by David Feige
It’s no wonder that Tona haunts my dreams --his bulbous, scowling face cast as the personification of my powerlessness --and no wonder it’s him I’m chasing, swimming to the surface of consciousness on a cold morning ten years later when, despite my passion for criminal defense work, I would relish a little extra time in bed.
- - - -
I like the cold --for personal and professional reasons. On cold nights, people stay off the street corners; less corner traffic means fewer arrests, and fewer arrests mean a lighter arraignment load. A light night in arraignments means a little dip in a public defender’s caseload --a moment of respite in a churning sea of relentless criminality. All year long, I sleep with the window open, hoping the air drifting in might signal a frost.
The radio mumbles about Iraq as I finally shake off sleep. The news of the moment: two guys stabbed and a little girl caught in a cross-fire shooting. My ears perk up, but both turn out to be in Brooklyn. No news at all from the Bronx. The sky is overcast, a portent of the snow forecast for later in the week. That would be nice.
My own law-breaking this morning involves having drilled out the water regulator in my showerhead --a crime for which I feel no remorse whatsoever. Every day I can look forward to about six minutes of illegal, superheated bliss. In the shower, I map out the day’s schedule, trying to imagine which clients will show up on time, which judges I have already pissed off during the week, which courtrooms are going to be glacially slow. When on trial, I visualize my cross-examination, whittling down my important questions to their spare, eviscerating essence. Some of my best summations have been devised or delivered amid the steam and scald. Mickey Richards, Omar Chavez, Juan Torres, and Steven Smith: all owe their freedom in some small measure to my shower inspiration. And it’s always been like that: even back when I couldn’t wait to get to work, couldn’t stand being away from the office and the action, I never passed up my contemplative shower moments. Indeed, they were the only moments of luxury back when I got into all this.
- - - -
Oddly, for someone who is, or on occasion has been called, a big, self-righteous blowhard, I did not get my start in the public defender business for righteous reasons. Really it was an accident.
It was in the spring of 1985. I was a sophomore in college. And while most of my classmates had summer plans long since settled, I had been too preoccupied eating barbecued beef and trying hard to seduce the woman who won the University of Chicago’s prize for best BA paper in English to bother planning my summer. Of course, the longer I waited, the more likely it seemed that somehow the decision would be made for me rather than by me.
Waiting out an April shower, an overstuffed sandwich safely in my stomach, I ducked one afternoon into the damp stone building that housed the university’s career and placement office. Justice couldn’t have been further from my mind, but as I flipped through the postings “Criminal Defense Investigator Wanted” caught my eye. I scanned down the page . . . investigating criminal cases . . . finding witnesses, serving subpoenas . . . visiting crime scenes. It all sounded cool to me. And rather than high-toned rhetoric about grade point average, self-motivation, and all the rest of the corporate nonsense, this ad sought people who were adventurous and had good communication skills. The Washington, DC, Public Defender Service, as it turned out, was looking not for brilliant students, but for people who could talk, drive, and take chances, and were willing to work for free. It had my name written all over it. I promptly lined up a public-interest summer grant and fired off an application.
The DC PDS investigator internship was exactly as advertised, and within a week I found myself wandering around southeast DC looking for a guy named Slim who had supposedly witnessed a robbery. It was a disaster. Alabama Avenue in the mid1980s might as well have run through Alabama itself. It was rural poverty writ urban --as if the tumbledown homes of the Deep South had been shoved together by some huge earthmover. There were low concrete bunkhouses with doors swinging from one hinge, playgrounds filled with dust or mud depending on when it had rained last, and people everywhere, crowding the little cement slabs that served as ground-level verandas, sitting on decaying chairs or plastic milk crates, huddling around card tables chockablock with dominoes, smoking, drinking, and fanning themselves in the humid summer sun.
I stood out.
It wasn’t just because I was white, though that certainly helped, but also because I had the stiff walk of the neophyte and the nervous look of the out-of-place kid that I actually was. No one would give me the time of day. Good luck finding Slim.
Nevertheless, as the summer wore on I began to take to the work. It was endlessly fascinating, exposing me to a world I had never really known --a world where people lived by street names, where drug commerce and violence lived cheek by jowl with working families and hopscotching children, where the first assumption was that I was a cop; the second, a rich junkie looking for a fix; the third, a parole officer; and beyond that the hopped-up kids of Alabama Avenue had no idea what to make of me. In time, as I adjusted to the expectations of Southeast, I began to both love it and understand it. By the middle of the summer I’d learned how to track down witnesses, ask questions, and dig up information that would prove useful in the rapes and murders and robberies I was investigating. I’d learned every street and alley in the Quadrant, and could talk my way into almost any house. And most every night I brought home the fruits of my investigations to the lawyers I worked for --hard-charging, dedicated defenders whose passion for their work inspired me every day to find more, and to dig deeper.
My time in DC transformed me. It turned a college kid’s diffuse sense of right and wrong into a focused and rigid moral framework. That first exposure --to the criminal justice system, to poverty, and to the macabre hierarchy of criminal defense lawyers --radically altered the next two decades of my life. It gave me a purpose.
Law school was, for the most part, full of overindulged kids looking to become lawyers either to please daddy or to bring home the big paycheck. Worse, with L.A. Law sexing up corporate work every week (Arnie Becker got laid twice a show), the fetid focus of law school life became who could get a job at the fanciest firm. This only compounded the pathological competitiveness of the entire law school experience.
I didn’t bother to talk to law firms during my first year. I knew exactly where I was headed for the summer: back to the streets of DC and the Public Defender Service. My second summer, though, was different. My dad, who dreamed of telling his friends about how his son was going to work for a Wall Street law firm, argued stridently that before I went off to spend (read: “waste”) my life being a public defender, I should at least explore the opportunity costs.
And that’s what I did: Dewey Ballantine is about as fancy and white-shoe as a law firm can be. It also had the distinction, in 1990, of being among the highest-paying law firms in the country. That summer, from my aerie on the forty-fifth floor with the commanding view of midtown Manhattan, I got my first taste of what “legitimate” success felt like --and it felt good. Plied with expensive food and name-brand liquor, I spent a summer wrestling with my identity as I shuttled between Wall Street, Broadway shows, and Yankee games. It’s not bad being treated like a king. And as it turned out, I didn’t mind making an ocean of money. But the vertiginous experience of being a bit player in the big world of commerce never quite sat right. Partly it was my insufferable lack of deference, partly it was my defiant streak, and partly it was just because, looking around the firm at my high-powered colleagues, with their sophisticated airs and entitled perspective, all I saw were slaves.
In Discipline and Punish, the brilliant meditation on the history of penology, Michel Foucault suggests that the more advanced a society is, the more subtle the modes and means of penal control. If a summer at Dewey Ballantine showed me anything, it was just how controlling an advanced society like a law firm could be and how brilliantly, brutally subtle penal control could be. Almost every day, one or another of my bright-
eyed colleagues would rush into my office detailing in a barely controlled whisper what partner had assigned what task to what associate, who had gone where, and whose fortunes were rising and whose were falling. It was as if we were back in junior high school, except that instead of gossiping about whether Nadjia Neherniak really made out with Mark Burnett, we spent every minute trying to ensure that no one else was making corporate inroads any faster or more effectively than anyone else. To keep tabs on this, summer associates spent an inordinate amount of energy considering how much “face time” was optimal --“face time” being time spent in the office irrespective of whether or not one had work to do.
In between visits to client-subsidized shrimp bowls, Broadway shows, and box seats at ball games, I reflected on the meaning of the experience. I concluded that though it was undeniably tasty and lucrative, to me it was all lifestyle and no life.
It was that realization that animated my stride in November of 1990 as I walked into the offices of the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society of New York City and announced, with more confidence than I felt, that I was there for an interview.
“Second or third?”
The woman behind the desk glanced up for a fraction of a second, taking my measure with practiced disdain. The question completely puzzled me, and at first I wasn’t even sure what she was talking about.
“There are three?” I asked, my too-cool-for-school laconic delivery quickly giving way to a more familiar boyhood schoolyard panic.
“Yeah . . . three,” said the receptionist, not at all impressed with my performance so far. “Who did you interview with on campus?”
“Ahhhh . . .” I stalled. “I don’t think you come to Wisconsin. I just sent in a letter and résumé and was told to show up today.”
This unusual way of doing things seemed to flummox her, but after taking my name, motioning me to a chair, and muttering into a telephone for a few seconds, she managed to say what I’d hoped to hear at the beginning of our conversation: “Someone will be right with you.”
The “someone” quickly morphed into four people, who led me into a nondescript room and mercilessly fired contentious questions at me for forty-five minutes. It was utterly unlike the law firm interviews, which seemed to be structured around the idea that no question was too stupid and no topic too inane to elicit a warm smile and a firm handshake. The people around the table (half of them in jeans) seemed to suggest that I had a lotta gall comin’ in to their office on Park Row in New York City and asking them for a job. Who the hell was I? each one of them wanted to know.
It was, in short, my kind of interview. And sitting there in the cramped room stuffed with too many chairs and a table two sizes too big, staring out a window that looked out into a sooty airshaft, I understood, implicitly, that this was my home and these were my people.
“Here,” said one of my interlocutors, pushing a set of stapled papers across the table at me like a detective presenting a prepared confession. “We’d like to have you back for a second interview. You’ll need to deliver a summation. This is the fact pattern.”
“Work out your summation during Thanksgiving,” said another, “and we’ll see you back here at ten thirty Friday morning.” Her tone left no doubt that I’d be there at 10:30 and be prepared.
And so while grandma was basting the turkey and my mother and sisters squabbled over mundane Thanksgiving-related matters, I was given the gift of homework. More than content to skip everything about Thanksgiving other than the meal, I holed up in a small bedroom poring over the facts of a faux robbery case, preparing my very first faux summation.
I was back at the offices first thing Friday morning, my heart pounding, certain I was actually going to die as I stood to face my four-person jury. But despite my nerves, my voice was strong and clear as I explained with a few rhetorical flourishes and dramatic gestures why my imaginary client was innocent. The summation lasted about twelve minutes, each one of them floating by me like an iceberg off the bow of a lumbering ship, each moment crystalline, weighty, and portentous. It was the first time, but by no means the last, that I heard myself sum up without understanding a word that I said, some deep part of my limbic system taking over the words while the conscious part of me was left abstractly appreciating the rhythms and sounds, completely divorced from the meaning of any of it. I supposed this was what it was like when an athlete spoke of being in the zone, of doing without thinking, of a deep and golden attention to one’s heartbeat, the smell of the arena, the chill of the late fall, the ball slowing as if thrown through honey.
Once done, I was led around to an office on the other side of the building and ceremoniously introduced to Ivar Goldart. Ivar wasn’t actually the big boss --that was a guy named Bob Baum. But Bob was out of the office, as was one of his deputies, and so, for my third interview, I got Ivar. Ivar was a lanky man who walked with a pronounced limp --the uneven lope gave him a weird gravitas, as if somehow no guy with such an affliction would ever say anything frivolous or stupid.
“What can we do,” Ivar asked me, “to get you to come work for us?” There was a long pause. In truth, it had never occurred to me that I’d get to ask for anything, and I was utterly unprepared for the question. But as I sat there in Ivar’s office, with its partially obstructed views and proximity to city hall, it was instantly clear to me that there was really only one thing I wanted. “Being from Wisconsin,” I explained, “I always kind of envisioned New York as being bound by the East River and the Hudson, and I’d really like to stay in the city I imagined.” In other words: Manhattan. Ivar fixed me with an ingratiating smile: “Oh, no problem,” he said. “That’s where we send most of our out-of-state people.”
And with that, then and there, in the narrow Park Row building across from city hall in downtown New York City, on the Friday after Thanksgiving 1990, I made up my mind: I’d turn my back on the filthy lucre of Wall Street and spend my life being down, dirty, and righteous with the Legal Aid Society of New York.
Ivar and I shook on it.
Less than six months later, after the bar exam, along with seventy-one other newly minted legal aid lawyers from around the country, I shuffled in and out of the College of Insurance Building (around the corner from the World Trade Center), where I learned things like “how to win speedy trial motions” and “just how much community service is a misdemeanor worth?” I went through day after day of lectures, demonstrations, and exercises designed to ensure that when we actually strode into court on behalf of indigent clients, we wouldn’t hurt them too badly. Six weeks came and went in a haze of astonishingly cool topics --each more real and practical than the next --all things I was desperate to learn. And like a kid in a samurai film who yearns for the day he can trade the bamboo stick for the tempered-steel sword, I gobbled up every day’s lessons hungry for the moment they’d finally cut me loose to do some real battle.
When it was finally assignment day, the Friday before we were to head to our waiting offices, one of our instructors wandered down the aisles calling out names and handing out our assignment slips.
“Enjoy,” John said, handing me my little white slip.
I took the little piece of paper and unfolded it distractedly. AP-3 --Brooklyn. Brooklyn? I felt a little rush. Surely there’s some mistake, I thought. Me . . . Brooklyn . . . impossible. They promised to send me to Manhattan. I don’t even know where Brooklyn is! I felt my face start to flush. I looked up. John was grinning at me.
“See you across the river,” he said, hooking a thumb east over his shoulder.
At that point, everything I knew about Brooklyn I had learned from Welcome Back, Kotter. But despite my ignorance and my horror at being relegated to what I considered a third-rate borough (the Bronx was at least sexy in a hard-core kind of way), my first year across the river was revelatory. Unlike almost all the other lawyers I knew back then --the ones I’d left in the towers of Wall Street, the smart people elbowing to succeed at big law firms --when I arrived at wor
k every single morning of that first year, I was utterly happy. The host of Morning Edition had barely gotten to his last name by the time the covers were flung aside and I was headed for my tiny bathroom, almost skipping with the realization that I was headed back to work. The sheer exhilaration of knowing that in an hour or so I’d be in court, standing beside the poor and bedraggled, the violent and the innocent, the people who never wanted me as their lawyer in the first place was intoxicating. That the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society would even pay me to do the work seemed, at the time, like a gift.
The limits of that gift soon became apparent. I got a raise for passing the bar and in one fell swoop went from making a paltry $29,500 a year to a whopping $31,000. I celebrated this by treating myself to coffee in the morning and toppings on my pizza at night. That ate up the raise.
My nutrient-deficient diet was just one of the scary aspects of my new life. Frankly, everything was terrifying. Every day of walking to court; finding my way around; memorizing the names of the judges, the assistant DAs, the court clerks; questioning whether I pled someone too soon or too late, whether the fine was too high, or whether I’d needlessly ruined someone’s life by giving them a criminal record --it was constant stress and confusion. And every day was a battle. Some were mere skirmishes, others Iwo Jima. Sometimes I saw them coming; other times I was blindsided like an American pedestrian crossing a London street against the light.
