Born in Soviet Georgia in 1937, he received his first prison sentence in 1957 for resisting arrest and, during his third in the 1960s, became a "thief in law", a Russian term comparable to a Mafia "godfather".
But if the Dallas paper legally obtained documents stolen by a third party, precedent suggests it is the thief and not the newspaper who would be subject to prosecution, even if the newspaper should have known that the information was stolen.