By: Mark Fierro & Justin Velez

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”

That promise at its core is just 24 words. They are written on a piece of parchment that is approximately six one thousandths of an inch thick, but they carry tremendous power to protect Americans.

Those words stand between us and what amounts to police states in other countries. Russia doesn’t have a Fourth Amendment. Dictators and functionaries in dictatorships don’t like the idea of the little people having rights, having recourse if police just bust down doors at all hours of the night to find or create evidence.
But our Fourth Amendment is just a piece of paper, unless someone fights to put power and judicial review into it.

For more than 45 years Vincent Savarese (Vinnie to his friends) has been wielding the immense power of the Fourth Amendment the way surgeons use scalpels, some might say the way Shohei Ohtani uses a baseball bat. If you are going to pick a Fourth Amendment fight with Savarese, you might want to pack a lunch.

Ask around the Nevada bar about the Fourth Amendment, and one name keeps surfacing.

“I don’t know anybody that is even his equal in Nevada when it comes to the Fourth Amendment,” says Dominic Gentile, one of Nevada’s most respected defense attorneys and Savarese’s colleague at Clark Hill. “He’s got a feel for it. He’s a master.”

Gentile traces that mastery to the beginning. Out of law school, Savarese went to work for the storied Boston criminal defense firm Oteri & Weinberg, where he trained under a lawyer who had argued before the United States Supreme Court. “From the very inception, he had a great mentor, a great work ethic and a great feel for the Fourth Amendment,” Gentile says.

Tom Pitaro, the veteran Las Vegas defense attorney and himself a Vegas Legal Icon, met Savarese when he came west from the same corner of Massachusetts, alongside his best friend and future law partner, David Chesnoff. Pitaro’s assessment has not softened since.

“Probably no one is more knowledgeable about Fourth Amendment issues than Vinnie,” Pitaro says. “He was sort of the master of it. He had a handle on it like no one I’ve ever seen.”

That reputation was forged at a particular moment. As Pitaro recalls, the big cases of the era almost all came down to drugs (find the gun, find the drugs, trace them to the defendant), just as the Supreme Court was rewriting the rules of search and seizure and pushing those fights down into the state courts. “It was groundbreaking law in many areas,” Pitaro says. “And Vinnie was at the cutting edge of it.”

He still is. The Fourth Amendment is what separates a free country from a police state, Gentile notes, and that line keeps moving, redrawn with each new technology like a shoreline after a storm, most recently over electronics and surveillance tools like the Flock cameras reading license plates nationwide. “Our electronics are almost a storage facility for our lives,” Gentile says. “The Fourth Amendment protects that, and Vince has been at the cutting edge of every one.”

But the old cases best explain the reputation. Savarese calls one of his first breakthroughs the case of Lawrence Pinaro.

Pinaro, Savarese says, was a man being used to get at his brother. Undercover detectives posing as Colombian drug smugglers handed him cash to convert into larger bills, money laundering, making plain the cash came from drugs. Twice they gave him $20,000; twice he blew it at the tables. So they tightened the screws. They loaded the trunk of a car with six kilograms of cocaine, told him to move it, and when he balked, they let him know they knew which school his children attended.

“He was legitimately scared. This guy was no tough guy,” Savarese recalls. He took the car. The moment he pulled away, the trap sprang: they arrested him for six kilos of cocaine, enough to put him away for the rest of his life.

It looked, Savarese admits, his client was like dead meat. But the government had also moved to forfeit Pinaro’s cheap used car, and Savarese used that throwaway case as a crowbar. The forfeiture entitled him to depositions, and he pried at them until the whole story came loose: the threats made against his client’s family. He carried it into the criminal case, and U.S. District Judge Lloyd George dismissed everything on the rare ground of outrageous government conduct.
To Savarese, the victory is measured by the man who granted it. “He may have been the most conservative federal judge I’ve ever practiced in front of,” he says. “This is not some liberal guy handing out walking papers.”, he was nobody’s soft touch, and he threw the case out anyway.

The same instinct, that a search either honors the Constitution or it doesn’t, runs through United States v. Gorman, a forfeiture case the government brought not against a person but against a pile of cash: $167,070 seized from a motorhome on a lonely stretch of Interstate 80 in northern Nevada.

A Nevada Highway Patrol trooper pulled the RV over westbound near Wells for a minor lane change, worked the driver over with roadside questions, and came up empty, yet couldn’t shake the hunch that money was aboard. With no drug dog available, he let the motorhome roll on without a citation, then radioed the Elko County Sheriff’s Office with an errand: find a reason to stop the same vehicle again, and this time bring a dog. A deputy did exactly that. The second stop produced a dog “alert” on the RV’s seams, a warrant, $167,070 in cash, and no drugs.

Savarese took it to federal court in Reno, before the late Judge Larry R. Hicks, and won on suppression, arguing the two stops were really one: a relay dressed up as coincidence, one officer passing the baton to the next to run the same stop twice and call it two. In 2017 the Ninth Circuit agreed, calling it a single integrated effort to circumvent the Constitution. Gorman got his money back, and the government paid his attorney’s fees.

“Just because they catch you with something, or think they’re going to, doesn’t mean they’ve got you,” Savarese says. “Not if they can’t prove the whole thing was legal under the Constitution.”

His range extends well past the Fourth Amendment. In the 1990s he represented Michael Washington, a well-known Las Vegas escort-service operator facing state racketeering and pandering charges. Savarese won a dismissal from District Judge Joseph Bonaventure, not on the facts, but on a due-process argument that Washington, in his final months after a heart transplant, was physically unable to withstand trial.

That win led to a bigger fight. When the Clark County Commission passed a series of ordinances designed to legislate the escort industry out of existence, Savarese challenged them. Three times the county wrote a new statute; three times Savarese knocked it down, struck by Judge George on First Amendment grounds. “Despite his conservatism, George was a stickler for the First Amendment,” Savarese says. “And we won.” The wins pulled him into a second body of constitutional work.

What his colleagues describe is a refusal to let go. Gentile calls Savarese a perfectionist for whom the perfect is the enemy of the good, a lawyer who might not start until noon, then work until three in the morning, because on a Fourth Amendment question there is no such thing as good enough. “He sees nuances where other people don’t even see the primary problem,” Gentile says. He reads a search warrant the way a radiologist reads an X-ray, catching the hairline fracture the rest of the room misses.

Pitaro frames it from the bench’s side: when Savarese rises to argue a search-and-seizure question, the judge and prosecutors both know he is not making anything up, and that he is likely the most knowledgeable person in the room. “He knew he was the expert, more so than the judge or the prosecutor,” Pitaro says. “If you have that sort of reputation, and that sort of background, it just doesn’t get better than that.”

Ask Savarese about the criticism that trails every suppression win (that a guilty man walked on a “technicality”), and he bristles at the word. What people dismiss as a technicality, he says, is nothing less than a basic, fundamental American right: the promise that police cannot, on a whim or a hunch, invade a person’s liberty, movement and privacy in order to convict him.
He is blunt about why those protections get trampled. When legislatures let law enforcement keep the lion’s share of what they seize, he argues, they hand police a perverse motive to search first and justify it later. “The more you search, the more you get,” he says, and the Constitution becomes an inconvenience rather than a command. The money corridors he fought for decades, the motorhomes pulled over twice, were the predictable result.

For more than four decades, Savarese has stood in that gap, not because his clients were always sympathetic, but because the principle never changed. At its heart, the Fourth Amendment is just 24 words. Someone has to make them mean something.

Mark Fierro began his career as a reporter/anchor at KLAS-TV, the CBS television station in Las Vegas. He worked at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. He served as communications consultant on IPO road shows on Wall Street. He provided litigation support for the Michael Jackson death trial. He is president of Fierro Communications, Inc., which conducts mock juries and focus groups in addition to public relations and marketing. Fierro is the author of several books including “Road Rage: The Senseless Murder of Tammy Meyers.” He has made numerous appearances on national TV news programs.

Justin Velez is a marketing and public relations professional with more than a decade of experience driving results-driven campaigns and earned media placements for brands across the healthcare, technology, retail, cannabis, hospitality and tribal governance sectors, among others. His expertise spans brand positioning, content strategy, copywriting, digital marketing and creative direction, from full-scale identity systems to multi-platform campaign production. He currently serves as project manager at Fierro Communications, Inc.