Richard Sherman’s death buries more than one body

I have a saying about what goes on in the film noir reality of private investigative life behind the scenes in Los Angeles: “I know where all the bodies are buried, because I was either on the burial detail or else I had it under surveillance.”

Richard Gilbert Sherman was a prominent attorney in Los Angeles since time immemorial. At some point, he got hooked up with the Jewish Defense League (JDL). One of the principal ways that he utilized them was to carry out bunco extortion schemes against his own clients.

Sherman would figure out which of his clients (he was a criminal defense attorney primarily) had been out of trouble with the law for enough time to have put away large sums of cash (usually, drug money). Instead of just waiting for his clients to get busted so he could get paid big bucks for defending them, “Mr. K,” one of Sherman’s close confidantes and a guy who could get the JDL to do his bidding, would arrange for death threats to be made to the clients.

When you’re a drug dealer and somebody makes a threat against your life, you don’t call the local gendarmes. You call your criminal defense lawyer. So Sherman would listen to their frantic call and play his part in this play of drama imitating life. He’d tell them, “that sounds really serious. I want you to meet with ‘Mr. K.’ He’ll get you protected and find out what’s going on. He’s really connected.”

So Mr. K arranges for you and your family to be sequestered at some ranch house in the middle of nowhere, with gun toting thugs like Irv Rubin, and twin-mental case brothers, Earl and Barry Krugel, playing bodyguards. If your kid gets too close to the windows, which are all draped for “security,” your kid gets wrestled down for his own protection. Again, life imitating drama.

Day one, the story is, ‘we don’t know who’s behind the threat but we have word out on the street.’ More drama.

Day two, ‘word has come back from the street. We know who’s been hired to kill you. We’re trying to make contact.’

Day three, ‘we have a meet set up.’

By day four, your wife and children are going insane, nagging you every minute. You’re ready to tear your hair out. The line for today is, ‘we met. He won’t tell us who took out the contract on you or why, but for $300,000.00 you can buy out the contract.’ By that time you’ll gladly pay anything to get out of the problem, because you believe that everything is real. The JDL guys would get $500 each, chump change given what Richard and Mr. K were getting on these escapades.

These plots primarily took place in the 80’s. In the 90’s Mr. K hooked up with a certain other lawyer [2/6/17: editorial addition; the lawyer is the now deceased Lawrence “Larry” Longo who was fired by the District Attorney’s office because he was prosecuting Suge Knight while renting his home in Malibu through his own attorney to Suge Knight for $19,000 a month among other problems] who used the same script with new actors to rip off African American rap artists. In the 2000’s, Mr. K hooked up with yet another attorney and a couple of crooked detective agencies to do the same thing to another yet another audience. Several years ago, I’m meeting with a client in federal custody who thought that a certain private investigator had saved his life from mobsters. Halfway through the story I ask him, “Did Mr. K have anything to do with this?” His jaw dropped and stayed dropped while I explained three decades of sordid L.A. law practice that he had been a victim of.

I have reason to believe that one of these extortion plots got out of hand, when a certain individual took a beating from one of Sherman and Mr. K’s cohorts, Robert Galambos (who like Mr. K was of Jewish-Hungarian descent and part of a cadre of Jewish and Israeli Hungarian criminals). Later, he died, and Robert Galambos got a very good deal from the District Attorney’s office by suckering them into believing that my client had confessed to killing him. Galambos, who had an unlicensed “bodyguard” service that he called “Big Men Incorporated,” provided his so-called bodyguards to amongst other sordid characters, former Private Investigator and now incarcerated felon, Anthony Pellicano.

While I was investigating Galambos during my client’s murder trial, I found out that there was a $500,000 fraud judgment against him for a completely unrelated fraud. I turned the judgment creditors on to where his assets were and they seized everything while he was in a federal halfway house. I also had his room mate at the federal halfway house he was in ready to testify against him if necessary about what a lying sack of s-t Galambos was.

Lo and behold, when Galambos gets out of custody, having lost his house and business while he was in the joint, he hits on Mr. K to reimburse him for keeping his mouth shut about their extortion schemes and other criminal enterprises. Next thing you know, Galambos is invited to go up sky diving. Strange thing happens: he jumps out of the plane and allegedly, a guy who jumps out after him accidentally kicks him in the head in mid-air, knocking him out, so he doesn’t open his parachute.

Kind of hard for a coroner to tell what killed you when you fall out of an airplane.

Oh, and did I mention who defended Galambos and his buddies who beat the guy up who later died? Richard Sherman and his buddies.

Now then there was also this little matter of Richard Sherman and Mr. K being suspects in the murder of Attorney Nate Markowitz. Andrew Blankstein wrote on December 12, 2003 in the Los Angeles Times that:

In 1981, attorney Nathan Markowitz, 45, suspected of laundering millions of dollars for narcotics dealers, was found in a Century City underground parking lot shot in the head, chest and armpit at point-blank range. At the time, police said they believed Markowitz’s killing was arranged by people who feared that the attorney would cooperate with the government.

Markowitz was believed to have named drug traffickers and at least one well-known organized crime figure.

[See also: http://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/01/18/Former-banker-Warren-Zacovic-was-given-a-60-day-jail/4037380178000/]

In October 1990, Hungarian Mafia hit man Bela Marko wound up dead along with well respected LAPD Detective Russ Kuster after the two shot it out at the Hilltop Hungarian Restaurant. The Hilltop, on Barham Blvd in the Hollywood Hills, was then owned by reputed Hungarian Mafia crime boss Csaba Simon. The morning after the shooting I opened the morning paper and in spite of Bela Marko not being named in the story, I guessed it was him. [Follow up article has the details: http://articles.latimes.com/1990-10-11/news/mn-2787_1_murder-case]

My then significant-other, a crime beat reporter for another newspaper, thought I was nuts, but this is what I based my guess on…..

While Marko was in prison in Nevada, he had named Richard Sherman and Mr. K as Nate Markowitz’s murderers. He claimed that he had been their lookout during the murder. Shortly before he was released, I got a call from the numbnuts head of the JDL, Irv Rubin, asking me on behalf of Mr. K, whether I knew how to contact Dracula (Gyula Tamas Zubovicz), the head of the Dracula Crime Family of the Hungarian Mafia, who had moved up to Seatac, Washington. Mr. K couldn’t call me himself, because he was too embarrassed to admit that he had wrongly accused me of certain nefarious activities and threatened to break every bone in my body a few months earlier.

Rubin needed to find Dracula because according to Mr. K, Bela Marko was then ratting him and Sherman out on the Markowitz murder. They needed to find Dracula to learn exactly when Marko had come in and out of the United States so that they could discredit his story of being an eyewitness. Dracula didn’t want to talk to Mr. K, because Mr. K had ripped him off in their last scheme. So when I called Dracula and explained what was going on, he said, “this is very interesting problem that Sherman and K——have. Marko came in officially after Markowitz was murdered….but he came in without the authorities knowing a year before that and when Markowitz was killed, he left in a big hurry without explanation. We always did wonder why he was in such a hurry to get out of the country that time.”

I also found out before Marko was ever let out of prison in Nevada, that Mr. K had gotten a rumor to him to convince him that both Csaba Simon and Dracula had betrayed him somehow. It was complete nonsense, but Marko believed it and let it be known that he intended to kill Simon and Dracula when he got out. Could that have been why he was at the Hillside? Was he stalking Csaba to cancel his ticket? We’ll never know, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis.

As another “oh by the way,” Sherman was on my cocktail curse list.

Richard Gilbert Sherman: October 25, 1931 - April 14, 2011

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