My Story
Swimming against the tide.
BIOGRAPHY
Allan Paul Haber, Esq., began his legal career at the Bronx Office of The Legal Aid Society, Criminal Defense Division, in 1985. Eight years later, in 1992, he went into private practice specializing in criminal law and bail-bond forfeitures. Most of Allan’s clients came from the Federal CJA Panel and the Federal Capital Panel, both of which Allan has been a member of since the early-to-mid 1990s. His areas of expertise range from narcotic and RICO conspiracies to murder, extortion, bank robbery, fraud, and international terrorism.
What makes Allan unique as a lawyer is that before going to law school, he spent 15 years in prison for three separate felony drug convictions, and he spent most of his young adult life as a heroin addict. After Allan’s metamorphosis, he became the President of the Fortune Society, a nationally known ex-offender program. He also worked as a counselor at Offender Aid and Restoration (OAR), a federally funded program that worked with violent juveniles and adolescents. As a consequence of Allan’s work at OAR he was awarded a Charles H. Revson Fellowship that allowed him to attend classes tuition-free for one year at Columbia University, while simultaneously completing his undergraduate thesis for his Bachelor of Arts Degree at New York University School of Continuing Education.
Allan is currently semi-retired, still working on several federal criminal cases, and writing a book that uses his life as an empirical-study of how to overcome addiction. He feels strongly that we are losing the battle against opiates not because we don’t have solutions, but because we foolishly follow the bad advice of experts and providers who are invested in a system that doesn’t work.
In 2015 Allan was awarded the Bart Lawson Alumni Award For Service and Outreach by the NYU School of Professional Studies, for connecting his expertise and scholarship to community outreach. In the past Allan has been a Board Member of FCI, Otisville, a federal prison in New York State; the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan; Project Green Hope; and the Vera Institute of Justice.
Allan co-authored a semi-autobiographical screenplay, Hard Promises, based in part on his life. The screenplay won a number of national and international awards but was never turned into a movie. He is considered by many to be an expert on addiction.
When he’s not busy working and writing his book, Allan can be found tending to his gardens at the Upstate New York home he shares with his wife of 23 years, Dr. Maria Theodoulou.
Follow Allan on Twitter and Facebook as he begins his journey to educate anyone willing to think big.
