Year after year, Gary Naftalis is rated the top trial lawyer in New York. (Eat your heart out, David Boies.) Admittedly, this is a far cry from his youthful ambition to play forward for the Knicks. But Gary, forced onto a different kind of court, has already managed to score more victories than the Knicks are likely to achieve in our lifetimes.
I first met Gary when we were both young federal prosecutors, sometime, if memory serves, in the 20th century. Gary was already famous within the U.S. Attorney’s Office as the prosecutor of last resort. For example, when Carmine Tramunti, the reputed boss of the Lucchese crime family, was acquitted in a major prosecution in the early 1970s, the Office turned to Gary to rescue its reputation by trying Tramunti on much-more-difficult-to-prove perjury charges. Gary’s two-hour summation, delivered without a single note, was among the best I have ever seen, and the jury, clearly impressed by Gary’s logic, passion, and boyish grin, promptly convicted on all counts.
