by David DeKok
Wertz grabbed Haefner by his arms and pinned him against the counter. He arrested him, handcuffed him, and took him to the police station. There, Rick went wild, according to the official report, offering “considerable resistance” to being placed in a holding cell. He took a swing at one of the officers. They finally had to manhandle him into the cell. That afternoon, he was charged with disorderly conduct, a summary offense, arraigned before a district magistrate, and released on ten dollars’ cash bail. Rick hired Sprague to represent him at the hearing on the citation, and the law firm ran up more than forty-two billable hours on his behalf. That resulted in total fees and costs of $4,106, but Sprague got the case dismissed.10
Schreiber dealt with Rick Haefner for many years, first as a reporter and later as editor of the newspaper. He recalled another incident in which Haefner did indeed reach the newsroom and became “quite voluble.” More often, he said, Rick would call to complain about a story that had been in the newspaper or which he believed was about to be published. “He was persistent and unrelenting, and you could not win an argument with him,” Schreiber said. “You could only try to reassure him.” At the time, Schreiber did not think Haefner seemed paranoid. “I saw him as a really intelligent guy who was doing his own defense work and who was vociferous about himself. He wanted to make sure we followed the rules of journalism.”
But clearly, Haefner also benefited from his social class. “He came from a respected family and was well educated,” Schreiber said. “He was accorded the respect that you would give to a college professor.” That would have been true at almost any newspaper, where class distinctions among news subjects are parsed carefully, if often unconsciously. It was thus understandable, but it allowed Rick Haefner to get away with a lot. He was never treated as just another nut on the street.11
Chapter 33
Suing His Own Lawyer
In June 1983, the Sprague firm dropped Rick Haefner as a client. Neither side ever said why, at least publicly. At that point, Rick had run up $72,034.06 (at an apparently discounted rate of $75 per hour) in legal fees and expenses on the Burkey charges, $18,957.39 in fees and expenses on the Terry Hess case, for which Haefner had assumed responsibility, and $4,106.22 on the newspaper incident, for a total of $95,097.67. It isn’t clear whether this total included fees and costs from his first and second civil rights lawsuits against the Lanaster County defendants. His brother, George, had loaned him just under $30,000 toward his total debt to Sprague, but that left more than $65,000, or more than $130,000 in today’s money. Sprague never did collect on the balance, despite suing Rick in 1987. Haefner wiped out the debt with a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in 1993.1
The summer of 1983 went badly for Rick. In addition to being dropped by Sprague, Judge Troutman in June dismissed a third civil rights lawsuit that Rick had filed pro se, seeking damages from the City of Lancaster and the police officers who arrested him in the lobby of the Lancaster Newspapers on February 6, 1981. Why Sprague didn’t handle the case is unknown. Perhaps Rick’s tab had gotten too high, or perhaps they had a falling-out. Then, on July 21, Haefner was arrested for shoplifting in a Kmart store in Manheim Township, a suburb of Lancaster, after a store clerk saw him switch the price tag on a seat cover. He was released with a citation and presumably paid the fine, no longer having Sprague to fight his petty arrests. It was not his first offense. He had been arrested at another store in Manheim Township back in December 1981, which suggests Rick had as much of a problem with theft as he did with pedophilia.
And then, on August 9, 1983, consumed with misplaced anger toward the lawyer who had saved him from a long prison term, but who had been stymied in his efforts to win damages from the authorities, Haefner filed a pro se lawsuit against Sprague, his law firm, and several other lawyers in the firm, seeking damages for, among other things, loss of reputation. He accused them of mishandling the two lawsuits filed over his arrest in 1975 by missing the statute of limitations deadline. Rick swore to the court, again quite falsely, that he was a pauper.2
Did the lawsuit induce a certain amount of mirth in Sprague’s ornate offices off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia? If so, it was premature. At first, it is true, Rick did not seem particularly attentive to this lawsuit, being repeatedly warned by Judge Alfred J. DiBona Jr. about the consequences of “non-prosecution.” His lack of focus may have stemmed from the death of George P. Haefner Sr. His father died at age seventy-five on December 28, 1983, succumbing to a heart attack as he drove home one afternoon, crashing into a neighbor’s garage. At the time, he was working as an insurance inspector for the Mutual Inspection Company and still helped out frequently in the rock shop, making the boxed sets.3
By the time Rick filed his second lawsuit against Sprague on April 16,1984, he had his crazy back, and he gave the lawsuit his full energy and attention. It quickly became a sort of medieval battle in which the catapults hurled legal papers instead of boulders or boiling oil. He matched Sprague and his lawyer, Ms. Gene E. K. Pratter, then of the large Duane, Morris LLP law firm in Philadelphia, now a federal judge, brief for brief over the next five years. But his pretrial behavior in and out of the courtroom annoyed the judge and opposing counsel and frightened their staff.
The case was assigned to Judge Louis G. Hill, who had been a Democratic state senator from Philadelphia from 1969 to 1978 before being elected a judge. Hill had run unsuccessfully against Mayor Frank Rizzo for the Democratic nomination for mayor in 1975. He first encountered Haefner on October 30, 1985, when Rick abruptly appeared in Hill’s chambers and filed an emergency petition for documents from Sprague’s lawyer, who had apparently told him he couldn’t have them right then and there. Ms. Pratter had to drop everything and file an affidavit explaining why they were unavailable. On March 11, 1986, Haefner did the same thing. This time, Hill ordered Pratter to make immediate arrangements for Rick to inspect and, if necessary, copy thousands of documents. On another occasion, Haefner submitted a court order to a deposition by Pratter but left before it was finished, saying he had to catch the train home to Lancaster. Despite his self-taught knowledge of judicial language and procedure, Rick seemed unaware of the normal, almost scripted pas de deux by which opposing lawyers maintain a thin veneer of civility during contentious legal battles.4
Haefner harassed Pratter, according to Judge Hill, and on one occasion caused an uproar in her office. A receptionist at the Duane, Morris law firm said in an affidavit that she was “quite frightened” of Haefner. This, by the way, was neither the first nor the last example of Rick’s hostile or threatening behavior toward women, whether lawyers, secretaries, or waitresses; there are numerous examples throughout his life. In response, Hill issued an order directing Rick to avoid prolonged discussions with Pratter’s staff and to behave himself in her offices. “Dr. Haefner demonstrated that he was an assertive, willful, and, at times, abrasive individual who was uncooperative and difficult,” the judge wrote. Rick complained that Hill had called him “a manipulative liar.” Hill denied using that exact phrase, conceding only that he had termed Haefner “a manipulative individual,” who in the past had “not been candid with the court.” There was a touch of humor in that, but much of Rick’s behavior was simply scary.5
Some of the sharpest arguments in the pretrial phase came from Pratter’s ultimately successful attempt to subpoena two sets of documents relating to pre-1975 sexual offenses attributed to Haefner. She believed, no doubt correctly, that they would undermine Rick’s claim to have had a good reputation before the 1975 arrests and the doomed lawsuits. Her investigators may have heard about the incidents from the Lancaster police, who apparently learned of them from the Lancaster Recreation Commission, even though there was never any prosecution. In 1986, Pratter subpoenaed a confidential file on Rick maintained by Franklin & Marshall College. Early in 1988, she also went after Haefner’s personnel file at the LRC from his work as a day camp counselor at Camp Optimist. The pretrial hearings on this is
sue brought out some of Rick’s more menacing behavior. The court reporter, who sat less than five feet away, told Judge Hill he was uneasy. So did the court crier and law clerks. Somewhat nervous himself, Hill requested a deputy sheriff to be present during the rest of the pretrial hearings. He considered Rick to be “explosive, unpredictable, and impulsive.” Few who dealt with him over the years would disagree.6
Haefner fought to keep the accounts of his alleged sexual misdeeds out of the court record. When he heard that Sprague’s lawyer was going to subpoena the personnel file, which included information about the Ocean City and Boy Scout scandals, Rick made frantic efforts to get the file from the Lancaster Recreation Commission. But what he might have been able to do a few years earlier was now impossible. In January 1988, he twice went to the Recreation Commission offices and demanded the documents, but on the advice of counsel, Susan E. Abele, the executive director, would not turn them over, or even let him see them. Haefner said the file was “possibly embarrassing, and has no influence on this case.” The first part was true, the second quite false, which was why Rick was trying so hard to toss it in the fire.7
With the trial date of his lawsuit against Sprague approaching, Haefner hand-delivered a letter to the LRC on April 25, 1988, demanding that the records subpoenaed by Sprague be removed from his file, or that at the very least, a hearing on his request be held. Donald Lefever, the commission’s lawyer, advised Abele that Rick was just making “hot air threats.” But Haefner, who was in his Terminator mode, would not be denied. There was a hint of menace in his words and actions. He appeared at the office on April 26 and asked to see Abele, who was not in. On April 28, he returned and again asked to see Abele. Told once again that she was out, he asked the secretary for the addresses and phone numbers of the Recreation Commission members, which she refused to provide. Rick demanded a response to his previous letter by the end of the day, or he would deem his request for a formal hearing denied. He didn’t get it. Not long afterward, Rick asked for and received a continuance of the trial until October.8
By that time he had a new lawyer, Kenneth W. Richmond, of Philadelphia. Rick had apparently lost confidence in his own legal skills, or perhaps he realized that the mighty Sprague would be too tough of an adversary. In addition, his financial situation had changed in a surprising way, and he now had the money to pay, even though he was still claiming to Judge Hill that he was a pauper. Haefner had already offered another lawyer a $10,000 retainer to take his case but was turned down. Some lawyers he had approached looked at his case file and refused, or signed on and then quickly resigned when they realized what they were up against. Anthony P. Ambrosio, a New Jersey lawyer who represented him briefly in 1988, told the court that Rick had made “material misrepresentations” that might require him to violate the Rules of Professional Conduct. He said Rick refused to take his advice and persisted in taking matters into his own hands. Ambrosio called Haefner “deceitful and dishonest.”9
One day in the summer of 1988, Richmond had been preparing to go home from the courthouse after finishing a trial. Haefner, who had observed him in action, approached and asked if he would represent him. Surprised, Richmond asked what the case was about. When told it was a lawsuit against Richard A. Sprague, and that Judge Hill was in charge of the case, Richmond told Rick that he “didn’t stand a chance.” Haefner said he didn’t care. “I have to have an attorney,” he said. “I just can’t go on by myself.” Richmond told him it would cost a lot of money, because he would have to put everything else aside. Rick asked how much and was told the retainer would be $25,000.
Haefner didn’t blink. Soon afterward, he appeared at Richmond’s office in downtown Philadelphia and handed him a shoe box. Inside was $25,000 in small bills for the retainer. Taken aback, Richmond asked to see the case file. Haefner had his helpers—presumably his usual posse of young male admirers—carry up seven or eight file boxes full of pleadings and videotaped depositions Rick had conducted of Sprague and other parties to the case. Richmond groaned when he realized that the videotaped depositions had not been transcribed, a requirement before anything in them could be used in court. But when Richmond watched the videotape of Haefner’s deposition of Sprague, he was transfixed. It was “astonishingly good, amazing,” Richmond said. “I was flabbergasted at how well he pulled it off.” He dealt with objections and with Sprague’s lawyer, Gene Pratter, a skilled litigator. “She’s a really elegant sort of woman, kind of impatient, well-educated, very sharp, and excellent at repartee,” he said. “Yet he handled all that with perfect aplomb.” Richmond decided to represent Haefner.10
One issue that had to be resolved in the litigation was Rick’s claim that he had lost income because of the failed civil rights lawsuits. Pointedly asked how he was paying his lawyers if he was as poor as he claimed, Haefner said his brother, George, had loaned him $25,000; the amount of George’s loans to him varied in the retelling. But that didn’t strike Richmond as being the whole story. “I insisted on knowing where the money was coming from. There were flea markets of some sort [actually gem and mineral shows he ran]. It wasn’t adequate to explain the shoe boxes.” Richmond demanded that Rick tell him the whole story about where he was getting his money. He did, and it was a shocker.
Rick was a trained gem expert, particularly when it came to emeralds. In the mid-1970s, after he left Penn State, he had taken courses in gem grading and appraisal offered in the United States by the Gemmological Association of Great Britain. That turned out to be a marketable skill. Haefner admitted to Richmond that his money came from appraising emeralds used “in huge, illicit drug transactions.” He told his lawyer that one emerald could equal a suitcase full of cash. Colombia mines 60 percent of the world’s gem-grade emeralds, and between 1984 and 1989, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his Medellin Cartel waged a bloody, if ultimately unsuccessful, war for control of the emerald trade. They used emeralds to launder drug money.
Now the shoe boxes full of cash made sense. Rick had worked for drug dealers. “Yes, that was the source,” Richmond said. Haefner was not selling illegal drugs, but he was aiding and abetting the drug trade by appraising emeralds so his clients did not get cheated. That disclosure was “a very, very large mistake,” Richmond said, because if he had been called to testify about how Haefner was paying him, he would have had to disclose the real source of Rick’s money. But fortunately for Rick, the court never went beyond his earlier claim that his brother, George, had loaned him $25,000. George, who attended the trial, had to explain where he got the money. Everyone moved on, and Richmond and Haefner exhaled.11
Richmond kept Rick on a short leash during the trial, commanding him not to say or do anything. He considered him to be one of the more intelligent clients he had ever represented but also found him “super-controlling and wanting to micromanage everything.” That all changed after the drug emerald revelation. Haefner stayed on his best behavior. He paid his fees on time and did what his lawyer told him to do. Richmond recalled that the color would visibly drain from Rick’s face if anyone called him a sexual deviant.
Sprague claimed in his testimony that Haefner had given him permission to wait to file the first civil rights lawsuit for strategic reasons. When Pratter, on November 8, 1988, made a rarely successful motion for a nonsuit, or a judicial declaration that a case is over and won’t go to the jury, she said that Haefner giving Sprague permission to wait was undisputed. “Well, it was disputed,” Richmond said. “It was disputed by Haefner’s testimony. Nevertheless, Judge Hill jumped on that. You could see his eyes light up.” Hill declared a nonsuit the following day. In his opinion, the judge noted that Sprague was allowed by Haefner and Richmond to have “free rein” to tell his own side of the controversy for three days, in testimony running to 426 pages.12
Haefner appealed to Superior Court, alleging that Judge Hill was biased against him. Several months after the trial ended, he appeared unannounced in Hill’s chambers and requested t
he judge’s pretrial notes of testimony. At that time, Hill was analyzing them because of the appeal and refused to hand them over. Rick became argumentative, Hill said, to the point where Hill told him not to come in again without an appointment and that if he did not leave immediately, a deputy sheriff would remove him.13
A year after Judge Hill stopped the trial, Haefner sent a coldly worded letter to the Lancaster Recreation Commission demanding that his personnel file be removed and destroyed. Given his history, they had to know a lawsuit was coming. He was again in Terminator mode, aggressive and relentless. Susan E. Abele, the LRC executive director in 1989, wasn’t sure what to do. She asked Donald E. Lefever, their lawyer, for help in drawing up a list of conditions under which the commission would consider destroying the file. But LeFever stood firm: Abele should not destroy the file or turn the originals over to Haefner, he said—not when there was still the threat of litigation. He said Haefner could place a letter in his file to address any perceived inaccuracies and could be provided with photocopies of its contents, but that was it.14
Haefner filed a pro se lawsuit on March 19, 1990, demanding that Lancaster County Common Pleas Court issue a writ of mandamus—a court order to a public official to carry out a legally mandated duty—ordering the Recreation Commission to destroy his personnel file from twenty-five years earlier. What is truly fascinating—and disturbing—about the complaint is what Haefner said, and the way he said it. For example, he said that the LRC, meaning Bomberger, accused him, in his own words, of “behavior that was thought to be immoral [emphasis added].” So masturbating preteen boys wasn’t really immoral? Rick couldn’t bring himself to drop the qualifier. It was the same attitude he had expressed to Bomberger when he was summoned, late in the summer of 1965, to explain his actions with the boys. “Richard said he felt only compassion for this mother, and if he had done anything wrong, he wasn’t aware of what it was [emphasis added]. He said he was only trying to do something good by taking the boys on a vacation before they go away to school.” That he would make a similar claim in the lawsuit shows he was still in denial about the real nature of what he was.15
