‘The craziest, most-evil lawyer in the history of New Jersey’ gets the podcast treatment

It would have been easy to go the ‘Sopranos’ route, but this series is infused with music nous at every turn.

Skyline of Newark , New Jersey

Her name — or, rather, her pseudonym — is notorious in the annals of Australian legal history: Nicola Gobbo, also known as Lawyer X, famously doublecrossed her Melbourne gangland clients in the early 2000s, informing on them to Victoria police while representing them in court.

Her exposure by the Herald Sun newspaper in 2014 sent the criminal justice system into a spin. She’s been in hiding virtually ever since, and a compensation claim filed in the Victorian Supreme Court this year suggests Lawyer X’s infamous flip wasn’t worth it, in the end.

But the lawyer formerly known as Nicola Gobbo is hardly the first to blur legal lines — in this country, or elsewhere in the world.

A new Wondery podcast called Criminal Attorney focuses on the actions of a hot-shot lawyer operating in a different gang heartland across the Pacific, this one in New Jersey.

As a criminal defence lawyer in the late 80s and early 90s, New Jerseyan-turned-New Yorker (and back again) Paul Bergrin garnered a reputation for winning unwinnable cases that saw some of Newark’s shadiest characters escape near-certain incarceration.

But rather than funnel information about their underworld activities to the cops, a la Lawyer X, Bergrin was right there with them, dealing drugs and bribing police with high-end escort services — a proverbial pie in which he also had a hand.

For his trouble, he came to be known as “the craziest, most-evil lawyer in the history of New Jersey”.

Criminal Attorney, then, is a true crime story with the lot: unorthodox legal methods, witness protection, dogged FBI agents, a future US Supreme Court Justice, and broad-daylight murder, all set in the one of the most-famous ganglands on the planet.

It’s reported by New Jersey native Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins, with assistance from Matthew Nelson — a reporter whose British accent appears rarely and in stark contrast to that famous New Jersey twang.

Jinx took the scenic route to Paul Bergrin’s story. He was behind the early 2023 podcast series The Conviction of Max B — an up-and-coming rapper from Harlem whose “easy score” saw him locked up for 75 years after being convicted of conspiracy charges comprising armed robbery, kidnapping, aggravated assault and felony ­murder.

Max B’s sentence was reduced to 20 years and then 12 years in 2019. He used his time behind bars to release his debut album Vigilante Season. Bergrin made a cameo in that story as Max B’s potential defence counsel, though, ultimately, he didn’t get the gig.

Still, he clearly made an impression.

Though it’s very much a true-crime investigation — Jinx’s first — Criminal Attorney is infused with his music nous. In addition to The Conviction of Max B, he also hosted RapCaviar and Mogul for Gimlet Media.

While it would have been easy — obvious, even — to go the Sopranos route, this series is all smooth, hip-hop-inspired sound design and slick vocals. Listeners float through it the way you would a long read on a Saturday morning.

It sounds different, because it is different.

“I think the thing that this sort of story challenges is that this guy represents a lot of criminals, but the story isn’t with any of the people he’s representing,” Jinx said.

“Hopefully, our cultural perception, our cultural sort of palette has opened up in the last couple of years to realise criminals come in all shapes and sizes.”

Kristen Amiet is the producer of The Australian’s daily news podcast The Front. Criminal Attorney is available now wherever you listen to podcasts.