Disgraced Lawyer Rebounds in Nevada; OC’s ‘Human Zoo’
OC INSIDER
by Rick Reiff
Remember William Yacobozzi Jr., the controversial former Newport Beach gangster-and-murder-case lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988? This week he’s again a candidate, this time in a three-way GOP primary for a Nevada state senate seat. The last time he ran, Yacobozzi was hit with a paternity suit. He settled but in 1992 a jury convicted him on perjury and other felony counts after hearing evidence that he hired an impostor to take a DNA test. Yacobozzi moved to Las Vegas, and in 1995 an OC judge restored his civil rights. Now Yacobozzi is a tribal judge for the Pyramid Lake Paiute Council and teaches paralegals at Morrison University. “I brushed myself off and rebuilt my life,” Yacobozzi told the Reno Gazette-Journal …
More politics: In the race to replace Superior Court Judge Ronald C. Kline, who is leaving the bench to fight child-sex charges, John Adams has a catchy name, a slew of GOP endorsements and more than three times the March write-in votes of his opponent on the November ballot, Gay Sandoval. But one thing Adams won’t have is the OC Bar Association’s seal of approval,he declined to participate in the bar’s candidate-evaluation process. Sandoval agreed to the drill and voters should know by mid-October what the bar thinks of her. Adams, a career businessman, said he believes the evaluation process favors litigators and penalizes lawyers who, like himself, primarily give advice. Adams blamed oversights for a couple of embarrassing disclosures: He said he’s filing a routine form with the secretary of state to clear up several suspended business licenses, and he has corrected a biographical entry on his website that claimed he was a Santa Ana lawyer during an eight-year stretch when he was suspended from legal practice for nonpayment of his bar dues. Adams advisor Adam Probolsky contended “ultra-liberal” Sandoval is “doing nothing but attacking Adams on petty business issues from years ago” …
While visiting England recently, UCI biz prof Judy Rosener was astonished to read about “the teeming human zoo” that is the Orange County Jail. A reporter for The Mail on Sunday described a stench-filled prison where inmates wail constantly, gangs battle and guards routinely beat prisoners. It was just one example of the London tabloids’ sensational coverage of Alastair Irvine’s incarceration here. The errant British son of privilege is charged with jealously stalking and threatening the boyfriend of a 19-year-old Newport Beach woman. Sheriff’s spokesman Jon Fleischman said the jail article was “almost a complete fictional account” that would be funny if the department did not take seriously the job of operating one of “the most well-run, most humane” jails.
