Leon Wildes Dies: John & Yoko Lawyer Who Beat Nixon Deportation Efforts Was 90
deadline.comAttorney Leon Wildes, who stood next to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in court, in public and on TV during the early 1970s as the famous couple successfully fought unrelenting deportation attempts by the Nixon Administration, died Monday, January 8, at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital.
He was 90. His death was announced by his son Michael Wildes, the Mayor of Englewood, New Jersey. Wildes himself would share at least a fraction of the Lennons’ massive fame for a while in the early ’70s, appearing with the couple on various high-profile TV talk shows during the three-year litigation.
After Lennon and Ono, both outspoken critics of the war in Vietnam, moved to New York City following the break-up of the Beatles, they soon became targeted by the Nixon Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Lennon had been convicted in London in 1968 on a marijuana possession charge, and a waiver he’d obtained was set to expire. Wildes would, over the course of a three-year legal battle, uncover evidence that in 1972 conservative South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond urged Nixon’s Attorney General John N.
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