After first claiming that he was originally offering “Late Show” host David Letterman a screenplay for $2 million, Robert “Joe” Halderman, an ex-producer for “48 Hours Mystery” on CBS, pleaded guilty Tuesday to attempted grand larceny in the second degree.
“I apologize to Mr. Letterman, his family, to Stephanie Birkitt, her family, and certainly to my friend and family. I will not be doing interviews. Thank you for your patience,” Halderman said after entering the plea.
As you may recall, Stephanie Birkitt (pictured) was the Cardozo Law grad who became romanticallyentangled with both Letterman and Halderman.
So, what kind of sentence did Halderman get?
On the media website Mediaite, we are erroneously listed as having an affiliation with the Late Show with David Letterman. We wish! If that were the case, then maybe we’d have inside dirt on one of the juiciest media scandals to come along in a while.
And it’s a media scandal with a legal angle — several, in fact. Last Friday, we named the woman at the eye of the storm, Stephanie Birkitt, our Lawyer of the Day. Birkitt — the former Letterman paramour whose ex-boyfriend, Robert “Joe” Halderman, stands accused of trying to extort David Letterman — is a lawyer. The blonde hottie is a graduate of Cardozo Law School, and she passed the bar exam twice — in New York and Connecticut. Very impressive, Ms. Birkitt!
Alas, Stephanie Birkitt may be a two-timer in more than one sense of the word. We previously stated, relying on other sources, that Birkitt’s sexual relationship with her former boss ended in 2003. Now we’re hearing otherwise, from the New York Post:
Pretty former “Late Show” staffer Stephanie Birkitt revealed in her diary that she continued having sex with boss David Letterman even after moving in with her CBS-producer boyfriend, who later allegedly tried to extort him over the affair, sources told The Post yesterday.
Letterman and Birkitt enjoyed romantic hikes last fall at his sprawling ranch in eastern Montana — where he was married in March — while her boyfriend, “48 Hours Mystery” producer Robert “Joe” Halderman, stayed home in Connecticut, the sources said.
At the time, Birkitt, 34, insisted to Halderman that she and the 62-year-old Letterman had just “a platonic relationship,” a source said.
“I’m his best friend,” Birkitt told the worried 51-year-old Halderman, the source said.
A friend with benefits? Like free law school tuition? Speaking of which, according to our reader poll, almost two-thirds of ATL readers would sleep with David Letterman in exchange for free law school tuition. UPDATE: According to Maureen Dowd (gavel bang: commenter), Letterman’s company loaned Birkitt the money for law school, which she paid back. If true, this is disappointing. What’s the point of sleeping with the boss if you can’t get paid for it?
More law-related Letterman links, after the jump.
The Village Voice had a great piece last week on the developing trial of Robert Simels, a New York attorney who has attracted a fair amount of fame from defending alleged mobsters and other assorted “kingpins.”
Legendary local attorney Robert Simels is only being punished for representing some of New York’s most unredeemable gangsters, say some in local legal circles. Kind of a what-goes-around-comes-around situation.
Simels not only lawyered for mafia turncoat Henry Hill (on whose life GoodFellas was based), but also some of the biggest Latino and black drug kingpins of the ’80s and ’90s. And now, Simels himself is in deep trouble. He’s been indicted for allegedly tampering with witnesses in a case revolving around a comparatively little-known Guyanese drug gangster, Shaheed “Roger” Khan.
There is talk that Simels has been hauled into court as a punishment for his unsavory client list. Coincidentally enough, his trial is taking place before U.S. District Judge John Gleeson — a former prosecutor who went after John Gotti.
So it should come as no surprise that Simels has turned to another legendary defender of clients with supposed mafia ties, Gerald Shargel:
Simels has hired Gerald Shargel, one of Gotti’s main lawyers and a guy who is, in fact, one of the most prominent mob lawyers in the city.
Nice.
But did you know that Shargel also doubles as a professor at Brooklyn Law School?
Details after the jump.
Marc Dreier, the jailed New York law firm founder, must remain in prison while he fights charges that he swindled hedge funds, a federal judge ruled after a prosecutor accused the lawyer of stealing $380 million.
“The evidence does appear to show an enormous risk of flight,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Douglas Eaton said at a bail hearing today in Manhattan federal court for Dreier, namesake of the New York law firm Dreier LLP.
Dreier, 58, was arrested on Dec. 7 on U.S. charges that he persuaded two unidentified hedge funds to give him more than $100 million by claiming, falsely, that he was selling at a discount notes issued by New York developer Sheldon Solow. He was arrested after returning to New York from Toronto, where he had been briefly jailed for impersonating a lawyer at the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan.
* Our Law School Dean hotties contest is now underway. Vote on the women here, the men here, and the alternate male candidates here.
* Do you know anyone who is currently clerking for Justice Alito? If so, we’d like to hear from you.
* If you’re in law for the money, we recommend Korean transactional practice, at a big firm. You’ll probably make more than you would as a solo practioner or small firm lawyer.
* If money is your top priority, then don’t bother with the law; go work for Goldman Sachs . Partners there take home an average of $7 million a year. And still find time to beat up on small businessmen.
* ATL readers: Not as rich as Goldman Sachs partners. But pretty damn smart.
* Creative ways to get yourself criminally charged: (1) walk around your office buck naked; or (2) walk out of a restaurant without paying (after concluding that your seafood pasta dish was short on the seafood).
* But protesting while topless, that’s okay.
* Lori Alvino and Matthew McGill: We are not worthy. The happy couple tied the knot earlier this month. Their wedding guests included two sitting Supreme Court justices, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, and two SCOTUS short-listers. (Yes, we’ve categorized this under Nauseating Things.)
* Some dispatches from the New Yorker Festival: Justice Breyer, with Jeffrey Toobin; legendary criminal defense lawyer Gerald Shargel, along with other experts on the Mafia; and some guy named Jon Stewart.
* There’s a new kid on the ATL block: Meet Stella Q. Welcome, Stella!
We attended several other New Yorker Festival events in addition to Justice Breyer’s talk with Jeffrey Toobin (which we discussed here and here). One of these was a fascinating panel about representations of the Mafia in popular culture, entitled TV, Movies, and the Mob.
The panel, moderated by Jeffrey Goldberg, was star-studded. It included the magnificent Lorraine Bracco, aka Dr. Jennifer Melfi of “The Sopranos”; Paul Haggis, who won the best screenplay Oscar for “Crash” (and is working on a new TV series about the criminal underworld); Harold Ramis, director and co-writer of “Analyze This” and “Analyze That”; and Frank Vincent, who plays Phil Leotardo on “The Sopranos.”
But the panelist of the greatest interest to us was a lawyer: Gerald Shargel, one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the country. Shargel has represented numerous high-profile defendants, including the Mafia boss John Gotti and various members of the Gambino family. As Goldberg drily described Shargel during the introductions: “He’s the sort of lawyer you got to when you have BIG problems. Not just regular-size problems….”
A more detailed discussion of the panel, after the jump.
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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This just in, from CBS News:
