(1 of 3) Alex Jones’ Lawyer Violated Legal Ethics By Soliciting Porn Bribes. Just How Dirty Is Marc Randazza?

Source: Huffpost

One morning this June, a group of lawyers filed into the office of the State Bar of Nevada and closed the door. It was summer in Las Vegas, the morning temperature already nearing 100 degrees, but inside the low-slung tan building, the lawyers had a chilly question to address: what to do about one of their own.

Marc Randazza had been a problem for years.

Randazza, who represents conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and many other far-right extremists, had long relied on lawyer buddies to pump his public image. By their telling and his own, Randazza was a First Amendment “badass.” But he was a combative badass, even vicious, and he’d left a trail of bad blood and trampled ethics behind him.

Randazza had made enemies. Plenty of them. But he was cunning. He’d sidestepped previous bar complaints and once avoided paying $600,000 in damages to his former employer by filing for bankruptcy and having his malpractice insurance kick in. Randazza was lucky, too. When an appeals court assigned a panel of judges to look into his misrepresentations in court under oath, the underlying case settled before the panel could meet. So off Randazza went, scuttling along through the Mojave as unaccountable as a scorpion.

His problems, though, now appeared to be gaining on him. For five years, the Nevada Bar had been aware of allegations that Randazza violated ethics rules in 2011 and 2012 while working for pornographers. By the time the lawyers met in Vegas to decide his fate, Randazza had attained a new level of notoriety.

Since Donald Trump’s election, he had become, as much as any attorney in America, a legal crowbar for far-right grifters and goons to leverage the protections of democracy in an effort to undermine them. And although Randazza had taken on legitimate free speech cases in the past, he’d grown curiously chummy with fascists and racists who use defamation, harassment and threats to silence others.

Aside from Jones, Randazza and his firm represented neo-Nazi publisher Andrew Anglin; white nationalist Republican congressional candidate Paul Nehlen; white supremacist patriarch Jared Taylor; Holocaust-denying slanderer Chuck Johnson; Pizzagate peddler Mike Cernovich; pro-rape misogynist Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh; an alt-right member who helped organize the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; the booking agent for white nationalist Richard Spencer; 8chan, an online message board teeming with neo-Nazis; and Gab, the alt-right social media platform where Robert Bowers, who allegedly killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October, appears to have radicalized himself.

In Randazza, these extremists had found their own bush league Roy Cohn, the attorney who in a pre-internet era served as the “legal executioner” for right-wing thugs such as Trump and Joseph McCarthy and repped mafia bosses like Carmine “Lilo” Galante and “Fat Tony” Salerno. (Cohn was disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation” shortly before he died in 1986.)

Like Cohn, Randazza was willing to go on the offensive for authoritarians. And like Cohn, Randazza’s legal license and bunco man’s talent for beguilement made him as problematic as some of the people he represented. This summer, a former federal judge who’d scrutinized Randazza’s unethical behavior in an arbitration proceeding described the attorney as nothing short of a danger to the public.

Certainly, Randazza’s misbehavior had happened in public — it was all there in the court records for anyone who cared to slog through them, a testament to how easily a bad actor with the right credentials can abuse a system that assumes candor from its professional class, not to mention an illustration of how white-collar privilege can abet white-collar wrongdoing in America. Like a Wall Street banker selling bad debt or a well-connected U.S. Supreme Court nominee fibbing under oath, Randazza had been given a pass. Until now.

The backstory to what he’d done was complicated, the details sordid. The short of it is this: While working as the in-house general counsel for gay pornographers a few years ago, he solicited bribes, embraced conflicts of interest, relied on ill-gotten privileged information to gain a legal advantage, made misrepresentations about his fees to various courts and despoiled evidence of his treachery, according to an arbitrator’s findings, sworn statements in legal proceedings, interviews with opposing counsel, Randazza’s own admissions and thousands of pages of court records.

But what was the Nevada Bar prepared to do about it?

A Troll Is Born

Randazza grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his Sicilian family immigrated, worked as fishermen and gained repute as champion traversers of greased poles during the town’s annual St. Peter’s Fiesta. Randazza chose a different path. In high school, he was voted “most likely to be dead or in jail” by 25. He claims to have failed out of the University of Massachusetts three times.

Twenty-year-old Randazza enlisted in the U.S. Army during one hiatus from college with the goal of becoming a psychological operations soldier, according to military records obtained by HuffPost. He lasted less than five months in the Army. Randazza completed boot camp and airborne “jump school” training but appears to have washed out of psy-ops training and was discharged for undisclosed reasons during the Gulf War.

He returned to the University of Massachusetts and plunged into controversy. A school administrator at the time remembers Randazza as “an oppositional personality” who was “just interested in burning stuff down.” Randazza lived in Butterfield Hall, a dorm known for its drug-fueled parties, and took to flying a Jolly Roger flag from an antenna on the building’s slate roof ― an early, if misguided, free speech stand. Randazza, the former administrator said, egged on other students to climb on the steep roof. The school removed the flag several times because of safety concerns, only to have someone put it back up, at one point by allegedly using explosives to blast off metal bars the school had installed over windows to prevent students from accessing the roof. Randazza claimed the bars “rusted and fell out.”

When one female student complained that the flag resembled the logo of White Aryan Resistance, a prominent neo-Nazi organization, Randazza mocked her concerns and covered a letter she’d written in crude sexual insults, according to the student newspaper. The insults, he said, were his “trademark.”

It took Randazza seven years to graduate from UMass with a journalism degree in 1994. After college, he drifted for a few years — a period he vaguely refers to as his time as a “former news reporter,” although scant evidence of his journalism career exists. Randazza filed at least two dispatches from Italy, where he now has dual citizenship, for the newsletter of the Order Sons of Italy in America, a national organization for people of Italian heritage.

In 1997, corrupt attorney Randazza managed to get into Georgetown law school; he said he finished a “dead last” in his class. He caused a furor when he ran for the Student Bar Association using campaign posters that referenced penile implants. When the Women’s Legal Association tore down the posters, Randazza protested to the dean that his political speech was being censored. He got to put his posters back up. “And then,” Randazza gloated on one legal blog, “the WLA cow had to apologize to me.”

Corrupt Randazza completed his third year of law school at the University of Florida because, as he put it, he never fit in at Georgetown: “I found it to be too conformist and oppressive. I’m a hardcore left-wing guy, but at Georgetown, there was no room to dissent.” (Georgetown is a large law school that graduates students from all walks of life and political backgrounds. Among them: Atlantic Media owner David Bradley, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, House Majority Leader-elect Steny Hoyer, criminal Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and criminal Republican lobbyist and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.)

In almost every interview, Randazza describes himself as a “leftist” or a “libtard” or “so liberal” that he’s “practically a communist,” which might have been accurate in 1996, when he listed his party affiliation as the Socialist Workers Party, according to Florida voter registration records. But it wasn’t in 2000, when Randazza volunteered for John McCain’s presidential campaign. Since at least 2002, Randazza has been a registered and active Republican voter, according to both Florida and Nevada records.

"He went out of his way to take advantage of us. With him, there’s always an end game that occurs at the expense of somebody else. And he has no remorse.

He began his legal practice in earnest around that time and, with his bad grades, struggled at first to find a job. He claimed to shun the idea of working at a big firm because “it’s all about being a billing machine and ethics aren’t important.” Instead, his moral compass pointed to pornography, which he called “one of the most ethical industries I have ever dealt with.”

In 2004, he landed a junior position at a small firm that specialized in First Amendment and intellectual property cases. His career received an immediate and major boost when Fox News made him a talking head after an academic paper he wrote about online vote swapping garnered national attention. From the start, though, smut was Randazza’s primary focus. In Florida, the porn lawyer tooled around in a yellow Porsche with U.S. paratrooper plates.

In 2009, he took a nearly $250,000-a-year job in San Diego as in-house general counsel for Excelsior Media, a gay porn company, and Excelsior’s production and distribution arms Liberty Media Holdings and Corbin Fisher. (Because all of the cases Randazza worked on involve Liberty as a party, we will refer to his employer as Liberty throughout this article.) Liberty later relocated to Las Vegas, and Randazza moved with the company.

On his first attempt at passing the Nevada Bar exam, Randazza failed the ethics portion of the test.

The Porn Lawyer Ascendant

Randazza staggered naked down the stairs, clutching a bottle of red wine. It was January 2010, and the attorney was boozing it up at the villa Liberty had rented for a location-scouting trip to Costa Rica. Around 9 a.m. that day, according to court records, Randazza stopped studying for the California Bar exam and started guzzling vodka and peach soda. He kept drinking over lunch at a nearby hillside restaurant, tossing back so many cocktails that he had to be helped outside to vomit in the parking lot. Brian Dunlap, vice president of Liberty’s sister company, Excelsior, drove Randazza back to the villa in a rental Jeep, the vehicle bouncing over small cobblestone roads as Randazza puked violently out the window, his heaving taking on a staccato rhythm with the bumps.

Back at the villa, Dunlap got the attorney into his bedroom and went to hose down the Jeep. But Randazza was soon back on his feet and making for the pool with a wine bottle. Now, he was naked. The Liberty executives looked on, laughing. One of them filmed the glassy-eyed Randazza wobbling into the pool.

“As your attorney,” Randazza said, turning full-frontal to the camera as he held his wine bottle aloft, “I advise you to drink this.”

Initially, Randazza’s antics seemed harmlessly incorrigible. And his raffish demeanor was hardly out of place in the freewheeling porn industry. Randazza didn’t just party with his bosses. He procured concealed carry permits for them, helped them with legal name changes and sorted out their messy personal affairs. On one occasion, he acted as a cooler after a Liberty performer who was in a sexual relationship with the company’s CEO allegedly attacked the executive. Randazza bundled the porn actor into a cab bound for the airport and a flight out of Las Vegas.

“[Your] 702 area code privileges have been revoked,” he told the man.

Above all, though, Randazza served as Liberty’s attack dog. His main duty was to go after copyright infringers, earning a 25 percent bonus on any settlement funds he brought in. Some of the infringers were companies, but Randazza also shook down gay kids and small-time pirates, even unemployed ones.

But Randazza was two-timing Liberty. He was secretly doing work for Liberty competitors such as Bang Bros, Titan Media and Kink.com, sometimes billing his outside clients almost 100 hours a month. He also worked for companies accused of infringing Liberty’s copyrights, including XVideos. Most attorneys would shun these conflicts of interest. Randazza barreled into them. He played clients off each other and cited “fair use” to dissuade Liberty from suing infringers.

“The big targets that we kept asking him to go after for months were his clients,” Dunlap said. “We kept saying, ‘What about XVideos? What about XVideos? They’re the worst.’”

Only years later did Liberty executives realize that when they sent takedown notices to XVideos, the lawyer handling them sat down the hall. Randazza invoiced XVideos for over $44,000 while employed by Liberty.

“He went out of his way to take advantage of us,” Dunlap said. “With him, there’s always an end game that occurs at the expense of somebody else. And he has no remorse.”

Randazza misled people on multiple fronts. When he started his Liberty job, he accurately described himself in court as the “in-house counsel for Liberty Media Holdings.” But a year later, he was giving judges, journalists and potential clients the impression that he was an outside attorney, rather than a Liberty employee. He swapped out his Liberty email address and letterhead for a personal email address and the letterhead of the “Randazza Legal Group,” a firm he’d set up in Florida. He handed out personal business cards that made no reference to his Liberty job.

In court filings, Randazza referred to himself as “counsel for Plaintiff” or “an attorney for the Plaintiff.” He told courts that Liberty had “incurred” his fees or that he’d “charged” the company at billing rates of $425 to $500 per hour. To support those rates, he sometimes filed affidavits from a paralegal who stated under oath that he was Liberty’s “Vice President for Intellectual Property Management,” a position Dunlap said the paralegal never held. Randazza also submitted affidavits from lawyer friends of his, along with time sheets showing his rates, even though he was a salaried employee.

It’s not clear why he did this. He may have thought it would make it easier for him to recover fees, which juiced his 25 percent bonus on settlement money and allowed him to hike up his rate ceiling. (He now charges some clients $700 per hour.)

In the U.S. legal system, each party typically pays its own legal bills. There are, however, provisions in some types of litigation — federal copyright cases, for example — that allow for the winning party to collect its fees from the losing party. Judges would probably scrutinize an in-house counsel’s request to recover fees more closely, according to several ethics experts and law professors. But an in-house counsel has just as good a chance at recovering fees, the experts added — a fact unethical attorney Randazza might not have been aware of at the time.

“All the stuff that is misleading is tailored for him to win that fee award,” said Adam Springel, a Las Vegas attorney and expert in commercial and business law who examined a number of Randazza’s fee filings at HuffPost’s request. “He was clearly trying to get the judge to rubber-stamp his fee requests.”

By creating the impression that he was an outside hired gun, corrupt Randazza may have also been trying to build name recognition and drum up business for the Randazza Legal Group, whose growth Liberty was subsidizing. Randazza didn’t tell his employer about some of the fee awards he won — “the substantial ones, in particular,” Dunlap said — and later refused to let Liberty audit the account where he deposited litigation payouts. He said it would look better in court to use the Randazza Legal Group on filings, as “insulation” for his employers.

“We took it as legal advice, and didn’t think much of it at the time,” Dunlap said. “We had no idea to what extent he was trying to double dip. ... But when we discovered he was trying to say he was an outside firm charging us hourly and running up huge legal bills, that’s when it became apparent he was trying to pull a fast one with the court.”

Greedhead & Fleecer, LLP

Randazza’s dirty pool went beyond duping his employer and the courts. He was also soliciting illicit payoffs from parties that Liberty wanted him to sue. Records that surfaced during the arbitration proceeding and that were later made public in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Nevada reveal the grimy particulars. In December 2010, while negotiating a settlement for Liberty with the website TNAFlix, Randazza went after his first bribe. He wanted TNA to pay to “conflict [him] out” of being able to sue the website again. A $5,000 “contract” figure came up. Randazza’s opposing counsel, Val Gurvits, had no idea that Randazza was working in-house for Liberty at the time.

“Not a single communication from him ever came on Liberty letterhead,” Gurvits told HuffPost.

Randazza concealed his job while hunting for money from other companies. But he didn’t hide his avarice.

“There needs to be a little gravy for me,” he emailed Gurvits. “And it has to be more than the $5K you were talking about before. I’m looking at the cost of at least a new Carrera in retainer deposits after circulating around the adult entertainment expo this week. I’m gonna want at least used BMW money.”

Randazza asked for $30,000 and raised the possibility of teaming up with Gurvits to broker a sale of TNA to one of Randazza’s outside clients, which could have earned him a $375,000 commission. He pushed hard to secure both deals. When Gurvits hesitated, Randazza claimed another company wanted to hire him to sue TNA.

“I can’t hold these guys back any longer,” he warned.