EIGHT

 

SMALL TIMERS

 The same day I learned of my ex-lawyer dying in a shootout with the F.B.I., I randomly received a link in my email (sent by a distant cousin) to the court transcripts of my great grandparent’s divorce proceedings in 1927. This document shed a bright light on a shameful family mystery. Why did my great grandparents divorce? And why did it seem to matter to anybody?  

 

The legal system has a built-in record button (esp. for white people). Anybody can read of their ancestors’ trespasses and perfidy, refusal to pay fines, bootlegging, divorce, kidnapping, murders (and being murdered) sometimes represented by counsel, other times representing themselves. Crimes span the centuries, rarely political, more often than not personal, family feuds over real estate or bad marriages. In recent years there are instances of more extreme violence, drug abuse (and its consequences), incest, and fratricide. Crime is a constant in most families.

 

 I’ve been lucky. No friend or family member is presently in jail (that I know of). My neighbor just got out of prison for money laundering. His (and my) present lawyer and I welcomed the free man home around the campfire a few days ago. This guy is the exception- an aspirational criminal. The rest of us are mostly small timers – middle class, banal (legally speaking), skating through life with the odd speeding ticket, lapsed alimony payment, or overdue library book. I don’t really need a lawyer…. but I still like having a couple around.  

 

My first lawyer (now dead in the FBI standoff) and I went to high school together. Luckily it wasn’t a criminal matter that led me to hire him, but a financial one. I needed a lawyer to help set up a business that would most likely lose my father’s money: a gallery. It was called a Sub-Chapter “S” corporation. Dad needed to minimize his losses if I failed. The lawyer did all the paperwork without fuss or muss, and predictably the gallery lost plenty of money. I failed miserably as a businessman. While no longer needing a lawyer’s services, I’d see him at the odd high school reunion as he climbed through the system. A friendly handshake and a “How ya doing?” That was it.

 

What can immediately be garnered from the forty-some page Federal Indictment of this ex-judge and prosecutor, filled with incriminating text messages, is how sloppy the man had gotten. This was a man who became a judge, worked in the District Attorney’s office at a very high level, a successful businessman who had what from the outside looked like a stellar career and family life. What happened?

 

The combination of the news of unexpected and violent death of this lawyer (still undetermined as a possible suicide) and the court transcript that aired my great grandparent’s dirty laundry got me thinking. My second lawyer was also about my age, the son of my father’s longtime friend and trusted personal lawyer. I hired him to divorce my second wife and plead down a speeding ticket, respectively. He did OK on the divorce but screwed up on the ticket proceedings. Eventually it was all worked out. A few years later this lawyer was arrested and disbarred for embezzling money from a trusting client’s escrow account. Neither this lawyer nor the one who died in the FBI shootout broke the law for much money. In the grand scheme of things, they made chump change as they both fell from grace. What does this 98 year-old family divorce proceeding and a dead lawyer have in common? I have no idea. Opening day is tomorrow.