Posted on: Sunday, December 8, 2002
White-collar defense lawyers get top dollar in corporate scandals
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post
There's nothing like a parade of corporate scandals, and the inevitable federal probes that follow, to make the phones ring in the offices of the nation's top defense lawyers.
Several veteran white-collar crime specialists say they're busier now than at any other time since the insider-trading and savings-and-loan debacles of a decade ago, balancing multiple business scandals and even turning away clients. Some are so overloaded that they rely on law partners and younger staffers to take care of everything but meetings with prosecutors and court appearances.
Their advice doesn't come cheap. Some of the most sought-after defense experts charge their harried clients more than $600 an hour.
The lawyers being most heavily pursued include Reid Weingarten, Peter Fleming, Mark Pomerantz, Lawrence Pedowitz, John Savarese and Charles Stillman. They complain that prosecutors are casting too wide a net and snaring innocent people in the current round of probes. They decry the practice of handcuffing executives who tried to surrender to authorities. And they criticize the government's dramatic step of charging Arthur Andersen LLP with obstruction of justice.
All have close ties to former colleagues in prosecutors' offices and a track record of shepherding famous people through the legal system — and keeping them out of jail.
For sheer volume of high-profile representations, Weingarten may hold the current record. Weingarten, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, has commandeered a piece of at least four high-profile business collapses. He represents former WorldCom Inc. chief executive Bernard Ebbers, the former top lawyer at Tyco International Ltd., the former vice chairman at Rite Aid Corp. and the one-time chief accountant at Enron Corp.
But he also practices the sort of disciplined time management that allows him to attend all of his 17-year-old son's basketball games. Weingarten, a single parent, said he leans on three partners and three or four more junior lawyers to help him with the heavy workload, saving courtroom arguments and meetings with prosecutors for himself.
Weingarten, 52, made his name locking up judges and other officials in the decade he took on public corruption as a Justice Department prosecutor. In one of his better-known cases, he won a conviction of Rep. John Jenrette, D-S.C., in the Abscam scandal of the 1980s, in which FBI agents posed as Arab sheiks seeking immigration help before hidden video cameras. He also prosecuted Rep. George Hansen, R-Idaho, who eventually was found guilty of making false statements about his finances. Along the way, Weingarten befriended prosecutors around the country — connections that serve him well now.
He's an aggressive advocate who relishes the courtroom battle, friends said, noting that he devotes all of his concentration to crafting a persuasive story to explain his clients' actions.
"You walk in and you either persuade them your guy is innocent or you're going to kick their butt," Weingarten said of his approach toward prosecutors.
Eric Holder, former deputy U.S. attorney general and a longtime friend, said clients flock to Weingarten "because he wins."
Weingarten and Theodore Wells, now at the Paul Weiss law firm, represented former agriculture secretary Mike Espy when he was charged with taking gifts from Tyson Foods Inc. and lying about it. Espy was acquitted in 1998. So was another Weingarten client, Ronald Carey, three years later. The Teamsters president was charged with using union dues improperly.
Weingarten has a flair for the direct and brash, advising WorldCom's Ebbers to defend himself against congressional attacks while still invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions that could incriminate him.
Fleming, 73, is widely known in New York legal circles for the way he mentored dozens of young lawyers who passed through the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office in the 1960s.
He counts among his most prominent victories a pre-Watergate acquittal of former U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, charged with obstruction of justice related to an investigation of fugitive financier Robert Vesco, and an acquittal of boxing promoter Don King, who was charged with insurance fraud. The victories were especially satisfying, Fleming said, because his clients had been "tarred and feathered" by the media. He's known for taking difficult-looking cases to trial rather than settling.
Fleming towers over his diminutive client John Rigas, who stands accused of looting millions of dollars from the cable TV firm Adelphia Communications Corp. Fleming's also defending former Arthur Andersen partner Phillip Harlow on civil charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission related to Sunbeam Corp.'s accounting problems. Earlier this year, Fleming ran defense for Michael Odom, an Andersen official who ultimately wasn't charged in connection with the company's shredding of Enron audit papers.
Fleming fought back immediately after postal inspectors put Rigas, 78, in handcuffs, arguing to the media and others that the arrest was unnecessary since Rigas had offered to surrender. His protests roused the American Civil Liberties Union, which sent a letter to prosecutors decrying the spectacle.
The former Navy officer, who tracked combat aircraft on radar from an aircraft carrier during the Korean War, still barks out his thoughts, lacing them with a potent sense of humor. He said he wanted to be a writer like his Princeton University classmate John McPhee. But his father nixed the idea. "My father said, 'You're not going to be what you want to be — which is Jack Kerouac,' " Fleming recalled.
More than 40 years into his career, Fleming said he can't imagine retiring. "What else would I do?" he asked with a laugh.
