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.
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) stubbornly fought against attacks by the Nixon administration and immigration officials on Mr. Lennon, the former Beatle, and his wife, Yoko Ono, by made a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and hidden U.S. immigration policies.
By uncovering secret records using the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that, in practice, immigration officials have broad discretion in deciding whom to deport, a revelation that continues to reverberate in immigration law. And he revealed that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.
Mr. Wildes was ultimately vindicated by a federal appeals court's wrenching decision in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not tolerate selective deportation for secret political reasons” and which stopped the attempt to throw Mr. Lennon out of prison Country.
The Beatles had broken up in 1970 and Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono moved to New York the next year. Mr. Lennon was convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; This protocol would normally have denied him entry, but he had received an exemption. The waiver came to an end and the Lennons received a deportation 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 famous clients. In his book about the case, “John Lennon v. United States,” published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he vaguely knew the Beatles – it was almost impossible not to – but that he knew the names members he knew had escaped him.
“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled telling his wife after meeting her at their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.
In the 2007 film, Mr Lennon is seen telling reporters about Mr Wildes: “He is not a radical lawyer. He's not William Kunstler.
Mr. Lennon had publicly spoken out against the Vietnam War – he recorded the anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 – and was involved in protests on behalf of New Left figures who fought the war.
Nixon administration officials feared that he would have an outsized influence on young people who would be allowed to vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, the White House told administration officials and their allies, particularly the conservative South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, to take action against Mr. Lennon.
At the heart of her case was the marijuana conviction in London. But appeals court judge Irving Kaufman ultimately ruled that the crime was not enough to make Mr. Lennon an “excludable alien.”
The real reasons for Mr. Lennon's quixotic persecution, Mr. Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to show thanks to his tireless search of records. In early 1972, Mr. Thurmond had written a letter recommending that Mr. Lennon be thrown out of the country, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency responsible for visas at the time. Of particular concern was the fact that Mr. Lennon had appeared at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who was jailed on marijuana charges.
“If Lennon’s visa were terminated, it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.
Ten days later, “a telegram went out to all immigration authorities in the United States instructing them not to grant the Lennons any 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 cause, its efforts appearing increasingly inadequate as public support for Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono grew. In letters and testimonies, many cultural celebrities of the era spoke out on their behalf, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and the authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller, as well as Mayor John V. Lindsay of 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 grip on power, all 'dirty tricks', including misuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”
All the while, the FBI was keeping an eye on Mr. Lennon. “Surveillance reports on him ran to literally hundreds of pages,” Mr. Wildes wrote.
When Mr. Lennon found out about the deceit, he was furious. “They even change their own rules because we are peacemakers,” he said in a television interview.
The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. Five years later, he was killed outside the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and wife Yoko lived.
In another breakthrough, Mr Wildes noted that immigration officials are free to deport or not, depending on whether there are extenuating circumstances. Revealing this policy continues to help immigration lawyers fight the deportation of non-citizens today.
“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking investigations into the 'non-priority' program and ultimately filed an application for 'non-priority status' for Lennon,” wrote immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia in her 2015 book “Beyond Deportation “. “Wildes learned that the INS had been granting 'non-priority status' for many years to prevent deportation of non-citizens with sympathetic cases, but the INS had never made this practice public.”
Throughout Mr. Wildes's admission of representing the Lennons, he kept an amused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes meeting them, as others did, in what he called “the wonderful upright bed.” her bank street apartment.
“You could meet half the world around this bed,” he wrote — “radical types like Jerry Rubin or Bobby Seale, strange 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 his shop. 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 became interested in immigration law, working for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee aid organization, and helping two Americans who had gone to Israel obtain U.S. citizenship. He founded the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and went on to write numerous articles on immigration law and teach 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 Wildes; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Immigration law had “biblical meaning” for him, Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a telephone interview. “It was valuable to my father to help others achieve their American dream, as he had – the golden grail of a green card or citizenship.”