Floyd Abrams and The Heroin Trail case
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This article is an historical account of Floyd Abrams's work on The Heroin Trail case, in which he represented New York Newsday. The Long Island paper had researched and printed a series of thirty-two articles entitled The Heroin Trail. It was an ambitious project: the publisher and senior editors wanted to follow Heroin trafficking from "the poppy fields of Turkey to the veins of Long Island kids."[1] The series won Newsday a Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service.
In an exhaustive account published February and March of 1973, over three hundred people in Turkey, the United States and Europe were described as heroin traffickers. One man in particular—Mahmut Karaduman, a nightclub owner in Istanbul—was described as specializing in smuggling via a route through the Black Sea, dividing his time between villas in Switzerland and Lebanon. Of all the people listed, only one person ever filed a lawsuit: Karaduman.
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[edit] The Heroin Trail
[edit] Procedural history
The case languished in the New York courts for years. New York vigorously enforces a law that libel actions must be filed within a year of publication of the story leading to the suit. Karaduman filed too late; he had only learned of the articles in the spring of 1974. In 1980 it was resurrected by the New York State Court of Appeals. The court held that since the New American Library had republished the article in a book that fell within the 1 year bright-line rule of when the original action was brought, the claim could proceed. But it moved "glacially" until the trial finally began in June and July 1986.
The trial lasted through twenty-four days of testimony, with eleven days translated from Turkish. Newsday had not yet called a single witness when two jurors caused a mistrial when they told Justice Kenneth Shorter they could not continue to serve. "It was the stuff of Dickens: A colossal amount of time and money had been wasted with no result other than an order to begin all over again," wrote Abrams.[2]
[edit] Pretrial
The aborted trial's transcript helped Abrams learn opposing counsel's strategy, and to master his own.[3] Newsday had taken pains to ensure their journalists were accurate. Every name on their list of traffickers had been verified with top narcotics agents, including high-ranking Turkish officials. They had notes on everything and all of the reporters came across as competent at trial. According to Abrams, Newsday had two major problems: 1. The journalists were regardless dependent on their sources (nobody had seen a drug deal take place), which amounts to hearsay; and 2. In the 1986 trial, Karaduman questioned whether the journalists had told the truth. He produced several important Turkish witnesses who would not corroborate their statements to the reporters; indeed, some denied ever meeting them. If this testimony were repeated, it would throw the credibility of the three American journalists into question. Who the jury believed would be central to winning the case.
