Paul Batista
Paul Batista (born December 9, 1948, in Milford, Massachusetts) is a television personality, American novelist and trial lawyer. He is the author of the leading treatise on the federal racketeering statute, "Civil RICO Practice Manual" published by the international publishing firm Wolters-Kluwer. As a trial attorney, he specializes in federal criminal litigation. He serves as a guest commentator on the CBS News Network, including, most recently, the trials of El Chapo, Harvey Weinstein, and Derek Chauvin, the former Minnesota police officer convicted of the murder of George Floyd. In addition to his legal career, he is an  actor who has appeared in the HBO movie "You Don't Know Jack", which stars Al Pacino as Dr. Jack Kevorkian Batista's first novel "Death's Witness" (Sourcebooks Landmark 2006) was awarded a silver medal by the Independent Book Publishers Association in 2007. "Death's Witness" was reissued in 2012 by Astor + Blue Editions and in 2016 by Oceanview Publishing. It also appeared in June 2016 on "USA Today"'s Best Seller List for books in all formats. It is a legal thriller described by "Publishers Weekly" as "guilty of delivering not only sharp courtroom drama but steamy  romantic escapism as well." His second novel, "Extraordinary Rendition", was released in May 2013 by Astor + Blue Editions and was reissued in April 2016 by Oceanview. "Extraordinary Rendition", also an Amazon Best Seller, revolves around the trial of a suspected terrorist brought to the United States for trial. Batista's third novel, "The Borzoi Killings", which involves the trial of a Mexican immigrant accused of the murder of an East Hampton hedge fund billionaire, was published in 2014, also by Astor + Blue Editions, and reissued in March 2016 by Oceanview. All three novels appear as audiobooks produced by  Audible.com. His novel "Manhattan Lockdown", a thriller about a sustained ISIS attack on Manhattan published by Oceanview, was released in June 2016. It, too, was a "USA Today" best-seller. It has been translated into Turkish and in 2018 was published by the major Turkish publishing house Agapi Yaymlaria. Batista's novel, "The Warriors", appeared in December 2018. It deals with one of the nation's greatest criminal defense lawyers, Raquel Rematti, and her defense in a criminal trial of a United States Senator, who is also the widow of an assassinated President and who is herself planning a run  for the presidency, on federal charges of fund-raising crimes. His most recent novel, "Accusation," revolves around a world-famous actor accused of sexual harassment by aspiring actresses and the actor's intense resistance to those accusations, is forthcoming from Oceanview. Since 1991, Batista has regularly appeared as a guest commentator on legal subjects on Court TV, CNN, HLN, CBS, ABC, and WNBC. He has written articles for "The New York Times", "The Wall Street Journal", and "The National Law Journal". His poetry has been published in literary magazines such as the "Atlanta Review", "Poetry International", and "Parnassus". He serves  as special counsel to The Aleph Institute, a charity that provides legal assistance to Israelis faced with criminal legal issues in the United States. Together with Alan Dershowitz and former United States Attorney General Michael Mukasey, he played a key role in President Donald J. Trump's commutation in December 2017 of the 27 year federal sentence imposed on Sholom Rubashkin, a prominent Jewish philanthropist. Batista, who is the son of Portuguese immigrants, was raised in the Portuguese-American community of southeastern Massachusetts. He is a 1970 graduate of Bowdoin College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and  a 1974 graduate of Cornell Law School. He served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. Batista's son, Aaron Paul Batista, is a tenured professor in Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. He holds a doctorate from Caltech. Batista's daughter Sara Batista is the United States Director of the Women's International Zionist Organization, a major Jewish-Israeli charitable group founded, in part, by Hannah Arendt. Batista is married to Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D. the former Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York, and now a syndicated weekly columnist for the New York Post . Dr. McCaughey is also a frequent guest commentator on the Newsmax Network, the Fox News Network, the BBC and other media outlets. Paul Batista lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.