Days of Scandal a Boon to Powerful Legal Clique

WASHINGTON —  A few scandals ago, before Robert S. Bennett was defending the president, he was chief investigator of the ethics of a group of U.S. senators known as the Keating Five.

One day, Thomas C. Green, the lawyer for one of the senators and a close friend, went into Bennett’s office, reached over the back of his chair and started rubbing his ample belly. “Bobby, Bobby baby, please let me see those documents,” Green pleaded, eager to get help for his client.

Bennett recalls pushing Green aside and laughing off his silly request. “Let’s have dinner later, but get the hell out of my office now,” he said. Bennett and Green are members of a small fraternity of well-paid lawyers in the nation’s capital who make a living juggling politics and the press for some of the best-known clients in the country.

On a good day, their substantial salaries are paid by the legal funds of presidents and Cabinet secretaries. But the benefits may be just as good--in publicity if not fees--representing operatives, secretaries and alleged girlfriends and their mothers.

This elite group of white-collar lawyers who have a client in every scandal numbers no more than a few dozen. And these days business is booming. There are live investigations brewing all over town employing lawyers for literally hundreds of targets and witnesses.

And just this week two eminent members of the fraternity showed its power. They cut an immunity deal for Monica S. Lewinsky where an outsider could not.

What makes these lawyers so influential is that they are not just behind-the-scenes power brokers. They also attempt to be grand manipulators of information, meting out much of what we learn about the problems of the most powerful people in the country and influencing how the cases affect the state of the Republic.

(Note to wannabe fraternity members: Always refer to Washington as a “town,” think about your cases’ impact not just on clients but on the country and feel free to call fellow frat brothers “baby.”)

President Clinton the First Client

Almost since the day he took office, President Clinton has been The First Client, keeping a team of lawyers busy fending off special prosecutors, grand juries, congressional inquiries and civil litigant Paula Corbin Jones.

When Lewinsky, this year’s Second Client, parted ways with Los Angeles defense attorney William H. Ginsburg and reached into the fraternity for representation, the other members seemed to collectively cluck: “What took her so long?”

Ginsburg, a medical malpractice lawyer, has expressed disdain for the claustrophobia of the legal bar inside the Beltway. But the conventional wisdom is that Ginsburg could not crack the fraternity and was flailing in the capital’s legal folkways.

Thus Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose relationship with the president is being investigated by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, hired two fraternity elders, Jacob A. Stein, himself a former independent prosecutor, and Plato Cacheris, another Bennett pal who once advised the president’s lawyer on how to buy suits.

Short of a secret handshake, this fraternity has just about everything you would expect in its social contract. From party weekends to their own code of ethics, these lawyers share traits such as formidable egos, flashes of brilliance and appetites for high pay and red meat. Their hourly rate is $475--and the decimal point is not where most Americans would put it.

Many of the fraternity’s senior members, now in their 50s and 60s, have been through similar stations of the cross. Typically, after law school they served stints as assistant U.S. attorneys. Eventually, they left government payrolls to defend white-collar criminals.

Since Watergate, white-collar defense work has blossomed into a cottage industry. It prompted Congress to pass the Ethics in Government Act, which originally included the Independent Counsel Law, and other federal statutes against fraud. And those laws, in turn, spawned the capital’s white-collar legal culture.

If Watergate created the first demand for a cast of lawyers to serve as prosecutors, investigators and defenders, subsequent Washington dramas and “gates” have kept them fully employed. At least 58 attorneys helped investigate the Iran-Contra scandal; dozens more represented defendants.

To be sure, in any particular city or even small town, there is a group of lawyers who rub up against each other, sometimes a little too closely for comfort. Miami has a “white powder bar” specializing in cocaine-related cases, Los Angeles has a club of entertainment lawyer-agents and New York has its merger-and-acquisition specialists.

While most legal communities do their share of trading of clients and connections, the hothouse nature of Washington politics has created a legal culture in which masterful juggling of conflicts of interest, instead of being an occupational hazard, enhances a lawyer’s reputation.

Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, recalls a moment of supreme conflict managed by a master. Under fire from then-CIA Director William J. Casey, Woodward went to see his lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, at the time the doyen of this lawyerly elite. After learning that Williams also represented Casey and the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board, the reporter asked his lawyer if he had too many conflicts of interest.

Williams, who died in 1988, leaned across his circular desk and told Woodward not to worry. “Bobby, he said, “I represent the situation.”

More complex situations, however, can leave lawyers “conflicted out” and forced to pass on some of their business to a friend or partner. When attorneys who have shared clients and billings suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of a case, critics argue that at least one client could be sold out.

For example, it is widely understood that Clinton’s attorneys were aggressive about finding friendly lawyers to represent witnesses in the Lewinsky case. But some said Bob Bennett went too far when he suggested that Kathleen E. Willey, a Richmond, Va., socialite who has said that the president fondled her near the Oval Office, hire Plato Cacheris. (This was before Lewinsky hired Cacheris.)

Willey’s counsel, a Richmond real estate lawyer who knew Cacheris and Bennett were close friends and former partners, would not have it.

Bennett, a pugilist by nature and by sport, grumbles at the suggestion of anything untoward, explaining that Willey’s lawyer was looking for someone who could practice in both Washington and Virginia, and Cacheris qualifies. “You always like to refer a matter to someone you know because you like to have a line of communication when it’s appropriate,” Bennett elaborated. Randall Turk, who represented former Reagan aide Michael K. Deaver in an independent counsel’s inquiry, explains why friends can make good adversaries: “They return phone calls, they give a heads-up if they can before making a deal with the government--all of which reduces tension if you need to start damage control for a public figure.”

The Echo Chamber That Is Washington

Unlike anywhere else, Washington is a reverberator. If the Justice Department starts an investigation of a public figure or a company, at least one committee of Congress and perhaps another agency will likely end up pursuing the same target. With so many investigative bodies empowered and so many reporters working, every nuance of a high-profile case seems to echo long after it is discovered. This requires defense lawyers to battle on many fronts.

“You have to know how to react when Justice investigates new facts and then something else comes out in The Washington Post and again when a Senate committee uncovers even more new facts,” says Thomas Earl Patton, who has shepherded several clients through big investigations. “We are not a mystical body with secret passwords but there are skills you build up.”

If they must be judged by a single skill, it would be how they keep clients from getting indicted and at the same time salvage their reputations. Many lawyers, in fact, go years without entering a courtroom. Theirs is the art of pre-negotiation--cutting immunity deals and plea bargaining to avoid jail time. In the course of a politically charged case, attorneys spend most of their time talking to opposing lawyers and chatting up reporters and political insiders to shape public opinion.

There are confident lawyers such as Brendan Sullivan, who represented Oliver L. North during the Iran-Contra scandal, and David E. Kendall, Clinton’s counsel on Whitewater, who keep their noses under the radar and talk to reporters only selectively, if at all.

And then there is everybody else.

(Sources familiar with Clinton’s strategy say that he wanted it both ways: He retained Kendall to quietly litigate and Bennett to be a public bulldog.)

At the same time Bennett rants about the “over-intrusive media,” he says that he has spent a career studying its rituals and following its gossip. “You have to think like a reporter and an editor, know how they operate and how what you say to them about your client will play.”

Again, Woodward illustrates how a smart lawyer who builds relationships with reporters and understands their needs can exercise leverage.

During the Watergate cover-up trial, he and Carl Bernstein were invited by Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon’s attorney general, to rummage through her husband’s papers in their New York apartment after he had walked out on her. When John N. Mitchell’s lawyer, William G. Hundley, realized the questionable manner in which the reporters had obtained the papers, he demanded that they return them or he would tell U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica what had happened. Hundley really just wanted to know what might appear in the Post. Woodward returned the notes.

“This was about him finding the buttons on my console to push,” says Woodward of Hundley, who is now Clinton friend Vernon E. Jordan Jr.’s lawyer. “He was saying to me, ‘You’re basically a fair guy and this is not fair.’ He wasn’t saying, ‘you can’t Xerox the papers or I’m going to stop you from running stories.’ ”

In fact, these lawyers are often resigned about what shows up in the media. Privately, they will even muse that the truth or guilt or innocence is not the point. Their job is to keep to a minimum the toll a case takes on their clients and their reputations.

“The point of these big cases is to win, have some fun, get some attention and get paid. Simple. End of story. But don’t quote me,” says one attorney, of course, anonymously. He also said that most lawyers in this elite do not depend on scandal cases “for their bread and butter. Their billable hours are about the boring CEO or regulatory cases.”

The fraternity has its frequent ritual gatherings. Members used to gather over martinis at Duke Zeibert’s, a now-defunct downtown power restaurant, and more recently over skewered chicken and shrimp at Bennett’s annual springtime party on his office rooftop overlooking the White House.

But no ritual is as important as an ordinary weekday lunch where lawyers gathered around one table can represent the scandals of several administrations. In that way, Washington lawyers are like Hollywood agents--only as well-known as their most famous client.

Recently, at a table at the Palm, Hank Schuelke, Dick Janis and Larry Wechsler, of the same law firm, sat around, jackets off, quietly eating lunch. But if you squinted past the creamed spinach, fried potatoes and grilled fish (an homage to middle age and good health by these tennis-playing and bike-riding lawyers), you could imagine a meal between Jimmy Carter administration official Burt Lance, Iran-Contra figure Albert Hakim and Clinton secretary Betty Currie--past and present clients of the firm.

So, how does an ambitious lawyer become part of the brotherhood? Publicity is one way. Experience in a big case is another. Growing up together in the law is yet another.

“You have white-collar lawyers from all the major cities who have vast experience, impeccable reputations and the ability to handle these D.C. cases,” says Jan Handzlik, a hard-charging Los Angeles white-collar lawyer. But the best-known cases might best be handled by Washington defense luminaries, he concedes. “Local guys have the edge.”

One former Clinton aide who has faced about as many grand juries as there are memorials on the Mall says that he debated hiring a skilled New York lawyer to represent him. But he settled on a Washington big shot with the resources of a well-connected law firm behind him. “Sometimes it was just gossip about what was said by another witness in the grand jury,” says the ex-Clintonite, “but these guys pick up more stuff on the street or at lunch than you’d get at a dozen depositions.”

Outsider Only Needs One Big Case

But it takes only one capital drama to turn an outsider--even a New Yorker--into a fraternity pledge.

Robert J. Giuffra Jr. was a 36-year-old associate at Sullivan & Cromwell when he was selected as co-counsel to a Senate committee that conducted weeks of televised hearings about Whitewater. From that he became known--to Democrats and Republicans alike, to the press and--most importantly--to other lawyers. When he made partner in January, his Whitewater nemesis Kendall sent him a congratulatory note.

“Once you do battle with these people you have some understanding of the rules of the game, and typically people who understand the game get to play again,” says Giuffra.

But gaining membership in this fraternity is not easy. Which is why there are so few women--and even fewer minorities.

“When they’re in this kind of jam, not many men want a woman next to them at the hearing table,” says Nancy Luque, a former U.S. attorney who helped defend Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), the powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, against corruption charges a a few years ago.

The good news for women like Luque, however, is that apparently when women get in a jam they, too, prefer someone like them at the defense table. Thus, Luque was retained by Maria Hsia, a twice-indicted player in the Democratic campaign finance scandal after she read in the newspaper that Luque was representing another woman entangled in the case.

“I won’t say I’m not part of the male club because I am,” says Luque. “But I’m not the first they call.”

Ultimately, there is a great awareness of the pageantry involved in taking sides in these cases and, at times, a great world-weariness with the whole process. But the power of these lawyers reaches beyond the politics of the day--and any one party or individual client. These lawyers are canny survivors and their fraternity is a permanent establishment in a political city that organically produces scandal and intrigue regardless of who is in power.

“There’s just a bunch of us who always end up on the short list,” says Tom Green, “Some of it’s luck and some of it fate and some of it’s because we’re just good on our feet.”

Times staff writers Robert L. Jackson, Ronald J. Ostrow and David Willman contributed to this story.

* JUST WHO IS LINDA TRIPP? ‘The answer is simple. I’m you. I’m just like you,’ she says. A12

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Capital Counselors

Here are some members of the small fraternity of well-paid lawyers in Washington who make a living juggling politics and the press for some of the nation’s best-known clients:

Randall James Turk

Age: 48

Law School: Georgetown University

Firm: Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin

Famous clients: Michael K. Deaver, former Ronald Reagan aide-turned-lobbyist; D. Craig Livingstone, former Clinton White House operative accused of masterminding “Filegate”

****

Nancy A. Luque

Age: 48

Law School: San Diego State University

Firm: Reed Smith Shaw & McClay

Famous clients: Maria Hsia, Los Angeles immigration consultant accused of illegal fund-raising; Jonathan Pollard, convicted of spying for Israel

****

William G. Hundley

Age: 73

Law School: Fordham University

Firm: Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld

Famous clients: Vernon E. Jordan Jr., law partner and friend of President Clinton; John N. Mitchell, attorney general under President Nixon

****

Thomas Charles Green

Age: 57

Law School: Yale University

Firm: Sidley & Austin

Famous clients: Washington power lawyers Clark M. Clifford and Robert A. Altman

****

Robert S. Bennett

Age: 58

Law School: Georgetown University

Firm: Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom

Famous clients: Bill Clinton in Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit; former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger; savings and loan kingpin Charles H. Keating Jr.

****

Robert J. Giuffra Jr.

Age: 38

Law School: Yale University

Firm: Sullivan & Cromwell, New York

Key federal work: Former chief counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, former counsel to Senate Whitewater Committee.

Key private clients: Armand D’Amato, brother of Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato