A prominent Manhattan lawyer who has represented everyone from notorious gangsters to football stars has been caught on bombshell tapes allegedly coaching an informant on how to silence witnesses in the case against his drug-kingpin client.
At one point, lawyer Robert Simels orders killer gang member-turned-informant Selwyn Vaughn to “neutralize” all the key witnesses — as well as their families, friends and lovers — against Guyanese drug lord Roger Khan.
When it came to one potentially devastating witness, a cooperator named David Clarke, Simels said, “I think their whole case falls apart if Clarke is neutralized by us or neutralized by us by cross-examination.
“Now, either we need to have him desire not to testify, which is unlikely, or we need to know every little detail of his life,” Simels, 62, says on the tapes, played in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
“I would take his mother . . . put her on the witness stand if she would do it to say, ‘My son hates Roger Khan and told me he was going to lie.’ ”
Simels — whose clients have included Queens drug lord Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, former Jet star Mark Gastineau and “Goodfellas” mobster-turned-informer Henry Hill — is on trial for obstructing justice.
Vaughn, 34, told jurors that Simels hired him “to persuade the witnesses either not to testify or to change their testimony” by bribing, threatening or otherwise silencing them.
Simels’ high-powered lawyer, Gerald Shargel, has argued that the tapes are being misinterpreted by the feds and that the informant tried unsuccessfully to entrap his client.
ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2JlfXp7j3Bma3FfqLatsc2cnGasmJp6uLXTp5ysq5WoeqLA06ipp52pYrCiwcahq2annmLBorzEaA%3D%3D