A lawyer for Efrain Gonzalez Jr., the ex-state senator who pleaded guilty last year to defrauding two non-profits out of $200,000, told a federal judge Friday that his client was coerced into admitting his guilt due to an “unusual set of circumstances” that included an unprepared attorney and a refusal by the court to allow him new counsel. “In his mind, [Mr. Gonzalez] would have to proceed—he could not get a new lawyer,” Lance Croffoot-Suede, Mr. Gonzalez’s new attorney, told Southern District Judge William H. Pauley at a hearing Friday. Mr. Gonzalez and his former lawyer and close friend, Murray Richman, realized on the eve of trial that “neither was going to persuade the other as to how this case should be resolved,” Mr. Croffoot-Suede said in asking that his client be allowed to withdraw his May 2009 guilty plea.
A New York Times article last week profiled the former longtime Bronx lawmaker and Mr. Richman in an article about the pitfalls of lawyers representing close friends at no charge. At the hearing, Mr. Croffoot-Suede, of Linklaters, alluded to the relationship, telling Judge Pauley that he did not have a 40-year friendship with Mr. Gonzales but that he was “just Mr. Gonzales’s lawyer and I take his instructions.”
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