As followers of this site may be aware, whistleblower attorney Leon Koziol has been persecuted by his profession after nearly 25 years of unblemished practice as a civil rights attorney in federal and state courts. Among the 40 trial jurists removed from his originally uncontested divorce, one was permanently banned from the family court bench by New York’s high court after the judge admitted to sexual abuse of his handicapped, five-year old niece (Bryan Hedges). Koziol was vindicated again when Hedge’s replacement judge, Michael Hanuszczak, was forced to resign after being found guilty of harassing his court clerks. Yet another replacement, Utica City Court Judge Gerald Popeo (no longer a judge) was publicly censored by a state judicial commission for racist remarks and physical threats from the bench.

This kind of exposure was obviously a public relations disaster for both federal and state judiciaries when coupled with court filings, lobby initiatives and protest marches in Washington and elsewhere which Leon sponsored to influence a federal investigation of Title IV-D funding abuses and human rights violations in our nation’s divorce and family courts. Indeed the most recent federal judge who dismissed one such filing was removed from a case by a federal appeals court in Manhattan for concocting a human gene for decision making that would not be discovered by the scientific community in “another fifty years.” The appeals court based its removal of Judge Gary Sharpe on the loss of public confidence which he caused to our judiciary by such omnipotence , United States v Cossey, 632 F.3d 82 (2nd Cir. 2011).

As most of us in the reform movement know, the best way of suppressing a highly qualified whistleblower is to attack his credibility and undermine his income producing capacity. Over a twelve year period, a collection of judges and lawyers in upstate New York did exactly that with a record period of law license suspensions, parental alienation and ultimate death threat based on an orchestrated child support debt. This long term persecution nearly cost Leon his life and forced him to seek human rights protection overseas. Too extensive an ordeal for conventional modes of public disclosure, it is now summarized in Leon’s newly published book, Whistleblower in Paris. Get a free insight at www.whistleblowerinparis.com. The book is available at Barnes and Noble stores and major bookseller sites.

To offset the defamation wrongly inflicted on this whistleblower, it has become necessary to recite Leon’s accomplishments on this site, in court filings, news releases, and reports to various oversight authorities. Put another way, you can always abuse public office by destroying a critic’s reputation but you cannot erase the achievements which support the credibility of a vital public message. One such achievement is a series of successful decisions in federal and state court in which Leon single-handedly invalidated a billion dollar casino compact against high profile law firms such as Cravath, Swaine and Moore. So humiliating were these defeats that they generated no public comment. Shockingly, they went so far as to dilute Leon’s identity as the successful plaintiff attorney by placing him alongside the law firm, Bond, Schoeneck & King, which did not assist or represent in any way. Look them up at Oneida Indian Nation v County of Oneida, 132 F.Supp.2d 71 (NDNY 2000) and Peterman v Pataki, 2004 NY Slip Op 51092. The headline story in the Las Vegas Sun is found below.

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