Donations To District Attorney Steve Wolfson Raise Specter Of Pay-For-Play Justice In Las Vegas
“This smells bad and if you don't think it does you're not paying close enough attention.”
*Clarification: After publication, Mr. Chesnoff and his law partner Mr. Schonfeld reached out to Vegas Watch through an attorney to clarify that while they did represent Ronaldo and make a statement on his behalf, that representation was short-lived. At the time when District Attorney Wolfson made the formal decision not to prosecute Ronaldo, he was represented by a different lawyer. There’s no evidence that Chesnoff or Schonfeld engaged in any quid pro quo or of any other unlawful conduct on their part.
As previously reported:
Key Points:
David Chesnoff and his firm, David Z. Chesnoff Chartered, have donated $30,000 to Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson. Chesnoff’s legal partner, Richard Schonfeld, donated another $20,000, while his wife, Diana Chesnoff, donated an additional $10,000. The following year, Chesnoff represented soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, who was accused of rape in 2009. Despite extensive evidence, Wolfson never prosecuted a case against the soccer player.
Since 2013, billionaire casino mogul Steve Wynn’s companies, Wynn Resorts and Wynn Las Vegas, have together given Wolfson more than $20,000. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal published allegations from a series of women who worked with Wynn that he had sexually assaulted them. Again, Wolfson declined to prosecute any of the cases.
Experts say that the donations give an appearance of a conflict of interest, raise questions about fairness: "The appearance of impropriety, the appearance of conflict of interest, that is enough to ask questions about Wolfson’s legal ethics."
Former school teacher Kathryn Mayorga accused soccer-star Cristiano Ronaldo of raping her in a Las Vegas hotel room on June 13, 2009. Ronaldo himself described the events of the evening to his lawyers: “It was rough...She said that she didn’t want to, but she made herself available. The whole time it was rough...Maybe she got some bruises when I grabbed her...But she kept saying no. ‘Don’t do it’ -- ‘I’m not like the others.’ I apologized afterwards.”
In 2017, the incident again became international news. Der Spiegel first reported that in 2010, six months after the alleged sexual assault at the Palms Place Hotel, Ronaldo had entered into a $370,000 deal with Mayorga, ostensibly paying her hush money to not disclose what happened at the hotel. Mayorga had reported that she was raped to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and underwent a medical examination that same day. In the years following the alleged sexual assault, Mayorga has said she is terrified of retaliation, has considered suicide, and suffered clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson, the elected prosecutor responsible for prosecuting sex crimes in Las Vegas, never prosecuted a case against the soccer player. Ronaldo, through his attorneys, has maintained that the sex was consensual. Wolfson officially announced his decision to decline to bring charges against Ronaldo in July 2019.
As Las Vegas District Attorney Steve Wolfson investigated the case against Ronaldo, the soccer star made arguably the smartest legal decision he could make*: Hiring Las Vegas criminal defense attorney David Chesnoff, a lawyer with an incredible record of success for his clients in front of Wolfson’s office, many of whom are charged with the most serious offenses. Sources described Chesnoff to Vegas Watch as an experienced and gifted lawyer, but also hinted that there could be another factor aside from pure legal prowess that could help to explain why Chesnoff, and other criminal defense lawyers who represent wealthy clients in Las Vegas, have had such success when facing off against Wolfson’s office.
Vegas Watch examined donation records maintained by the Nevada Secretary of State to Wolfson since he took office in 2012 and found that Chesnoff and his firm, David Z. Chesnoff Chartered, have donated $30,000 to Wolfson. His legal partner, Richard Schonfeld, donated another $20,000, while his wife, Diana Chesnoff, donated an additional $10,000. Half of this $60,000 total arrived in August and November 2017, the year before Chesnoff’s big win for Ronaldo. Richard Wright, who also would later join Ronaldo’s criminal defense team, donated an additional $3,000 to Wolfson.
The crux of the concern is that the $63,000 that Ronaldo’s lawyers and their associates donated to Wolfson -- who raised less than $300,000 total in the year of his last election -- puts the District Attorney in the impossible situation of dispensing impartial justice when his re-election campaign is being financed in part by lawyers whose world-famous client stands to go to prison, likely for years, if prosecuted and convicted.
"I think there are reasons to, at least, be suspicious about the actions of both of the Ronaldo lawyers, Chesnoff in particular, in terms of making the donations. What was their intention in doing that? It’s a fair question,” Scott Cummings, the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, told Vegas Watch. “One can raise similar questions about DA Wolfson in terms of what influence those donations might have had when they were accepted. That too is fair. Even if there aren’t any technical ethical violations surrounding these donations, for the lawyers to give and the DA to receive this money, it certainly raises a strong impression of impropriety. Is there a conflict here? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it definitely has the appearance of conflict.”
The Ronaldo case is part of a pattern of behavior that raises questions about whether justice is for sale in Steve Wolfson’s Las Vegas.
In 2019, tech billionaire Henry Nicholas received what Clark County public defenders described in a court filing as a “sweetheart deal” from Wolfson’s office. Nicholas and a friend, Ashley Fargo, were arrested in Las Vegas in 2018 on charges of drug trafficking after police found a trove of drugs -- heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and ecstasy -- in their hotel room. Chesnoff represented Henry Nicholas in the case. The plea deal allowed for Nicholas and his friend to plead to possession and avoid felony drug trafficking charges and prison. “What it shows is that we have two systems of justice in our state,” said Clark County Commissioner William McCurdy (then-Assemblyman and chair of Nevada Democratic Party) to the Nevada Current. “We have a system for those who have wealth and one for those who do not.” Later that month, in response to the plea, public defenders in Clark County began seeking the same generous plea for their indigent clients facing drug charges. Vegas Watch spoke to a number of public defenders who said that lawyers representing indigent clients are unable to donate sizable sums of money to the District Attorney’s office.
Addie Rolnick, a law professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, explained to Vegas Watch that if it were to become a norm in a legal community where criminal defense lawyers representing wealthy clients regularly donated large sums of money to the district attorney, “such a system would disadvantage poorer defense attorneys and poorer clients. Public defenders with high caseloads, in particular, would almost certainly be unable to make donations at this level, compounding the disadvantages already faced by indigent defendants.”
Ronaldo and Nicholas are two of the biggest names in a broader pattern of what at least appears to be a conflict of interest whereby lawyers with cases in front of Wolfson’s office provide large donations and receive head-scratching charging and plea decisions for their clients.
“Conflicts of interest involve putting yourself in situations in which you may have the opportunity and be tempted to do something bad, or in which the people to whom you are responsible may find it hard to know whether you acted as you did for proper or improper reasons,” said Bernie Burk, Visiting Associate Professor at Penn State Law, to Vegas Watch. “And when it's hard to tell whether people in a position of trust acted out of honest or corrupt motivations, we can find ourselves distrusting those people and questioning the legitimacy of their decisions.”
Many of Wolfson’s donors from the local legal community specialize in criminal defense, meaning they would often be fighting with Wolfson’s office for their clients’ liberty. The support from these lawyers goes beyond the sheer dollar figures. In both of his successful bids for District Attorney, local law firms have organized fundraising events on behalf of Wolfson, which helped channel funds into his campaign coffers. For instance, in June 2018, the Las Vegas Defense Group hosted a fundraising event for Wolfson, which resulted in numerous donations from local lawyers who apparently had attended the events.
The Las Vegas Defense Group’s website boasts of convincing Wolfon’s office to give their clients a break in serious criminal cases, including domestic violence prosecutions: “Our client is a Henderson police officer facing a battery domestic violence charge. Prior to the scheduled trial, the prosecutor agreed to dismiss the entire case. Now our client can get his record sealed right away.”
"Just the appearance of impropriety is a major problem,” Sarah Hawkins, president of Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice, told Vegas Watch. “There doesn’t need to be a smoking gun. The appearance of impropriety, the appearance of conflict of interest, that is enough to ask questions about Wolfson’s legal ethics. It's especially important when you’re talking about ethics and someone like Wolfson -- a person who is elected to their office and owes allegiance to the public and to public safety, but who time and again fails to hold to that allegiance. This smells bad and if you don't think it does you're not paying close enough attention."
Multiple sources told Vegas Watch that there is a whisper network in Las Vegas about Wolfson’s donations and the specter that those dollars could influence outcomes for the wealthy and connected -- and not all of those donors are criminal defense lawyers, sometimes it is the person accused of illegal behavior who made the donation. For example, billionaire casino mogul Steve Wynn is a major Wolfson donor who has faced criminal allegations, but no criminal charges from Wolfson’s office. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal published allegations from a series of women who worked with Wynn that he had sexually assaulted them. Other accusations followed that initial report. One of these women, a manicurist who worked at one of Wynn’s hotels, alleged that Wynn raped and impregnated her in a massage room on the hotel property. Wynn admitted that he engaged in sexual intercourse with the woman, but claimed the sex was consensual. Wynn’s company paid the manicurist $7.5 million dollars to settle a civil case. Wolfson’s office didn’t file charges of any kind in relation to any of the sexual misconduct allegations leveled against Wynn. Since 2013, Steve Wynn’s companies, Wynn Resorts and Wynn Las Vegas, have together given Wolfson around $20,000.
Rolnick, the UNLV law professor, cautioned against reading too much into donations in a single case, but explained that a broader pattern of curious charging decisions in cases involving wealthy and connected donors raises troubling implications. “On one hand, there are many reasons a prosecutor can and should decline to pursue charges, and declination can be an important part of reducing the harm of criminal system involvement,” Rolnick explained, but a “decision not to pursue charges against famous or wealthy defendants, especially if coupled with a record of pursuing charges against poor defendants, could raise similar questions about fairness.”