From delivering the Brooklyn Eagle to prosecuting Saddam Hussein

Brooklynites In Florida: An Interview with International Prosecuting Attorney Greg Kehoe

April 2, 2014 By Palmer Hasty Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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World renowned Attorney Greg Kehoe was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, but his family moved to Rockaway Beach on the edge of Brooklyn at the age of six. As he explained in a recent interview with the Brooklyn Eagle, “Rockaway is right next to Brooklyn and Coney Island, so, most of my memories, my connection to humanity if you will, was through Brooklyn.”

Kehoe has been a law partner with the international law firm Greenberg Traurig since 2006. This interview with the Eagle was conducted in Tampa at his Greenberg Traurig office.

For a tough prosecuting attorney, Kehoe has had a dream career. He worked as a young law clerk in federal court at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn prior to joining the Justice Department in 1982.

In the early 90s he worked on investigations for the House Counsel on Foreign Affairs in Washington, then returned to the Justice Department to work overseas on the War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia until the turn of the millennium.

When he returned to the states he had a private practice for four years until he was tapped in 2004 by President George W. Bush to work for the Department of Defense in Iraq. In 2005 he was back in the states and became a partner at Greenberg Traurig.

In 2008 he returned to The Hague in the Netherlands to work on another War Crimes Tribunal related to the Croatian War of Independence.

He’s prosecuted high profile corporate fraud and racketeering cases. In the late 1990s he helped prosecute Bosnian Croat General Tihomir Blaskic for war crimes during the International Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In 2008 he returned to the Netherlands to represent former Croatian Lieutenant-General Ante Gotovina, who was accused of international war crimes during the Croatian War of Independence and sentenced to prison. In the Appeals case, Kehoe won Gotovina’s acquittal.

In 2004, via Presidential appointment, he worked for the Department of Defense as Head of the Regime Crimes Liaison group advising the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which was set up to prosecute former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and other members of Hussein’s regime.

When the Eagle asked him how one goes about getting a Presidential appointment, Kehoe said that “it’s not exactly a direct path.” Then he paused for a moment, laughed as he often does in conversations, and said, “it’s a funny story but its true; here’s what really happened.

“I do this skiing trip every year, you know, with some older guys like myself. Early one morning the phone suddenly rings in the condo we had rented in Vale, Colorado. One of my ski buddies answers the phone and says: ‘Yeah’…then turns from the phone and yells, ‘It’s the Attorney General of the United States.’

“I take the receiver and a voice says: ‘Can you speak to General Ashcroft?’

“I’m thinking, this is the Attorney General, but before I could even say yes this voice came on the line. (It was evident Kehoe enjoyed imitating John Ashcroft’s voice.) ‘Greg? …What are you doing?’

“I’m skiing!”

As if that was immaterial Ashcroft continued:

“I want to ask you if you’re interested in talking about a job over in Baghdad.”

“Yes General, of course I’m interested in the job”

“Can you come up this week?”

“I’m skiing General!…In Vale!”

“Well, can you come up next week?”

“Yes, I’ll come up next week.”

After he hung up, Kehoe said he sat there for a moment wondering;

“How did they find me? I wasn’t even on the lease for the condo. But they found me.”

That phone conversation would eventually lead Kehoe to the deserts of Iraq investigating mass grave sites, as well as face-to-face encounters in the courtroom with Hussein.

Kehoe’s first job, which, as an 8-year old newspaper delivery boy, included delivering the Brooklyn Eagle when the paper was temporarily revived as a daily paper in 1962-63. (That was the year the Typographical Union had walked out on eight New York newspapers.)

“Here’s what happened,” Kehoe said. “The Eagle was the newspaper in Brooklyn by the time it first went out of business in 1955. Some other kids and I were delivering newspapers when the printer’s strike hit New York in ’62.

“Back then you delivered newspapers on your bicycle, and I can tell you categorically, for the immigrant population in my area, the newspaper strike was a big crisis. I lived in a house where we suddenly went from reading seven newspapers a day, to none.”

“That’s when the Eagle came back. The Eagle came back during the strike. They came to us and said do you guys want to deliver the Eagle? We said sure. And the way we did it, we just went around to people we’d already been delivering papers to, and asked them if they wanted to get the Eagle.” That was when the Eagle’s circulation grew from 50,000 to 154,000.

Kehoe recalled that “everybody, and I mean everybody, wanted the Eagle.”

Kehoe’s memories of growing up in an area of Rockaway that to him was still Brooklyn, has informed his perspective on life ever since.

Although his father was a policeman, and his mother worked as a law secretary on Court Street at Borough Hall, the Eagle asked him how he became interested in law. “Law was just an intriguing thing,” he said, “perhaps enforcing the law comes from my Irish background. I mean this in a very positive way when I describe Rockaway as a policeman-fireman-city worker ghetto. It was loyalty to the people around you and doing the right thing. And it didn’t make any difference what you were, Catholic, Jew, or Protestant, you took care of the people in the neighborhood.”

Kehoe attended St. Francis De Sales grammar school before going to high school at St. John’s Prep in Bedford Stuyvesant.

“We had dozens of kids on our block, I mean, those were the baby boomer days. We played stick ball in the streets daily, and later we could always get enough kids up for a game of baseball.”

He went to Boston College for his undergraduate degree in English and Political Science. Then he earned a law degree from St. John’s School of Law in Jamaica, Queens. In 2005 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Legal Letters from St. Johns School of Law.

“Since we’re talking about neighborhoods and Brooklyn, I’ll give you an example. You would walk down the street one of the little old ladies on a lawn chair in the front yard would say, ‘Can I help you…who are you looking for?’ Well, I’m looking for whoever, and she would say, pointing, they live four houses down there. But if you didn’t belong, what she was telling you was we don’t know you and you don’t belong here, so you definitely need a reason to be here. That was a characteristic of the whole geographic area, Brooklyn, Rockaway, it was just the way the neighborhood people looked out for each other.”

Given the historical significance of the Iraq war, the Eagle asked Kehoe more about his experience as liaison for the Iraqi Tribunal that prosecuted Hussein.

“I set up a courtroom in Camp Victory not far from the Iraqi airport. We brought an Iraqi judge in for the initial court appearances. Saddam was one of several regime prisoners brought in. When he stood directly in front of me and the guards had removed his shackles, I said, ‘You’ve got to go through that door right there.’ Later, in a conversation with Saddam, he told me he thought I was sending him into a room to be shot.”

“While I was there in the courtroom, with the Iraqi National Security Adviser and Deputy Prime Ministers, for the first time I realized the profound damage Saddam had psychologically and emotionally inflicted on that country. It was astounding. Here are these grown men well into their professional careers, shocked momentarily with fear, actually shuddering when they saw him just 10 feet away.”

Kehoe said his job also included investigating the existence of the mass graves, where the Saddam regime had executed and buried thousands of women and children.

“You go and see 300 plus bodies of women and children (babies) who had taken .22 caliber rounds to the back of the head. In the next trench you saw all the men who were gathered together and shot with AK-47s. It was devastating to witness.”

“We’d take chopper rides along the Arabian Peninsula and see grave sites already prepared for future executions. Elements of my case were based not only on what Saddam had done, but what he had been planning to do.”

To give you an idea of the atmosphere in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was prosecuted, the Maddox Business Report described Kehoe’s exit from Iraq like this: “he had to be accompanied by a security detail of 18 Navy SEALs wearing flak jackets and helmets, equipped with rifles and sidearms.”

While we were talking about the neighborhood-centric characteristics that Brooklyn is well known for, it seemed like Kehoe also felt some native Irish pride when he associated those characteristics with the heroism displayed on 9/11 in 2001.

“I used to talk to my daughter a lot about that foundation of taking care of one another. For example, those guys in my neighborhood and other areas of Brooklyn, while everyone was frantically trying to get out of the burning buildings that morning, those guys were heroically going in to save people. I remember, there were 61 deaths in the Rockaway area as a result of what happened that morning. Cops and firemen growing up with the idea of sacrificing themselves for the greater good if necessary.”

He paused for a long moment. “It’s not chivalry I’m talking about, its more than that, its something you grow up with.”