The Last Mouthpiece

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 11, 2001

The two-fisted title notwithstanding, "Bobby" Simone sees himself not as a "mob lawyer," but in the quasi-libertarian role of a man who spent decades defending the shunned and despised, earning himself the enmity of the federal government, with which he sparred for years, until the feds finally convicted him in 1992 for racketeering (he served several years and is not currently a licensed attorney). Simone's dense, unmediated narrative is best in its early sections, where he describes how his defense of local femme fatale and nightclub owner Lillian Reis offered him an entry to the seemingly glamorous world of the 1960s Philadelphia mob. There he developed friendships with "made men" like Angelo Bruno and Nicodemo Scarfo and indulged heavily in drinking and gambling. Then the narrative jumps into the 1980s, when Simone was kept busy in court by mob-related violence, and he himself became a target of FBI investigations. Simone's recitations of hard-edged criminal trial tactics are impressive: he persuasively depicts the dangers of government collusion with criminal informants, noting that multiple murderers were rewarded for testifying against him and his clients. Buried within this prolix memoir is a compelling tale of a renegade lawyer's battles on behalf of amoral mobsters, and of his downfall, but Simone presents only its disingenuous, self-serving outlines. His stance is basically untenable, because he labors to present notoriously vicious clients like Scarfo as "legitimate businessmen," even though these same men attract a remarkable amount of federal prosecution, not to mention assassinations in their driveways. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.