Tamara Greene case lawyer shuns critics, says he’s now close to proving claims of coverup in Detroit
DETROIT, MI — Norman A. Yatooma thought the whole story was just too implausible when he first heard the claims the family of Tamara Greene made against the city of Detroit and former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
How, he wondered, was it possible that the largest city in Michigan, and its most prominent and powerful leaders, would derail the murder investigation of a young woman? The young mother and exotic dancer seemed an unlikely target of any murder plot, let alone a victim of the city’s political elite, he thought.
Not only did the story sound impossible, but the lawyer who originally took the case was unable to get anywhere with representing Greene’s son, Jonathan Bond. And she’s a good lawyer, Yatooma added.
But she was overpowered by what he calls “some of the best law firms in town.”
So, Bond’s father, Ernest Flagg, asked Yatooma if he would take over in the suit against Detroit, Kilpatrick and former Chief of Police Ella Bully Cummings.
“It sounded to me like the makings of a bad movie script, and what was making the script bad was just plain bad writing,” Yatooma said. “The script was so weak, no one would believe it.”
But Yatooma, whose own father was murdered, couldn’t look Bond in the eye and tell him no. In Bond, who was 10 years old when his mother was killed, Yatooma said he could see his own younger brothers who were about the same age when their father was killed.
Yatooma acknowledges that he was an unlikely pick to represent Bond in the family’s quest to prove that the city of Detroit intentionally ruined the investigation.
But on a cold day in mid-December, Yatooma leaned forward, put his elbows on the table in the office at his Birmingham-based Norman Yatooma & Associates PC, and said, “I’m closer than ever.
He ran down a mental list of the people who he’s deposed, and how each have a piece of the story that he now believes to be true: the city and the mayor did indeed thwart the investigation of Greene’s murder.
“There have just been too many witnesses intimidated, too many documents destroyed, for the murder investigation to have been successful,” Yatooma said. “The officers themselves made it clear that it’s not because of any incompetence or apathy that this investigation went bad. It’s because they were ordered to stop.”
In the next few weeks, Yatooma will depose another 20 people, and he said he believes that very soon he’s going to have all the evidence he needs to prove the coverup.
Speculation abounds as to why the investigation was closed less than a year after Greene’s murder in 2003, even though the city’s standard is to leave open murder investigations for a minimum of two years.
But Yatooma said none of that matters.
“The media has frankly made this case about something other than what it is. So many think it’s about proving who killed Tamara Greene, who only rarely in the media is referred to anyone other than a stripper, or who is referred to by her stage name, ‘Strawberry,'” Yatooma said.
But even if he could do what the police has not been able to do — find and arrest the person who fatally shot Greene as she sat in her car — he’s not a criminal prosecutor. He couldn’t do anything about it.
“It’s not about putting Kwame Kilpatrick in jail for having had a raucous party [where it is said that Greene had been hired to dance],” Yatooma said. “The party itself is not a crime. It is just one of the many plausible reasons her murder investigation could have been covered up.”
Along the way, some of his peers have asked Yatooma if he was, frankly, crazy for taking on such an impossible case. But Yatooma shrugs in a way that would convince anyone that he’s not lying when he says, “It doesn’t matter if anyone thinks it’s nuts. If it’s right, it’s right.”
No one thinks that now, he says.
“People now have come to expect that the mayor could cover up a murder investigation, and that he could have lied,” Yatooma said.
He paused and added, “And that he possibly is capable of anything.”
The making of a ‘mercenary’
Norman A. Yatooma has a penchant for impossible cases. He pursues them with the kind of ferociously competitive spirit that leads him to sometimes don the Rolex watch that used to belong to once-prominent Detroit businessman LeVan Hawkins.
Hawkins was a client who successfully sued Burger King Corp. for tens of millions of dollars when the company failed to follow through on opening more than 200 restaurants in urban areas.
But Yatooma said Hawkins fired him to get out of paying his fees, and after a four-year battle to collect, Yatooma raided Hawkins’ home and office. And just days after Hawkins was found guilty of perjury in a federal corruption scheme, Yatooma auctioned off Hawkins’ belongings to settle the debt.
Except for that watch, a jukebox and a sword, on which Yatooma engraved his motto: “A head for an eye, an arm for a tooth”
“‘An eye for an eye’ just seems a little too even-handed to me,” he said.
One of Hawkins’ attorneys dubbed Yatooma a “rabid pit bull,” a title Yatooma accepted as an honor. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox has called him a “mercenary,” Yatooma added, with the same sense of pride.
The latest additions to the collection of souvenirs are a couple of paintings by “painter of light” artist Thomas Kinkade.
On Dec. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court denied leave to appeal in a case that Yatooma’s clients, art gallery owners Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello, said they were duped into investing in Kinkade’s franchise. They said he earned their trust by exploiting their religious faith.
According to the dealers, they were forced to sell Kinkade’s works at minimum prices while Kinkade himself undercut them. When Kinkade bought the publicly traded company in 2004, at a loss to investors, some franchisees lost everything, Yatooma said.
Yatooma’s clients were awarded $860,000, plus more than $1 million in attorney fees, in an arbitration settlement; in a bizarre twist, a San Francisco federal judge had originally overturned the arbitrators’ decision, but in July, a federal appeals court restored it.
