John Lennon’s lawyer explains how the musician’s deportation case changed immigration law | Rebroadcast

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

On the night of December 8th, 1980, legendary musician John Lennon was shot and killed outside the Dakota Apartments on the upper West side of New York City. I’m Lee Rawles, the host of the Modern Law Library podcast, and to mark the 45th anniversary of the former Beatles’ death, we’ve gone into our back catalog to share a conversation I had in 2016 with John Lennon’s immigration attorney Leon Wildes. Leon passed away in 2024, but he shared a fascinating glimpse into a case that exposed corruption in the Nixon administration and changed the US immigration process forever. The year was 1971, a volatile one for the country and one of the world’s most famous musicians, John Lennon was facing deportation. Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I am talking with the author of John Lennon versus the United States, the inside Story of the most bitterly contested and influential deportation case in United States history. Mr. Leon Wildes is the founder and senior partner of Wildes and Weinberg and the author of the book We’re also joined by his son, managing partner Michael Wildes, an adjunct professor at the Benjamin n Cardozo School of Law in New York. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us.

Leon Wildes:

Our pleasure. Our pleasure.

Lee Rawles:

Now, Leon, you are the author of this book and were the AttorneySync this case. Can you describe a little bit how you came to represent John Lennon and his wife Yoga Ono in this case?

Leon Wildes:

Well, I got a call from a colleague who I had done immigration work for in the past, and he said that he had an important potential client for me, and these clients do not go to lawyers’ offices, so he would be happy to come along with his employer, the manager of the Beatles, Alan Klein, and permit me to interview these clients and see whether they want to retain me.

Lee Rawles:

Now what I find really amazing is that you actually had not heard of the Beatles or John Lennons music. In fact, I think you told your wife that you’d gotten a call from Jack Lemon and Yoko Moto.

Leon Wildes:

Yes, that’s correct. I said to the attorney that I had never heard of these people and he said, well, I don’t recommend that you let people know that you don’t know who they are. So I arranged to go along with them and had the privilege of meeting John and Yoko in their village apartment where they lived at the time.

Lee Rawles:

Now Michael, how old were you when your father first took this case?

Michael Wildes:

Well, I was born in 64 and dad took the case on in 71, so I was not old enough to know anything more than a little about the Beatles music than my dad did. You should know that dad came back the first night after meeting John and Yoko and had to then sit in a cab the next night after he met them because he’s still embarrassed to come home to my mom and explain that he had no idea who Jack Lemon and Yoko Moto, that’s who he thought he had met when he saw my mother couldn’t believe that he had no idea at the time, but my brother and I were young and tender at the time and we developed a very strong familial relationship that last to this day with Yoko. Truthfully, this became part of not just the iconic immigration laws, but part of the annals of our family relationships too,

Lee Rawles:

And I did find this also pretty amazing. Leon, when you took this case, did you have any idea the length of time it would take you to resolve these matters for your clients and the kind of impact?

Leon Wildes:

Not at all because I was consulted on a much more limited problem. Yoko explained that she had an 8-year-old child by a prior marriage and that that child is an American in the New York area as she assumed that the father of the child has been hiding the child out and she hasn’t succeeded in getting to see her child who she had named Kyoko. I thought that that was a limited kind of issue and I felt that her reason for the need of additional time was so strong that I didn’t think it could be denied. So I just assumed that the job was a limited one. I’d asked for six months extension, I get it and move on.

Lee Rawles:

It really was very heartbreaking what you described Yoko and John’s search for her daughter kgo, and one of the things that you did not realize at the time, but outline in your book is that the reason John was being targeted for deportation was not simply his status as a visiting alien, but because he was being politically targeted by the Nixon administration. How did you come to find out that this kind of conspiracy was going on?

Leon Wildes:

Well, the basis for the information that the president had at the time and why he wanted John and Yoko out was the fact that John had made an appearance a month earlier and I didn’t get to hear about that appearance for several months beyond the time that I was retained as a result, I didn’t realize stepping into it that this was anything more than a routine concern for an extension of stay. In fact, I had mentioned to John, I asked him, how about applying for residence? I thought that that would be something we were capable of succeeding in, and he said, well, you should know better than I that that’s impossible because of my conviction. Well, I had a different kind of conviction about his conviction. I was somewhat aware of the fact that the British system did not produce the kind of serious conviction that was produced throughout the world and indeed in every American state, and that I thought maybe I’d be able to succeed in that, but they showed no immediate interest at the time.

Lee Rawles:

And you outlined very well in your book, and one of the other things I really appreciated about it was you have so many of the source documents actually appended to John Lennon versus the United States. You were able to uncover the fact that the immigration officials were told to shelve essentially the motions you were making that they had not even been entered for consideration. Did you prior to this have any idea that political forces could make this kind of determination on what should be a simple immigration status hearing?

Leon Wildes:

It would never have entered my mind to think that the government would hide applications and not consider them or prejudge them in a simple case like that. It had never happened in my practice and I didn’t anticipate that it would.

Michael Wildes:

The documents that are in the book show memos from the committed to reelect the President and internal memos from security and FBI records that they were tailoring my father and John at the time. There are a lot of anecdotes, and not only family pictures but personal notes that are in the book two that John wrote to my father that he was followed by car as well as by foot at the time. It was 18 year olds that were given the right to vote. The reduction from the age of 21 to 18 made this constituency a very vulnerable constituency to Nixon, and he felt that linen would be able to curtail that and then tried to use an old conviction to get him deported. All of this was selectively used against him for political reasons.

Lee Rawles:

And Michael, your father says that he is pretty certain that your phones are being tapped at this time and he may have been being followed. Was this affecting your home life in any way that you were recognizing as a child?

Michael Wildes:

I recall that John used to call up our house as an older woman disguising his voice, and he was very respectful over our Sabbath and there were all kinds of machinations when we would travel that dad and he would go through to communicate anecdotally, my father would speak to his own father in Yiddish. He would say John Lennon’s name and then tell him updates on the case thinking that the FBI would now have to hire an old Jew to translate the transcripts of the tapes. It was something that bothered John and Yoko. It was something that was my father who grew up in a household where there was pictures of Franklin Deena Roosevelt. He was a virtual deity. It was unconscionable that a president would use the FBI and would try to track a case, let alone a famous Beatle just because of his politic.

Lee Rawles:

And Michael, I’m so glad to have you on the line with us because you are in the next generation of immigration lawyers to practice. After your father had achieved this victory in court for John Lennon and indeed established something called the Lenin Doctrine, did you end up studying this case at all or using this in any of your classes?

Michael Wildes:

My brother, my wife and myself each had the privilege of having our dad as our law professor and to this day, I teach the course. Dad comes and gives a lecture to these very lucky students who get to see what John Lennon was in the world of music. Dad is iconic in the world of immigration law. The way he masterly used the Freedom of Information Act and all the litigative tools in order to help John is still being studied and is the basis upon which where dad had discovered in this illustrious case a path to help scores of students eventually and children. Now under daca, this case stood for the revelation that there was a program to discreetly not prosecute everybody. This deferred action program is now credited to the Lennon case and it’s a real feather in dad’s cap and in our practices cap. We’re still practicing in dad’s, I should say, 83 years young in the same building that John used to call on dad all these years.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I want to thank both of you for speaking with us today. If people are interested in picking up the book, John Lennon versus the United States or in Learning More about Your practice, where should they go, Michael?

Michael Wildes:

The website is wild law.com. That’s W-I-L-D-E-S-L-A w.com. There’s a treasure trove of law review articles and materials that dad has pinned through the years and a lot of interviews and we’re welcome requests if people would like dad to come to their firms or to law schools and to address communities and to have a conversation about the significance of this extraordinary case. The book can be purchased on Amazon or Barnes and Noble and is available. As well as that entertains now feature film and documentary requests. There is a revival of interest in not only the immigration debate, but the exact jurisprudence that was called out of this case.

Lee Rawles:

And as he said, you can learn more by picking up the book John Lennon versus United States. Thank you so much for listening.