Gerry Spence: Buckaroo Barrister

In late August 1992, Randy Weaver was holed up in his shack on Ruby Ridge, a rocky bluff in the mountains of northern Idaho. His wife's body had been rotting at his feet for a week, ever since an FBI sniper shot her through the face as she held their infant daughter. His 14-year-old son, also killed by a federal agent, lay lifeless in the barn. Weaver, a white separatist under siege for violating gun laws, had taken a bullet in the shoulder. Hundreds of FBI agents and other lawmen surrounded the cabin. Weaver prepared to die.

Bo Gritz, a burly and bearded leader among survivalists, volunteered to negotiate Weaver's surrender. He made it to the Ruby Ridge cabin, fought off the stench of the rotting body and huddled with Weaver. Weaver wanted to walk out alive with his surviving teenage daughter and the baby. And he wanted a good lawyer.

"Maybe I can get Gerry Spence to represent you," Gritz said.

"Who's Gerry Spence?" Weaver asked.

Gritz explained that Spence is one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country, a towering mountain man who wears a buckskin jacket to court and wins big cases for the little guys. Weaver was not impressed. Gritz searched for something else to say, something that might convince Weaver. "Spence," Gritz said, "is the man who defended Imelda Marcos."

"Imelda Marcos," Weaver said. "He must be big stuff."

Gerry Spence was in his baronial log mansion in Jackson Hole, Wyoming when Gritz called. He didn't know Gritz and had never heard of Randy Weaver or Ruby Ridge. Gritz described the gory scene. "Weaver will surrender if you'll represent him," Gritz said.

"I can't represent someone I've never met," Spence shot back. He did, however, agree to talk with him. That was enough for Weaver, and he walked out with his hands up.

Spence flew to Idaho that night and interviewed Weaver in jail. The case had all the makings of a classic Spence crusade: The rest of the country saw Weaver as a nut from the white-militia lunatic fringe, but to Spence this was yet another example of big government ganging up on a little guy. Spence loves defending "ordinary people" against big corporations, big government or the "one-eyed media." The national spotlight was beaming on Ruby Ridge, and it would cast its glow on Gerry Spence.

On April 13, 1994 Randy Weaver walked into a Boise, Idaho courtroom with Spence leading his defense. Weaver faced charges of murdering a U.S. marshal during the siege, conspiracy, assaulting federal agents and selling illegal weapons. His guilt was a foregone conclusion and a conviction was a mere formality. But for the next 42 days Spence showcased the courtroom tactics and dramatics that have enshrined him as perhaps the most brilliant litigator of his time.

The government prosecutors vilified Weaver---a short, meek-looking man---as a crazed zealot bent on bringing down the federal government. They linked him to the Aryan Nation's white supremacist militia. They dumped his cache of rifles and pistols in front of the jury box to prove how dangerous he was. They described how deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan was shot dead in the skirmish on Ruby Ridge. Then they rested their case, leaving the stage for Gerry Spence.

Resplendent in his rawhide, Spence zeroed in on the bloody siege and focused the 12 members of the jury on one question: Who was the real murderer? Pacing back and forth in the courtroom, Spence told the jurors in plain language how the Weavers tried to live a simple and peaceful life in the mountains. The villains in his version of the story were the FBI crack shooters who killed Weaver's wife and son in cold blood. He called the agents to the stand.

"Well," Spence asked FBI agent Richard Rogers, head of the elite unit at Ruby Ridge, "did you know of anybody then, and do you know of anybody (continued on page 126)Gerry Spence(continued from page 122) now, as you sit here today, who saw Mr. Weaver shoot anybody?"

"No," answered Rogers.

Spence asked if anyone had seen Randy Weaver point a gun at anyone. Rogers said no.

Spence then called Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper who shot Vicki Weaver as she held her baby, Elisheba.

"Did you fire a warning shot?" Spence asked.

"Sir, we do not fire warning shots in the FBI."

"Well, if you do shoot at someone," Spence asked, "you shoot to kill, don't you?"

"Yes, sir," Horiuchi responded.

"Do you enjoy your job?" Spence asked a minute later.

"Yes," Horiuchi answered.

Spence paused and looked at the jurors. Dorothy Mitchell, sitting in the jury box, shuddered. "That was hard for me to take," she told a Washington Post reporter. "He was just coldhearted."

"This is a murder case," Spence boomed to the jurors during his closing argument, "but the people who committed the murders have not been charged."

The jury acquitted Randy Weaver of murder and all other major charges. Spence also helped Weaver win a $3.1 million award from the government. In September 1995 Weaver testified before nationally televised Senate hearings that focused on the Ruby Ridge siege and slammed the FBI. Spence, once again resplendent in rawhide, played the hero.

It's a role he loves. Spence has written six books and has won dozens of celebrated cases. (A good example is the $10 million verdict he gained in Karen Silkwood's plutonium contamination case against Kerr-McGee.) But the Ruby Ridge case and the O.J. Simpson trial put Spence over the top. NBC hired him as a Simpson trial consultant and Larry King named him to his dream team of commentators who tussled over O.J. every week. CNBC assigned him a weekly talk show, putting him in the Geraldo Rivera orbit. His latest book, How to Argue and Win Every Time, is a best-seller. He went to President Clinton's birthday party last summer in Jackson Hole, and he showed up at a White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington. Everyone else wore black tie. Spence, of course, wore black buckskin.

"I think he's a corny figure," says Washington Post television critic Tom Shales. "That ridiculous buckskin jacket reeks of a calculated way of distinguishing himself from all the other lawyers on TV. There's a line between the law and showbiz. He crossed it some time ago."

That line grows fuzzier by the day. Major trials are becoming the moral dramas that define American values. The Simpson case was about murder, spouse abuse and race. Randy Weaver's trial raised fundamental questions about the government's abuse of force. The Menendez case was a tale of greed and parenticide. William Kennedy Smith's trial was about upper-class rape and Mike Tyson's was about lower-class rape. Susan Smith makes us wonder how a mother could drown her two sons.

Who will interpret the issues raised in these cases? Gerry Spence will. He has volunteered to be a wise man for hire at a time when America seems terribly confused. But Spence can be confusing as well: Is he a TV personality, a writer, an egomaniacal huckster, a philosopher or---as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz calls him---a prophet?

•

To get to Spence's log castle in Jackson Hole, you take a winding two-lane road out of the small town of Wilson at the foot of Teton Pass. His driveway snakes up a hill through a stand of aspens. He has named his spread Singing Trees. The house sits in a small meadow cut into the mountains. To the north the jagged peaks of the Tetons hit you in the face.

The man who opens the heavy door is wearing a frumpy red cardigan sweater. The gray workout pants are baggy and have a few holes. His toes peek out of old running shoes. He is tall and bearish. His shoulders are rounded and a bit hunched. His gait is stiff, his white hair shaggy, his cheeks ashen. He sticks out a hand and his blue eyes sparkle, a bit worn but friendly.

"Gerry Spence," he says.

Although he doesn't look like the same Gerry Spence who dominates the courtroom, he has many faces---and the one around the house apparently is that of a comfy codger.

Today, Spence is in his writer mode. He is 14 chapters into his memoirs, The Making of a Country Lawyer. It's his seventh book, and like the others, it's mostly about himself.

I look around at the wilderness and try to imagine Johnnie Cochran or Roy Black living in such a remote locale. "Why," I ask him, "did you choose the mountains?"

"Why does the guru, the wise man, live on the mountain?" he responds. "I'm not suggesting I'm a wise man. I'm suggesting there's a value to being separate in the extreme. There's an underlying wisdom in mother nature. There's a sort of sanity that can be gained here."

By now we've climbed two flights of stairs to his study.

"You step out on my porch and it's absolutely silent," he says. "Except when I hear the goddamn fax machine."

On the way up the stairs I had caught a glimpse of the cavernous living room and the chandelier made of moose antlers. His home, designed by his wife, Imaging, is medieval in scale but hobbitlike in design, topped by turrets and adorned with octagonal windows. It's built with massive tree trunks and big boulders, as if it were made for a giant. In Spence's book-lined study there are American Indian totems that are carved out of wood, buffalo skulls hanging on the stone fireplace, a .50-caliber buffalo rifle slung on the stones, a grainy photo of a cattle drive and photos of his parents on the walls. Pieces of his past are all around.

As we talk, Spence rages and preaches, lectures and argues. But he begins with a few words about the Simpson trial that made him a TV all-star.

"It's a watershed case in this country," he says. "In a way it's as important to this nation as the Civil War. We may be on the brink of a new kind of civil war."

He warms to the subject, leans toward me so that our knees are almost touching. His voice rises in volume, deepens in pitch. This is Spence the thespian lawyer.

"And so," he says, pausing for effect, "it means that there's massive almost-unanimity within the black community, which feels it is banished from the white power structure."

It's a note that Spence struck often during the endless hours of television rehashes of the Simpson case. He doesn't like the white power structure, even though it made him. But he uses it, and he's a member in good standing. Beneath the brilliant attorney and the homespun facade, Spence is an angry, radical populist.

"You seem to have a lot of rage," I say. (continued on page 167)Gerry Spence(continued from page 126)

"Thank you for feeling it," he says. He puts his large hands over his face, with the tips of his fingers over his eyebrows and the palms at his chin, and stretches his skin like a mask, as if he could wipe away the rage.

"You want to know why I'm angry?" he says. "I used to be a Republican. I ran for Congress in 1962 as a Republican. If you'd have read my press clippings, I'd have made Newt Gingrich a great running mate. I hated welfare. But I didn't know anything. I lived in this little state of Wyoming and never experienced the suffering of little people until I started representing them in courts. Then I saw the power of the corporations and how they control Congress and the appointment of judges. You join in that sense of powerlessness.

"In fact, you begin to feel like a black man. I feel like a black man. People will misunderstand that. I feel as if I have been banished along with the poor and the damned and the injured and the forgotten and the hated. They are my clients. If you live with them and suffer with them and care about them and love them every day of your life, you begin to understand."

I can't help but mention that few of the disenfranchised manage to live in such splendor.

"You see this house," he says, "and whatever else I have. It all comes from insurance companies. That's like an Indian hanging out his scalps. These are my fucking scalps."

He's a black man? An Indian? Or is he merely a master manipulator?

To understand anything about this man you have to begin with his parents: with his father, the decent man who taught him by example to live an ethical life, and with his mother, a religious woman whom Spence believes may have died for his sins.

•

Gerry Spence's early life was rugged, Western and wholesome. He was born at home, in Laramie, Wyoming, just after midnight on January 8, 1929, the dawn of the Depression. His father was a chemist who worked in factories and fed the family elk meat and homegrown vegetables. His mother sewed clothes from animal skins and made sure Gerry went to church every Sunday.

Midway through our first interview, as the afternoon light faded from Spence's study, he said, "Come over here. I'll introduce you to my father." He beckoned me to a nook by a window and showed me a 16"x20" photograph he had taken of his father in 1991, a year before he died at the age of 92. "The greatest man I ever knew," he said.

Before Spence was big enough to hold a rifle, his father would take him into the Bighorn Mountains to stalk deer and elk. Spence was 12 when he killed his first deer, and from that day on he reveled in the "gutting-out process, the blood clear to one's shoulders, the smell of the fresh slaughtered animal warm and good on one's body," as he wrote in one of his books. Spence has quit hunting wild animals, but he still sees himself as a killer when he goes into the courtroom. "You just have to exercise a powerful amount of judgment as to who you kill," he says.

At 17 Spence left his home for a tour in the merchant marines. He drank whiskey and visited bordellos in every port. In Aruba, girls sat in bars naked and went "beach-beachy" with him all night. For the big Westerner, it was the blossoming of his swaggering ego, which was about to reach full flower in lawyer Spence.

One day in 1949 Esther Spence, Gerry's mother, took her husband's hunting rifle, walked into the orchard behind her parents' ranch, lay down under an apple tree, put the barrel in her mouth and blew out the back of her head.

Gerry Spence blamed himself for his mother's suicide. He was 20 at the time. When he was four, his younger sister, Peggy, died of cerebral meningitis. Esther feared that her son would contract the disease and die, so she made a biblical deal with God: Spare my son and I'll give him to you. Instead, Gerry Spence turned out to be an unruly rake, "whoring, drinking and gambling," he admits.

He returned to Wyoming, married Anna Wilson and went to law school at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. They had the first of three children. He graduated from law school at the top of his class and flunked the bar exam. Crushed at 23, he picked himself up, passed the exam and moved to Riverton, a tiny town in central Wyoming. He was a failure in private practice, so he ran for and won a job as county attorney, and then as prosecutor. In those two four-year terms, Spence honed his basic trial skills. At first he lost cases to veteran defense attorneys. He yearned to deliver spontaneous oratory but always needed notes. He made up for his weaknesses with dogged preparation.

By 1962 Spence was winning cases and had become so powerful that he decided to run for Congress as a Republican. He won just one precinct, two votes to one. The humiliating defeat sent him into a depression ruled by his mother's ghost, which he claims started visiting him in dreams after her suicide. To exorcise the demons, he tried sensitivity training and found himself at a mountaintop retreat for couples that was sponsored by the Episcopal Church. They took turns explaining why they had come.

"I have come here today, brothers and sisters, for one purpose," Spence said, "and that is to fuck your wives."

Instead, he began to get in touch with his inner self. He conversed with his mother. He returned to Riverton and worked like a man possessed. But he continued to drink heavily and sleep with other women. Then he found the love of his life.

Spence was skiing in Jackson Hole when he spied "an exotically beautiful woman with raven hair and flashing blue eyes." A month later he saw her again in Casper. They started talking by phone and meeting in funky hotels. They drove naked across the prairies and drank whiskey all night. Gerry Spence had fallen madly in love with LaNelle Hampton Peterson Hawks, who was married and had children. He wrote poems to her by day and dreamed poems of her at night. The name Imaging came to him in a dream. He gave her the name and it stuck.

Spence's first marriage didn't. One day his wife caught Spence and Imaging drinking whiskey and cavorting on the roof of Spence's office in Riverton. Torn between his family and this wild affair, Spence moved with his wife and four children to Mill Valley, California. Finally, he left Anna, drove back to Wyoming, settled in Casper and married Imaging in Lake Tahoe. It was in Casper that Gerry Spence's legal resurrection took place.

•

Spence and Imaging were shopping at the Safeway in Casper when they saw an old man Spence had recently beaten out of an insurance settlement after a woman ran her car into him and left him crippled.

"I'm sorry how your case turned out," Spence said in a moment of uncharacteristic empathy.

"Don't feel bad," the old man replied. "You were just doing your job." He patted Spence on the back and smiled.

Up to that moment, Spence had made good money representing insurance companies. But that chance encounter triggered the transformation of Gerry Spence, the insurance company lawyer, to Brother Spence, attorney for the downtrodden.

"What would have happened," Spence asks, "if he had turned to me and said, 'You motherfucker, you've just cheated me out of my justice'? I'd have said he should have hired a better lawyer. But when he turned to me with love and forgiveness in his eyes and said, 'You were just doing your job,' that brought into question what my job was. I was at the age when I was questioning life. Is it just masturbatory ejaculation? Hedonistic expression of my egotistical self? All of a sudden it became clear: To cheat poor people because I had been given a talent was not my job."

From that day on, Spence championed the underdog. He won a $1.3 million verdict for a secretary who caught gonorrhea from the son of an ambassador. He successfully defended Ed Cantrell, a Wyoming highway patrolman who shot an undercover agent between the eyes. The agent was a key witness in a statewide corruption case, but Spence convinced a jury that Cantrell was acting in self-defense. The Karen Silkwood case in 1979 vaulted Spence to national attention.

It was the beginning of Spence's evangelical stage. He spoke to groups of trial lawyers across the country and pleaded with them to be ethical and moral, to "tell the simple truth" and to speak to jurors from their hearts. After a speech to members of one bar association, a judge and his wife approached him.

"You should have been an actor, Mr. Spence," she said. "No, wrong," the judge broke in. "He is an actor."

"I don't think it's acting," Spence said. "I think it's the opposite. It's being who you are: angry, sad, maybe afraid."

"Don't give us that shit, Gerry," the judge said. Then he laughed and the couple walked off.

•

Now Spence is giving the shit back and laughing all the way to the TV studio. He's hammering home the same themes in books, television and interviews: Lawyers should represent the little guy and return power to the individual. Big corporations and big government are evil. Eat the rich.

"See," he tells me early in the interview, "I don't like rich people. And I'm richer than most of the rich people I don't like."

Living in Jackson Hole, a playground for the rich, and working in television, he has plenty of rich friends. Alan Hirsh-field, former chairman of Twentieth Century Fox, is his "close friend" in Jackson Hole. Larry King is another wealthy buddy. ("If Spence weren't from Wyoming," says King, "he'd be from Brooklyn.") But Spence says that his everyday buddies are local photographers and the people he defends, not the corporate fat cats.

"I've turned down millions of dollars because I don't want to defend corporate America," he says. "That isn't what I want to do with my life."

In defending the little guy, Spence has done quite well for himself. He has won dozens of big cases, with multimillion-dollar payoffs against McDonald's, Aetna, USX Corp. and others. His books are moneymakers. He owns his land in Jackson Hole, where he moved 18 years ago, and a ranch in Dubois where he conducts the Trial Lawyer College every summer. Whenever he wins a case, gets on Larry King Live or talks law on his own show, people clamor for his services.

But as the demand for Spence's legal services increases, he spends less time practicing law. He rises at five a.m., has coffee and a bowl of oatmeal, goes to his study and writes until noon. He naps after lunch, and in the afternoon he does interviews and makes calls. In the evening he takes a walk with Imaging. When does he go to the law office of Spence, Moriarity and Schuster in Jackson Hole, the one with the huge carved eagle over the door? "Never," he says. He selects the few cases he takes from the solitude of his study.

"I wait until I see a case I fall in love with," he says, "because I don't believe a lawyer can represent a client without caring about the client. Caring is a contagious emotion. You can't ask jurors to care about your client if you don't. I have the opportunity to do countless cases that I feel need to be done. I try to find cases that have powerful, irresistible influence, where the issues of the case transcend the case itself."

One thing that transcended the Randy Weaver case was that his client was a white supremacist and reputedly a card-carrying member of the Aryan Nation. Spence's friend Alan Hirsh-field pointed that out in a letter imploring him not to take the case. Spence wrote back that his sister is married to a black man and his daughter is married to a Jew. Still, many complained that his antigovernment rhetoric and his defense of Weaver made him a hero in the militia movement.

"You and I both could find things about every philosophy we agree with," he says. "But we have our own overriding ideals. I'm so far left of the militia groups that I meet them coming around the other side. It's a strange dichotomy that, as you say, my writing gives comfort to militia groups. But they're not reading carefully what I write."

Spence's critique of American society, a body of thought that he's been developing for more than 20 years, indicts the country's politics, economy and media. But he offers little in the way of remedies. He shies away from revolution and doesn't trust reform. His solution boils down to a belief that people will throw off their bonds when they are given the facts of their enslavement. His job is to get the word out through the media and by example through the cases he takes. So would he, for instance, represent Timothy McVeigh, who allegedly bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City?

"What do I have when I'm finished?" he asks. "When I finished the Randy Weaver case, I had America focused on a problem. When I finished the Imelda Marcos case, I had America focused on a problem. I haven't looked at the Oklahoma case and probably won't. What do I have if I represent McVeigh?"

He pauses. The hatred of the entire nation, perhaps?

"I can't see it," he says.

•

Spence has displayed his healthy ego most of his life. When he moved from Wyoming to Mill Valley in a vain attempt to salvage his marriage, he tried to place an ad in the American Bar Association Journal. "Best trial lawyer in America needs work," it read. The journal returned it with his check.

Gerry Spence revels in his ego. "It is I, always not the client, on trial," he wrote in his first book. "The jury accepts or rejects me, not my case. I make the case. I am the director, the producer, its principal actor. It is my courtroom, my judge, my jury." And if the jurors say no, "they are saying no to all of me."

Spence understands exactly how to make the most out of himself. He's a master at self-promotion. Which brings us to the question most asked about him: What's with the fringe? "That's how I became who I am," he tells me. "You have to market yourself a little bit. I wanted to distinguish myself from all of those defense lawyers in New York."

The homespun frontier image has worked well for Spence, but even his friends worry that he's in danger of becoming a caricature.

"Have I already? That's the question," he says. "I think there's a danger all right. Television creates these huge myths. People see me on TV in this status called celebrity. It's nothing but a myth. And it is caricature."

It's hard to separate the caricature from the man and especially difficult to understand how Spence could be both a glib television talker one day and a brilliant lawyer the next. It seems that sooner or later the caricature will cheapen the substance and diminish the brilliance of what Spence does best, which is to serve clients as one of the top trial lawyers in America. At some point he'll have to decide between the greenroom and the courtroom.

A few of his legal brethren are annoyed. "The costume and the awshucks act are enough to turn me off," says Sol Linowitz, a respected Washington, D.C. attorney and former ambassador who co-authored The Betrayed Profession, a book on legal ethics.

Judged as a lawyer, Spence sometimes has been compared to Clarence Darrow. That's a bit much, he allows, and he doesn't like to be in the same league with Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. He relates more favorably to William Kunstler. He believes Ralph Nader is "the greatest man in America."

"I don't know where I fit in," he says. "I'm more thoughtful than most lawyers, other than Nader, and I think my agenda is broader."

•

In ten minutes Spence will be live on CNBC, broadcasting Gerry Spence from his living room inside the log castle at Singing Trees.

It's Friday evening, and a truck with antennas and a satellite dish is parked by the side of the house, as it is every week in preparation for the regular broadcast at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time. CNBC is based in Fort Lee, New Jersey and Spence was asked to fly in to broadcast from the studio. No way, he said. You come to me.

The Spence who greets me at the door this time is made for TV. He's sporting the buckskin fringe and a black turtle-neck, but he's still wearing the well-worn sweatpants and the Swiss-cheese running shoes. Spence is in a jocular mood, juiced up for the show. We chat about Bill Clinton's visit to Jackson Hole in August, and I ask what he thinks of the president.

"I have doubts about somebody who plays 280 holes of golf in Jackson Hole while the world is in turmoil, babies are starving, families are homeless and men are dying at war. Golf has ruined more good men than whiskey."

It's 60 seconds to showtime. Larry King introduced Spence to the camera when King started his CNN show years ago. Spence was his third guest, after Mario Cuomo and Pat Buchanan. "We knew right away he was special," says King. "He's such a character they should do a sitcom about him, Spence for the Defense. He would play himself. No one else could play him."

As Spence is about to go live, Imaging makes her entrance. She's a tiny woman dressed in black. Her hair is jet black and semispiked. Her cheekbones are high, her lips are full, but it's her blue eyes that captivate. Imaging quickly walks over to Spence and applies some rouge to his face. "Perfect, honey, thank you," he says. She takes her seat just to the right of the camera, so that when Spence looks toward the lens, he can focus on Imaging.

As usual, Spence welcomes his viewing audience to his weekly fireside chat with a short homily on the natural wonders of Jackson Hole. He presents his guest, Roy Black, the defense attorney famous for getting William Kennedy Smith acquitted of rape. Black is in Miami and appears on a split screen. He is one of a host of high-priced defense attorneys whom Spence has showcased. Before Black, Spence brought on Albert Krieger, lawyer to mobster John Gotti.

It sometimes seems as if Spence wants to use his show to rehabilitate the entire legal profession. On one segment he asks: "Do you think all defense lawyers are sleazy?" With Roy Black he tries to explain the Simpson verdict as a validation of the American judicial system.

Before every commercial break he puts on a folksy grin, holds his hand up to the camera, slowly bends his thumb up and down and says: "Don't touch that clicker. If you do, I'll be sad."

A minute before he goes off the air, Spence bids goodbye to Roy Black and closes with a minisermon. He smiles, the timbre of his voice drops and he delivers a homily on the subject of banishment. He explains how the Indians punished people by banishing them. How horrible it is that "we" have banished entire segments of our society, he says, implying that African Americans, especially, have been banished.

"Don't do it," he begs. "Don't banish your children, don't banish your neighbors. Don't banish the man on the highway. You have the power. That's it for me tonight. Goodbye." Imaging, Spence and I gather for a quick critique. "Do you think I'm preaching?" he asks me.

"Do you want to?" I ask.

"Well, you can't help yourself," says Imaging.

"I guess I am," he says. "Perhaps Mother would be proud."

"You step out on my porch and it's absolutely silent," Spence says. "Except when I hear the goddamn fax."

At 17 Spence left home for the merchant marines. He drank whiskey and visited bordellos in every port.