Paul Batista, a novelist and television personality, is also one of the best known trial lawyers in the United States. He is the author of the leading treatise on the federal racketeering statute, Civil RICO Practice Manual, first published in 1987 by John Wiley & Sons, and now in its third edition. As a trial attorney, he specializes in federal criminal litigation. He currently serves as a guest commentator on the CBS News Network, including, most recently, the United States of America v. Joaquín Guzmán Loera|celebrated trials of El Chapo and Harvey Weinstein. 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 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. In May 2016, Death's Witness was selected by Amazon for a tenth anniversary promotion and in the same month was one of the books placed on Amazon's Overall Best Seller List; 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 new 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 Since 1991, Batista has regularly appeared as a guest commentator on legal subjects on Court TV, CNN, HLN, CBS 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 GeneralMichael 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 Dr. Betsy McCaughey, 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 Fox News Network, the BBC and other media outlets. Paul Batista lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.
