Leon Wildes Obituary – Death: John & Yoko Lawyer Who Beat Nixon Deportation Efforts Passed Away At 90
Attorney Leon Wildes, who stood alongside John Lennon and Yoko Ono in court, in public, and on TV during the early 1970s as the famous couple successfully fought deportation attempts by the Nixon Administration, passed away on Monday, January 8, at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. He was 90.
His son, Michael Wildes, the Mayor of Englewood, New Jersey, announced his death.
Wildes gained some recognition in the early ’70s, sharing in the Lennons’ fame for a while as he appeared with the couple on various high-profile TV talk shows during the three-year legal battle.
After Lennon and Ono, both outspoken critics of the Vietnam War, moved to New York City following the Beatles’ breakup, they became targets of the Nixon Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Lennon had a prior conviction in London in 1968 for marijuana possession, and a waiver he had obtained was set to expire.
Over the course of a three-year legal battle, Wildes uncovered evidence that in 1972, conservative South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond urged Nixon’s Attorney General John N. Mitchell to deport the Lennons, with Mitchell forwarding the request to immigration officials.
“If Lennon’s visa is terminated, it would be a strategic countermeasure” to the antiwar activism, Thurmond wrote in a letter to Mitchell.
Lennon’s struggle to remain in the United States, partly because Ono’s daughter Kyoko lived here with Ono’s ex-husband, gained considerable public support through appearances on The Dick Cavett Show, the Tomorrow show with Tom Snyder, and others. High-profile supporters included celebrities like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, and New York Mayor John V. Lindsay.
Wildes’ efforts on behalf of Lennon and Ono were successful: On October 7, 1975, a Federal Appeals Court judge reversed a deportation order for Lennon. Judge Irving Kaufman wrote, “The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds. Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream.”
Lennon was granted a green card in 1976.
The landmark case was chronicled in the 2006 documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” and, in 2016, in Wildes’ book “John Lennon vs. The U.S.A.: The Inside Story of the Most Bitterly Contested and Influential Deportation Case in United States History.”
Wildes also co-produced Mark St. Germain’s Off-Broadway play “Ears on a Beatle” in 2004, a fictionalized depiction of the FBI’s Lennon investigation.
Born on March 4, 1933, in Olyphant, Pa., Wildes is survived by his wife Alice Goldberg Wildes, sons Michael and Mark, eight grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.