Author says lies brought down judge

Claiborne, 86, survived prison and impeachment in life; but health problems, including Alzheimer’s disease, finally defeated him.

Seven years after Claiborne’s death became front-page news in Las Vegas, a California author is seeking to restore the man’s reputation with his new book, “Lies Within Lies: The Betrayal of Nevada Judge Harry Claiborne.” The book, $28.95 in hardcover, is being published by Stephens Press, a Review-Journal sister company.

In the book, author Michael Vernetti argues that Claiborne was unjustly targeted by federal prosecutors who relied on an untrustworthy informant, Mustang Ranch brothel owner Joe Conforte.

“You don’t need any super-secret sources to come to the conclusion I came to; you just need to read the trial transcripts,” Vernetti said.

In 1983, five years after President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the bench, Claiborne was indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and tax evasion.

At trial the next year, Conforte testified that he gave Claiborne $85,000 in return for favors, but the jury deadlocked. Prosecutors refused to pursue bribery charges in a second trial, which ended with a conviction on tax-evasion counts.

“Time and again, logic and the strong opinion of Nevada law enforcement officials argued against the pursuit of Claiborne,” Vernetti wrote in his book. “And each time the feds turned a blind eye to those objections and relentlessly plowed ahead with a determination that makes Ahab’s search for the White Whale look like a weekend hobby.”

Claiborne was the first federal judge ever convicted of a crime while in office. He served more than a year in prison. In 1986, while still in custody, Claiborne became the first federal official impeached by Congress in a half-century.

Nevertheless, he later was readmitted to the practice of law and was considered one of Nevada’s best attorneys.

Some 300 people, including several state court judges and at least three federal judges, turned out for Claiborne’s funeral in January 2004.

Historian Michael Green, a College of Southern Nevada professor, said he thinks Claiborne “was more sinned-against than sinning.”

Green is scheduled to take part in a panel discussion with Vernetti and his editor, Geoff Schumacher, at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road. A book signing will follow.

Green said plenty of Nevadans oppose the viewpoint of Claiborne’s defenders.

“They aren’t necessarily inclined to voice it and antagonize the people who feel equally strongly the other way, but I do think Claiborne is the victim and the symbol of an attitude about Nevada that is still among us and was much stronger when Claiborne was in the feds’ cross hairs,” Green said.

Howard Cannon biographer

Vernetti, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said the seed for his Claiborne book was planted when he interviewed the former judge for his first book, “Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada: A Biography,” published in 2008 by the University of Nevada Press.

“He was this funny, relaxed Harry Claiborne that everybody had always talked about,” Vernetti said.

The author, who covered politics for the Review-Journal for about a year in the early 1970s, later was Cannon’s press secretary and said he knew all about Claiborne’s “baggage.”

But Claiborne impressed him during the interview.

“He didn’t say a thing about himself,” Vernetti said. “He just wanted to talk about Cannon.”

Vernetti noted that Cannon and Claiborne both arrived in Las Vegas in the same week in 1945. Cannon died about two years before Claiborne.

After the Cannon biography, Vernetti, who runs a home-based consulting business, was looking for a new project. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI documents about the investigation of Claiborne’s ties to Las Vegas private investigator Eddie LaRue. What he received was “mind-blowing.”

“That’s when I first saw that they had nothing,” Vernetti said. “It was just a bunch of nonsense.”

The author learned that an FBI “confidential source” in September 1979 had implicated LaRue in illegal wiretapping.

“Naming LaRue elevated what might have been a routine matter to a higher plane,” Vernetti wrote, because LaRue’s agency had tailed a woman on Claiborne’s behalf throughout 1977, when Claiborne was lavishing attention on the keno runner who lived with her fiancé.

“From the moment that source started talking to FBI agents, Claiborne’s dream job on the federal bench — indeed, his liberty itself — was in jeopardy,” Vernetti wrote.

Although Claiborne was never charged in connection with illegal wiretapping, Vernetti concluded the investigation “signaled a willingness to take down a sitting federal judge based on the accusations of a single, unidentified — and uncorroborated — source.”

Vernetti said Las Vegas police already had investigated the allegations involving LaRue, and the FBI already had done an extensive background investigation after Claiborne’s 1978 nomination.

So the decision to initiate a federal investigation in 1979 remains an “enduring mystery” from Vernetti’s viewpoint.

The author noted that Joseph Yablonsky took over the FBI’s Las Vegas office that year and had targeted Claiborne as a corrupt official.

“He was whipping the flames,” Vernetti said. “That was part of it.”

LaRue was acquitted of all charges in connection with the wiretapping claims.

informant in brazil

Vernetti said he spent about three years researching the Claiborne book, moving from the LaRue information to information about Conforte, who was awaiting sentencing for tax evasion when he made the bribery allegations against Claiborne.

Vernetti reviewed transcripts of grand jury hearings, both of Claiborne’s trials and of the Senate impeachment proceedings.

The author determined that Conforte was “ridiculed” on the witness stand, where “he was just making stuff up to save his ass.”

“These were big, humongous lies,” Vernetti said. “That’s where I got the name of the book: Conforte tells lies within lies.”

Green said Vernetti explored the Conforte angle well.

“What this book also helps capture is an attitude and a time,” the professor said. “The ’70s and ’80s in Las Vegas are in some ways a lost period of our history. It has gotten some attention, but it’s mostly in connection with the mob, driving out the mob, and readying ourselves for Steve Wynn. Or there are certain events like the MGM fire that get a lot of attention. The Claiborne case is part of the federal government acting differently toward Nevada. We’d always gotten attention, but mostly just the casinos. Now the federal government is looking at the broader community.”

Vernetti interviewed most of the major players for his book, including Yablonsky, now retired in Florida, and Claiborne’s attorney, Oscar Goodman, now mayor of Las Vegas. The author said he tried to interview Conforte, a fugitive in Brazil, but “he’s not easy to get to.”

While Vernetti wanted to give readers a flavor of Claiborne’s life, he did not intend for the book to be a biography.

“There is much more to him than is in this book,” Vernetti said.

But the author did want to convince readers that, although Claiborne had flaws, “the things he was accused of were manifestly not proven.”

“This book is only about those things,” Vernetti said.

Vernetti said he wants to restore Claiborne’s good name. He said the former judge deserves a presidential pardon and the entire impeachment process should be reformed.

And Vernetti said readers need look no further than the recent prosecution of the late Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, to see that the issues raised in his book remain relevant.

Stevens’ conviction for lying on Senate ethics forms was set aside in 2009 amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. That case, like Claiborne’s, was prosecuted by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.

Vernetti said the public needs to pay attention to how the Justice Department goes about prosecuting people.

“That’s an important issue for all of us,” he said.

Contact reporter Carri Geer Thevenot at cgeer@reviewjournal.com or 702-384-8710.