Friends and Kin:
(This started out to be about a case I tried, and turned into a bio starting when I got out of Law School in 1960, brought up to my disbarment in December 2003. I have decided I will tell the whole story of my Disbarment in the next Blog.)
It's June 25, 2005. It's hard to believe that we are just a week into summer. It seems as if we should be a year into this awful humid heat in South Louisiana. I swear I don't remember it being so miserable when I was growing up. We had no A/C at home. A big attic fan that, when you dropped the windows to a few inches opening it would create a gale of heated air over your sweaty, shirtless kids body. The only time I knew A/C was when we went to a movie, and you nearly froze and then thankfully came back out to the heat of the night to let your thermostat return to normal. At LSU in 1953 none of the classrooms were air conditioned, with the exception of the big auditoriums as in the Geology building when I took the basic Geology course. We had didn't have to adjust to the heat, for it was just normal to be in the heat night and day. But I have adapted to A/C and wonder if things are better, for I was happier then---or at least I seem to remember times that seem mellow or tart or sweet or electric with anticipation about something or other. The future I anticipated then is now. It isn't quite what I expected, but nobody made the present but myself. I am fully responsible for the condition I am in---fully, regardless of how I could legitimately point fingers. To the degree I point fingers to those who may seemed to have had something to do with creating my present time situation, is the degree to which I grant them ownership and power over me now. I can look back and see every point where I set the next stage in motion, allowing these things to happen. I don't think anyone else is different either. So taking the responsiblity (ability to respond) frees me to the extent I truly take responsibility. It is not easy sometimes to stop thinking about how "they" did this or that. It really wasn't them, it was me who, at that time, just didn't do something different that would have led to an entirely different track, and it can't be said that I didn't know. I made the choices knowingly, perhaps lazily, but always with knowledge.
I began this blog with the purpose of talking about one of my cases that I hadn't written about in my previous Rants, and it turned into a biography. This is OK, for I intend to complete my bio and then go back and write about cases, people, experiences, trials, funny things, poems and stories I have written, etc. This is a blog about my life after law school.
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I read Keillor's The Writer's Almanac every day. These jump start these Rants when I am a bit dry, and have to prime my Rantpump. Day before yesterday there was this little morsel. I was wondering why my libido was stirring a bit more than usual---it was because it was the time of the honeymoon. Here's a quote from TWAlmanac:
It's Midsummer Night's Eve, also called St. John's Eve. St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers. It's a time when the hives are full of honey. So the full moon that comes this month was called the "mead moon" because honey was fermented to make mead, which is where the word "honeymoon" comes from. It's a time for lovers. As an old Swedish proverb says, "Midsummer night is not long, but it sets many cradles rocking."
Reminds me of the old temporary buildings that were built at LSU near the RR tracks on the LSU campus to house returning Vets. It was said the train that passed in the middle of the night woke many of the veterans which created a babyboom during that period. However, that piece written about honeymooners was regarding Europeans, whose summers don't compare to South Louisiana summers. But when I was young, and it isn't much different now that I am a bit longer in the tooth, I didn't care when the opportunity arose, I was ready, day or night, summer or winter. That is an amazing phenomenon. Sometimes I wish it would just leave me alone.
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This begins the bio.
After graduating from LSU law school in 1960, I went straight into the Army and spent the next three years trying court martials at Fort Benning, Georgia.
I was told by my Congressman, Overton Brooks, that I would be sent directly to Europe after I had spent 90 days in the service on an Observation Tour. I took the deal, because I was looking at a draft notice after graduating from law school and there was no time to get in the Navy or Air Force at that time, or at least I didn't think so. I kinda liked the idea of being a First Lieutenant in the Army, and craved to go to Europe. That had been my lifelong dream.
So in July, 1960, I took off for Fort Jackson, SC., where I got my uniform and was directed to Charlottesville, VA., for two weeks of military law school. We were a Special class, as there was a shortage of Army lawyers and we were given a Special Indoctrination two week training before going to our assigned base, and mine was Fort Knox, KY. So I found myself in a class with two law school buddies, Don Zuber and Gilbert Litton. Zuber to go to Ft. Holibird, Md., and Gil to Ft Riley, Kansas.
I was single and hot to go in my new uniform. The night I got there I went directly to the nursing school and told the receptionist I wanted to meet a nurse, and a girl standing there looked me up and down, and I did look pretty spiffy in my no belly, and 145 lbs, and totally blatant need. She said she had a boyfriend but her roommate may be interested. Her roommate came down and she was some cute and fine. We went out to eat and I must say nurses have an open arms policy that goes into effect just about immediately. I saw her every night I was there and on weekends, and after graduation spent the weekend in DC going to museums, etc., etc., etc. We had one day of training, shooting the carbine and doing jumping jacks, and THAT WAS IT, THAT WAS OUR MILITARY TRAINING! We were totally unprepared for the Army. We were civilians from the get go and it showed. I hardly knew how to put my brass on.
I swapped my duty station with a guy who was going to Benning in Georgia, because my roommate told me Benning was loaded with girls and Knox was a terrible place. I knew I was going to be there only 90 days before going to Europe, so I wanted to go where there was action, as I planned lots of actioin in Europe. I learned later that Fort Knox was a half hour from Louisville, where the women are fast and the horses are beautiful, and to this day I would like to kick his ass for telling me a total lie for the ratio of men to women in Benning was about 1000 to 1.
So I walked into this bulldog Staff Judge Advocate Lt. Colonel Sterling, with his snow white hair cropped so his red scalp showed through, and his big white and flaccid face with those cold but bloodshot blue eyes like marbles. He looked me like I was a dogs breakfast and I swear shook his head because civilian was stamped all over me. You see, we had no basic where they chop you up and pour you out so you look like everyone else and have that middle distance stare that reeks of fear and remembrance of what will happen to you if you don't act, talk and smell like the soldier next to you, and you better learn to duck and keep your head down. I never learned that. I looked like a feather merchant in a three piece suit to him. I was.
He immediately assigned me to defend a corporal charged with forgery, and ordered me to plead him guilty at a Special Court Martial (an abbreviated trial that has a maximum sentence of six months that can be served locally without being sent to Leavenworth. ) He was thoroughally pissed when I asked to go see the prisoner, and especially when I returned and told him the Corporal said he was not guilty. He raged and said I was going to try him by General Court Martial the next week. I had never seen the inside of a courtroom, never tried a case, knew nothing, and he assigned the most senior of prosecutors to try it.
I knew nobody, and immediately everyone in the office (all strangers to me) ran for cover. I learned an old buddy from law school was a pfc in the Second Infantry Division Admin company. He had been drafted right out of law school, and already held over for another six months because of the business with Russia. I asked him to help! Hey, you don't get a pfc to sit with you in court martials, especially one who, when the Commanding General of the Third Army stops in front of you at one of those army parade inspections as asks "what do you think of Fort Benning, Private?" And your answer is, "how do I get out of this chicken shit outfit?" No, no. You don't have that guy sitting by you. I didn't know this when I asked him to sit with me. But I think he was only part of the problem. I was the main part of the problem for Sterling simply wanted me dead for some reason. It was a hate at first sight kind of thing.
Sterling stamped around the courtroom during the trial, outranking any of the men on the panel hearing the case, and openly praised the prosecutor each time he jabbed his legal sword into my heart, and openly sneered and scowled at me throughout the trial. The poor corporal had been given permission by his sergeant friend to sign his name to chitbooks at the NCO club, but when it came to trial, this sergeant was unavailable and on bivouac in the boonies and couldn't be available to testify. The poor bastard was given five years.
Col Sterling, my SJA, sat me in front of his desk the following morning and screamed at me from 0700 hours until 0900 hours about what a total failure I was as a human, a lawyer, a soldier. I asked him if I could go to DC and ask for a transfer out of his office. He allowed it, and the next day I was at the Pentagon talking to the woman in charge of all these transfers, referred to as Gen. Burns. She said there was nowhere---except main post, Fort Benning. I took it. I figured this nut was going to find a way to do something to me if I didn't get out of there, even if it was only ten miles away at main post, the Infantry Center.
On transfer I was given a special efficency report which, when I found it on my desk, was smouldering. I don't think there was ever such a bad efficiency report given on any soldier anywhere before that. I had only been in his office for less than three months when it came in. At the same time, I got notice that Overton Brooks had died of a heart attack, and I had political stamped all over my file. So, my European trip was dead, and I was personna non grata in my new office and a dangerous man. I had received a call from Exec Officer of Admin co of 2nd Inf. Div., who told me I should write up Col Sterling for what he did in court, and what I had observed, as he was an alcoholic and they had many reports on him and he should be handled. I did as instructed, and Sterling got passed over for full Colonel and I was passed over for Captain because of the report. I made Captain a year later, but this was an anxious year for two pass overs will justify elemination from the service. I was a bit nervous in the service until I finally realized all they could do was kill me, and I would do what I pleased from then on and really defend those cases assigned to me and I became a deadly trial lawyer at that point because it was them against me, not them against my client. I tried and won many cases much to their chagrin, including the first acquittal by general court martial they had had at Benning in fifteen years.
It was not a very happy three years. During that time there was the Berlin and Cuban crisis, Kruschev banged his shoe on the podium at the UN announcing they were going to bury us, Kennedy announced creation of bomb shelters and burial of the thousands or millions expected to die from the oncoming nuclear war, etc., etc. We knew we were going to die and life would never be the same starting at any moment. I wrote a novel about a trial and the current times, Command Influence.
So I got lots of court room experience and when I got out as a Captain in 1963, lit in Natchitoches with Johnny Makar, from July until November when I moved to Covington. Natchitoches (pronounced Nak uh tush) is a small college town in N. Louisiana, very beautiful, set on Cane River, with a heirarchy in the legal system that requires you to outlive the old lawyers to get in line for success, governed by a strict social code that is overseen by the bluebloods who grant the ability to survive in accordance to one's ability to conform to the set of more's there, and if one is not born to it or has the pedigree of generations, one will never be permitted in. And I realized at that point I didn't want in, and was suffocating in that closed in world of yesterday. So I moved to Covington, another equally socially enclaved city, equally beautiful also, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, to set up an office for Walton Barnes, a Baton Rouge lawyer who was handling lots of foreclosures there and wanted someone to take an office next to the courthouse. It was becoming a blue blood, sophisticated bedroom for New Orleans. I did that for a couple of months, not expecting to be part of the society, but just simply wanting to be a damn good lawyer and when I learned Barnes was in the courthouse one day, handling the foreclosures he had set up the office for me to handle, and he did not come to visit his own office next door, I realized I was at a dead end.
So I heard of an old lawyer, who was around 74, who had an office in Slidell, another small city bordering on Lake Pontchartrain, just about thirty miles south of Covington. Slidell was different. It was open and anyone could make it if there was just enough push. I loved Slidell, for it was just like it had been for a century, but it had a forward looking viewpoint, owing largely to the incursion of people moving in from N.O., and Boeing setting up at Michoud and in Picayune, Miss., just thirty or so miles to the north. Boeing people from Seattle were dying in the heat and mosquitoes, but they moved there for the money. Seattle area is heaven, and Slidell did offer great fishing and hunting, but Washington was the place of dreams--with seasons, cool, even snow.
I worked with old man Provencal and his wife Ursula. They drove twin Cadillacs, and lived on Bayou Liberty, a beautiful bayou flowing into the lake, and they would leave the office daily and drive to N.O. to play poker and bridge at the Athletic Club. He was fiesty. He had gotten into a fist fight on the courthouse lawn in Covington just a year or so before I went with him. I loved them.
After nearly a year I got an offer from Willis McDonald, of McDonald and Buchler (beekler) of Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, to join their office and work in the area of Municipal Bonds. When municipal improvements are needed, they float a bond issue to pay for the streets, water systems, schools, whatever requires large outlay of money for construction, etc. I would travel over the state and meet with mayors, aldermen, engineers, and obtain contracts to do these improvements. I was always onthe road and returned on the weekend. I was a roving PR guy, and would come back and do the technical paperwork and help put together the bond issue. I traveled to the four corners of the state, and all in between, going to night meetings of the council to present out plan, to getting signatures on bond issues (Once I had two million in negotiable bonds int he trunk of my car for a sewer and water issue in the little Cajun city Mansura, near Marksville, needing signature of the Mayor and Secretary. We sat all day drinking beer, eating cochon du lait (milk fed pig cooked over an open fire pit---delicious) while I turned the pages so they could sign. This was the life.
By 1965 I was divorced and would fetch my little four old John from Slidell on friday night and spend the night with him each week, returning him to Slidell saturday afternoon or Sunday, and then party when I had a chance. It was a busy time. I lived in the French Quarter on Esplanade Boulevard.
Louisiana was undergoing some turbulent political times, as usual, and John McKeithen became Governor. The firm had lost the gigantic and extremely lucrative Jefferson Parish Client (at the time the most growth in the state) owing to a change over in Mayor President. Before that, Sheriff Clancy had called the shots, and he was Buchler's wife's uncle. So they had gotten rich over the largesse of the patronage of the relationship, and that is why I was important for they knew I could get out and meet people, and they wanted to expand their bond work into N. Louisiana and around.
I tried, and got a few bond issues here and there, but it was hard, for my firm was very straight laced and I would take out of towners out to eat a fine restaurants, and my firm may buy Christmas presents and make some donations to campaigns, but they wouldn't buy whores or whatever the out of towners coming to the Big Easy for a weekend wanted. Foley, Cox and Judell supplied what they wanted, and so we were squeezed out to a few cities who just liked us and didn't want those extra benefits. Those country City Attorneys, who were basically instrumental in hiring the bond attorneys, went to New Orleans for a party, not just for a fine dinner at Brennans or Commander's Palace. At the time I was put out for I wanted the business and was willing, at that time of my life which had little concern of such things a morality (which was the beginning of a spiral down), and thought we should be competitive. But Mac was a big gentle man in body, spirit and morals and would have no part of it. I am glad to have known him. I learned from him. Don't compromise your integrity, even though it meant loss of business.
So by 1967 Ted Jones, my buddy who was admin assistant for John McKeithen, and previously executive assistant for Congressman Speedy Long, had his masters in Tax law from Georgetown, and he suggested that I do the same. I set it up, and he sent me to Guaranty Bank in Alexandria, to set up my financing, as I didn't have any other source to pay for my 18 months in DC getting my Masters. Virgil Ayres was the banker, and of all things was from my home town of Castor, Louisiana, and he gave me the same deal he had done for Ted---honored his checks as they came in and was paid back as Ted set up his practice. I told Buchler in April I was going to leave in September and he told me it had been a bad year and if I was going to leave, why not leave now!!! Now this was a shock. I wasn't ready for that. We had been in a bind for we had not been able to sell our bonds for a year for Louisiana had a bad reputation politically and defaulting on bond issues by political cronies of past Governor Jimmie Davis, so we were in a low state with Standard and Poors and Moody's bond rating service. We had several million on such things as grain elevators, even the student union at Southern University, and couldn't sell the bonds for there was a state limit on interest and we couldn't sell them for less, so I was suddenly in the cold.
I turned in the company car and credit card, to my chagrin, and my friends Speedy Long and Lewis Sleeth (new D.A. in Jena, LaSalle Parish, in the dry hills in Central Louisiana) asked me to come and help them until September, so I moved there, found an old second hand Plymouth with a stick shift in the floor that had been a hotrod, and had transportation. I moved into an unairconditioned cinderblock building Lewis owned, and started helping them. I found many cases just about to run out of time, and rescued them by filing suit just hours before the year ran out--they had been so busy in politics (Speedy being Congressman and Lewis running for D.A. and being the youngest DA in the history of Louisiana) they had let their files get into serious condition. I went through all their cases and brought them up to date.
I was visiting a lady in Baton Rouge on weekends, and sometime in late July stopped by the bank in Alexandria to say hello to Virgil. He wasn't there. I didn't know the new guy. "Where's Virgil?"
"He's not here. He's no longer with the bank."
To say the least, I was stunned, particularly when the guy handed me a notice that the $5,000 I owed the bank, as a consolidation of my debt, was due. It seems Virgil had turned states evidence against the president and the president's son, and they kicked him out. My Georgetown Master's in Tax law went winging out of the window at that moment, and I had to scramble to resort my life as I had really wanted this degree and had no way to go for there was no money available.
Jones and Lewis had a newcomer friend in town, Al German, who was buttering up all the politicians (Ted was admin assistant to the Governor and therefore I had entrance to the Fourth Floor of the Capitol at any time, including the private elevator) and they made arrangements that I get a job as attorney for the State Parks and Recreation Department and an apartment in the Colonial Terrace, the new, stateof the art apartment complex on Wooddale Blvd. built by German. I was to be attorney for the Apartment complex and had a neat three bedroom overlooking the pool for $100 a month. I was to be paid $500 a month by the Parks, but was to kick back $100 to Lamar Gibson, the Director.
I attended montly meetings of the Commission, and monthly meetings of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, run by Clyde Funderburk, and daily went by the office (then in the Old Louisiana National Bank Building on Third Street) I actually earned the money I made, and more, but after taxes and the kickback to Lamar, I had about $150 left over.
I set up my "law office" in my apartment, got dressed, put on my tie and coat and sat in the living room. Of course nothing happened. I looked for an office around town and wanted a place where there were no lawyers. I found it out on Plank Road, the industrial part of town a few blocks from the EXXON refinery. It consisted of two rooms for $100 a month, plus utilities. For the first few months the building was under construction, being owned by Sidney Warmack, who owned finance companies, and he was renovating the building to have a finance company next door, and I had a big board people had to walk over to get into my office for a couple of months.
I had no experience or mentors. I had tried Court Martials, (even getting the first acquittal by General Court Martial that had been had at Benning in fifteen years ---U.S. v. Edwards---I wrote a fictionalized account of it in Command Influence). Military trials are very different from civilian criminal court. I had never appeared in civil court, had a set of green Revised Statutes I had bought on time from Claitor's Bookstore, and no typewriter. I bought an old second hand desk and a couple of chairs, and borrowed a portable typewriter from Lud Bandaries who lived in the apartment complex. I was really set up, but noplace to go and didn't know how to get there---just willing to make mistakes on the way and knowing that sooner or later I would get good enough to do a decent job.
I notarized papers for the new finance company. They would bring in a stack of documents and I would just sign and seal away, without seeing the guy who signed, saying I saw them. This was done everywhere then. I thought nothing of it, and did this for several finance companies and car dealers. I think this was the practice in the industry then. They would pay me some set amount a month. I notarized car titles and did bills of sale for a dollar. I stuffed the dollars in my shirt pocket, and atthe end of the day my pocket many times bulged with dollars. Here I was notarizing papers when a year before I was wearing a BrooksBrothers suit, wing tips, eating in the finest restaurants in New Orleans and being a big shot.
I was always friendly with people who came in for whatever reason, for my whole enjoyment was talking with people, and soon people came in with legal problems and some little fees. When you are new like that, there are many out there who will come in and suck you for free advice, and I realized that was so, and I was so callow and new I couldn't at first tell them from the real honest ones who would pay. I looked so young in 1967 (I was thirty two) that I was carded when I bought a beer. It was hard looking so young giving advice to those who looked at you like you didn't know anything, and they were largely right, for I was starting out and knew little. It's odd how people feel intimidated at the aspect of a piece of paper on the wall. That's how I was able to make a living those years, by just having the paper on the wall.
At first there was a trickle of business. First a bankruptcy came in. I knew NOTHING about bankruptcies, so I got a book, borrowed some forms from a lawyer friend and filed it, learning as I went, and soon I was handling lots of bankruptcies. The same with divorces. I typed terrible looking petitions out on that skipping and uneven typewriter, with onion skin carbon copies. I filed them and went to court, watching other lawyers confirm the divorce judgments and soon was pretty good, able to think with it. I closed loans. They were simple in those days, no big deal. I checked title, gave title opinions, and drew upt he deeds from a form book and did assumption of mortgages, which were allowed in those days. I never dreamed I would be disbarred thirty years later and be in the mortgage business.
Things were so loose. You could file suit in Federal court "written on a brown paper bag," it was said. No rules. Now there is a thicket of rules you have to abide or get kicked out of court. In those days when you filed suit you usually saw the defendant the first time in court, as there was no discovery, no such thing as depositions to find out what they were going to say. You just went for it. In a couple of years I had fumbled and bumbled my way to a decent law practice, and had to hire law clerks. By 1969 I had associated Bert Garraway, and it was Sledge and Garraway, with three secretaries, and had expanded into the vacant office next door and was known as an ass kicking lawyer.
For some reason, one Evangelical preacher after another started coming in for this or that, growing to the finale' of preachers when a well coiffured man named Jimmy Swaggart came in and said "every man of God needs a mammon." Well, not having any idea what Mammon was, and not knowing Jimmy Swaggart from Adam, or Eve, for he was unknown in 1968. Being a dictionary kind of guy, owning at least two dozen of all kinds, I found a consistent definition of "Riches, wealth, sometimes personified as the god or demon of riches."
"If therefore, ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?" Luke xvi.ll.
"Ye cannot seve God and Mammon," Matt. vi.24.
If he was there to deal with a man of riches, a mammon type, he was in the wrong pew. I could barely pay my light bill.
Well, I was impressed by his Do, all pomped up and almost ducked in the back, and those clear blue eyes that spoke of an intensity I had never seen except when I was in the Army when a martinet officer delivered a machine gunned lecture on the merits of discipline and good order. Here was this crisp man who told me he had just returned from Ohio where he had done a tent revival on the riverbank and overnight there was a flood destroying two Cadillacs. I was shocked that anyone would have two Cadillacs. I was even more shocked to hear that he wasn't worried, for his revival more than paid for them, besides, they were insured.
I began to see the light, and it hurt my eyes. This began a seven year representation of this Man of the Cloth, as his Mammon, forming corporations, buying WLUX radio station, or whatever he needed. He was good pay. I sent a bill and got a check right back. I got so busy in personal injury work, making good money at it, that I lost interst in Jimmy, never realizing he would become one of the major TV Evangelist of the world. Back in the early seventies, Burt Garraway, the lawyer working for me, went to his office in Melrose (he bought almost a block of property there under the name of Campmeeting Revivals, Inc., a non-profit corporation) and found a room filled with girls sitting at desks each with a large stuffed mail bag sitting nearby, and several large garbage cans sitting hard by the desk. She would slice open an envelope and shake the money out into the garbage can and drop the envelope in another garbage can. There were a dozen girls busily engaged in this money shaking enterprise.
By 1975 that area of Plank Road had degenerated to a crime area and I moved to Wooddale Blvd., in the office building where my cousin, David Sledge, was running the Family Debt Counsellers. Burt went to practice with old man Spedale on Plank and I left him with Jimmy, as I was so busy with my PI practice I had no time for hourly fees. I was the state expert at trying and winning cases against the Highway department for defective roads causing injuries. I won eight major cases in a row, including one million dollar judgment on a supposedly unwinnable case in Amite when my client hydroplaned into a bridge abutment on LA 16.
I had become the lawyer of the highway, nailing them every time with big judgments for defective design and maintenance, and lawyers referred me these difficult and long lasting cases. The highway department always fought the cases, delayed, appealed when you won and cases took years. I hung in there and made the law. I will write about some of these cases in my future Rants for they were all unique and scary, for they were tricky and hard fought.
By 1976 I was burned out, working night and day and weekends. I met the Cloy brothers, Charles and Jarvis, and they offered me a deal. Come with them and be the lawyer for the company and they would teach me the construction business involving industrial controls and installation. I set up Southway Corporation, moved off Wooddale and into a metal building that housed their construction company way back off North Sherwood in the commercial section. We put seven bids in for seven jobs and MMR (Matthews, McCracken and Rutland) low balled us in every bid, knowing they had staying power---being the big industrial giant in this business they are---and knowing they could knock us right out of the park, and we never got one job we bid on over eight months. I realized this was barracuda waters, and I moved in with Winston Riddick in his old house that served as a law office on N. Fifth Street, where I restarted the practice.
It was then that the Bates O'Steen decision came down, and Jacoby and Myers decision in L. A., involving lawyer advertising. I saw the writing on the wall and made a major decision at that point. I was in LA at that time off and on and dropped by Jacoby's office and visited him. He had a legal clinic doing divorces. A paralegal would interview and he would never see the client until trial when he ran them through like cattle. He would call a name, the name came forth and went into the court room and bingo a divorce, and he would call another name, going through lists of dozens a day until he was done. He made a fortune. I thought it may work in Louisianas, I set up The Louisiana Legal Clinic, but it didn't work, for people want personalized service and even though a non contested divorce is simple, they want to talk to the lawyer and that took too much time to justify it.
So I put an ad in the yellow pages. It was only the size of a business card, but the phone rang off the hook. It was the first ad in the book. I moved to the Taylor Building on 3rd Street, with offices on the fourth floor overlooking the river. I had an association with Randy Shipp and Kevin Galatas with my law clerk Bob Godwin. By now I was exclusively doing PI work. Galatas had been my law clerk while I was in the 5th street building. Galatas blew, left, and took some good cases without my permission. Shipp went with another lawyer who was running for judge. He was going to get his practice when he won. I moved to a little office catacornered behind Perkins Road Hardware on Perkins near the overpass. I was there when I hit the highway department for a million for damages to the family that hit the bridge in Amite after hydroplaning down a highway that had literally been resurfaced by tar leaking from trucks leaving a nearby asphalt plant.
I was told by my CPA that the fee I made of around $350,000 was all to be eaten up in taxes. I was more than disgusted. I left BR for the summer, and went with my bride Michele, eight year old daughter and new three month old son Jake and spent the summer in California. I met my friend Bill Yaude and he was in the tax shelter busines with a company out of Los Vegas, selling tax shelter giving 6:1, 3:1, and I decided to buy some eighteen wheelers, art, and oil interests, and did so, reducing my tax bill to $5000 which were later denied, but it cut me some slack for two or three years. I decided to get intot he business and tried it for several months and realized it wasn't worth it for I didn't sell one tax shelter. I bought an interest in Bill's father's talc mine in Marblemount, WA, for a $25,000 and lost that. I was a terrible investor.
I returned to BR in October and decided to study for the Series 7 exam and studied for it while looking around for deals. I had met Dr. Nathan Schlecter some years earlier. He was a phd. chemical engineer, reputed to having built the Amarada Hess refinery in St. Croix. I had met him several years before when twoguys came through Baton Rouge, Larry Fuhrmann and Bill Spires, with him in tow, with plans to build a refinery on Plaquemine point, a phallic looking piece of land formed by the Mississippi forming a long horseshoe bend leaving a peninsula that, back at the base was about 2 mile wide. In other words, you could travel west two miles and meet the river again. These guys were going to get an option on the land and he was going to build a refinery.
The had hired me at $1000 a month to just be there, and I gave them some names of men who may invest, and they took these guys and whipped them into a frenzy of buying and sold them interests in the refinery, used the money to buy an option, and kept the option to themselves. When I learned of this I told the investors but they were so sold on these good boys that they turned against me. Schlecter hadn't been paid for his work so he called and I filed a suit and a lis pendens and lien on the land. Furhman had used the money to buy the option and kept it for himself and was about to sell it to the ________ brothers who were going to build a coal slurry plant on the spot just before their silver empire crumbled. He finally did sell it for a profit of around $3,000, 000 and walked, leaving the investors hanging. I learned to never bring my friends into any deal. So Schlecter was still in Baton Rouge.
His wife kicked him out of the house and he appeared at my door needing a place to stay, and he became the man who came to dinner. Two years later he was still there, putting together deals. We decided to find a refinery not being used, and there were plenty of them in those days. It seems during President Carter's reign there were small refineries that said they were being prejudiced by the big boys, and so the order of the day was the big ones were to supply feed stock to the little ones at cost, and the little ones were to sell the finished product back to the big ones at a profit. Refineries sprang up like weeds inthe garden, and soon the big refineries were just paying the little ones to stay in business. When Reagan came in he cut it out and the refineries went out of business. They were all over.
We were going to make JP4, the fuel used in military aircraft. It was a mixture of fuels of high octane that needed minimal work. There was a minority owner in Beaumont who just mixed the stuff and sold it without ever turning on a cracker.
We found one in Brownsville Texas, on the Intercoastal canal, and I got an option and needed $2,000,000 to put it into operation. The next year was spent trying to find the money. We didn't. But we went through all kinds of big shots who said they could do it---the profits would have been huge. The Defense Fuel Supply in Baltimore gave us the first approvals and the go ahead. They even held up the bidding in 1983 to wait for our plans to come through, and we just couldn't find the money.
Finally, one of Doc's friends in Houston finds this guy, Walter Combs, a so called genius in finance with a stable of forty or fifty doctors who used him for consultation. He had just returned from two years in Africa. He had a size twelve hat and a size twenty neck, and a big gold tooth right in front. He cussed a lot. I sold him my company, AMJET, Inc., with a payment of $20,000 a month until operations began, after which I would make $800,000 a year just on my interest. This was a big deal. It was real as well. He said he would raise the two million from his doctors. Then he said he was going to sell bonds. Having been a bond attorney for four years, I knew this was impossible. I told him so.
He bought a small operational company that had gone public and was just making it, and he used that vehicle to suck my company under the shelter of it and do a big reissue of the stock. He made a big issue, split it 8:1, took lots of shares, and had it set for sale after getting a market maker in NY and a broker in LA, and it went on the market in December 1984. He, like Furhmann, used me to pull off a crooked deal and make themselves millions. I saw the stock start at $1.00, plunge to 25cents by noon. I saw my project was dead, I was broke, and I tucked my tail and came home, knowing I could make it in law if I tried. I had before.
So I started all over inJanuary 1984 after an absence of nearly five years and by 1987 had the biggest fee year ever. I will tell about this tomorrow. After which I have decided I will tell the whole story about my disbarment.
