Event Recap: John Kroger at Friends of Mystery's Bloody Thursday

John Kroger doesn’t watch police shows. “When you’re living it every day,” Kroger says, “the last thing you want to do is come home and watch crime on TV.”

But Oregon’s attorney general tells some crackerjack stories about his years as a federal prosecutor. He entertained about 75 people at Friends of Mystery’s meeting on Thursday night. The group of mystery enthusiasts meets at Terwilliger Plaza, an upscale retirement community with a killer view of the dark Willamette and the bright lights of downtown. They also put out a great spread of treats: chocolates, cookies, pound cake and brownies for free, and wine for purchase.

Kroger read from his award-winning book, Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins and Enron Thieves (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He also graciously answered questions from the crowd, be they on his book, on Oregon law, or on legal issues in general.

At the time Kroger began writing his book, he was a law professor at Lewis & Clark. “As a law professor, I wrote technical pieces on constitutional matters,” he said. “I felt like there were all these stories from my time as a prosecutor that were bursting to get out, but it was not the kind of thing a law professor writes.” Encouraged by his friends, he wrote them anyway.

Kroger was a relatively rookie prosecutor when he was assigned to the Gregory Scarpa case. He had never met a murderer before, and here he was prosecuting a Mafia hit man who had killed about twenty people. “We had evidence for fourteen,” Kroger said. “At the end of the day, we dropped most of the charges and went with our six best.”

Mafia killers are extremely professional, Kroger informed the crowd. They almost never leave any physical or forensic evidence. They destroy the gun and burn the clothes they were wearing. The only witnesses left alive are the other Mafia guys they work with. So it was three of these men who Kroger had to cultivate as witnesses against Scarpa. Grim as the crimes were, Kroger’s stories about working with these individuals had the audience laughing.

Another story he told from his book was about one of his early cases. A Colombian woman was caught at the airport smuggling a large sum of money in boxes of automobile air filters. Since there are not nearly enough funds to prosecute all cases, the job of a federal prosecutor is to discern which cases must be prosecuted, and which can be dropped. When Kroger met the woman, she told him that she had smuggled money for her husband, a drug dealer. If she didn’t comply, he would beat her or leave her. But now he was not taking her phone calls. She was stranded alone in another country.

Kroger didn’t prosecute her.

“I’m glad I began my career by erring on the side of empathy,” Kroger said. “But a few years later, after hearing so many bullshit stories, I would have indicted her.” He considers it the most important story in his book because it shows his transformation. “I quit after five or six years because I was aware of how I’d changed. I was less naïve but I was also less empathetic.”

The theme of Convictions is the way the criminal justice system changes not only the defendants, but the lawyers who are in it.

During the question period, somebody asked Kroger if he would ever consider defense. He began his answer with a caveat that many of his friends are defense attorneys, and he respects them. But, no. Not for him.

“The ethical life of the lawyer is really strange,” he said. “Most lawyers. their ethical responsibility is zealous advocacy for their client.” But a prosecutor is an exception. Their goal is justice, not to win or lose.

He took the words of his mentor to heart: If you’re constantly advocating for positions you don’t believe, it will destroy your reverence for the truth.

After miscellaneous questions on drug legalization and whether or not it’s lawful to lie to a police officer in the state of Oregon (it is for now, but better do it fast, because Kroger is writing a bill to change that law), someone finally steered the talk back to the theme of the evening: writing. Is he working on another book?

Kroger, who had been most forthcoming with his answers until then, hemmed and hawed and seemed a tad bashful. But finally he admitted that he gets up at five every morning to have an hour to write before his wife and son awaken. “I really love to write,” he said. “It gives me immense pleasure.”

But what is it? A new book? “I’m actually working on something,” Kroger said, “but I’m not going to tell you what it’s about.”

Image credits Lewis & Clark College and IndieBound.