Few lawyers in America have handled more headline-making cases than Marc Agnifilo of Agnifilo Intrater. A former prosecutor in both the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Jersey—where he and I met and became friends, around 20 years ago—Marc has defended a number of famous (some might say infamous) figures. His clients over the years have included so-called “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, former NXIUM cult leader Keith Raniere, and Luigi Mangione, who faces state and federal charges in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Earlier this month, Marc and his colleagues won acquittals for Sean “Diddy” Combs on federal racketeering and sex-trafficking charges—the most serious charges that Combs faced, which could have landed him in prison for life had he been convicted. Last week, I interviewed Marc about the trial and shared some highlights in these pages; now, I’m pleased to provide the complete podcast.
Thanks to Marc for taking the time to speak with me, so thoughtfully and openly, about an interesting and momentous case—as well as his remarkable career as one of the nation’s leading trial lawyers.
Show Notes:
Marc Agnifilo bio, Agnifilo Intrater
How Diddy’s Likable Defense Lawyer Helped Save His Unlikable Client (gift link), by Corinne Ramey and James Fanelli for The Wall Street Journal
The husband-wife legal team working on two of today’s biggest criminal cases, by Eric Levenson for CNN
Prefer reading to listening? For paid subscribers, a transcript of the entire episode appears below.
Sponsored by:
NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com.
Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any transcription errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “View entire message” in your email app.
David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat dot Substack dot com. You’re listening to the seventy-eighth episode of this podcast, recorded on Thursday, July 17.
Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment at nexfirm dot com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.
I’m very excited about my latest guest: Marc Agnifilo, founding partner at Agnifilo Intrater. One of the nation’s top trial lawyers, Marc has tried more than 200 cases over his 35-year career. Marc and I have been friends for years, after working together in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey. Before he served as a federal prosecutor, Marc worked as a state prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and after his time as a prosecutor, he became a defense lawyer. He has represented numerous high-profile defendants, including the so-called “pharma bro,” Martin Shkreli; Keith Raniere, former leader of the NXIUM sex cult; and Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I spoke with Marc not long after he tried the biggest case of his career, defending the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs against criminal charges brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. After a two-month trial, the jury acquitted Combs of one count of racketeering conspiracy and two counts of sex trafficking. Although the jury did convict on two counts of transportation of individuals to engage in prostitution, the outcome was widely viewed as a defense victory, since the racketeering and sex-trafficking counts were by far the most serious—and if Combs had been convicted of them, he could have faced a life sentence. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Marc Agnifilo.
Marc, thank you so much for joining me.
Marc Agnifilo: David, thanks so much for having me.
DL: It’s always great to have an old friend here, so I know some of this. But for the benefit of my listeners, tell us a bit about your background and your upbringing. Where did you grow up?
MA: I was born in the Bronx, and then when I was eight years old, we moved six miles from the Bronx to Yonkers, which was like moving to the woods. I went to public school. I went to Roosevelt High School for high school. I went to Connecticut College. I was a DJ. I was really into music. I was a DJ on the radio; I DJ’d the parties. It was a fun time.
I went to Brooklyn Law School, which I really enjoyed. I went to the Manhattan D.A.’s office in 1990. It was trial by fire: Manhattan was really violent back in the early ‘90s, which gave us young ADAs plenty to do. I realized I wasn’t paying my student loans, so I tried to have my own firm when I was 29. I realized I was kind of young to do that, but I had a big trial win in a New York State RICO case, which we call OCCA [Organized Crime Control Act] in the state.
And the judge, Justice Bernie Fried, said, “What are you going to do with your life?” And I said, “Well, Judge, you just saw it. I don’t have another job. What you just saw for the last two months is what I do for my life.”
And he said, “You should go to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” And I said, “I’ll never get that job. I’m from Brooklyn Law School; I have my own practice. I don’t have a judge looking out for me or a big firm sending me.” He said, “No, you’re a really good trial lawyer and they always need good trial lawyers. If you had to pick an office, where would you go?” And I had two really good friends, Mark Costello and Perry Carbone, in the office in New Jersey, and I called them, and they said, “You’d love it.”
So I said to Justice Fried, “Hey, I want to go to New Jersey.” I think he wrote a letter to Faith Hochberg—who was the U.S. attorney at the time, she’s now a district judge—and I was lucky enough to get the job. And I met you, and we had lots of adventures in the District of New Jersey, being AUSAs together.
Then I left in 2006. I went with Ben Brafman, was with Ben for 17 years, and did a lot of great work. Ben and I, while we were together, were very close. And when I told him I was leaving, he was upset. And then sometimes he acted the way people do when they are upset—and it was my job to forgive him.
I started my own firm almost two years ago, and it’s been great. We’ve had a lot of success, a lot of trials—I probably try three cases a year, every year, long cases. I was in trial from January until early April this year, before the Combs case—a trial in Camden, New Jersey, a healthcare-fraud case in federal court. So I’m a real trial lawyer. There are a lot of great trial lawyers out there, and I’m happy to be considered one of them, I think.
DL: Let me drill down on some of the things you just mentioned. Did you have any lawyers in the family or early exposure to law?
MA: No, all Italian bricklayers, carpenters. I was the first person anywhere in my family to go to law school.
DL: Although I believe, if I’m recalling correctly, that your uncle is the celebrated novelist, Don DeLillo?
MA: My uncle is Don DeLillo. We’re very, very close. He doesn’t have any kids, so I see him probably once every few weeks; I saw him just last week. He’s still smart as a whip. I don’t know that he’s writing anything at the moment, but he was a huge influence on me, because I tried to be a writer and realized I just don’t have it in me to spend long hours by myself.
DL: You were very active in Moot Court at Brooklyn Law, and you were one of the leaders of the Moot Court project there. I’m guessing that when you went to law school, you already knew you wanted to be a trial lawyer specifically?
MA: So really what happened was this. In my first year of law school, I was a little disillusioned. I thought it was like a trade school. It didn’t seem special. I didn’t exactly know why I was there. And then my second year, I did an appellate advocacy program where we represented a prisoner—a living, breathing human being, who was in jail on a robbery. And I, along with the professor, wrote the appellate brief for this man. And all of a sudden, something struck me: “This is real. This man is in jail. Maybe he committed the robbery; maybe he didn’t. But the issue is with the integrity of the lineup.” And so something just hit me: “This is real. Criminal law is real. People’s lives are at stake. It’s important to be good at it. It’s important to be dedicated.” And from then on, it was really natural that I got into Moot Court, because I wanted to go to the DA’s office and I wanted to be a trial lawyer. I was willing to put the time in to try cases of all different types. And then I was off and running, and I never looked back.
DL: Clearly, you love trying cases. You told us about a little of what led you to go from being in the Manhattan DA’s office to the District of New Jersey. But I’m guessing that when you made the jump from state to federal, you knew you would probably get many fewer trials, right?
MA: I thought so, but I’ve had four federal trials in the last year and a half, all of them a month long or longer—so it’s not that fewer. I was on trial in a DA’s case for seven months. It was a case involving a crane collapse, and it kind of had the feel of a civil case. We waived a jury, so it was a bench trial, and the judge acquitted my client of an assault; the DA’s office charges these crane collapses as reckless assault very often, and that’s what they did in that case.
So I knew it’d be fewer trials, but the trials are so intense. I had the Keith Raniere trial. I had Martin Shkreli; that was a trial. Roger Ng, the biggest Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case in the history of the DOJ, was a trial. So even though the trials are only two months, we’re talking about years and years of preparation for each one.
DL: That’s true. And it’s interesting, you just named some of your greatest hits; the cases for which you’re most famous are actually federal cases.
Now, was it difficult for you to make the transition from working as a prosecutor for years to working on the defense side, including defending some very unpopular people? Martin Shkreli was one of the most reviled people, and Keith Raniere wasn’t exactly a beloved figure either. Was that difficult for you?
MA: It really wasn’t. I really liked Martin, and I think Martin is actually a very genuine, honest person. And I thought what he did to get himself in trouble was essentially—I hope I can mildly curse on your show—calling bulls**t on Big Pharma. I think what Martin saw, and what a lot of people saw, is that pharmaceutical companies were just jacking up the prices of drugs and saying, “Well, we have to do it because of all the research and development we’re doing.”
So Martin called bulls**t on the industry and said, “Well, I did it ‘cause I wanted to.” And it came across as callous, and I think it was misunderstood because no one really understands Martin has a wicked sense of humor. But it was his way of not just poking fun at, but kind of exposing, the pharmaceutical industry for what it was, in his view and the views of a lot of people.
Raniere was a fascinating guy. I genuinely think Raniere was well-intentioned and thought that he was helping people. The problem with Raniere is that when you start having intimate relationships with women who are arguably under your sway, that gets problematic in a hurry—and that kind of was his undoing at the end of the day.
I find these people fascinating. That’s the thing about criminal law, and especially criminal law with people like that: these people push all the boundaries. The confines that we all feel to live in society the way we are, they don’t feel them; they go beyond them. And that’s what ends up getting them in trouble very often.
DL: I think that people forget, with Shkreli, that (a) the things for which he was convicted were not the price-raising things that got him in the public eye, and (b) you actually got a good result for him, in the sense that he was acquitted, I think, on more counts than he was convicted of. Correct?
MA: You’re right. He was acquitted on the five most serious charges, and he was convicted on three. And it’s funny, because when the jury returns its verdict, and they say not guilty on the first count, not guilty on the second count, I’m thinking, “Wow—are they really about to acquit Martin Shkreli of all counts?” But then they did convict him on three.
And I thought that Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, who’s a very fair judge, was going to give him a lower sentence than he got. But Martin got himself in trouble with some remarks that he made about Hillary Clinton. He said that he wanted someone to pull out Hillary Clinton’s hair and make sure that they got a follicle so that he could clone her. And whether he has a First Amendment right or not to say such a thing, he had been convicted of three counts, and Judge Matsumoto reflected that in the sentencing, at the end of the day. But he’s out of prison, he’s doing well, and I consider him a groundbreaking person who could do great things in society, and I think he will.
DL: Let me ask one or two more questions before we dive into what I really want to focus on, namely, the Combs case. You worked for a long time, I think you said 17 or so years, with Ben Brafman, another legendary defense lawyer. What would you say you learned from working with him?
MA: So I learned something during the Shkreli trial. Ben and I split up the crosses: he did half the cross-examinations, and I did half the cross examinations. I’m a fast-moving crosser: I get in, I hit my targets, and I get out. But Ben did something that I’d never quite seen done the same way: he wanted a particular answer from this witness, and he was just going to keep this witness on the stand until he got it. And he finished the day, we went to the next day, we went through that entire day, finished the second day, and on the third day, you could see the witness just saying, “What do I need to say to you to get off this witness stand? ‘Cause I’ll say it.” And Ben got him to say it on the third day, and it was an important piece of information, and Ben just wore him down. So I learned that.
Also, Ben has a great way with juries. He’s funny, he has a great sense of humor, and—I know we’re going to talk about the Combs case in a few minutes—I needed to use my sense of humor in talking to the jury in the Combs case. I do that with juries in all my cases. I wouldn’t say I learned that from Ben, but Ben gave me a license in my own mind to do that.
DL: Let me ask you one question before we dive into the Combs case. You were working with Ben, who’s a great lawyer. You were working on some amazing cases for some really high-profile people. What led you to strike out on your own and launch Agnifilo Intrater?
MA: It was just time. I probably should have done it even earlier, but honestly, I was on trial for seven months. I had about a year run up to that trial. I didn’t want to disrupt the situation while my client was about to go to trial, or certainly during the trial. So, I ended up pushing it back about two and a half years, just for that reason alone.
But it was just time. I wanted to do things my way. Zach Intrater is one of my law partners, Teny Geragos is another one of my law partners, and we just wanted to build a firm our way. We wanted to get the other lawyers that we wanted. We wanted to kind of move Ben’s office into the future—Ben, because of when he grew up, is just not keeping up with the times technology-wise, things like that—and so we wanted a firm that was more along those lines. And, mostly because of Teny and Zach, we have done it. I don’t know that I contribute to the 21st-century qualities of our firm.
DL: So even though you’re a well-known and seasoned trial lawyer, having tried more than 200 cases over your 35-year career, it’s still very impressive that you landed someone as high-profile as Sean Combs as a client so early in your firm’s history. How did you come to be retained by him?
MA: That’s a good question. So someone named Kenny Meiselas was Sean’s longtime manager, and Kenny has a son who has a podcast with my wife—the Legal AF podcast is hosted by Kenny’s son Ben and my wife Karen.
What happened was we were getting wind that the Southern District of New York was sort of sniffing around Sean Combs, and they had approached two of his people, like a CFO and another kind of executive in the company. And his lawyers at the time didn’t understand this and said, “It sounds like they’re just barking up the wrong tree, because these guys are CFOs, they’re buttoned-up, and there’s nothing wrong with the business. So the Southern District must be just missing the mark.”
And I said, “Listen, I’ve built probably more racketeering cases than anyone I know, and what they’re doing is they’re seeing if they can establish a cogent enterprise going back in time, so they can try to develop racketeering acts and attach them to this cogent enterprise, so they’re going to build a RICO case.”
So I had a conversation with Sean and Kenny on a Zoom and I said, “This is what they’re doing.” And Sean said to me, “Wow, I’ve spoken to 40 lawyers. No one said this.” I said, “Well, this is what they’re doing. This is the playbook. There’s a playbook—one that if I didn’t help write, I certainly learned early in my career—and this is it.” And I think he saw that I knew what I was talking about, and as fate would have it, I ended up being exactly right; that was exactly what the Southern District was doing. And so I think my history with RICO, and my history with a racketeering and sex-trafficking case like Raniere, helped. He saw that I knew my way around the statute, I knew my way around these trials, and there weren’t that many people who did. And he hired me, to my great good fortune.
DL: You alluded to having worked on more of these cases than pretty much anyone out there. You were the head of the Violent Crimes Unit at D.N.J., where you worked on multiple racketeering cases. Did it feel weird to go from being someone who prosecuted many of these cases to defending the most famous racketeering case of all at its time?
MA: There was a transition, but by the same token, because I knew the racketeering statute so well, I also knew how it could be abused, and I certainly tried to avoid doing that. And I think most prosecutors try to avoid doing that. But I think sometimes with high-profile targets, I don’t know, maybe they’re not as careful as they would be otherwise. It was easier in terms of knowing the law than I thought it was going to be.
DL: I have a theory on why they wanted to make this a racketeering case. I think when the video of Sean Combs and Cassie came out, it was a horrible video—I think that’s fair to say—but I believe it was also, at the time it came out, outside of the statute of limitations. Whereas with RICO, if you can establish that something is a racketeering enterprise, you can reach back to all of these prior acts. So why do you think they wanted to make it a racketeering case? Because as I think we will get to, there’s an argument that it didn’t really fit racketeering terribly well.
MA: I agree with you, and I think that was a fatal flaw in the case, and I think they tried to get around it. I’m going to answer your question in a minute. I think they tried to get around it by making it a racketeering conspiracy, which they felt was a little more forgiving, because that’s the prevailing wisdom. The problem with a racketeering conspiracy is you need a co-conspirator. Combs can’t do it alone; Combs has to do it with not just a co-conspirator on each individual racketeering act, but on the racketeering enterprise as a whole. And they didn’t have a racketeering enterprise as a whole, and they didn’t have Combs on that, and they didn’t have a conspirator on that. And so they ended up losing the racketeering charge because they just didn’t come close to having remotely enough evidence of it.
The attraction of a racketeering case is that you get to dump all of these bad acts into one case, and the prosecutor’s goal in these cases is to just kick up so much prejudice. The idea is that it’s almost like making a fish stew. If you have a really fresh fish, you’re just going to give it to the customer. But if the fish is a few days old, you’re going to cut it up, and you’re going to put it in a stew with a few onions and some tomatoes and spice, and maybe no one will actually notice that the fish isn’t really that good.
The same thing is true of racketeering acts. You just throw in all these crappy racketeering acts, and well, if he didn’t do the arson, maybe he did the kidnapping, and if he didn’t do the arson or the kidnapping, maybe he did the forced labor. And it’s a lot to unwind. So the defense lawyer has a lot to do because Combs was charged in terms of racketeering acts with probably 20 different events. There were three kidnappings, there were four forced-labor conspiracies, and each of these forced-labor conspiracies had different events that were part of the charge.
So you have to convince the jury that it’s all nonsense, that none of it’s true. So you end up trying a case that has all of these events in it. And in this particular instance, when it came to Combs, we got a jury that saw through it, that wasn’t prejudiced by all of the events that the government threw in, and I think they saw through it and rightly acquitted him of the racketeering conspiracy.
DL: Let me push back on one thing. You mentioned that there were no co-conspirators. But the evidence at trial did show that there were many people who were involved in making the arrangements or the logistics or what have you for the so-called “freak-offs.” There were a lot of people in his orbit, former assistants, etc. So why cannot the Combs enterprise qualify as a racketeering conspiracy?
MA: So to satisfy the racketeering statute or the conspiracy statue, the co-conspirators would have to knowingly be involved in the charged racketeering activity. In other words, at the end of the day, there was no evidence that this was sex trafficking. And so the personal assistants, the other people who worked for Mr. Combs, thought, “This is Mr. Combs and his girlfriend. If they are together or if they have a swingers’ lifestyle, what business is it of mine? This is what he does. It seems legal. There’s no indication it’s not.”
There’s sort of a strong puritanical thread I think that ran through the government’s case, like, “Well, you, Personal Assistant, knew there was a possibility that there was going to be another man in that room!” “Well, so what? What business is it of mine?”
And it’s not a matter of business at all. The personal assistants were very good about this, saying, “This was his personal life. And I know it was his personal life because when he had these hotel nights, I would go home and rest. I wasn’t on call because it wasn’t part of his business.” And I think that’s the way they viewed it. I think that’s the way the jury viewed it.
DL: So you got a sizable team of amazing defense lawyers—including one of my former podcast guests, Alexandra Shapiro. But it’s notable that a lot of these lawyers came from different firms; they’re not all with you and Zach and Teny. How did that team come together? Did you put it together? Did Sean Combs put it together? How did you all coalesce?
MA: It was a combination of me and Sean. I brought in Alexandra’s firm and I brought in Sher Tremonte and Anna Estevao, and I really had a vision for the defense that it was going to be women-led and young-women-led. I thought that was important, and we were lucky enough to have great young women lawyers. My partner, Teny, in her early 30s, has been through the wars, was with me for Ranieri, was with me with Roger, was with me for all these huge trials. In my view, she had a breakout trial. She gave a stirring, wonderful opening.
Anna Estevao crossed Cassie. Now, I had written the whole cross of Cassie. I wrote the whole thing; I had it ready to go. And one day I’m in my office until about two in the morning, and I decide to walk home, which is about an hour and a half walk. And I’m looking for the streets of New York to help me with the trial. And I realize I can’t do the cross of Cassie. It’s the wrong thing. Because let’s say I box her in, I outflank her, I use my 35 years of cross-examination experience to trip her up or make her look less credible—I lose ground even from that. And I started to realize I need a young woman.
I’ve never necessarily been one to believe that only a certain type of person should cross-examine a certain type of person. I think juries see through that stuff. So the only way it was going to work in this case is the defense had to be authentically and thoroughly woman-led. It can’t be a token. It can’t be a gesture. It has to be authentic, and it has to be a real commitment. And it’s a commitment that I realized we had to make and that we should make. And I was lucky because we had these outstanding young women lawyers.
So Teny did the opening and did just an epic opening. It set the stage for the whole rest of the trial. Anna did a great, patient, thoughtful, non-aggressive but effective cross of Cassie. Teny did the same thing with the woman we call Jane. And so the women had the biggest crosses in the case and the opening, and it was a genuine thing. If the jury would’ve seen it as something other than that, it wouldn’t have worked. But it was real. It came from kind of the heart of the defense; this is what it is. And so that was certainly a decision that I made.
And there was a controversy around it. This was Teny’s first opening statement in any case. So her first opening in her career is the Sean Combs trial, and she kills it. She knocks it out of the park. To this day, the press is talking about the opening—and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a trial where two weeks after the verdicts, they’re still talking about the opening. And it’s because the opening really set the stage. It put everything in motion in this very kind of measured way, that in a sense I think only a young woman who really knows the facts—and no one knew the facts like Teny—could do. She was perfect that way. And Anna was the perfect person to cross Cassie.
So the defense started to take shape in these different ways. And ultimately, I had to get buy-in from Sean, and he did give it. And one of the things Sean said to Teny right before her opening—and I’ll never forget it—he said, “This is my life, but this is your moment. And my life will be best served if you rise to your moment.” And Teny went out there and rose to her moment.
DL: You did mention that you wanted young women lawyers to play this very central role in the case. Were you perhaps responding to some extent to the prosecution’s staffing of this case? Because I believe that all of the half-dozen or so AUSAs on this case were women.
MA: Yeah. Was I? Maybe on some level I was, but I don't think it was that much of a counterpunch. I think it was our authentic strategy. And there are certain things that I’ve learned in 35 years—I feel like I’m pretty light on my feet, I can cross, I know trial feel—but sometimes there’s a type of sincerity and genuineness I think that comes from someone who hasn’t done it as many times as I have, and that’s really how it came across.
The cross-examination of Cassie I thought was fascinating because Anna was just genuine and authentic the whole way. She wasn’t trying to catch her. I don’t think we pointed out an inconsistent statement or said that she was lying about anything, not one time. It was all, “But then you sent this text message, right? And you sent this text message because that’s how you felt at the time, right?” “Yeah, that’s how I felt.”
And we were so good at really mastering the written communications. We realized that if we could do that and if we could master the written communications at least as well as the government lawyers did, that was going to be our best chance for success. Because they had this relationship in real time, and our view was that Cassie and Jane, to a certain extent, were looking back at a relationship in hindsight—with maybe some measure of regret, or not—but this is a relationship that happened in real time on text. And if you can make that relationship real for the jury, that’s what you have to do.
DL: You mentioned you weren’t really trying to have a “gotcha” kind of cross examination with Cassie. But another one of the very talented lawyers on your team, Nicole Westmoreland, did elicit what Judge Subramanian called a “real Perry Mason moment,” in one of the crosses she did.
MA: Nicole is awesome. Nicole is a great lawyer, a great person, and a great cross-examiner. And we put Nicole with witnesses who we thought were not going to be as honest as some of the other witnesses. And Nicole just went and took care of business. Nicole is just a very skilled cross-examiner, so we needed that as well.
I never was of the view that Cassie was going to get up there and lie. I think that she was going to have a different view of her relationship now than when she was living it. And whether that’s lying I guess is up for debate, but she wasn’t going to get up there and lie. And so we didn’t need to do that to her, and we didn’t look to do that to her. Some of the other witnesses I think were getting up there to lie, and that’s where Nicole came in. And Nicole handled it and handled it very effectively.
DL: So to zoom up a little bit higher, did you have an overarching defense theme? And I know, of course, we saw some of these themes in both Teny’s opening and your closing, but if you could offer a pithy summary of how you were thinking about the case, how would you describe it?
MA: This was all his personal life, and these were all his girlfriends. The heart of the case was his personal life. The government didn’t find that he did anything wrong with his businesses; they didn’t find anything wrong with the loans that he got or with the hundreds of millions of dollars that passed through his businesses. Had they found something wrong with that, that would’ve been in the indictment.
And so they charged into his bedroom and into his private hotel rooms, uninvited—because these are not women who went to the police. These are women who either did nothing or went to civil lawyers because, after the fact, they wanted a certain sum of money. That was the real theme—that this was his personal life. It was nobody’s business, and the government was making this into something that it was not. And so everything in the case revolved around that.
Now, we also had to admit, and we admitted right up front, that there was domestic violence, and there was domestic violence with Cassie a number of times through the years. I realized, early on, we had to fully take account of that. The word I used was we have to “own” that; we have to take all the dispute out of that. The government’s not going to have to prove these things happened. We’ll admit it in the opening, and we won’t give a hard time to the witnesses who truthfully testify about these things.
So that was another part of it, because I thought what the government was going to try to do was to say that if you have this violence in the past, it’s a short walk from that to the force or coercion required for sex trafficking. So we had to separate the two, and we had to own one, because one was committed—and we had to fight the sex trafficking because we firmly believe, and the jury firmly believed, that that was not committed. So that’s the reason we did that.
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So with Mr. Combs, you fully “owned,” as you put it, the Cassie video. You didn’t try to minimize the video or deny what your client did. There were definitely aspects of the defense presentation that did not put him in the best light. Contrast him with a client like Donald Trump, who seems to always want his defense lawyers to put him in the best light, etc. What was Mr. Combs like as a client?
MA: He’s a fascinating person, he was a fascinating client, and let me tell you exactly why. By the time I met him, he was already under investigation, and we didn’t know what was going to happen. It just kept getting more and more real, and it looked more and more inevitable that there’d be an indictment. Then he was in jail, and we couldn’t get him out.
And he had a lot of time to reflect. He is a religious man, he grew up going to church, he went to a religious Catholic high school, and I think he started to realize that he has done things wrong. He’s an imperfect person, he’s done things wrong, and he gave us the green light, to his great credit, to tell the truth—the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it was probably the key to success. And I think that comes with a certain amount of humility that some other people say he didn’t have, but he showed it with us—that he’s strategic, he’s smart, he’s built these businesses that maybe no one else could build, Black-owned businesses that were successful and that really made their mark on the business world.
So he is all of that. But I think this whole situation gave him this tremendous “time out” to reflect on things and say, “Okay, I’ve had these great successes, I’ve had these great blessings, but I still have these flaws, and these flaws have now come back to affect me, and we have to be honest about all of it.” So as you said, we had to take it all on, and he wanted us to do that.
And so really what it was is, we couldn’t just sort of say, “Yeah, okay, we admit that he hit Cassie.” We had to go further than that. We had to sort of radically accept it and almost take it away from the government: “You don’t need to do anything with this. We’ve got this. Don’t waste the jury’s time. Here’s another time that he hit Cassie, he was in a...”—unless you’re going to link it to forced sex, and that’s how it played out at the trial in my view. I think the jury’s like, “Okay, we understand all this. Are you going to link this to sex, or not?” Because if you’re not going to link it to sex, it might not be all that relevant. And I think the reason is because we took all that on.
DL: And people should note that he was acquitted not only of the racketeering, but also acquitted of the sex trafficking. But let me ask you this about him as a client. Many times, successful people, wealthy people, people in roles of leadership, when they come to a trial, they kind of think, “Well, I’m a smart person. I have good judgment. Let me sort of run this case.” But it seems that he was content to let his lawyers be lawyers rather than try to be a backseat lawyer himself.
MA: Yes, that’s very true. He would say many, many times, “I’m just going to get out of my own way.” And that was the phrase: “I’m going to get out of my own way.” And he put a lot of trust in me, and I really appreciated it. And he would say that. He said, “I’m going to trust you. I’m going to trust you on this.” And I would say, “You should, because I know how to do this, so you have to trust me.”
DL: Were there any major things in the defense that you changed because of input from your client?
MA: Him testifying is always a big one.
DL: I feel that during our time back in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the conventional wisdom for defense lawyers was to never put your client on the stand. But I feel in the past few years, that’s been changing, and despite whatever jury instructions people get about the Fifth Amendment, I feel that juries today sort of expect to hear from defendants. So how much thought did you and or your client give to putting Sean Combs on the stand?
MA: We gave it a lot of thought, and we gave it a lot of thought deep into the trial. And it really wasn’t until the government put on a former CFO that we decided not to. The CFO was a great witness for us and gave us a lot of great background about Sean, about his companies, and about racial diversity back when nobody was doing that. So you look at all the issues that you would want your client to testify to, and you ask yourself, “Well, do we already have those?” And by the end of the government's case, we had already had a lot of them.
Now, we knew on some level that it’s Sean Combs; the jury is going to want to hear from Sean Combs. But I think (a) the jury also understood that they can’t hold it against him, and (b) my sense of the jury by the end of the government’s case is they had this look to them, like, “We understand the issues; we got it.” So I didn’t get the sense that they were sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting for Combs to testify. It would have been a fascinating thing had he testified, but we got everything we needed out of the government’s case, so there was really no reason to.
DL: And so I’m guessing then that you felt pretty confident in your decision to put on a defense case that lasted under an hour, even though the prosecution had been up there for, I don’t know, six weeks or something like that?
MA: Yeah, we did. It’s because we got great stuff out of the personal assistants. We felt that we had neutralized the witnesses that hurt us, and we realized there wasn’t really that much more for us to add. The government called four personal assistants. I thought they were all very valuable to us. I thought that the two escorts that the government called were very valuable to us, in terms of the sex trafficking. And so we just didn’t need to call any more escorts or any more employees on our own.
DL: Going ahead to your closing statement, it was at times funny and folksy and sarcastic. And it was controversial. Some people hailed it as masterful. Others found it offensive, especially your reference to the Combs-Cassie relationship as “a great love story”—even though it featured violence, as we know. Do you have any regrets about that closing, or anything you would take back, or something you said in the moment where you now think, “Well, if I were to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have done it that way”?
MA: I think my reference to Jaws and needing a larger roll of crime-scene tape was probably not necessary. Other than that, no, really, no.
Let me tell you a little bit about the closing. The night before the closing, I had nothing written. Zero. I had written an outline, I had written some stuff, I read it over, and it wasn’t good enough. It was not what you would need for the closing in the Sean Combs “trial of the century.” It just didn’t rise to that level. So this is 7 p.m., I’m summing up in 14 hours, and I literally do not have a note. And my wife says to me, “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s take a little walk.” And I’m walking and I’m talking to myself and I realize I know what I want to say. And so I wrote down three pages of bullet points on a legal pad, in pen, and those were my notes.
What I felt the jury lacked was a story. What is the story of this case? “We don’t need a PowerPoint, we don’t need to see the emails for the 15th time, we don’t need to see the video again unless you’re going to point something out that we haven’t noticed. But we want to know the story of this case. Tell us a story.”
The way you tell a story is you look at the people you’re telling the story to. So I set it up so that I wouldn’t have to be stuck at a podium, I got close to the jurors, and I told them the story of this case. And I used a little bit of a tester to see where they wanted to go. It was toward the beginning, and I said, “Homeland Security used all this equipment, and they knocked down all the fences, and they used a special response team, and they destroyed all of his property—but it’s worth it because they got the Astroglide.”
And they all started laughing. The whole jury started laughing. And I realized, “They want this. They don’t want me to be up there, all staid, saying, ‘You shouldn’t believe this witness.’ They wanted the story.”
One of the things that people don’t realize about trials, and it’s the most important part of the trial, is you have this shared experience with the jury. You’ve all gone through the trial together. I’s not just you talking about the evidence, it’s all of you—we had 17 jurors, because we had five alternates at the time—so the 17 jurors and you have all gone through this last two months of just craziness, and it’s a shared experience that’s never been discussed. So if you can do that, all of a sudden you’re like them. You’re not “other”; you’re not the lawyer and they’re the jury. You have this shared experience that you’re all now commenting on.
So there are things that happen during the trial that are funny. There are things that happen during the trial that are emotional. And the way you bond with the jury is you talk about those things in that way; you don’t talk at them.
“I’m going to tell you a story of something we all just saw.” It’s almost like we went on this two-month backpacking trip, and now I’m going to tell you a story about what we all just did—and this was funny, and this was sad, and this was poignant. And I said that the Combs-Cassie story was a great love story because I maintain that it was. And some great love stories have parts to them that are sad and unfortunate and regretful. Yet these two people loved each other. And what I told the jury—and I think some of their faces softened when I said it—I said, “Read the text messages at the end of their relationship. They are some of the best writing and saddest writing you’ll ever see.” Because that’s true. This is a human thing. It’s a trial and there’s laws and there’s a judge, and we’re in the federal courthouse, but this is human beings living their life. And that was such a central theme of the defense that I had to put it in motion in a way that had a visceral impact.
And so you have to kind of break the static of what happens in a federal courtroom, by all the tools that are available to you—sarcasm, humor, telling a love story—because it’s not just the data. The government wants to give them data: “Here’s an email, read the text of the email, read this.” But these are people who loved each other and wanted to be together. And if I could tell that story and reach them, reach their hearts, that was the way that I would win the case. Not because I got something over on anybody, but because that’s the true story.
And so that’s what the summation turned into, and that’s why I couldn’t write it beforehand, because I had to do that in front of the jury for the first time. I’m this big believer in first times. If you can keep your thoughts straight (and you don’t want your summation to veer off into crazy places), and you can do something for the first time in front of a jury, and the jury gets the energy of that, it’s so much more powerful. And so the summation came together the way I wanted, even though I had only three pages of bullet-pointed notes.
DL: And you spoke for how many hours in that closing off of those three pages of bullet points?
MA: Four and a half.
DL: Wow. So your point about the tester or trial balloon is so interesting to me because it essentially suggests to me that you have to trust yourself and make these decisions on the fly. You didn’t have a script. You had to put this out there, see how they reacted, see if they laughed at the Astroglide reference, and then adjust accordingly. That takes a huge amount of guts. A lot of people would be terrified.
MA: So there’s one trial in my career that I guessed wrong on; I thought I was going to win, and I lost. It was the Roger Ng trial, the FCPA[Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] trial, and it was a Covid trial. The jury wasn’t in a jury box. The jury was in the audience of the courtroom, there were no other spectators, and the jury had masks. So there were jurors who were 50 feet away from me, and I had a mask on. And I didn’t meld with the jury at all. They were too far away, and I couldn’t do my thing. And my thing is to be with them. My thing is, “I am feeling where you are, and I am going to tell the story that we all just saw together. This is our story. Here’s the funny things in our story. Here’s the poignant things in our story.”
And once you do that, you win. It’s really that simple, if they go with you. If they don’t go with you because they’re saying, “Well, wait a minute, your client definitely robbed that bank,” then you lose anyway. But if you feel that from them, you’re going to win. And so I knew that the jury got it. I didn’t know what the verdict would be, but I knew the jury got it, and I knew that I was kind of building as I went, and the summation was going the way I wanted.
DL: So then tell me, how were you feeling as the jury left to deliberate, and how were you feeling during the deliberations? Because they sent out a couple of notes, and I understand that one of the notes might have thrown you and your colleagues on the defense team for a loop, perhaps.
MA: So I think what you’re talking about is when they came back the second day and said they had verdicts on counts two, three, four, and five, but not on count one. And no one knew what to make of that. Is it bad? Is it good? And I read the press on it, I made the mistake of reading the press on that—we looked ashen, we looked shaken, all these things—none of which are all that off. We didn’t know what to think.
So the day ends, and I go home. At three o’clock in the morning, I wake up, which is standard—I wake up between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. every day when I’m on trial, which is not nearly enough sleep for me—and I have this thought. And I send Teny Geragos a text and I said, “The verdict is going to be good for us. We have to figure out: where’s the airplane? Where’s his passport? We’re going to make a bail application, because they probably convicted him of the prostitution, and they probably acquitted him of the sex trafficking, which is why they can’t reach a decision on the racketeering—because if they had convicted him of the sex trafficking, they would have convicted him of the RICO, because now he’s a sex trafficker. They’re not going to do him some favor on the RICO. And had they acquitted him of the prostitution, they would’ve acquitted him of the RICO. But they can’t reach a decision on the RICO, which means they split.”
It hit me with such clarity, like it had to be that—and then of course it was. And I also had the feeling that if they couldn’t reach a decision on the RICO that second day and they reached decisions on the others, there might be just a couple of holdouts against us, and they’ll see fit to acquit him of the RICO. And then I think a half an hour into the third day of deliberation, they did exactly that. So I needed the dust to settle, and then I think I figured out what was going on.
DL: So as you mentioned, the jury came back, and they did convict on two interstate-transport, prostitution-related counts, but they acquitted on the racketeering, and they acquitted on the sex trafficking. I think the general consensus about the verdict was, in the words of our former colleague, Mitch Epner, that this was “a major victory for the defense and a major loss for the prosecution.” Combs was acquitted on the most serious counts, the counts that could have exposed him to a life sentence.
But let me ask you this. In your post-verdict statement, you praised the jury as “wonderful,” and you said they got the situation “right—or right enough.” And the “right enough” part, I’m guessing, alluded to the fact that they did convict your client on these two prostitution-related counts. But speaking very candidly, I think you did have an uphill climb on those, in terms of just the text of the statute and the facts—there were these escorts who were transported, etc. You’re not going to appeal those convictions, are you?
MA: I think we are—and I’ll tell you why. Because Combs has to intend prostitution, interstate travels for the purpose of prostitution—and why would he think it’s prostitution, when the Cowboys 4 Angels escort service is alive and well? We can have a “Cowboy” at our house in an hour. It’s an ongoing business, doing very well, operating in dozens and dozens of locations, with more locations every day.
How is he supposed to know that it’s illegal, when it’s a thriving business? How is he supposed to know it’s illegal to make your own pornography, when you could go on YouTube, YouPorn, whatever, and there are entire categories of homemade porn? If someone traveled from one state to another to do that, why isn’t that a violation of the Mann Act—if they were paid something, or their travel was paid, or there was some compensation? Why would he think that making homemade porn is illegal or that using Cowboys from Cowboys 4 Angels is illegal?
He was convicted of that. And I think the jury must have reached a conclusion: “It was just too much—there were too many Cowboys, and too many porn stars, for us to acquit you of this.” But if you look at the trial evidence, the government called two of these men, and they both said very clearly, on the record, “I am not a prostitute.” They both very clearly said, “I do not have sex for money.” So if we’re looking at the trial evidence, I don't know where the trial evidence shows prostitution.
I think that there’s this innate notion: “Well, it must be, right?” But that’s not what the trial evidence showed. So we’ll have to see what happens. We’ll have to see what the sentence is. We’ll have to see a lot of things. But Sean is considering appealing.
DL: Your client is acquitted on these major charges, but on the same day, you move for his release on bail post-verdict, and Judge Subramanian denies it. What did that feel like for either you or your client? Was there a kind of whiplash, or a bittersweet thing going on? Because on the one hand, you achieved what was widely regarded as a big win. But on the other hand, at the end of the day, at the end of the trial, your client is going back to MDC [Metropolitan Detention Center].
MA: So what Sean said, and it’s as good a way to put it as any, is that we just won the championship, and they stole our trophy. And that’s kind of what it felt like. We win the championship, and now I’m ready to hoist up the Stanley Cup, and someone drives away with the Stanley Cup, and I never get to touch it. But on a more substantive note, it’s a tricky situation because as the court rightly observed, the entirety of the Mann Act is a violent crime. But why would being a john be a violent crime? [Ed. note: The government argued that Combs was convicted of two violations of the Mann Act, which are automatically “crimes of violence” for bail purposes—so detention is mandatory, unless a defendant can show “exceptional circumstances.”]
If it’s a violent crime, you have to show “exceptional circumstances.” And I think we are going to go back to the court with a bail application, probably in the next several days, and try to argue that the exceptional circumstance is that a john is being prosecuted under the Mann Act. The purpose of the Mann Act was to prosecute people who make money from the business of prostitution, which Sean Combs did not do—so that’s the exceptional circumstance, we’re going to argue.
DL: Are you and/or Alexandra Shapiro—who is really amazing at appeals—are you working on the sentencing and the appeals? Which members of the trial team are returning for sentencing and/or appeals?
MA: So I think we’re all returning for sentencing, the whole trial team is returning for sentencing. In terms of the appeal, that’s a conversation that I would have with Sean. Alexandra Shapiro certainly would be front and center in the appeal. There’s no better appeals lawyer I know of, anywhere in the country, than her. And Jason Driscoll, who works with her, he’s dynamite, and he did a lot of the arguing at the trial and is very, very effective. And so Alexandra and Jason, I expect, will be center on the appeal.
Brian Steel was a very important member of our team, a very experienced, very talented lawyer from Atlanta. We were lucky to have him. He really added a lot of perspective, a lot of judgment, a lot of experience he brought to the team, and he did some very important cross examinations. Xavier Donaldson, another very experienced, very skilled trial lawyer, was also critical to our team.
We really gelled. When you asked a little while ago how did it happen, they started calling me Herb Brooks. I don’t know if you remember, in Miracle, the Minnesota guys wouldn’t get along with the New England guys, and they would fight. And then Herb Brooks said, “The name on the front of the jersey is a lot more important than one on the back.” That was our mantra. The front of the jersey is “Combs”—instead of “USA,” it says “Combs”—and that’s a lot more important than the name on the back. And so we really gelled. We put our egos aside—which is not always easy for lawyers to do—and we became one team for Sean Combs. And after we came out of the courthouse for the press conference, I said, “Let’s all hold hands.” We all held hands, and we walked up to the mic together, because that’s the way we did this. We were a team. We couldn’t do it without every single member of our team.
Someone asked me, “What does it take to win a federal case like this?” And I said, “It takes three things: you need a great team, you need a great trial strategy, and you need an innocent client.” Just because you’re innocent doesn’t mean you’re going to win—not in federal court, especially not with RICO—but we had all three.
DL: On the subject of the defense team, I would urge people to watch the video of that press conference, because I think everyone on the defense team spoke, which is unusual—usually, you just have the leaders speak—and you can tell, just from how you related to each other, that everyone really seemed to get along.
But looking ahead to sentencing, which I believe is currently set for October, based on your filings and the government’s filings on the bail application, it sounds like you’re going to end up pretty far apart on the sentencing positions—and it seems the government will want your client to maybe get more than five years in prison. Now, I realize you may be limited in what you can say because it hasn’t happened yet, but can you say something about sentencing in this case?
MA: One thing I can say, because it’s public on the docket, is that the court asked the parties for something that I think is really important and useful. The court wants to know all of the Mann Act cases, anywhere in the country, where the defendant’s Criminal History Category is I, and the court wants to know what the sentences were in those cases. [Ed. note: under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, defendants are assigned to one of six criminal-history categories; Criminal History Category I is the lowest, including many first-time offenders.]
And the court was very clear: the court wants a joint letter, if possible, on that subject. He doesn’t want argument; he wants to know the data. So what is a survey of the Mann Act, what does that look like? A nationwide survey of sentences under the Mann Act, for people who do not have a criminal history? And so I think the court is going to see that as a fundamental data point, and we’ll all be arguing off of that.
Our judge is a remarkably fair judge, a thoughtful, hardworking, very fair judge—and not because everything went our way, not everything did go our way, because not everything should have gone our way. But Judge Subramanian is really just a credit to everything that a federal judge should be. And what I told Sean is, “I don’t know what the sentence is going to be. But it’s going to be fair, because he’s just a fair man.”
And I was disappointed, obviously, that Sean wasn’t released after we felt like we won the case. But I understand the judge’s reasons, and I’m going to take what I hope to be that understanding and go back to the court, to see if I can put this in a different light and to see what the judge says.
DL: I will echo what you were saying about Judge Subramanian. He has not been on the bench that long, he comes not from a criminal-defense background, and I thought he ran this very complicated, lengthy trial very smoothly. So hats off to him.
So after the trial, some critics of the verdict claimed that it marked the end of the #MeToo movement or was a setback for the quest for justice for survivors of sexual assault and harassment. Do you have thoughts on how the Combs verdict relates to the broader context of #MeToo?
MA: Someone older than I very wisely said that trials are very poor vehicles for social change and social referenda. Trials turn on individual pieces of evidence, on individual arguments of lawyers, and are not really to be held out as how society feels about anything. And the same is true here.
This case is a moment in time; it rises and falls on the specific evidence, and I don’t think it says anything about the #MeToo movement one way or the other. I think the #MeToo movement is a very important, wonderful movement. I’m all supportive of it, and I hope it continues. And I don’t think that any one trial affects that one way or the other. Trials rise and fall on their individual facts, and this one did as well.
DL: So years ago, Sean Combs and Donald Trump were on friendly terms, and in late May, Trump said he would “certainly look at the facts,” is how he put it, if Combs requested a pardon or a commutation. Is that on the table? It certainly can’t hurt to ask, right?
MA: So I don’t know anything about any of that. That’s just not my end of the business, so I can’t comment, one way or the other. I hope to never need it. I hope he gets a reasonable sentence and goes back to his life and his seven children, who are all waiting for him. But I’m not a political person at all. I’m a registered independent. I want to be a good citizen of our country, but I don’t like politics at all.
DL: Fair enough. So you mentioned your wife, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who is a leading defense lawyer in her own right and a former prosecutor of many, many years, and also a very successful podcaster. People should check out Legal AF; it’s great.
MA: She’s a big fan of yours too.
DL: Oh, well, thank you! Please send her my regards. How did you meet? Tell us that story.
MA: All right. So one day in 1992, there was a fight in front of the Dizzy Izzy bagel store on 13th Street, and one man cut another man’s arm off with a machete. They were both bagel delivery men. It was raining. There was one spot that had an awning. And so when you brought your bag of bagels—the Dizzy Izzy bagel store made bagels for other stores as well—it was very important to park underneath this awning. Two bagel delivery men were waiting to get that spot. And when Rafael Uceta cut in front of Du Park and got the spot, Du Park got out of his van and approached Rafael Uceta, who went back to his van, got a machete, and cut Du Park’s arm off. As good luck would have it for Du Park, who was not having a lucky day, there were two EMTs in the Dizzy Izzy bagel store buying bagels, who had a fully equipped ambulance. They grabbed Du Park’s arm and brought Du Park and his arm to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where Dr. Basil Dalavagas reattached Du Park’s arm.
I was a third-year in the Manhattan DA’s office. This was my trial. At the time, Karen Friedman was a beautiful woman from Southern California. She was in my stomping grounds here in Manhattan. I was the New Yorker, she was from California, and she second-sat my felony trial, and we convicted Rafael Uceta of assault for cutting off Du Park’s arm. And now, we have three kids and a grandkid, and it’s a great DA love affair.
DL: Wow, that’s a great story. So are you constantly talking shop? I know you mentioned that right before your closing, you and Karen took a walk together. I assume that it has more benefits than drawbacks in terms of having a spouse. And she’s also of course a member of your firm, Agnifilo Intrater; you work together at the same firm. I’m guessing overall you like that setup?
MA: I do. I’m consumed by and love my work, I do. And it’s never gotten onerous. It’s hard and it’s a lot of pressure, but there’s no more interesting way that one can spend one’s life than working on these cases. And I’m very lucky to have Karen right there with me, and she helps me in every conceivable way. She knows when I need a change of scenery, and she knows when I need to go for a walk. She knows.
Take the Combs summation. I was all stuck in my own head. She just said—our daughters ride horses, and when they’d get nervous, I used to say to them, “Ride the f**king horse. Stop thinking and ride the f**king horse.” Karen just said that—“Go ride the f**king horse”—and I knew what she meant. And so I went and I rode the f**king horse. So it’s a great thing, and it’s something we share. Everyone’s like, “How do you work with your wife?” It’s awesome. It’s terrific. We help each other. We bring different strengths and perspectives. I’m more of a trial lawyer; she’s more of an investigator and a critical thinker and all of that. And so you put the two of us together, and it’s pretty good stuff.
DL: I can relate. My husband Zach, who like Karen is also a Georgetown Law grad, is now a fellow legal blogger, so we also work together. Now, you mentioned how Karen helps you, but I am guessing that you also help Karen. And her most famous case right now is she’s representing Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old man charged in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. I know Karen is really the lead lawyer on that case, but to what degree will you be involved?
MA: I was always going to be involved to a certain extent, and then I think my role probably increased when the federal government got involved, and certainly when they charged him with a death-eligible offense. So we’re in this very much together. Karen spends a lot of time with Luigi at the MDC and on their equivalent of Zoom, called VTCs, and that’s a very important thing that she does, and she knows the facts of the Mangione case cold. Now that my trial’s done, that’s probably the next big project. It’s funny because Karen kept referring to my case as the “second-biggest case of the century”—which she absolutely means, she’s like, “Well, it’s a lot of pressure having the second-biggest case.” So we’ll see.
DL: Here’s my last question before we go to the speed round. You mentioned that you and Karen are now the parents of three, and grandparents as well. Are any of your kids interested in going into law? As we know from your partner, Teny Geragos, the daughter of the famed defense lawyer, Mark Geragos, having a front-row seat to the work of a great trial lawyer can be a great advantage. So are any of those kids of yours going to go into law?
MA: Our daughter, Sofia, is a paralegal on the Luigi case. She doesn’t know if she wants to go to law school yet; she’s not sure, she’s weighing it out. The Luigi case is just so consuming. It’s more than a one-in-a-generation case. I don’t know of another case that has the same combination of characteristics of this dynamic, fascinating, smart, interesting man, and it’s death-eligible, and it’s Southern District. The attorney general really ran amok, the way she ordered the death penalty to be pursued. We raised all that in motions. So you have this one-in-a-generation case, and I think Sofia is just going to ride this out, see how it goes, and then she’ll make a decision about what she does from there. But other than that, no—no one else has any interest in law. They think we’re entirely too stressed-out, and they don’t want to be as stressed-out as we have shown that we are.
DL: Turning to my speed round—these are four questions, and they’re the same for all my guests—and my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law, down in the trenches, or law as a more abstract system.
MA: I don’t like losing trials, and they affect me greatly—forever. Roger Ng now is in Malaysia, and I managed to work things out so that he could go there with the knowledge of the U.S. government; there’s nothing wrong going on. But until that happened, I was just a wreck. And I’m a wreck when I lose trials. I think that one of the journalists caught me in the elevator and said, “How do you feel after the Combs verdict?” I said, “I’m relieved that I’m not miserable.” And that really sums it up. The worst thing about my job is the feeling that you have, for the rest of your life, when you lose a trial. So that’s an easy one.
DL: My second question is—you alluded to writing earlier, creative writing—what would you be if you were not a lawyer?
MA: I don’t have the talent to be a fiction writer like my uncle. I can’t fill blank space. So I would like to think I’d be an investigative journalist. I think, maybe second to lawyers, they have such an important responsibility to bring the truth forward and can keep government honest, and I really think that would be a wonderful way to spend one’s life.
DL: So you touched on this next topic a little bit, when you said that you’re waking up in the middle of the night during trials, but normally, when you’re not on trial, how much sleep do you get each night?
MA: If I’m not on trial, six or seven hours. But if I’m on trial, I go to sleep at about 10:00, and I wake up at about 1:30, and I’m just up for the day.
DL: Wow. Okay. Fair enough. And then my last question is, any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?
MA: I think people have a misapprehension that being a lawyer is boring. I feel like I’ve had one of the most exciting lives I can imagine—not just the trials, but I do a lot of cases overseas, and I’ve gotten myself in fascinating and crazy situations in places like Kyrgyzstan and Belarus and Bulgaria and Turkey. Crazy things happen in these places. And I would just say, “Go for it—don’t be afraid.”
Once I’m in Istanbul, and I’m going to the Four Seasons right on the Bosphorus, which is this beautiful hotel, to meet these crazy people that I could not possibly say their names in public. And I’m like, “What qualifies me to even be here? I went to law school? Going to law school somehow qualifies me for the meeting I’m about to have?” So it’s a fascinating life, and just go for it. If it’s boring, don’t do it. You’ll find something interesting. Don’t be afraid—just go for it in every way.
DL: I totally agree. I think law is fascinating, and this has been a fascinating conversation. So Marc, thank you so much for joining me.
MA: Thank you, David. I really appreciate you inviting me.
DL: Thanks so much to Marc for joining me. He’s had a long and fascinating career as a trial lawyer—and I think it’s safe to predict that he has many more interesting trials ahead.
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