On the afternoon of March 2, 2004, a thirty-year-old man named Deshawn McCray — everyone called him Kemo — was walking with his stepfather near the corner of South Orange Avenue and Hazelwood Avenue in Newark when a man came up behind him and shot him in the back of the head, then stood over him and kept firing. Kemo was a confidential informant for the federal government. He had made drug buys from a dealer named William Baskerville, and his testimony was the case. The government had told exactly one person outside law enforcement the informant’s identity, in the ordinary course of discovery: Baskerville’s defense attorney. Within hours of learning it, the FBI would eventually prove, that attorney had telephoned Baskerville’s boss, the drug trafficker Hakeem Curry, and passed along the name. And at a meeting with Curry’s crew on a Newark street corner, the lawyer had explained the stakes in words that members of the crew would repeat, under oath, for years afterward: no Kemo, no case. If the witness was dead, Baskerville walked.
William Baskerville understood the arithmetic immediately. Awaiting trial, he learned of the shooting and, according to trial testimony, celebrated: the case against him was dead because the witness was. He miscalculated. The murder converted a routine drug prosecution into a capital investigation, and every cooperator it eventually produced testified against him too. He was convicted of the drug charges and of conspiring in the killing, and sentenced to life.
The lawyer was Paul Bergrin, and the outrage of the story — the reason it remains, two decades later, the darkest attorney-misconduct case in modern American memory — is not that a criminal somewhere obtained a law license. It is the résumé. Bergrin was a former U.S. Army officer who kept a reserve commission for years, a former Essex County assistant prosecutor, and a former Assistant United States Attorney in Newark — a man who had stood in federal court for the government, who knew precisely how the machinery of witness protection worked because he had operated it, and who then spent a decade dismantling it from the other side of the aisle. Prosecutors do not use the phrase lightly, but they used it in open court: Bergrin ran his law office as a racketeering enterprise. The jury agreed with all twenty-three counts of it.
The Soldier-Prosecutor
Bergrin’s beginnings were the kind the profession celebrates. Raised in Brooklyn, he enlisted in the Army and came out an officer, keeping a commission in the reserves for decades and retaining a soldier’s vocabulary of loyalty and mission that juries found irresistible. He prosecuted first for Essex County — homicides, the grinding felony docket of Newark in the 1980s — and then federally, as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of New Jersey, the office that would one day spend the better part of a decade building the case against him. Colleagues from those years describe a hard-charging trial man, more courtroom than library, beloved of cops and impatient with paperwork. When he crossed to the defense bar, the conversion was total in the way of the born advocate: the state he had served became the adversary, and the presumption of innocence became not a principle but a weapon he genuinely enjoyed swinging. None of this is unusual; the criminal bar is staffed with former prosecutors, and the crossing is honorable. What the résumé concealed was the absence of any inner boundary that the crossing normally leaves intact.
The practice he built was a family business in the Newark style. His firm operated from a building on Market Street, staffed with associates and investigators who moved in his orbit; his law partner and longtime girlfriend, Yolanda Jauregui, would eventually stand beside him in the federal indictment and plead guilty to trafficking conspiracy charges of her own. The office’s client base was the city’s narcotics economy, and prosecutors would later argue that the line between counsel and consigliere had dissolved entirely — that Bergrin was not a lawyer with criminal clients but a member of the enterprise whose function happened to be performed in a suit, in a courthouse, under the protections of the Sixth Amendment.
The Rise
Through the 1990s and 2000s, Bergrin built the most conspicuous criminal-defense practice in New Jersey. He was flamboyant, tireless, and genuinely talented before a jury — a courtroom brawler with a soldier’s bearing who won cases other lawyers refused to touch. The client list ran from street-level dealers to hip-hop royalty; he represented Queen Latifah in a traffic matter and the rapper Lil’ Kim’s circle, and when American soldiers were charged in the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, Bergrin flew to the courts-martial and defended one of them, collecting national television time along the way. Newark’s drug organizations — the ones moving kilograms, the ones with payrolls — kept him on something like retainer. Law enforcement noticed what the retainer bought. Witnesses in cases against Bergrin’s clients had a way of reconsidering, relocating, or recanting. The pattern was discussed in the U.S. Attorney’s office he had once served, and for years it remained a pattern only: suspicion without proof, the professional courtesy of the benefit of the doubt extended to a former colleague.
Kemo’s murder began the conversion of pattern into evidence. The FBI was up on Hakeem Curry’s phones, and an intercepted call captured Bergrin relaying the informant’s identity — “a guy by the name of K-Mo” — days after the government disclosed it to him. Anthony Young, a Curry soldier, later testified that Bergrin met the crew on a street corner and told them that if Kemo never testified, Baskerville would come home — and that Young himself then stalked the informant for months and pulled the trigger. But cooperator testimony against a decorated ex-prosecutor was a hard sell, and the government waited, and watched, and Bergrin, unindicted, expanded.
The Empire
What he expanded into supplied the case its tabloid chapter. In 2005, when a client named Jason Itzler — proprietor of NY Confidential, the most expensive escort service in Manhattan — went to jail, Bergrin did not merely represent the business; by the government’s later account, he took it over, running the service with an associate, laundering its proceeds, and enjoying its inventory, all while maintaining his practice as an officer of the court. New York prosecutors indicted him for it in 2007, and the episode would have been the scandal of any ordinary legal career — a felony conviction arising from a Manhattan brothel — but in Bergrin’s biography it functions almost as comic relief, a misdemeanor of the spirit between murders.
NY Confidential deserves its footnote in full, because it measures how far outside ordinary professional gravity Bergrin had drifted. Itzler’s operation, run from a loft in Tribeca, had been Manhattan tabloid legend — escorts marketed at rates running to the thousands per hour, a client book the columns speculated about for months — and when the Manhattan District Attorney dismantled it, Itzler’s defense lawyer was Bergrin. The government’s evidence, developed in the 2007 New York indictment and folded into the later federal narrative, was that Bergrin and an associate stepped into the vacuum their own client’s arrest created: keeping the enterprise alive, collecting its revenue, and laundering its proceeds while Itzler sat in jail. A defense lawyer inheriting his client’s brothel is the kind of fact that would define any other disciplinary case in the profession’s history; in Bergrin’s it is a transitional paragraph.
The heart of the federal racketeering case that followed was uglier. In 2008 and 2009, Bergrin agreed to help a cocaine-trafficking client named Vicente Esteves deal with the witnesses against him, and the man Bergrin recruited for the job — a purported hit man called Oscar — was a cooperator wearing a wire. The recordings gave the jury Bergrin the craftsman, the former prosecutor coaching a contract killer in evidence hygiene: make it look like a robbery, a home invasion gone wrong, nothing that suggests a witness was targeted; kill quickly, before the witness list solidifies. He discussed which witnesses mattered most and how their absence would gut the indictment. It was the Kemo playbook, narrated by its author, on tape. Alongside the murder plots, the indictment charged that Bergrin had trafficked cocaine himself, coached witnesses to lie in a military court, and bribed and suborned across a decade of cases — a law practice as full-service criminal enterprise, with the attorney-client privilege as its security system.
The Esteves recordings preserved something rarer than a confession: pedagogy. Here was a man who had spent years as a federal prosecutor explaining, in the patient tones of continuing legal education, how the government builds a case and therefore how to unbuild one. Kill the witness early, he counseled, before the government locks in testimony; stage it as street crime, because a witness who dies in a robbery is a statistic while a witness who dies as a witness is a federal case; never discuss it on a phone. The tapes’ horror is their fluency. Legal ethics imagines misconduct as deviation — a lawyer who breaks rules under pressure. Bergrin on tape is not deviating from anything; he is practicing a coherent, learned discipline that happens to be the precise inversion of his oath, criminal defense conducted as counter-prosecution by homicide.
The Trials
It took the government two tries. At the first trial, in 2011, limited by rulings that severed the case and constrained the racketeering evidence, the jury hung on the Kemo murder counts. The Third Circuit took the extraordinary step of removing the trial judge from the case, finding the appearance of partiality in his handling of it, and the retrial in 2013 — before a new judge, with the full pattern admitted — ended differently. Bergrin, characteristically, represented himself for stretches, cross-examining the murderers of the man whose name he had leaked. The jury convicted him on all twenty-three counts: racketeering, conspiracy to murder a federal witness, the Esteves murder-for-hire plots, drug trafficking, and the rest. In September 2013, U.S. District Judge Dennis Cavanaugh imposed six concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole, telling the courtroom that the case represented as profound a betrayal of the justice system as any he had seen. The Third Circuit affirmed. Bergrin, disbarred and imprisoned, has spent the years since filing appeals and petitions from federal custody, insisting on his innocence to any forum that will docket him. Anthony Young, the triggerman, testified his way to a plea. William Baskerville, the client whose case began it, was convicted anyway — of the drug charges and of conspiring in Kemo’s murder — and is serving life.
The 2013 retrial gave the case its most indelible image: Bergrin, representing himself with standby counsel at his elbow, rising to cross-examine Anthony Young — the man who had confessed to shooting Kemo McCray on Bergrin’s alleged instruction. For days the disbarred-in-waiting lawyer performed the rituals of his profession — the courteous objections, the impeachment by prior statement, the theatrical incredulity — against witnesses testifying that those same skills had been placed at the service of murder. Jurors later said the performance cut against him: he was too good, too fluent in the machinery, for the jury to believe the machinery had been used around him rather than by him. It took them little more than a day to convict on everything.
The Curry organization, for its part, did not outlive the case that revealed it. Hakeem Curry was convicted on federal drug charges and sentenced to decades in prison; the crew members who had hunted Kemo McCray across Newark for months — trading the work among themselves, Young testified, while Bergrin’s message hung over them — were swept into pleas and convictions. Kemo’s murder itself went unsolved for years precisely because the staging worked as designed: a Black man shot on a Newark corner in 2004 read as street violence, and only the slow accumulation of cooperators converted it into what it was, the contract killing of a federal witness ordered through his own government’s discovery process. His family waited nine years for the verdict that named it.
The Privilege
Every profession’s ethics rest on an asymmetry of trust, but the criminal defense bar’s asymmetry is the starkest: the state hands its adversary the identities of the people who will testify for it, because a defendant cannot meet accusers he cannot name. The entire apparatus — discovery rules, protective orders, the presumption that an officer of the court is not a courier for a drug organization — assumes the lawyer is the firewall. Bergrin is what it looks like when the firewall is the arsonist. The damage he did runs beyond his victims, beyond Kemo McCray bleeding on Hazelwood Avenue; it runs through every prosecutor who now hesitates before disclosing a name, every honest defense lawyer whose discovery requests are met with a new caution, every informant told, truthfully, that the system protecting him has failed catastrophically at least once and been caught. The betrayal, as the sentencing judge understood, was structural.
The case forced the federal courts to confront a doctrinal puzzle they still handle awkwardly: what to do with the Sixth Amendment when the lawyer is the crime. Bergrin wrapped himself in the right to counsel at every stage — arguing that prosecuting a defense attorney for his representation chills the entire adversary system, that his street-corner counsel to the Curry crew was law practice, however aggressive, and that the government was criminalizing zealousness. The courts’ answer, refined across the appeals, drew the line where common sense had always put it: advising a client of the evidence against him is advocacy; conveying a witness’s identity to the people who will kill him, with instructions on timing and staging, is aid to murder that happens to be spoken by a member of the bar. The privilege protects the function, not the man, and a law license, the Third Circuit’s decisions made plain, is not a letter of marque.
The bar’s official machinery, it must be recorded, contributed nothing to stopping him. No ethics committee, no fee arbitration, no disciplinary docket detected the enterprise; New Jersey’s disbarment followed the convictions as an afterthought. Bergrin was stopped by wiretaps, cooperators, and two federal juries — by the criminal law, which is to say by the tools reserved for the people the profession is supposed to be distinguishable from. His courtroom gift was real; the soldiers he defended at Abu Ghraib, the acquittals he won for men the state could not convict, were real. That is the confounding remainder of the case. The system did not fail to produce a good lawyer. It failed to notice that it had licensed a gangster who was one.
Sources: United States v. Bergrin, No. 09-cr-369 (D.N.J.), superseding indictments, 2013 trial record, and sentencing of Sept. 23, 2013; Third Circuit opinions including United States v. Bergrin, 682 F.3d 261 (3d Cir. 2012) (reinstating racketeering counts) and the court’s reassignment orders; United States v. Baskerville (D.N.J.); DOJ press releases, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, 2009–2013; contemporaneous coverage by the New York Times (including the 2013 sentencing report), NJ.com/The Star-Ledger, and New York magazine’s reporting on NY Confidential.