Mandatory minimums demand a federal-grade defense.
Trafficking and conspiracy counts carry guideline sentences with little judicial discretion. The weight, the role, and the search are where the case actually moves.
Netflix told the story. The defense was ours.
When Shonda Rhimes built Inventing Anna, the defense at its center was Todd Spodek’s - argued for the so-called fake heiress in a Manhattan courtroom long before Arian Moayed of Succession played him on screen. What 320 million hours of viewers watched is the method every client of this firm gets, in every federal district.
The record, dated and sourced.
How your case unfolds.
THE FULL PROCESS →Risk-free, in person or by phone. Ask anything, for as long as it takes. Strategy starts the same day.
Wire evidence, controlled buys, a detention motion already drafted - we engage before the drug indictment lands, and fight for release the week it does.
Suppress the stop, audit the lab, litigate the weight and the safety valve - and if trial is the advantage, the informant meets a real cross-examination.
Federal drug cases are charged by weight and theory - a conspiracy count can attribute the whole operation’s drugs to you. The defense fights on three fronts: the search that produced the evidence, the attribution that inflates the weight, and the role assessment that drives the guideline. Each one moves the sentence more than any plea for mercy ever will.
Built from the top of the wire down.
Federal drug cases start with a wire on someone else’s phone. Months of interceptions, controlled buys, and pole cameras come first; your arrest is the last step, not the first. The discovery is a mountain - and inside it are the minimization violations, stale probable cause, and attribution leaps that unmake the case.
Weight sets the floor. We move the floor.
Quantity drives §2D1.1 and the statutory minimums - five years at 100 grams of heroin, ten at a kilo, doubled by an §851 prior. But relevant conduct is litigable, safety valve unlocks sentences below the minimum, and role reductions move levels. The lab math gets audited too; it is wrong more often than juries assume.
The stop, the search, the snitch.
These cases die at the suppression hearing: a pretextual stop, a dog that alerted on cue, a warrant built on a recycled informant. Constructive possession fails when proximity is all they have. And cooperators trading decades for testimony make cross-examination the best evidence in the room.
The mandatory-minimum map.
§841(b) sets the floors: five years at 100 grams of heroin, 500 of cocaine, or 40 of fentanyl; ten years at ten times each; doubled by an §851 prior; a twenty-year floor if death results from the drugs. The First Step Act widened safety valve - a meaningful share of drug defendants now qualify to be sentenced below the minimum. Fentanyl analogues, meth purity, and converted drug weight under §2D1.1 are where lab work and lawyering intersect - and where ranges collapse.
The first 48 hours after a drug arrest.
Say nothing about quantities, sources, or phones - agents write proffers from hallway remarks. Detention is the first battle: employment records, sureties, and a written release plan win it, and cases are defended better from outside. Do not consent to phone searches; the warrant fight over your device may be the suppression motion that ends the case.
Know who is on the other side.
The first 72 hours decide the next 72 weeks.
No interviews, no consents, no explaining, no deleting. The words said in hour zero are the exhibits at trial. Write down what was asked and by whom - then stop.
Privilege attaches, facts get mapped while memory is fresh, documents get preserved the right way, and nobody in your orbit talks to agents unrepresented again.
We contact the government as your counsel: target, subject, or witness gets confirmed, deadlines get calendared, and the defense - not the investigation - sets the tempo.
Todd A. Spodek is a second-generation trial lawyer whose defense of Anna Delvey became Netflix's Inventing Anna. He appears on Fox News and CNN as a legal analyst, authored "My Advice to Diddy" in The Spectator, and is quoted by the Associated Press when the biggest federal cases break. The record behind the profile: a complete acquittal in a $26M money-laundering trial, RICO charges carrying a 10-year minimum dismissed, and 6 months on a $12M Ponzi case.
Why this firm.
Five decades of federal courtrooms. Whatever the government has charged, this firm has defended it before.
No allegiance to U.S. Attorneys, agents, or agencies. The client is the only constituency.
Every district in the country, one client portal - documents, invoices, counsel, in real time.
We decline more federal matters than we accept - and every accepted case gets the whole bench.
See who fights for you before you ever call.
Who we are, how we work, and why clients nationwide trust us with their future - in under a minute.
On the record, on the wire.
Get ahead of the case.
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