Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the U.S. government's attempt to deport John Lennon, died Monday in Manhattan. He was 90 years old.
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, Wildes (pronounced WY-ulds) doggedly fought attacks by the Nixon administration and immigration officials against Lennon, the former Beatle, and his wife, Yoko Ono. . , bringing together a series of legal arguments that exposed both political traps and a hidden American immigration policy.
By uncovering secret records through the Freedom of Information Act, he demonstrated that immigration officials can, in practice, exercise broad discretion over who they choose to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law. And he revealed that Lennon, an anti-war activist and vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.
Mr. Wildes was finally vindicated by a harsh federal appeals court decision in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not tolerate selective deportation based on secret political motives,” and which halted the effort to remove Mr. Wildes. Lennon from office. country.
The Beatles broke up in 1970 and Lennon and Ono moved to New York the following year. Lennon had been convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; that record would normally have barred him from entry, but he had obtained an exemption. The exemption was coming to an end and the Lennons received a deportation notice.
“It was a very scary moment,” Ono said in the 2007 documentary “The United States vs. John Lennon.”
When the Lennons hired Mr. Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of their famous clients. In his book about the case, “John Lennon vs. USA”, published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he vaguely knew the Beatles (it was almost impossible not to be), but that the names of their members had escaped him.
“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he remembers telling his wife after meeting them at their Bank Street apartment in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.
In the 2007 film, Lennon is seen telling reporters about Wildes: “He's not a radical lawyer. He is not William Kunstler.”
Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War (he recorded the anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969) and had been involved in protests on behalf of figures in the New Left movement, which campaigned against the war.
Nixon administration officials feared it would have enormous influence among young people, who would be allowed to vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age had been lowered from 21 to 18. White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, particularly conservative South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, to go after Lennon.
His case centered on a marijuana conviction in London. But appeals court Judge Irving Kaufman ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Lennon an “excludable alien.”
The real reasons for Lennon's quixotic persecution, Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to demonstrate through his relentless search of the records. In early 1972, Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending that Lennon be removed from the country, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency then in charge of visas. Of particular concern was the fact that Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who had been jailed on a marijuana charge.
“If Lennon's visa is canceled, it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.
Ten days later, “a telegram was sent to all US immigration offices ordering that the Lennons should not be given any extensions in their time to visit the United States,” Wildes wrote in his book.
Over the next three years, the government continued to apply pressure, in efforts that seemed increasingly clumsy as public support for Lennon and Ono grew. In letters and testimonies, many of the cultural celebrities of the time spoke on his behalf, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, artist Jasper Johns, and authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Joseph Heller, as well as the mayor John V. Lindsay of New York.
“The only reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon's desire to get John and Yoko out of the country before the 1972 election and for a new, much younger electorate to get the vote,” Wildes wrote. “To ensure their control of power, any 'dirty tricks,' including abusive use of the immigration process, were acceptable.”
All the while, the FBI kept a close eye on Mr. Lennon. “Surveillance reports on him ran literally hundreds of pages,” Wildes wrote.
When Mr. Lennon found out about the ruse, he was furious. “They are even changing their own rules because we are pacifists,” he said in a television interview.
The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed in front of the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and Ms. Yoko lived, five years later.
In another development, Wildes discovered that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The disclosure of this policy continues to help immigration attorneys fighting the deportation of noncitizens today.
“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking research into the 'non-priority' program and ultimately filed an application for 'non-priority status' for Lennon,” immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia wrote in her 2015 book , “Beyond Deportation.” “Wildes learned that the INS had been granting 'non-priority' status for many years to prevent the deportation of noncitizens with favorable cases, but the INS had never made the practice public.”
During what Wildes recognized as the grueling work of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly gaze on his famous clients, sometimes finding them, like others, in what he called the “wonderful vertical bed” of his bank. Apartment on the street.
“You could find 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 politicians”. agents like the deputy mayor of New York.”
Leon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933 in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, a small coal mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and textile merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in her store. Mr. Wildes was educated in Olyphant public schools and earned a bachelor's degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.
He quickly gravitated toward 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 later wrote numerous law review articles on immigration law and taught at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
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 importance to him,” Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a telephone interview. “My father harnessed the value of helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done: the golden grail of a green card or citizenship.”
