Leon Wildes, immigration lawyer who defended John Lennon, dies at 90

Leon Wildes, a New York immigration attorney who successfully fought the U.S. government's attempt to deport John Lennon, died Monday. in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death at Lenox Hill Hospital was confirmed by his son Michael.

For more than three years, from early 1972 to the fall of 1975, Mr. Wildes (pronounced WY-ulds) fought tenaciously against attacks by the Nixon administration and immigration officials on Mr. Lennon, the former Beatle and his wife Yoko Ono . , which collected a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and a hidden U.S. immigration policy.

By uncovering classified data through the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that immigration officials can in practice exercise broad discretion over whom to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law. And he revealed that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and outspoken critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.

Mr. Wildes was ultimately vindicated by the sharp decision of a federal appeals court in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not tolerate selective deportation on secret political grounds,” and which ended the attempt to get Mr. Lennon out of jail. country.

The Beatles had broken up in 1970, and the following year Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono moved to New York. Mr. Lennon had been convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; that record would normally have barred him from entering, but he had been granted a waiver. The exemption expired and the Lennons received an eviction notice.

“It was a very scary moment,” Ms. Ono said in the 2007 documentary “The USA vs. John Lennon.”

When the Lennons hired Mr. Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of his celebrity clients. In his book on the case, 'John Lennon vs. the USA,” published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he was vaguely aware of the Beatles – it was almost impossible not to be – but that the names of the Beatles members had escaped him.

“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled to his wife after meeting them at their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.

In the 2007 film, Mr. Lennon tells reporters about Mr. Wildes: “He is not a radical lawyer. He's not William Kunstler.'

Mr. Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War — he recorded the anti-war song “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 — and had been involved in protests on behalf of New Left figures, who campaigned against the war.

Nixon administration officials feared that he would have outsized influence among the young, who would vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, most notably conservative Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, to go after Lennon.

Their case revolved around the London marijuana conviction. But appeals court judge Irving Kaufman ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Lennon an “excludable alien.”

The real reasons for Mr. Lennon's quixotic pursuit, Mr. Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to demonstrate thanks to his relentless digging through the documents. In early 1972, Mr. Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending Mr. Lennon's deportation, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency then responsible for visas. Of particular interest was the fact that Mr. Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who was jailed on marijuana charges.

“If Lennon's visa is revoked, it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.

Ten days later, “a telegram went to all immigration offices in the United States instructing that the Lennons should not be granted an extension of their time to visit the United States,” Mr. Wildes wrote in his book.

Over the next three years, the government continued to press its case, in efforts that increasingly fizzled as public support for Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono grew. In letters and testimonials, many of the era's cultural luminaries spoke up for them, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller, as well as Mayor John V. Lindsay from New York.

“The sole reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon's desire to remove John and Yoko from the country before the 1972 election and give the vote to a new, much younger electorate,” Mr. Wildes wrote. “To ensure his hold on power, all 'dirty tricks', including the abuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”

All the while, the FBI kept a close eye on Mr. Lennon. “The surveillance reports on him amounted to literally hundreds of pages,” Mr. Wildes wrote.

When Mr. Lennon learned of the deception, he was furious. “They even change their own rules because we are peace-minded,” he said in a television interview.

The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed five years later in front of the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and Mrs. Yoko lived.

In another breakthrough, Mr Wildes found that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The revelation of this policy continues to help immigration attorneys fighting the deportation of non-citizens today.

“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking research into the 'non-priority' program and ultimately applied for 'non-priority status' for Lennon,” wrote immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia in her book 2015, 'Beyond Deportation'. “Wildes discovered that for years the INS had granted 'non-priority' status to prevent the deportation of non-citizens with sympathetic cases, but the INS had never publicly disclosed this practice.”

While Mr. Wildes acknowledged the all-consuming task of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes meeting them, as he did others, in what he called the “beautiful upright bed” in their mentioned bank. Street apartment.

“You could meet half the world around that bed,” he wrote – “radical types like Jerry Rubin or Bobby Seale, eccentric musicians like David Peel, poets like Allen Ginsberg, actors like Peter Boyle, television personalities like Geraldo Rivera, or even political figures. agents like the deputy mayor of New York.”

Leon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933 in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, a small mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and dry goods merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in his store. Mr. Wildes was educated in Olyphant public schools and received a bachelor's degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.

He soon turned his focus to immigration law, working for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee aid organization, and helping two Americans who had gone to Israel establish their American citizenship. He founded the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and went on to write numerous law review articles on immigration law and teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by another son, Mark; his wife, Alice Goldberg Wiles; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Immigration law had “biblical significance for him,” Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a telephone interview. “My father found value in helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done: the golden grail of a green card, or citizenship.”