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The speaker for our Sept 16th meeting is Alexander Silvert on the Mail Box Conspiracy Story. Alexander was raised in New York City and Vermont. After graduating from UCLA and driving a cab in New York, and a year of post-graduate political science courses at New York University, he switched to Boston College Law School where he obtained his JD in 1984. He worked as a state and federal public defender in Philadelphia before moving to Honolulu in 1989 with his wife and three-week old son to work at the Hawai‘i Federal Public Defenders Office. He served as the First Assistant FPD from 1992 to his retirement in October of 2020. During his tenure he handled numerous high publicity cases, including representing two defendants in potential federal death penalty cases. In 2000, he was one of several AFPDs named “Federal Defender of the Year” by the National Association of Federal Defenders. In July of 2013, the author began his representation of Gerard Puana, who was charged with destruction of a mailbox owned by Honolulu Chief of Police Louis Kealoha and his wife, Katherine Kealoha, third-ranked City of Honolulu Prosecutor. The case continued for over seven years, with the author starting as defender and ending as the key instigator of the federal prosecution of the Kealohas in what has become known as the greatest public corruption case in the history of Hawaii. In October of 2020 Silvert retired as a Federal Public Defender after 33 years. Silvert has written a book about the Puana/Kealoha case entitled “The Mailbox Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Greatest Corruption Case in Hawaii History.” Silvert currently is a lecturer at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law and runs his own private federal criminal law consulting firm in Hawaii.
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