Joel Cohen
Years ago I was a corruption and then mafia prosecutor over a 10-year span—first for New York state, and later the U.S. Justice Department. Top tier criminal investigations always. I spent more time in investigative grand jury rooms than anywhere else, examining witnesses—crooked police, politicians and mobsters. Witness after witness was hostile to those probes, but no lawyer for any witness ever intruded into the sanctity of the grand jury chamber. The law simply didn’t allow it (and from my vantage point, rightly so).
To me, lawyers for witnesses, typically, were simply in the way. They were often, to my mind, “obstructionists” and sometimes even outright suborners. I and my colleagues were invariably frustrated by the constant battle against witness contempt, dissembling, evasiveness and sometimes even outright perjury. These roadblocked our pathway to piercing the omnipresent blue wall of silence, or code of omerta. You know—truth, justice and the American way.
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