Marvin Shoob

Marvin Herman Shoob (February 23, 1923 to June 12, 2017) was a judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. He was born at Walterboro, South Carolina, raised in Savannah, served in Europe with the Third Army, and graduated from the University of Georgia law school in 1948. In the early 1960s he and the state senator Jimmy Carter redrafted the rules of the Georgia Democratic Party. President Carter appointed him to the bench in 1979. He took senior status on September 30, 1991.¹

The BNL Case

The indictment of Christopher Drogoul, manager of the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, for lending some five billion dollars to Iraq without the knowledge of his superiors, came before Shoob in 1991. Drogoul pleaded guilty to 60 counts in June 1992. At the sentencing hearing that September he testified that the branch had been "a tool of the U.S. and Italian governments." On September 14 Representative Henry B. Gonzalez announced that the CIA had told his committee it had good evidence that the bank's officers in Rome knew of the lending, contrary to what its general counsel had told the prosecutors. On October 1, 1992, Shoob allowed Drogoul to withdraw the plea and removed himself from the case, recording his conclusion "that officials at BNL-Rome were aware of and approved Mr. Drogoul's activities." He called Drogoul and his Atlanta colleagues "pawns and bit-players in a far more wide-ranging conspiracy."²³

Drogoul's public defender, Sheila Tyler, told the court: "It is clear to me that my client was merely a small fish in a larger operation." Shoob said to Drogoul in open court: "I don't believe for a minute that you were able to do all of this on your own." "You're right," Drogoul answered. "I do not want to be in a position where I have to sentence Mr. Drogoul, where he takes the fall when there are other people involved who are equally culpable," the judge said. "A special prosecutor ought to get into this entire matter." During the hearings a federal marshal came to his chambers concerned for the prisoner's safety. Shoob asked who might threaten him. "Would you believe the CIA?" the marshal said. The judge said he would not. That night the Shoobs slept with their floodlights on. Their house had been vandalized in the early 1980s after he ordered the release of Cuban detainees from the Mariel boatlift, when Attorney General Edwin Meese told him "we think it would be a good idea to just put them all on C-5 cargo aircraft and drop them over Cuba with parachutes."⁴

Attorney General William Barr declined to seek an independent counsel and named a retired judge, Frederick Lacey, who reported after 54 days: "I find Judge Shoob's specific charges against the USAO to be inaccurate." A second Justice Department review, the Hogan report of August 1993, found that an officer of the bank in Rome might have known of the lending but that the evidence would not support a prosecution. Officials of the CIA said that the head of the department's fraud section, Lawrence Urgenson, had urged the agency to withhold information on Drogoul, which Urgenson denied. Drogoul pleaded guilty to three counts before another judge in September 1993.³⁵