Alexander Silvert

Alexander Silvert was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina but raised in Vermont and New York City. After graduating from UCLA and driving a cab in New York City for several years, and after 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 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 in federal court with destruction of a mailbox owned by Honolulu Chief of Police Louis Kealoha and his wife, Katherine Kealoha, third-ranked City of Honolulu Prosecutor. Silvert developed evidence that his client was being framed by the Kealohas for a crime he did not commit. 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 and several members of a secretive police unit 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, runs his own private federal criminal law consulting firm in Hawaii, and frequently appears on local television news broadcasts commenting on pending criminal law and public corruption cases. .