Stuart V. Goldberg

Earning his way to pay for law school, Stuart V. Goldberg drove a cab at night and taught school during the day.

He taught elementary school on the South Side of Chicago. The Board of Education called the class Educable Mentally Handicapped. He called them ignored. He was drawn to those have-nots. Every day of their life was a tug of war. Those children and their families taught him too. He saw what it was like to never have a chance. He knew what he was going to do – he was going to champion their rights.

As a cabbie rolling over the nighttime streets of Chicago, he studied mankind from eight inches of rear view mirror. Every face had to be watched – beautiful, ruined, venal, and innocent. He listened to the lonely voices of the people going home to no one. At night, everyone was fighting their own hard battle. Cab drivers see a different view of the street and its night people. They see the struggle of order – the victims and the victors. They see man’s inhumanity to man. The tussle of good and evil fascinated him.

The Talmudic scholar, Maimonides, wrote that a person “should see the entire world as half good and evil, so that with a single good deed, he will tip the scales for himself, and for the entire word, to the side of merit.”

Attorney Stuart V. Goldberg believes that there is a secret garden in the heart of every accused criminal – a garden, which no matter how dark, may be nourished. To appreciate each person no matter what or where he or she is in life, and to give that person the best chance possible – and to convince the court that the sins should be erased but not the sinners.

The author shares his passion for criminal law with his writing novels and screenplays. "The Snake Charmer" is set against the backdrop of Operation Greylord, an FBI undercover probe into the Chicago judiciary. Goldberg infuses fiction with fact drawn on his first-hand experiences during the operation as it unfolded at "26th and Cal."