If you live in Los Angeles and listen to the radio or read the papers, then you know who Myles L. Berman is.
For a better way of putting it, Myles L. is a drunk tank attorney, and you’ve probably seen his ads – Myles L. featured with arresting eyes, curly black hair, a Harry Reams Deep Throat porno mustache and a subliminal message that conveys the fact that he’s your only friend in troubled times.
“Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” Myles L. advises.
Myles L. is the guy for you when you pull out of Sardo’s late at night, and the Burbank police detain then mace you with shit spray while whacking you in the side of the skull with a rubber bag full of live rats for driving drunk. When you only got one phone call. It had better be Myles.
Curiously, Kayden Kross- when she got into a real estate beef recently- called the Sacramento equivalent of Myles L. Berman.
Kross wasn’t driving a house drunk, nor was she driving a drunken house. But her first call was to Jon-Paul Valcarenghi. With that handle, you almost expect a square-jawed, accented kickboxer with muscle bound legs for your defense money. Instead she got a high school David Caruso.
According to web reports, Valcarenghi also specializes in drunk tank cases. Where Myles L. and Jon-Paul differ is the fact that Myles L. apparently belongs to the California DUI Lawyers Association, where Jon-Paul does not. Or so according to the Internet. What that all means in the scheme of things, I have no idea.
All of this useless detail kind of leads you to wonder what particular defense Kross has in mind when she’s arraigned next month. Although we’ve already seen glimmers of it.
In Sacramento, Valcarenghi undoubtedly does a ton of business with rheumy-eyed politicians who tend to keep late night whiskey hours making sure citizens are protected from evil porn stars – what with all the tax money these state capital rape technicians gnaw out of citizen coffers for their own personal use, but we won’t go there.
Behaving in the manner of a fast-talking late night infomercial artist with a deal too good to be true, Kross is up on a number of federal indictments regarding some questionable property dealings.
They are complicated ones but are basically Ponzi schemes when you come right down to it. In her first salvo of defense, Kross is claiming victimization and that she was a naïf in the hands of unscrupulous Snidely Whiplash mortgage professionals.
Forgetting, of course, the fact that Kayden allegedly walked away from all this with a bag of cash weighing in at almost $150,000. May we all be victimized and tied to the railroad tracks to such an extent.
If found guilty, Kayden will probably go to a cinderblock jail cell where there’s no promise of sunrises and where days drag by like dead animals.
In order to rescue the lovely Kayden from these dire consequences, it will be Valcarenghi’s job to sell a judge or a jury on the fact that she’s a dumb blond who didn’t know any better. And Jon-Paul’s already begun weaving a marvelous tapestry detailing Kayden’s inner pain to accomplish that with statements made to AVN.
But there, Jon-Paul’s got some problems. Because Kross in her published blogs conveys the impression that she’s blessed with insights possessed only by the Dali Lama. Humility is not one of Kayden’s stronger virtues, you see, and it comes across in the lofty tone of her words.
Even her ex-boyfriend, who apparently warned Kayden that she was crossing ethical lines and stood to get her fingers caught in the mouse trap, was assured that she’d walk because Kayden was, after all, young, blond and cute. She said she knew what she was doing.
Okay, so let’s stretch the boundaries of imagination and accept the fact that the young dumb and cute defense might actually play, forgetting, for the moment, that Kayden’s a paid professional who engages in consensual sodomy.
If this case ever goes to trial, the jury will have to overlook this minor detail. That in itself is an interesting line of thought with many loose ends in play but can be salvageable in the long term if managed right.
New Frontier Media proved that as much when it went public in the late Nineties. In its early days in Colorado, the company dealt with a mishmash of characters, the likes of the multi-millionaire J.P. Lipson aka “The Pig Farmer” – savvy players from all walks of mainstream business who vied for seats of honor at the porno picnic table. In the process, New Frontier Media encountered a barrel of lawsuits in what can only be said were broad misunderstandings over the use of the word money.
Threatened to be left walking home in a barrel, the company devised a unique courtroom tactic. Thusly, New Frontier wrote the last word on the intricacies of “fraudulent inducement” and how it plays on the violin with courtroom acoustics.
New Frontier’s argument, time and again, was that they were innocent babes led to slaughter, connived into many and different deals of financial complexity by the wolves of Wall Street – a play on the young and dumb principle, if you will. And it worked like a charm each and every time. It was beautiful.
So if the boyishly young Jon-Paul plays his cards right, juries can and will fall for this ploy like a ton of very heavy bricks. And with a hot blond batting her innocent eyelashes coyly from behind a silk hand fan like the farmer’s widow, it’s a cinch.
Me, what little I know of the legal world I learned from watching Corbin Bernsen at work in LA Law. So if I were Jon-Paul, I’d simply advise Kross to cop to a driving a house while drunk rap, take the points, fine and suspended sentence. I don’t think Myles L. could offer better advice than that.