Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.
Since his indictment in May, Noel Gage has gone toe-to-toe with federal prosecutors over their allegations that he is a crooked personal injury lawyer who lined his own pockets at the expense of his clients.
He has publicly predicted he will be acquitted of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy charges and has even aired TV commercials portraying himself as the victim of the powerful insurance industry he has fiercely battled, and beaten many times, over the years.
And he has hired a battery of criminal lawyers to defend him, including lead attorney Tom Pitaro, who has taken on the government before in high-profile cases and won.
Now that his day in court has come — his trial got under way this week before visiting Senior U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush — Gage and his team of lawyers are not letting up.
On Tuesday, the day jury selection began, Gage and his team put their combativeness on display by filing a motion objecting to the slides Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Schiess planned to use in his opening presentation to the jury. Quackenbush had ordered Schiess to give the defense a copy of the PowerPoint presentation two weeks ago.
In their motion, the defense attorneys rattled off a litany of concerns about the presentation. They didn’t like, for example, that Schiess included a photo of one of the alleged victims in a wheelchair and that he marked equal signs in red when referring to some of the medical malpractice settlements scrutinized by the government in the case. Those things, the lawyers charged, were too argumentative for an opening statement, which is supposed to present only the facts.
Quackenbush agreed and ordered Schiess to remove the photo of the wheelchair-bound woman and mark the equal signs in black.
But what the lawyers found most objectionable was a photo of Gage that popped up throughout the government’s presentation. It was unflattering, they complained.
They wrote: “It is dark, grainy and at an angle, with Mr. Gage looking sideways, larger than the other head-shot photographs, irrelevant for the trial, and seeks to portray Mr. Gage as a sinister attorney.”
Schiess told the judge that he merely was using a copy of a Las Vegas Review-Journal photo of Gage taken during one of his recent interviews.
Quackenbush, however, apparently found the photo a little scary, too.
He ordered the defense attorneys to provide Schiess with a better photo of Gage.
It must have made Gage look too good, however, because Schiess decided against using it in his opening statement Thursday.
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There might be fireworks at today’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Philip Pro regarding the status of the closed Crazy Horse Too.
But the arguing won’t be between the federal prosecutors and Rick Rizzolo, the topless club’s former owner. They’re actually on the same side when it comes to the matter before the court.
Prosecutors expect to have a deal to sell the Crazy Horse Too any day now and have joined forces with the jailed Rizzolo, from whom the government seized the club last year, to make sure a sale goes through.
Federal prosecutors and lawyers for Rizzolo are to line up in court today against restaurateur Mike Signorelli, who is trying to get a piece of the pending sale stemming from the brief period in which he ran the club under an agreement with Rizzolo before its seizure.
The government already is conducting a criminal investigation into allegations that Signorelli failed to pay the Internal Revenue Service thousands of dollars in employee payroll taxes during his stint at the Crazy Horse Too.
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At the Regional Justice Center, Las Vegas justices of the peace are drawing higher grades for afternoon attendance this week.
On Tuesday, two days after a Sun story pointed out many of their courtrooms were not being used in the afternoons, another Sun spot-check found five of the 10 courtrooms open for business at 2 p.m.
During spot-checks Jan. 29 to Feb. 1, the largest number of open courtrooms in Justice Court on any afternoon was three. None was found to be open Feb. 1, a Friday.
District Attorney David Roger has suggested the justices of the peace make better use of their courtrooms in the afternoon to improve the efficiency of the county’s lower-court system.
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