by Jess Walter
But Howen told the jury this was more than just a simple theft. He called as a witness the owner of the private fueling station, who also delivered fuel oil to tanks all over the city. When he’d broken into the building to turn on the pump, Tommy had grabbed a ring of keys that would open fuel tanks all over the city. Howen had the witness identify the keys and testify to the fact that they could open thousands of tanks.
In his first closing argument ever, Nevin said, “Mr. Howen would have you believe that Tommy Fort was involved in a conspiracy to control the fuel oil market in the city of Boise—” He showed the jury the battered gas tank, implying he would have to do it five gallons at a time. Then came Nevin’s encore. How could Tommy be guilty of burglary, breaking into a building to commit a crime, when his crime had been committed outside?
The jury hung on the serious charges, and Tommy Fort was found guilty only of attempted petty theft. In the real world of lawyers—where innocence is unashamedly measured in degrees—it was a huge victory. And so were the next four cases Nevin tried, bringing cross-eyed looks from the other PDs and jokes that he might never lose.
As soon as he began to wonder himself, he did lose. But he quickly gained a reputation as one of the top defense attorneys in Boise, a natural in front of a jury. After he left the public defender’s office, he continued to hold his own against Howen. But their biggest case together went to Howen, the 1986 trial of Elden “Bud” Cutler, security chief of the Aryan Nations, who hired an FBI agent to behead a witness in the Order trial.
Over seven or eight cases, Nevin and Howen developed a grudging respect and a good working relationship. The prosecutor seemed intrigued by the young upstart who managed to smudge some of his intricate prosecutions. Both rose in the Idaho legal community, Nevin as a top criminal lawyer and death penalty specialist, Howen as a top federal prosecutor and the scourge of white supremacists.
Nevin learned a lot about what a prosecutor was trying to accomplish by talking to Howen. “My job is to put on a good enough case that the defendant has to take the stand,” Howen told him. “Because then, I’ve won my case.”
Howen taught him another important lesson about being a lawyer, something that came back to Nevin as he decided to take Kevin Harris’s case. Howen said, “What you have to do as a lawyer is get away from the fear of losing.”
CHUCK PETERSON WASN’T THINKING about winning or losing. As soon as he read that Gerry Spence had volunteered to be Weaver’s lawyer, Peterson had only one thought: he needed to be on that case. Peterson wasn’t in the upper echelon of Boise defense attorneys like Nevin. He was talented and confident, an in-your-face litigator who’d been trained as an army lawyer on a base with 28,000 soldiers and just seven defense attorneys. But after the army, he hadn’t fit in at his first big law firm. So he hung his own shingle with a handful of other lawyers and tried to make a name for himself. But Boise—home to federal, state, and county courts, federal agencies, the Idaho legislature, and corporate offices—was up to its lapels in lawyers, 1,333 in the district, 40 percent of the lawyers from an area with 20 percent of the state’s population. Chuck Peterson felt like just another suit.
But working on a case with Gerry Spence—who never even wore a suit—could change that. Since Spence was from Wyoming, he would need local counsel, and Peterson figured that was his chance to finally display his talent. “I just gotta figure out a way to get on that case,” he said to one of his partners.
Like Nevin, Peterson was a student of Spence’s, and he recalled the Wyoming lawyer’s advertisement years earlier: “Best Trial Lawyer in America Needs Work….” On August 31, while Bo Gritz was still trying to get Sara Weaver to surrender, Peterson sent Spence a fax, offering his assistance as “Best co-counsel in America …”
That afternoon, Peterson—young-looking and intense, with a sharp face and spiked, blond hair—got ready to leave his office and go to his first night class at nearby Albertson College. Burned out on the law, he was thinking about becoming a counselor. As he was getting ready to leave, the secretary said he had a phone call. It was Gerry Spence. “Right,” Peterson said. Before sending the fax that morning, he’d told some of his partners about it, and he laughed at their clever joke as he punched the button for the speaker phone.
“This is Chuck Peterson.”
There was no mistaking the tugboat baritone. “Chuck. This is Gerry Spence. I got your fax.”
“Oh?”
“You know,” Spence said, “that’s something I would have done if I was your age. I’m going to get in my airplane and fly to Boise, and you can pick me up at the airport.”
“Sure.”
“You arrange a way for us to meet with our client,” Spence bellowed.
“Okay.”
After they hung up, Peterson grabbed one of his partners, Garry Gilman. “You may as well come along. It’s going to be a hell of a show, no matter what.” Chuck Peterson never made it to those counseling classes.
“LOOK,” GERRY SPENCE GROWLED at Randy Weaver. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to defend you or not, but if I defend you, I’m not going to listen to that bullshit.” Spence told Randy that he had black and Jewish relatives. “I’ll defend you, maybe, but it isn’t going to have anything to do with your beliefs, and I don’t want to hear about any of that stuff, and you’re not going to say any more about it.”
That was about the last time Randy talked to his attorney about the Jewish conspiracy.
Gerry Spence had arrived in Boise the day before as grand and confident as Peterson expected, six feet two inches tall, 230 pounds—but in a way, even bigger than that. A fringed buckskin coat draped over John Wayne shoulders, gray felt cowboy hat pulled down over his silver pageboy haircut and settled just above his squinting eyes, Gerry Spence seemed for all the world like the gunfighter he fancied himself. He and his lawyer son, Kent, had driven with Peterson to the Ada County jail—a drab, concrete block of a building out by Boise’s strip malls and office parks. Randy Weaver sat in front of them, tired and beaten, just hours after his surrender. Peterson sized up his potential client. His head was shaved, he was pale and weak-looking, shackled, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and orange thongs. Spence had expected a wild-eyed, charismatic kook, and what he was seeing was just a tired, little man. But he also sensed that he was listening to someone who was telling the truth. Peterson and Spence looked at each other: This guy kept all those officers at bay?
That night, they just listened to Weaver’s tale: set up by the government on a phony gun charge, his son shot in the back, his wife shot in the head. Every few minutes, he’d start weeping and couldn’t finish his story.
Kent Spence didn’t seem too enamored of the case and, as Peterson dropped the Spences off at their hotel, he figured he’d never see them again. He guessed they’d fly out the next morning and Peterson—who had told the local judge he’d represent Weaver—would be stuck with this dog of a case.
But they were still in Boise the next morning, when Spence lectured Randy about not talking about his beliefs. That day at the jail, Spence had pointed questions for Weaver: Who shot first? Where were you? What did you see? Randy answered clearly and consistently, and then he started in on his beliefs, how the Jews were probably behind the whole thing, and that’s when Spence stopped him. “Keep that stuff to yourself.”
That afternoon, they drove downtown to meet with the judge. “Well, what do you think?” Spence asked the other attorneys on the way.
Peterson didn’t think they had much of a case, but he stayed quiet. He was there because of Gerry Spence, not Randy Weaver. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Spence said.
The lawyers turned into the parking lot at the federal courthouse, hours before the arraignment was to begin. There were television and print reporters camped all over the courthouse steps, and Spence turned to his son. “We’re in this case.”
Kent Spence—the actor they’d have to hire to play his dad twen
ty-five years younger—grinned, shook his head, and turned to Peterson. “You in?”
“If you’re in, I’m in.”
“We may never get paid,” Gerry said.
“Oh, well,” Peterson said. “If you’re in, I’m in.”
Back at Peterson’s office, Spence sat down and wrote two press releases, one with his name on top and the other with Randy’s name.
STATEMENT OF Gerry Spence:
I was told that if I would agree to represent Randy Weaver he would come down off of the mountain and surrender. Hoping that my agreement to represent him would prevent further bloodshed, I have made my appearance on his behalf in federal court today.
Mr. Weaver and our co-counsel do not see eye to eye on many issues.
We do not believe in white separatism.
We do not share Mr. Weaver’s religious beliefs.
But our personal beliefs and his are not important to this case. In America, all of our religious and political beliefs are protected by our Constitution….
And then, Spence composed Randy’s statement, detailing in it how his wife and son were murdered and explaining he had come down from the mountain only to protect his girls.
“I have never believed that I could get a fair trial in a government court,” Spence wrote for his newest client. “I was assured that Mr. Spence, one of the great lawyers of the country who has spent his life fighting for people and the cause of freedom, will see that I get a fair trial. I believe Mr. Spence will see that my rights are protected. If I did not believe that I would still be up there.
“I have authorized Mr. Spence to undertake my defense understanding that he and I see eye to eye on very few political and religious issues. As a matter of fact, we are poles apart in our beliefs. But one thing he and I agree on, and that is people ought not to be murdered by their own government.”
BESIDES SINGLE-HANDEDLY REVIVING the buckskin industry, Gerry Spence had another rare quality, one vital among prominent people of the twentieth century, the ability to define himself. In a world narrated by mass media, fame cast people arbitrarily as Good Guy or Bad Guy, but Gerry Spence would have none of that. Through a chain of bold and unlikely court victories and a string of books about his exploits and philosophies, he crafted himself as the Lone Ranger of the law, not just a good guy, but something more, a mythical figure, a hero. Big. It was some trick, creating a hero from a profession that mostly inspired mistrust and scorn.
In the courtroom, Spence was his own work, painting himself—broad and imperfect—for the jury just as soon as he was turned loose on them. He hoped to make the jury forget the client and concentrate on the lawyer—who didn’t fight the other side’s battle of details and evidence, but who crafted a homespun story, a worldview, an ethic that he invited the jury to adopt as its own. “Folks, you and I know this case isn’t about a murder. It’s about …” Every chance in front of the jury he repeated his story and every question was framed through that worldview. Outside the courtroom, he spun another kind of story, revealing and reinventing himself in a string of books that mixed his exploits, his flaws, and his philosophies like a stiff drink that he just kept topping off; he was a man who just couldn’t stop writing his autobiography.
Gerry Spence sprang from Colorado ranch and farm families in January of 1929, the winter before the Great Depression. One grandfather was a member of the Zion Religion, an Old Testament, fundamentalist faith that decreed, among other things, that it was a sin to eat pork. Some Protestant fire made it to Gerry’s mother, but that was pretty much the end of that line in the Spence family. Gerry’s own faith was the Western ideal of individualism.
His father was a chemist at the University of Wyoming, but the Depression sent the family spilling out of Laramie and into California, looking for work. They ended up back in Wyoming—in Sheridan—where Spence’s dad worked for a railroad and the family grew up poor. Spence’s mother made coats and gloves for her three children from the hides of elk, deer, and antelope, and the family took in tourists to get by. Gerry helped out, washing and ironing sheets, driving horse teams, and selling cinnamon rolls door to door. By fifteen, he was a pushy loudmouth who terrorized the rest of the family—perfect attributes, his devout mother realized, for a preacher. Gerry thought he was better equipped to be a lawyer.
He graduated high school at a time when it was still possible to go off to sea for adventure, and Spence had a fine time as a merchant marine. He drank rum, smoked cigars, visited whorehouses. But he refused to pay union dues, and the other merchant marines tossed him overboard and emptied a garbage chute on him. He eventually quit, moved back to Wyoming, was married, and got into law school, but his mom didn’t approve of his gambling or his godlessness, and they argued almost as much as Gerry and his wife did. During his first year of law school, Spence’s mother committed suicide.
Her death was hard on Spence, and at first he blamed his own boozing and debauchery for her sorrow, and ultimately, her death. He graduated first in his law class at the University of Wyoming, failed the bar, passed the second time, and moved to Riverton, Wyoming, to join a law practice. In 1953, he ran for county attorney as a Republican, knocking on doors and leaving notes for those people he missed. Every registered Republican got a check “to be cashed for honest law enforcement,” and at twenty-four, Gerry Spence became the youngest county attorney in the state. He was a buzz saw. He shut down the Little Yellow House brothel in Riverton, revoked liquor licenses, and even prosecuted himself for shooting ducks outside of shooting hours. He won a second term but didn’t run for a third, deciding instead to aim for Congress. He got pounded and set up a private practice.
Gerry Spence in the early 1960s was the picture of Republican establishment—four kids, a member of the Kiwanis, the Elks, and the Sheridan Country Club. He represented insurance companies looking to screw those little guys he’d later champion.
There was a midlife crisis: lots of drinking, some sensitivity training, and an affair with a woman named Imaging. He campaigned to be a judge, was rejected by the governor, sold everything, and moved to Mill Valley, California, where he planned to go to art school. That didn’t work out, and he and his wife divorced. Spence wandered back to Wyoming, married Imaging, and sobered up. He went back to his insurance law practice and got rich. In his first book, Gunning for Justice, Spence wrote that he was in a grocery store when he saw a hobbled accident victim that he’d earlier defeated in court. After years of representing the establishment, Spence had a “crisis of conscience” and vowed to spend the rest of his life on the side of criminal defendants and people suing big corporations.
The cases—he called them “little people trying to get big justice”—made him famous in the West and in the larger legal community. Spence’s reputation quickly went national with a string of high-profile cases, beginning with the 1979 Karen Silkwood case, whose heirs sued Kerr-McGee Corp., charging she had been contaminated by Kerr’s Oklahoma nuclear plant. Spence won a $10.5 million civil suit, but it was overturned on appeal, and the family eventually settled for $1.4 million. He represented a beauty pageant queen, Miss Wyoming, in a case against Penthouse magazine, which published an article, purporting to be fiction, describing a woman who resembled Spence’s client but boasted incredible sexual talents. With his commanding pronouncements and disdain for legal technicalities, Spence cut through the “legalese,” turned witness’s testimony into his own speeches, and strained courtroom decorum so much that the opposing attorney in the Miss Wyoming case moved for mistrial four times—during Spence’s opening statements alone. Miss Wyoming won a $26.5 million defamation award in that case—also overturned.
When rich, powerful clients requested his services, he transformed them into little people, too, so that in 1990, Imelda Marcos became “a small fragile woman” whose only crime was being “a world-class shopper.” Charged with embezzlement and racketeering in a New York trial, the former first lady of the Philippines hired Spence for a reported $5 million. His loud, pl
ainspoken tactics didn’t play as well in front of a New York judge, who rode Spence throughout the trial. Even his co-counsel in that case tired of his antics. But Spence won the case, and Marcos was acquitted. He did many cases for free but commanded huge fees when his clients could pay—40 to 50 percent of the settlements at a time when other top attorneys got 33 percent. He bragged that he’d never lost a criminal trial and hadn’t lost a civil case since 1969.
Spence’s ethics were welded to his emotions, and he used the same zeal to win a murder acquittal for an old ranch hand and sheriff named Eddie Cantrell as he did to convict another accused murderer while serving as a special prosecutor in 1979. In that case, Spence wore a bulletproof vest and placed bodyguards around the courtroom to illustrate the viciousness of the defendant, a man named Mark Jurgenson, who’d killed an old friend of Spence’s. At his most stirring and manipulative, Spence asked for and got the death penalty. Later, he would write that it was the worst thing he ever did. In another epiphany, he decided he was against the death penalty. He even tried to get Jurgenson’s sentence changed to life in prison.
But in 1991, Jurgenson was electrocuted, the first execution in Wyoming in twenty-six years. In some ways, Jurgenson’s death was the most startling example of Spence’s power in the courtroom and, also, his ability to reinvent himself—a trait critics called hypocrisy.
And there were plenty of critics: prosecutors and attorneys who’d faced him, companies whose pockets had been lightened by his rhetoric, and judges who’d spent entire trials trying to keep him in line. But by September 1992, Gerry Spence had something that transcended all of that: celebrity. Gerry Spence came to the Randy Weaver case in September 1992 as probably the best-known attorney in the world, a perfect mix of brilliance and self-promotion.
IN BOISE, IDAHO, it was as close to a dream team as you’re likely to get. On Weaver’s side of the table were Spence, his son, and the sharpest of the Wyoming contingent, Gerry’s assistant, Jeanne Bontadelli—the left side of his brain. (“Jeanne? Have I read that memo?” “Yes, Gerry, you have.”) Peterson and Garry Gilman completed Weaver’s team.
