Just hours earlier than Donald J. Trump was set to be booked on racketeering costs at Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, he shook up his authorized crew in Georgia, including Steven H. Sadow, a veteran prison protection lawyer who has dealt with a variety of high-profile instances.
Mr. Sadow filed a doc with the court docket on Thursday stating that he was now “lead counsel of record for Donald John Trump.”
In Atlanta authorized circles, Mr. Sadow (pronounced say-dow) is broadly seen as one of many metropolis’s most gifted protection attorneys. He isn’t any stranger to movie star shoppers, having defended rappers like T.I. and Rick Ross, in addition to the singer Usher and the lawyer Howard Ok. Stern.
Mr. Sadow just lately defended the rapper Gunna, whose actual identify is Sergio Kitchens, in a high-profile case in opposition to Young Slime Life, or YSL, an Atlanta hip-hop collective.
Mr. Kitchens was charged by the Fulton County district lawyer’s workplace with conspiracy to violate the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. In December, Mr. Kitchens entered a responsible plea to the racketeering cost, and he was launched after one yr of his five-year sentence was commuted to time served and the remainder of his sentence was suspended.
In 2000, Mr. Sadow obtained an acquittal for Joseph Sweeting, who had been charged together with one other man with homicide and assault within the stabbing deaths of two males after a Super Bowl occasion. The case turned well-known as a result of the All-Pro linebacker Ray Lewis was additionally charged however reached a plea cope with prosecutors.
More than 20 years in the past, Mr. Sadow was a fixture in news stories a few scandal involving an Atlanta strip membership known as the Gold Club. At the time, federal prosecutors stated that it had ties to the Gambino crime household of New York and charged 15 individuals related with the membership with quite a lot of racketeering, cash laundering and prostitution costs.
Mr. Sadow defended the membership’s proprietor, Steven E. Kaplan, in opposition to RICO conspiracy costs. Mr. Kaplan ended up getting into a responsible plea to a racketeering cost, an final result Mr. Sadow known as “a very good deal for all concerned.” In 2002, Mr. Kaplan was sentenced to 16 months in federal jail.
In 2021, Mr. Sadow instructed The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that RICO was “overused” by Georgia prosecutors, including that “it’s been overused for quite a long time.”
In a press release on Thursday, Mr. Sadow stated that Mr. Trump “should never have been indicted,” including that “he is innocent of all the charges brought against him.”
“Prosecutions intended to advance or serve the ambitions and careers of political opponents of the president have no place in our justice system,” Mr. Sadow stated.
Mr. Sadow had beforehand expressed misgivings about Mr. Trump. During one alternate on Twitter in 2017, Mr. Sadow stated that he was “not a DT supporter.”
Mr. Sadow grew up in Trotwood, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, in keeping with an interview he did in 2015 with Georgia Super Lawyers journal. In the interview, he stated that he had needed to be a prison protection lawyer ever since he was 11 years previous, when he watched the tv present “The Defenders.”
“I turned to my father and said, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be a criminal defense lawyer,’” he instructed the journal.
Richard Fausset, Danny Hakim and Maggie Habermancontributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com