Donald Trump was having a bad day – a flight to Atlanta and then a trip to the Fulton County Jail where he would turn himself in and turn on his scowl for his mug shot.
But just hours before the former president’s plane touched down on Aug. 24, there was a stunning new development in his case. Trump had decided to shake up his defense team. Lead attorney Drew Findling, who had vigorously defended Trump for the past year, was out. Steve Sadow was in. A pit bull of a lawyer, Sadow has represented Atlanta’s top rap stars, one of its most famous strip club owners and a friend of NFL legend Ray Lewis charged with the linebacker in a double homicide outside a Buckhead nightclub.
Sadow was on the tarmac as Trump’s plane taxied to a stop. He was ushered inside and was soon accompanying Trump in his motorcade to and from the jail.
From the get-go, Sadow declared Trump innocent of all charges. He has sought to have various counts against Trump dismissed and made it clear he would represent his new client as zealously as any other.
“The president never should have been indicted,” Sadow said. “Prosecutions intended to advance or serve the ambitions and careers of political opponents of the president have no place in our justice system.”
A year later, Sadow hasn’t succeeded in getting the charges against Trump dropped. But he has helped to stop the case in its tracks, effectively shutting it down until next year, at the earliest.
With co-counsel Jennifer Little, Sadow has accused District Attorney Fani Willis of falsely testifying about her romantic relationship with former Trump special prosecutor Nathan Wade. And he said she played the race card during a speech at a historic Black church in January.
“That’s as bad as it gets in Fulton County,” Sadow told Judge Scott McAfee during a hearing seeking Willis’ removal from the case.
Some have criticized Sadow for taking on the polarizing ex-president as a client. But he isn’t having it.
“To those of you who have or may choose to denounce, berate or attack me for agreeing to represent any client you despise, disdain or dislike, save your breath,” he wrote in April in a post on X. “As it is said: ‘Any fool can criticize, complain and condemn – and most fools do.’ ‘Nuff said.”
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Sadow declined to comment for this story. But he has given numerous interviews to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution over the past few decades.
A brainy dad, a bowling mom
Sadow, 70, grew up in Trotwood, Ohio. His father was 18 when he graduated from Georgia Tech and later worked on the Dyna-Soar Project, a military program in the 1960s to develop a space plane. His mother was a homemaker but also a whiskey-drinking amateur bowler who traveled the country participating in various tourneys.
He was 11 when he first told his father he wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. That was while watching “The Defenders,” the TV courtroom drama starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as a father-and-son defense team.
Sadow attended Marietta College in southeastern Ohio where he was recruited to play middle linebacker. But he abruptly quit the team before the season started, intent on becoming a radical criminal defense lawyer like William Kunstler, who gained fame representing the Chicago Seven.
Thanks to a job working at a billiards hall, Sadow became the college’s champion pool player. On one occasion, he played the legendary Minnesota Fats. (Sadow broke without pocketing a ball and then watched Fats run the table.)
Sadow went to Emory University law school, where he met his wife, Susan Sadow, who would become a highly successful workers’ compensation attorney. In a recent interview for the Atlanta Jewish Times, she said her husband “went to no classes except those related to criminal law. … Steve had too much fun.”
Blessed with a near-photographic memory that is often on display in the courtroom, Sadow crammed for his exams and did well, qualifying for financial aid after his first year.
Sadow has long said his wife routinely made the most money in the family. That may not have been the case most recently though. Sadow has been paid $1.5 million so far for his defense of Trump, according to campaign finance records.
In legal settings, Sadow can be combative, combustible and controlling. In private settings, he comes off as sensitive, thoughtful and sometimes riotously funny.
He fully enjoys the fruits of his success. He drives a Bentley V12 convertible. He and his wife spend time each year at the St. Regis Resort in Aspen, Colo., and The Phoenician in Scottdale, Ariz. In 2018 and 2022 they took 24-day trips around the world, part of a Four Season Hotels private jet tour, stopping in 10 cities along the way. The trips retail at $150,000 to $200,000 a seat.
Last month, Sadow asked the appeals court to delay its Dec. 5 arguments until January. He said that two years ago he fully paid for an “international and costly” trip to celebrate his 70th birthday and 45th wedding anniversary. The court recently denied the request.
At court hearings, Sadow wears his trademark cowboy boots. He owns 27 pairs, including blue crocodile, gray suede and black ostrich.
Longtime Democratic voter
There is no party registration in Georgia but voter records show that Sadow has pulled Democratic ballots in primaries dating back to 1984. In the Jewish Times interview, Susan Sadow said she and her husband align politically most of the time.
“But she tends to remind me that I represent the 45th president in his case in Fulton County,” he said.
Sadow got his start as a criminal defense lawyer in 1979 working for the law firm headed by prominent Atlanta attorney Ed Garland. That summer, Garland asked Sadow to travel with him to northwest Georgia to defend pornographer Mike Thevis, the so-called “Sultan of Smut.”
The young attorney had yet to pass the bar exam, but he got a front-row seat to watch Garland and Bobby Lee Cook, perhaps the most accomplished defense lawyer in Georgia history, in action. Even so, Thevis would be convicted of plotting to monopolize the U.S. pornography business through racketeering activities, including four murders and two arsons.
Sadow has said he learned from the best: Garland, who exudes charm and ingenuity, and the charismatic Cook, whose withering cross-examinations won many acquittals.
Seven years later, Sadow left Garland’s firm after it declined to make him a named partner. In the ensuing decades, Cook, who died in 2021, asked Sadow to join him in dozens of cases, defending clients together at trial an estimated 40 times.
A suicide victim, shot twice?
One of their more notable occurred in 1989 when defending Alice Herring, a chicken farmer accused of murdering her one-time boyfriend, Bobby Chappelear. Herring claimed he committed suicide.
Credit: Special
Credit: Special
When reviewing the state firearms expert’s notes, Sadow read that the barrel of the handgun had body tissue inside of it. He alerted Cook to that fact and, during cross-examination, Cook got the expert to acknowledge he had been wrong to conclude the weapon had been fired from too far away for Chappelear to have pulled the trigger himself.
The concession likely helped jurors embrace the idea that Chappelear committed suicide, although the fact remained that he was killed by two gunshots, not one. They acquitted Herring.
In 2000, Sadow gained national prominence in the sensational Buckhead murder trial that was covered gavel to gavel by Court TV. Sadow’s client, Joseph Sweeting, was charged along with NFL star Ray Lewis and Reginald Oakley in the murder of two men on Jan. 31, 2000, following Super Bowl XXXIV in Atlanta.
In the middle of a trial that featured flip-flopping witnesses and prosecution miscues, Lewis reached a stunning plea deal that cleared him of the murder charges and saved his football career.
A day after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, Lewis was now the state’s star witness and ready to testify against his two friends, Sweeting and Oakley.
During the trial, Sadow had chatted Lewis up, often talking about the beautiful women who accompanied the football star to court. And he got to know Lewis well enough to decide it would be unwise to attack one of the most tenacious linebackers in NFL history during his cross-examination.
“So, we meet again,” a grinning Sadow began. “Are you the same Ray Lewis who was sitting as a defendant in this courtroom when (DA Paul) Howard told this jury you were absolutely guilty of murder?”
“Yes, that’s me,” Lewis replied.
Sadow went easy on Lewis, coaxing answers that did more to help than hurt the defense. A week later, when the jury returned not guilty verdicts, Sadow and Sweeting leapt up and embraced each other.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
On the day Sadow conducted his delicate cross-examination of Lewis, a notable criminal defendant was watching from inside the courtroom gallery: Steve Kaplan, the owner of the infamous Gold Club.
The strip club on Piedmont Avenue was known for catering to the rich and famous, including numerous professional athletes. It was also the focus of a criminal investigation, resulting in an indictment against Kaplan and his employees charging them with prostitution, bribing Atlanta police and having ties to organized crime.
At the time, Kaplan’s lead lawyer was the highly regarded New York attorney Benjamin Brafman. But after watching Sadow’s performance in the Lewis trial, Kaplan jettisoned Brafman and tapped Sadow to represent him. It marked Sadow’s first $1 million fee.
By the time the case went to trial, with Kaplan’s substantial financial backing, Sadow had so thoroughly investigated the government’s key witnesses that prosecutors were reeling. At one point, one of the jurors wrote an anonymous letter to lead prosecutor Art Leach, complaining that the government’s case was getting pounded in court. (The juror was soon identified and excused.)
In the 14th week of the salacious trial, Kaplan struck a deal. He would plead guilty and get prison time – 16 months – on the condition his four employees could enter pleas to lesser charges and not have to serve a day behind bars.
Sadow later said he initially counseled against the deal because he believed the jury would have ultimately found Kaplan not guilty. (In fact, six of the jurors showed up at Kaplan’s sentencing in support of the former club owner.)
Kaplan entered his guilty plea on Aug. 2, 2001. Later that night, Sadow sat at a table sipping Dom Pérignon inside the Gold Club, which would soon be turned over to the feds.
Credit: AJC staff
Credit: AJC staff
“We didn’t wage this war to compromise,” Sadow said. “We waged it to win. But common sense won out.”
In 2010, Sadow was again in the national spotlight. In Los Angeles, he defended lawyer Howard K. Stern, the boyfriend of Anna Nicole Smith, the reality TV star and Playboy model who had died of a drug overdose.
Stern was charged with prescribing, administering and dispensing controlled substances to Smith. But after a nine-week trial, a jury acquitted Stern of seven charges and convicted him of single count that would later be dismissed.
Inside a courtroom, Sadow knows his audience, talking one way to a jury and another way to a judge, said Stern, who is now a public defender. He also found it surprising that Sadow, as is his practice, did not write down questions for his cross-examinations or notes for his arguments.
“It’s because he’s always entirely prepared and his memory is amazing,” Stern said. “Whatever anybody might think of Trump, he picked the right lawyer in Georgia. Steve is going to give him as good a chance as any lawyer could.”
‘RESPECT YOU BACK’
In 2008, Sadow was a member of a team of high-profile lawyers who represented rap star T.I., charged with illegal firearms possession.
Credit: Michael Blackshire
Credit: Michael Blackshire
T.I. faced a minimum of four years and nine months in prison but had a plea offer of three years behind bars on the table. Sadow told the rapper to hold out for a sentence of a year and a day, the extra day allowing for an early release. That’s because Sadow had found a hole in the government’s case – a handgun found in the console of T.I.’s car was not registered to the rap star, but instead to his bodyguard who had turned snitch for the government.
T.I. wound up getting the year-and-a day sentence and began his prison stint after performing 1,000 hours of community service telling kids about the pitfalls of drugs and gangs.
Sadow recounted this in 2022 on T.I.’s “expeditiously” podcast.
“I must say you’ve never led me astray and you’ve never told me something that you weren’t for sure certain about,” T.I. told his former lawyer. “You know what I mean? And that’s hard to find in legal representation.”
Sadow responded, “It’s the way to do it if you want somebody to respect you back.”
Staff writers Tamar Hallerman and Charles Minshew contributed to this article.
