When Mayor Eric Adams is arraigned Friday, he will be joined at the defense table by his lawyer Alex Spiro, who has become one of the country’s most famous trial lawyers.
Mr. Spiro made his name defending a long list of embattled celebrity clients, including Jay-Z, Alec Baldwin and, most recently, Elon Musk, for whom he serves as a personal lawyer.
Mr. Spiro graduated from Tufts University and then Harvard Law School. In 2008, he took a job as a prosecutor in Manhattan’s district attorney’s office, where he helped indict Rodney Alcala, a serial killer and onetime game show contestant. Mr. Spiro eventually turned to criminal defense.
Now a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Mr. Spiro joins Brendan R. McGuire and Boyd M. Johnson III, who have been representing the mayor. Mr. Spiro, who takes a more aggressive approach and came out swinging at prosecutors on Thursday, will handle the trial; Mr. McGuire and Mr. Johnson will coordinate legal strategy across the three other federal corruption investigations swirling around the mayor.
Mr. Spiro spent his early career defending professional athletes, including Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end, whom he helped represent in 2017 after he was accused of shooting two people in Boston. Mr. Hernandez was found not guilty of the killings, though he later hanged himself in prison while serving a life sentence on charges connected to a separate murder.
In the years since, Mr. Spiro has notched unlikely wins in high-profile cases involving billionaires and celebrities. In 2019, he defended Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who was charged with soliciting sex in Florida. The charges were dropped. This year, he helped defend Mr. Baldwin against charges involuntary manslaughter related to a fatal shooting on the set of the movie “Rust.” The case was dismissed in July.
More recently, Mr. Spiro has made headlines as Mr. Musk’s go-to lawyer, after successfully defending the billionaire in a high-profile defamation case in late 2019.
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