COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

A Legal Angel Or a Mob Lawyer?

Arthur J Pais

One of the first things a visitor to Sarita Kedia's Manhattan office noticed recently was her sparse room. The shelves had no books or documents. Her table looked as if it was waiting for a few coffee-table tomes.

"It is an empty room, isn't it?" Kedia asked, smiling mischievously. "You should have seen it a few days ago."

She had spent several hours the previous day supervising the packing of documents related to her most famous client, John A Gotti, who had entered a plea bargain with the prosecution. Kedia had to send the documents for safe-keeping in a warehouse.

Gotti, the son of draper don John J Gotti, pleaded guilty to racketeering and other charges and received a considerable smaller sentence than the expected 20-year term. Kedia's boss, controversial attorney and well-known defense attorney Gerald L Shargel has credited her for negotiating the deal with the prosecution.

Twentyeight-year-old Kedia, who has been working with Shargel -- her senior by about two decades -- for about two years, had to fight hard to be in the Gotti defense team.

She chuckles when reminded of the reports that Gotti was indifferent to her because he was used to dealing with male lawyers.

There was a time when he called Shargel's office and was asked if he would talk to Kedia since Shargel was not available, he would decline the offer.

But a stage came when he would ask only for her. She says he came to appreciate her passion for details, her patience and her persistence that won his release last October on bail after nine months of incarceration. And then she helped him enter a plea bargain process.

Kedia says she does not know care if people call her a mob lawyer. For that matter you may even call her an angel to mobsters. After all that was Gotti called her, his angel.

She says her reputation will rest on "how I tackle the difficult cases within an ethical framework."

Her client has been misportrayed by the media and the government as a mafia figure, she had said, and she was preparing to tell the jury that Gotti Jr should not be judged by his father's reputation. The senior Gotti was sentenced to a prison term a few years ago.

As a defense lawyer, she will fight hard to keep her clients free. It is left to the prosecution to prove their case, she says, as any other defense lawyer would say. Except that her gentle voice carries a deep conviction.

Kedia, who was born in Bombay, has lived most of her 28 years in the United States. Brought up by tradition-minded ("very tradition minded," she says) parents in the deep South where she encountered many racial incidents in her childhood, she was expected to go into medicine like her two sisters.

"But my parents are also enlightened," she says. "And they let me go into law." Her father is a professor of law and her mother, a professor of accounting at Grambling State University in Louisiana.

The idea of becoming a defense lawyer came to her when she worked with the Legal Aid Society in Washington DC several years ago.

"I had first hand experience how the law often went against the poor and the helpless," she says. Today she represents the rich and seemingly helpless. "But at the core of everything I do is to test the system and challenge what the authorities take granted as the truth," she adds.

Her parents had thought she should go into corporate law. And Sarita, who had given up business studies at the University of Pennsylvania to study law at the University of Tulane, did so for a year.

"But I was bored," she says. "I wanted something truly challenging. Something thrilling."

While her parents reconciled to the idea of their middle daughter becoming a defense lawyer, they had not expected her to work for a high profile lawyer who represented the Gottis.

Shargel also represented Gurmit Singh Dhinsa, described by the prosecutors as a cold-blooded murderer who went after several people who were informing the FBI on his fraudulent multimillion dollar business. While Dhinsa was found guilty and faced execution, Shargel fought hard to have him sentenced for life.

Kedia admires Shargel's "passion and eye for details," she says. "He can grasp things in a minute which will take someone like me hours to understand. I admire his intellect. He is my model."

"I had naturally heard about Shargel even before I moved to New York," Kedia says. "Who in my area of specialization has not heard of him?"

She thought she should alert her parents to Shargel's reputation. She sent them a copy of a lengthy article about him. "The article dwelt on many controversial things about him but it was also a fair article," she says. Then her parents came to New York to meet with him. "And mysteriously everything worked out fine. They went home convinced I had made the right decision."

Her traditionalist parents have come to trust her instincts and decisions.

Tell us what you think of this report