The evidence is sketchy, but it seems to place the attack in the hands of organized crime-perhaps even Gotti himself. The authors open after that trial had concluded in yet another Slotnick win, and with a sensational incident: He was attacked by a masked man who beat him with a baseball bat. He put similar tactics to work in his defense of Bernhard Goetz, the “subway shooter” whose trial made international news. Slotnick’s defense was a standard confuse-the-jury ploy, but it worked. One of his early cases, indeed, involved a group of Jewish Defense League members who allegedly blew up a Broadway producer’s office, killing a woman who worked there. An “urbane lawyer known for his twenty-five-hundred-dollar Fioravanti suits, he was not unacquainted with violence,” write Patterson and Wallace. The Patterson publishing machine clanks its way into the nonfiction aisles in this lumbering courtroom drama.īarry Slotnick made a considerable fortune and reputation as a defense attorney who had a long list of controversial clients, including mob boss John Gotti and Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.

James patterson er