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convention in Las Vegas, and Franklin was the host. He loved playing that role.
    And that’s when I stopped being a young lawyer, a boy, and became a man. I look back on it now as a rite of passage. Again, it wasn’t something they taught you in law school, but something you had to learn if you were going to make it as a defense attorney. I confronted Franklin.
    “If you don’t honor our agreement,” I said, “I’m calling a press conference and I’m going to announce exactly what you did. I’m going to call you a liar in front of every D.A. in the country. I’m going to tell them you care more about winning cases than justice, that truth doesn’t matter to you, and that you’re not a man of your word.”
    The charges against Crockett were dropped.
    Interestingly, later on I heard that the jury in the second trial was torn on the identification issue and how it fit in with reasonable doubt. Would you believe it was resolved by a woman juror who examined the evidence in their deliberation room and announced to the others that when Crockett was arrested, the cuffs on his trousers matched the stitching on the drapes from the window the person carrying the shotgun came through? She said they must have come from the same sewing machine. Not in a million years do you figure a case gets decided that way, totally out of left field. Absolutely nuts! Her assumption could have put Brown in the electric chair.
    Crockett and his family thought I was the greatest lawyer in the city. That’s how I started building my criminal practice.
    Was he innocent? He passed the test. But he went right back into the drug underworld, and I would have another encounter with him later that wasn’t as pleasant.
    In the end, you could say I won the case, but it wasn’t based on anything they taught me in law school. I didn’t get the district attorney to go along with the agreement based on the legal issues or the facts, which he should have done. That was the right thing to do. Instead, he went along because he was worried about his image and about all the negative publicity I was threatening to bring. I had to hit him over the head.
    As I said earlier, sometimes you have to practice law with a baseball bat.

    I did all kinds of cases back then. There was a dealer over at the Hacienda that Carolyn and I knew in our early years in Las Vegas. Carolyn would often play at his table after we had gone to dinner on my Dad’s $25. His name was Bob Butler, and I had helped him with some financial problems by filing a bankruptcy petition for him.
    One day while Butler was working, the phone rang. The pit boss answered it and then cupped his hand over the receiver and asked everyone, “Who’s the best criminal defense attorney in Las Vegas?”
    Butler thought of me. “I don’t know if he practices criminal law, but Oscar Goodman’s a great guy,” he said.
    The pit boss got back on the phone and told the caller, “Oscar Goodman is the best criminal defense lawyer in town.”
    Little did I know I was about to take my first step toward becoming a mob lawyer.
    The caller was Mel Horowitz, who I didn’t know from Adam. He was a major underworld figure supposedly involved in pornography, which was a big mob money-maker back in the 1960s. He had a vast bookmaking operation in the Northeast andCanada, and he moved around in the best of mob circles. He knew people like Meyer Lansky, who the FBI said was the financial genius behind the national crime syndicate; Raymond Patriarca, the Mafia boss who oversaw all organized crime in New England; and Fat Tony Salerno, who was head of the Genovese crime family in New York, the family originally headed by the late Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who with Lansky had set up the national organization. These were heavyweights in a world where I was clearly a novice.
    Horowitz’s stepbrother had been arrested in Las Vegas driving a stolen car. He needed a lawyer. The case was pretty much open-and-shut; there wasn’t