Rafeedie: Case of a Maverick U.S. Judge

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie once described himself as the only carnival barker to ever make it to the federal bench.

He wasn’t joking. As a young man in Los Angeles just before and after World War II, Rafeedie made a living running carnival rides and traveling the carny circuit with a portable horse race game called Derby.

The rough-and-tumble carny world was, in many ways, an appropriate beginning for a judge who government and private attorneys describe as one of the toughest, gruffest and most street-smart in the federal courts.

In a decade as a U.S. district judge, Rafeedie has garnered a reputation as a no-nonsense jurist who despite a conservative background has a strong independent streak that has sometimes put him on a collision course with federal prosecutors.

His decision Monday to free Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was kidnaped from Mexico two years ago at the behest of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, was a stunning turning point in a case that has strained U.S.-Mexico relations.

But the decision was, in some ways, not surprising to those familiar with the straight-ahead Reagan-appointee who has presided over some of the biggest cases to come before the federal court in the last decade.

Rafeedie was born in Orange, N.J., in 1929, the son of Lebanese immigrants. At age 7, he and his family moved to Santa Monica, and he began working at the old Pacific Ocean Park carnival several years later.

After serving in the Army during the Korean War, Rafeedie became interested in becoming a lawyer. He got the idea from one of the carnival employees who was a law student at the time.

Rafeedie enrolled at Santa Monica City College and earned his law degree from USC in 1959.

For nearly a decade he worked as a private trial lawyer before being appointed a Municipal Court judge in Santa Monica by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1969.

He became a Superior Court judge in 1971 and served until 1982 when he was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan.

Rafeedie has presided over the Camarena murder-torture case since the first trial in 1988.

In 1990, Rafeedie surprised prosecutors by ruling that the U.S. government’s kidnaping of Alvarez Machain violated the extradition treaty with Mexico. The ruling was overturned by the U.S Supreme Court.

Rafeedie also presided over the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department money-skimming case in 1990, which resulted in the conviction of seven former narcotics officers involved in stealing cash seized from drug traffickers and money launderers.