A Spellbinding Tale of Corruption In Law Enforcement

Alexander Silvert was raised in New York City and Vermont. After graduating from

UCLA and driving a cab in New York, and a year of post-graduate political science

courses at New York University, he switched to Boston College Law School where he obtained his JD in

1984.  He worked as a state and federal public defender in Philadelphia before moving to Honolulu in

1989 with his wife and three-week old son to work at the Hawai‘i Federal Public Defenders Office.

He served as the First Assistant FPD from 1992 to his retirement in October of 2020. During his

tenure he handled numerous high publicity cases, including representing two defendants in potential

federal death penalty cases. In 2000, he was one of several AFPDs named “Federal Defender of the

Year” by the National Association of Federal Defenders.

In July of 2013, the author began his representation of Gerard Puana, who was charged

with destruction of a mailbox owned by Honolulu Chief of Police Louis Kealoha and his wife,

Katherine Kealoha, third-ranked City of Honolulu Prosecutor. The case continued for over seven years,

with the author starting as defender and ending as the key instigator of the federal prosecution of the

Kealohas in what has become known as the greatest public corruption case in the history of Hawaii.

In October of 2020 Silvert retired as a Federal Public Defender after 33 years. Silvert has written

a book about the Puana/Kealoha case entitled “The Mailbox Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Greatest

Corruption Case in Hawaii History.” Silvert currently is a lecturer at the University of Hawaii Richardson

School of Law and runs his own private federal criminal law consulting firm in Hawaii.