Paul Batista

Paul Batista (born December 9, 1948, Milford, Massachusetts), a novelist and television personality, is also one of the most widely 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 (Wolters Kluwer 2008). As a trial attorney, he specializes in federal criminal litigation. He currently serves as a guest commentator on the CBS News Network. In addition to his legal career, he is an actor who has appeared in the HBO movie "You Don't Know Jack," which starred Al Pacino as Dr. Jack Kevorkian

Batista's first novel "Death's Witness" (Sourcebooks Landmark 2006) 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 has been translated into Turkish and in 2018 will be published by the major Turkish publishing house Agapi Yaymlaria.

Batista's new novel, "The Warriors," will appear in 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.

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.

Paul Batista lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.