Leon Wildes, a renowned Manhattan lawyer known for his years-long battle in the 1970s to prevent the deportation of John Lennon, has died at the age of 90. The immigration expert ultimately helped the Liverpool native obtain permanent residency in the United States.
Wildes died, as has only now been reported in the US specialist media, on Monday (January 8th) in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. His son – immigration lawyer and Englewood, New Jersey mayor Michael Wildes – said he was in poor health after a series of strokes.
“Dad felt that he was truly living the American dream for a child from Olyphant Pa., and he spent his life making the same experience possible for many others,” said his son Michael Wildes, who is also the firm’s managing partner Wildes & Weinberg, which his father helped found. “He was loved by his family, was extremely humble and was highly respected by our bar.”
The immigration lawyer’s death shines a spotlight on a lesser-known chapter of John Lennon’s New York era.
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, Wildes agreed to meet the Lennon/Ono couple at the Manhattan offices of Apple Records.
“Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto”
He later made a rather embarrassing “confession” about the bespectacled musician and his artist wife: “I had no idea who these people were,” he said in an interview. At first he misunderstood their names as “Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto”.
What Wildes then considered a routine formality developed into one of the most dramatic legal disputes in the pop music world of the time. Lennon and Ono had moved from England to New York City and were trying to locate Ono’s daughter from a previous marriage, Kyoko Chan Cox, who had been kidnapped by her ex-husband.
The pair also became involved in the new US left in this era. They opposed the Vietnam War and supported efforts to defeat President Richard Nixon for re-election. Since the minimum voting age had been lowered from 21 to 18, Lennon planned a tour of the United States in 1972 that would potentially attract millions of young people.
As government files later revealed, some Nixon supporters feared that Lennon would harm Nixon politically. In a memo sent in February 1972 to Senator Strom Thurmond, a Republican from South Carolina and a member of a Senate subcommittee on homeland security, aides recommended a “strategic countermeasure”: revoking Lennon’s visa. The government also tried to expel Tokyo-born Ono from the country. But she received a permanent residence permit in 1973.
Senator Thurmond forwarded the memo to Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, whose deputy, Richard Kleindienst, contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In March, immigration informed the British rock star that his visa would not be extended.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is said to have personally intervened
Officers cited a drugs bust in London in 1968 when Lennon pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis resin. Under US law at the time, non-residents faced deportation. The basis for this was a law or better: a regulation that relates to the unlawful possession of narcotics or marijuana.
Over the next two years, Lennon and Ono faced constant harassment from the US government. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is said to have even personally intervened at times. Her phone was tapped and her whereabouts were closely tracked. Lennon was later quoted as saying that the pressure contributed to the temporary breakdown of his marriage. The musician moved to Los Angeles in 1973 and began what he called a “very long weekend” of drinking and drugs, at the end of which the couple reconciled in 1975.
It was thanks to Leon Wildes’ hard fight that Lennon was finally allowed to stay in New York, where he was tragically shot in December 1980.