Former defense attorney pens tell-all book
Zyburski sentenced to one year in prison, disbarred for drug charge
The seed for Paul Zyburski becoming a criminal defense lawyer came in 1980 at age 19 after he says he was nearly beaten to death by Warren cops.
Zyburski says the incident provided him the motivation and money — a $25,000 settlement of his would-be lawsuit — to graduate from a prestigious law school and begin a wild ride in Macomb County’s criminal justice scene and a financially-rewarding career.
Over his career — beginning in 1986 — Zyburski cemented himself as a “courtroom fixer” among the local criminal element and participant in a court system he says was rampant with corruption. He admits to a long history of a partying lifestyle, including abuse of drugs and alcohol that led to a stint in rehab and contributed to a one-year suspension of his law license along with a federal criminal conviction resulting in disbarment and prison.
The Roseville native was indicted by U.S. attorneys on drug charges in 2018 while his was running for judge in the town he grew up in. He pleaded guilty to a 20-year drug charge and served over six months in a tough federal prison and several months in a halfway house before being released and serving an astounding 500 hours of community service.
Zyburski, 60, of Marysville, recounts his rollercoaster career in an entertaining 217-page, self-published paperback called, “From Pepperdine to
Prison. The Life of a Courtroom Fixer,” which was released this fall with a 500-count printing.
His tale chronicles his interaction with what he calls the “Motor City mafia,” judges, other lawyers and fellow prisoners that can be of particular interest to readers familiar with the characters, some of whom are named while others are not or are given fictitious names.
“I can back everything up in there,” Zyburski said in an interview. “I became an expert in getting rid of cases.”
Still, the book carries legal qualifiers. Among other things, the notes say, “No warranty is made with respect with (sic) the accuracy and completeness of the information contained therein ….”
His path began after he was charged with assaulting a police officer as part
of the incident in which he was beaten after mouthing off to cops. Appearing in front of the late judge George Montgomery in Warren district court, Montgomery asked Zyburski what he wanted to do with his life.
“Without giving it much thought, I said, ‘I think I want to be a lawyer,’” Zyburski says in the book. “The whole courtroom started laughing. At that point I realized that if I can make a whole courtroom laugh when I’m 19 years old without a law degree, I can only imagine what I could do with a degree.”
Montgomery promised he would give him case assignments if he returned as a lawyer. The judge dismissed the charge against him and admonished the officers.
Several years later Zyburski was back. To get there, Zyburski attended Michigan
State University, during which he showed an interest in politics and law, and got near-perfect grades, he says.
“Law school was the next logical choice,” he says.
An MSU visiting professor from University of California, Berkley recognized Zyburski’s academic success and recommended he attend Pepperdine University in California, aka the “West Coast Harvard,” Zyburski says. He obtained a partial scholarship and completed law school. He served an internship at 20th Century Fox in nearby Los Angeles, where he had an interaction with the actor Michael Douglas.
He failed the Bar exam in Michigan twice because of excessive partying until finally passing the third time.
Early in his career, one local judge, the now-deceased William Cannon of Clinton Township, took an interest in Zyburski, and they became close friends, he says. Zyburski played hockey with one of Cannon’s sons.
Cannon granted him many dismissals of criminal cases and was able to influence cases under the jurisdiction of other judges, he says. Zyburski stops short of admitting engaging in bribery.
“He treated me good and I wanted to treat him good,” he said in an interview.
Zyburski says he quickly gained credibility in the legal field from Cannon and the late lawyer T. John Lesinski, a former lieutenant governor of Michigan and one-time chief judge of the state Court of Appeals. Zyburski was hired because he knew attorney, Martin Krall, who worked with Lesinski. Krall had represented Zyburski in the cop beating incident.
Zyburski, aka “Pauli,” also was boosted by a strong-and-long friendship with Francesco Bommarito, aka “Frankie da Bomb,” an “eastside legend” among outlaws who “loved to introduce me as the consigliore,” he says in the book.
Zyburski gradually built a reputation as someone who can “fix any case at any time under any circumstance,” which he says in the book is “obviously an exaggeration” but gave him stature among some other judges who treated him favorably.
“The judge sends a case to their so called friend,” he says in the book. “Their friends give a kickback to the judge. There’s the usual lunches, dinners or sporting events, and vacations, that’s a big one. And yes, there are kickbacks in the form of cash.”
The judges “want access to the perks that I’m throwing around like Rip Taylor (the late actor) threw confetti,” or, “They just assumed I knew about their own involvement into their personal or professional wrongdoings,” he writes.
Cannon always told him, “Everybody in Macomb County can be bought,” Zyburski said in an interview.
Several times in the book he calls Macomb the most corrupt county in the United States and “a cesspool of greed and corruption.” It’s an apparent reference to the following 2019 statement by Matthew Schneider, then the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, “Our statistics show (Michigan leads) the nation in corruption cases, by far.”
Michigan had experienced about 18 corruption investigations for each of the last five years while most other states averaged one corruption case a year over the past five years, except for New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, which had had about four per year, according to Schneider.
The FBI wrote of “systemic corruption in multiple municipalities in southeast Michigan, primarily Macomb County,” in 2016 when Dean Reynolds was the first defendant to be indicted as part of a several-year, widespread federal corruption investigation centered in Macomb County that ended this year. It resulted in criminal convictions of more than two dozen people.
Those indicted include former county prosecutor Eric Smith, who pleaded guilty in federal court to federal obstruction of justice for trying to cover up using campaign funds for personal expenses and in June began serving a 21-month sentence. Smith also faces 10 felony charges including racketeering and embezzlement in state