Jury Hears Tape of Witness Talk By N.Y. Attorney on Trial in Obstruction Case
Although a federal judge decided this month that a number of tape-recorded conversations between criminal defense attorney Robert Simels and a high-profile client would not be heard at trial, jurors got an earful Tuesday of the lawyer’s taped conversation with a witness for his client, accused drug kingpin Shaheed “Roger” Khan.
Khan “really wants you to testify to all that s–t,” Simels at one point tells the witness, Khan associate Selwyn Vaughn, as Vaughn secretly taped the conversation in the lawyer’s office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, reports the New York Daily News.
Asked by a prosecutor if the expected testimony, which was outlined on a memo Simels provided to Vaughn at the meeting, was true, Vaughn said it wasn’t, the newspaper reports. The trial of the Brooklyn Federal Court case began this week.
Simels says he is being prosecuted in the Brooklyn Federal Court case because of his aggressive defense tactics.
“It’s easy for prosecutors to make an accusation, but it’s quite another thing for them to prove it,” attorney Gerald Shargel, who represents Simels, told the New York Times last year. “Everyone who knows Bob knows that he’s a highly skilled and highly competent and very aggressive defense attorney. He’s not a criminal.”
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge John Gleeson excluded from evidence tapes of Simels’ conversations with Khan, due to what he described as a “careless” error in the surveillance order that required government agents both to monitor the tape and not to listen to it, reports the Lewisboro Ledger.
If convicted, the 62-year-old Simels could be sentenced to as much as 10 years in prison, reports the New York Law Journal.
An associate attorney who worked with Simels, Arienne Irving, is also a defendant at trial in the case.
Earlier coverage:
ABAJournal.com (2008): “Prominent NY Lawyer Accused of Seeking to ‘Neutralize’ Witnesses”
