One afternoon last summer, Sarita Kedia joined a friend from law school for lunch at a trendy restaurant in Southampton. As the two caught up on friends and careers, a client called Kedia on her cell phone.

"Oh, hi John," Kedia said, immediately recognizing the voice. "How are you?"

Her friend, Cameron Kenny, listened as Kedia joked about "the government's" case and reassured her client. Normal lawyer stuff in most situations, but not here: the "John" on the phone was John A. Gotti, the reputed "acting boss" of the infamous Gambino crime family, allegedly run by his imprisoned father, John J. Gotti

After Kedia put down her cell phone, Kenney leaned over and asked, incredulously, "Jesus, Sarita, What are you doing?" Kenney knew her mild-mannered friend from Louisiana represented alleged mobsters, but suddenly the particulars of that work – like a phone call from John Gotti over lunch – were real to her. She was, she admits, a bit startled. But Kedia simply tossed back her long brown hair, let out a laugh from her 5-foot-1-inch frame, and returned to her meal.

That was only one of the many calls the 28-year-old Kedia took from the "Junior Gotti" in the last year. She is part of the four-person team representing Gotti, led by her boss, the celebrated criminal defense attorney Gerald Shargel.

On April 5, just hours before his trial was to have started, Gotti pleaded guilty to being part of a criminal racket that involved bribery, extortion and the threat of violence. By pleading guilty, Gotti faces as many as seven years in jail, and will pay a $1 million fine. Kedia said she was pleased with the deal.

"I think it's absolutely the right decision. He did this for one reason and for one reason only: to put all this behind him. To get along with his life," Kedia told India in New York.

Just days before pleading, which he had refused to do for months beforehand, Gotti decided to return to jail rather than continue to follow a strict bail agreement that confined his movement and required him to pay $5,000 a week for a private security firm to patrol his Long Island home. Gotti, according to reports, no longer wanted to have to ask family members to pay for the firm.

Kedia and her colleagues spent more than a year preparing for the trial. During that time, Kedia, the team's youngest member, was responsible for writing the motions, making phone calls to the prosecution and keeping Gotti up to date. Court arguments and press calls were generally left to Shargel and the other lead lawyer on the case, Bruce Cutler, who, like Shargel, also defended the elder Gotti before he was sentenced to life in prison.

But partly because of scheduling conflicts for Shargel, Kedia had an unusually large amount of public exposure on the case.

In the early part of the year, while Shargel was busy defending an Indian gas station owner, Gurmeet Singh Dhinsa, accused of operating his own mafia-style business, Kedia filled in for him, making regular presentations in court and briefing reporters.

She made regular appearances in the New York Times, Daily News and New York Post, along with a few television interviews. (She doesn't claim to be camera shy. "I love it. I'll admit that," she said.)

Although Shargel returned to the Gotti case full-time after the Dhinsa trial ended in March, Kedia continued to play a major role, largely because her talent was too great not to put her to use, her colleagues said.

"She is just terrifically competent," said Shargel.

At first glance, Kedia seems out of place in the world of mob lawyers and wiseguys; Kedia is young, diminutive and gets animated about skydiving and hiking, not "The Godfather." Her courtroom presentations are said to be methodical, lacking, at least to date, the theatrics many of her colleagues spend years cultivating.

"She's a tiny little woman dealing with some sophisticated and infamous clients," says Shargel's other associate. "The initial feeling is that I don't want her dealing with this. But she has smarts and she has moxie."

Colleagues credit her with winning the trust of Gotti, although it was not easy at first. "For the first few months, I had a client who I would say was very reluctant to speak to me," Kedia said in a recent Interview with India in New York in her Times Square office, filled with black binders of government wiretap applications and folders marked in black letters "Gotti."

For example, when Gotti started calling the office following his arrest last January, if Shargel wasn't there, he would call back rather then speak to her, recalls Kedia. "At the time, I didn't know if it was shyness or that he didn't like me, or he didn't like women or what it was," Kedia says. "Since then I have learned that he was just shy. Now, he loves me, and I don't think he would go trial without me, which makes me feel very good."

In an interview with the New York Times, which ran a profile of Kedia this week, Gotti was eager to praise his young lawyer. "If I'm ever in a pinch, she's the one I want next to me," he was quoted as saying. "She's super-talented, she's sincere and she's an angel."

Kedia described Gotti as a "very, very nice guy" and she says she doesn't feel threatened by him. "I think that friends and colleagues who are not in this field do question why we are involved with the representation of John Gotti," she says. "They think it is scary, sitting in the same room with John Gotti. But I feel safer in a room with John Gotti than I do on the subway."

Friends say Gotti is not the only client Kedia has won over; her Upper West Side apartment is regularly filled with fruit baskets, champagne bottles and flowers from clients. "Those big Italians, they just love her to death," says Melanie McCurdy, her law school friend. "They are very appreciative."

It's not only tough male clients Kedia must win over – her male colleagues are, at times, also resistant to her. "I am a young woman and most of the lawyers in the field are men," she said. "There weren't as many female attorneys around when I started."

Shargel agrees that women face a harder time breaking into trial law. "Unfortunately, trial law is one of the last bastions of sexism. Women are often seen in a secondary role," he said.

Born in Bombay, Kedia grew up in Ruston, Louisiana – a college town of 25,000 – far away from the gritty streets of south Brooklyn and Queens that many of her clients call home. "I don't know that I heard much about the mob as a kid in Ruston," she said.

Her parents wanted her to go into medicine, as her two sisters have, but she was not convinced. "We tried to see if she would go into medicine, but she said, 'No, I am not interested in that' says her father, P. Ray Kedia. Law was not totally alien to the family: P. Ray Kedia practiced in the Bombay High Court in the 1960's before moving his family to Louisiana in 1971. He now teaches criminal justice at Grambling State University near Ruston.

He and Kedia's mother, Sushila, get a steady stream of newspaper clips from their daughter when she is quoted about the Gotti case. They have overcome their initial reluctance about her career choice, he said. "I was kind of concerned when she went to New York that – being a younger woman, being of Indian parents – she would have a hard time. But after a while, she put our worries to ease."

Kedia graduated from Tulane Law School in New Orleans in 1994 and headed straight to New York to practice criminal law. A major corporate firm offered her a well-paying job in New York, but she turned it down and joined another successful defense attorney, Mel Sachs. Her job with Sachs paid her $50,000 less than what the corporate job did, a cut she admits was hard to take. "When I started in the field, I was very poor; I regretted my decision," she said. "But now I don't."

Sachs assigned her – on her first day – to help him defend a young man, David Degondia, accused of killing a police officer during a drug bust in Manhattan. Degondia was convicted and sentenced to life in prison – although he is still appealing.

Kedia says the jury's decision shocked her. "It felt like having a dagger stabbed in your heart," she said, putting her fist to her chest. "It was very sad and shocking to see that this young man would spend all of the rest of his life in jail."

Despite the defeat, the press attention to the case, the courtroom drama and the intense legal maneuvering all excited Kedia. She worked for Sachs for another year, but soon began angling for a job with Shargel, considered by many to be one of the country's lead criminal-defense attorneys, according to a 1994 profile of him by the New Yorker.

Since starting in criminal law, she has worked on more than 100 cases, most of them not mob-related. Shargel usually handles "white collar" crime, like union officials charged with taking kickbacks or lawyers offering bribes.

She had defended a handful of other reputed mobsters aside from Gotti. ("They were people lower down on the indictment," she says wryly.)

Kedia says she does not feel any moral dilemma about defending clients accused of racketeering, stealing money from charity, gambling, and, in some cases, murder. "No one is guilty until proven guilty and people deserve a defense," she says curtly. "My job is to defend people."

Her biggest mob case before now involved a reputed Genovese family soldier, Thomas Cestaro, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to extorting money from the annual San Gennaro festival in Little Italy, according to press reports. In a deal that Kedia said she was pleased with, Cestaro received 41 to 51 months in jail and had to forfeit about $800,000 to the government.

Cestaro's case was mentioned in passing by New York's papers, but Kedia's name didn't start appearing in the papers until she joined the Gotti case. The New York press has an insatiable appetite for stories about Gotti.

The press attention is flattering – and good for business – but there are professional risks to representing mobsters. The government watches your actions very closely; two others in the Gotti team have been investigated by federal authorities for allegedly serving as "house counsel" to the Gambino crime family.

In 1990, both Shargel and Cutler were disqualified from representing the senior Gotti after they were caught on wiretaps talking with their clients at a social club in Little Italy. Prosecutors alleged the two had obstructed justice and encouraged perjury in the discussions, according to reports. They were later investigated by a federal grand jury investigation, but no charges were brought.

Kedia dismisses questions about professional risk. "This isn't a case where our entire practice is organized crime, when you have to be concerned about being labeled a 'mob lawyer,'" she said.

I know Gerry was probably labeled a mob lawyer a few years back, but now everyone has gotten past that. It's not a concern for me. At my stage, being labeled any kind of lawyer, just having anybody know my name is definitely the advantage. There is no disadvantage."

Colleagues scoff at the idea of Kedia becoming the target of an investigation, although they acknowledge the risk.

Sachs, her first boss, said that provided she always keeps her relationship with her clients "professional" – not attend their wedding, in other words – she will not face any difficulty.

One high-profile case is often enough to turn a good defense lawyer into a mini-celebrity – witness the ascension of Johnnie Cochran to the national stage following the O.J. Simpson trial. Kedia, speaking before Gotti accepted his plea bargain, acknowledged that she was in an enviable position. "I'm sure that any defense attorney would like to be involved in this case," she said.

But after Gotti pleaded guilty, Kedia said she won't miss the case, despite all the attention it has brought her. "I'm always happy to get a good result for a client," she said.

© India in New York 1999. All rights reserved.