‘Tampering Cloud’ Over Linda McMahon’s Company’s 1994 Federal Trial (New York Post, 11/22/95)

I have posted a crude facsimile of the story about World Wrestling Entertainment defense attorney Laura Brevetti and her husband Martin Bergman from the New York Post on November 22, 1995. See http://muchnick.net/nypost1995.pdf.

The article, “TAMPERING CLOUD OVER WRESTLING BIG’S TRIAL,” lays out the accusations that Bergman offered inducements to Emily Feinberg, a star prosecution witness at the 1994 federal steroid-trafficking trial of Linda and Vince McMahon’s WWE (then known as the WWF).

The sidebar article, “Marriage puzzled their pals,” describes the “Odd Couple” marriage of Brevetti and Bergman.

This copy is not easy on the eyes. I put it up in this form in order to illustrate that the global question of obstruction of justice dogging Linda McMahon’s current Senate campaign in Connecticut should not be regarded as either old or trivial. On the subject of “old,” think of it more as an important story that other media, irresponsibly, allowed to die instead of working to amplify and resolve. Please also consider whether there is a healthy political statute of limitations on evidence that after a major candidate’s company escaped conviction at a federal trial, a credible and well-documented “tampering cloud” hovered over it.

In the coming days I will try to get the complete text, or at least key portions, transcribed and posted.

My thanks to the folks at the New York Post library for running this down on microfiche. (The newspaper’s electronic archives go back only to 1998.)

I apologize to the Post reporters – the late muckraker Jack Newfield, in collaboration with sports-media columnist Phil Mushnick – for earlier calling their story a pickup of William Bastone’s near-simultaneous Village Voice article about Bergman. (I previously uploaded that one, “The Fixer,” to http://muchnick.net/bergmanarticle.pdf.) Newfield and Mushnick actually came first.


Irv Muchnick