Attorney lives Lennon's 'do you want to know a secret?".

THE recently released Lions Gate documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" is rekindling interest in the events surrounding the late Beatle's bid to gain U.S. citizenship in the early 1970s.

For L.A. attorney Dan Marmalefsky, the fire never went out.

Lennon's supporters claim that he was flagged by intelligence agencies for his antiwar stance and that then-President Richard Nixon viewed him as a threat to his reelection campaign.

Among those interviewed in the documentary is University of California, Irvine professor Jonathan Weiner, who has pursued a Freedom of Information Act case against the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain documents detailing the surveillance.

Marmalefsky, a litigation partner at Morrison & Foerster LLP, has been working on the case in conjunction with Weiner and the American Civil Liberties Union for 23 years. He took the pro bono case when he was 27 years old. He's 50 now, and still working on it.

"It's only about half my life," joked Marmalefsky, who calls himself more of a John Lennon fan than a Beatles fan. "We all had our favorites. And John was mine."

Over the past two decades, the FBI has released some of the disputed Lennon documents, but a few remain held up by litigation. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in 2005 that the remaining files could be released. The government has filed a notice of appeal and the documents will be held until the judgment is affirmed. The case could go to the Supreme Court on appeal.

Marmalefsky said one of the driving forces behind his commitment to the case is to fight what he calls "the government's knee-jerk tendency towards secrecy."

Documents that have been released in this case are available on the FBI Web site, which describes the documents as related to an "Investigation conducted when the FBI learned that John Lennon contributed $75,000 to a group planning to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 1972."

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on whether or not Lennon was under surveillance, but noted a provision in the Freedom of Information Act that allows the government to redact or withhold documents to protect the identity of persons, groups, or foreign nations that may have provided the FBI with the information.

Plaintiffs believe that the still-withheld documents would provide background on several aspects of the case: the U.S. position that Lennon was ineligible for a U.S. visa because of a drug conviction in England; that the U.S. tried to deport Lennon and Yoko Ono when their visas expired; and Lennon's alleged $75,000 donation to the Allamuchy Tribe, which planned to demonstrate at the Republican National Convention.

By the time the convention rolled around, Marmalefsky noted, Lennon had been deported.