashner - Hostile witness

He scrunched up his eyes and rubbed the back of his hand across his nose and then said, "Sure, yeah."

"Is this money from a drug transaction?" I asked.

"Hey, wait, what do you take me for?"

"Is this money stolen?"

"Get out of here. Rest assured, Mr. Carl, I work hard for my money."

"Knowing the law as well as you do, can I, in good conscience, take this money, Michael?"

"Trust me, Mr. Carl," he said with his broad smile.

I looked at him very carefully, weighed everything, and then I took hold of the bundle of bills and placed it in my desk drawer. "Wait just a second," I said as I reached into my drawer for some letterhead, "while I write up a receipt."

"Receipt?" he said, as if he had never heard of the word before. "What's with the receipt? I paid you cash."

"Lawyers who don't give receipts for cash sometimes have the peculiar problem of forgetting to report the payments to the IRS."

"Yeah, isn't that funny," said Michael Tombelli. "That's what happened to my last lawyer. He just got four years."

"First I'll write out your receipt, Michael," I said, "and then we'll discuss what to tell the District Attorney."

So that was that. I had once aspired to walk among the paneled corridors of wealth and power with the elite names of the legal world. I had wanted to shed my past and my heritage as a snake sheds its skin and ascend to Olympian heights. Now I would skulk around the City Hall courtrooms, representing baby mobsters and other lowlifes as they tried to minimize their jail time for their petty and not-so-petty crimes, socking away my retainers and advising my dear clients how to stay just to the right side of that narrow and shifting line. I knew what life was like for a lawyer who represented the members of the mob. It was no different than for a lawyer like Tony Baloney, who spent his life defending drug dealing scum. He was scorned by his fellow practitioners, excluded from the finer firms, from the prestigious clubs, from the sober-minded committees of the bar association. Aspersions were cast as to his integrity, his veracity, his fitness to stand before the bar. He was investigated relentlessly by the District Attorney, he was hunted like wild game by federal authorities, his taxes were audited each and every year. He became a pariah.

I had found my calling.