Priceless Defenders

IN June 1967, Grant B. Cooper flew to Danang to win acquittal for a Marine sergeant charged with murdering a Vietnamese civilian. The boy's parents paid his fee, but the grizzled lawyer picked up the air fare. When somebody asked him why he went all the way to a battle zone halfway round the world, Cooper replied: "I've never defended a man in a military court before." Most probably he took on the Sirhan case--without pay--because he had never defended an accused assassin before.

Born in New York City in 1903, Cooper decided in high school that he had had enough education. He made his way to California as an engine-room wiper on a tanker. He went to work for an uncle's law firm in Los Angeles, studying at night, and in 1927 passed the bar exam. Cooper built a thriving law firm. He defended Dr. Bernard Finch who, with his mistress Carole Tregoff, killed Finch's wife. Two juries were deadlocked and three trials held before Finch and Tregoff were convicted. They were saved from the gas chamber, and connoisseurs of courtroom melodrama still recall the lawyer's re-enactment of Finch's supposed struggle to get the gun from his wife before--as he claimed--she shot herself.

While Cooper handles the day-to-day presentation of Sirhan's defense, Russell E. Parsons will be preparing witnesses and planning appeals, which are his specialty. His most famous was in the 1955 case of People v. Cahan, which involved a bookmaker whose Hollywood apartment was bugged by police. Parsons claimed that law-enforcement agencies had thus electronically crossed Cahan's threshold. His argument successfully established the California law that evidence illegally obtained is inadmissible in a criminal case.

Oldest member of the Sirhan defense team, at 73, Parsons won his law degree at the University of Southern California. In 1935, he defended a murderer named "Rattlesnake" James, who tried to kill his wife by holding her foot in a box full of rattlesnakes. To play it safe, James dispatched her by drowning. Parsons managed to keep his client alive for seven years after conviction in a day when appeals were hard to come by. As for his defense of Sirhan: "It won't be the first time I've defended someone free," he says. "There's a poor devil in trouble, and that's enough for me."

The third member of the team, Emile Zola Berman, was once described by an associate as a "marvelously warm person" who looks like "a living version of Ichabod Crane." Last week he spotted Mary Sirhan shyly working her way through the reporters in the courtroom. Berman bowed gracefully and kissed Mrs. Sirhan's hand--a gesture for which she was obviously unprepared. Nor was her son prepared to be defended by a Jew for a crime he allegedly committed because of his victim's pro-Israeli campaign oratory.

A celebrated New York negligence lawyer, he traveled several years ago to Louisiana to save the life of Camille Cravelle, a Negro charged with "aggravated rape" of a white woman. Berman argued before an all-white jury in a segregated courtroom, finally came out of the capital case with a three-year sentence for his client--later reduced to 18 months. In 1956, he made headlines with his defense of Marine Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, who faced a six-year term for ordering a march on Parris Island that resulted in the drowning of six recruits. Berman got the drill instructor off with only light punishment.

Berman, 66, was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side of romantically minded parents. He is fond of saying that "you could never survive in that neighborhood with a name like Emile Zola"--hence he is nicknamed "Zook." After getting a law degree from New York University and practicing in Manhattan, Berman flew bombers in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II as part of "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's personal wing. He was discharged with the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal and Bronze Star.

Berman is chief trial lawyer in a New York firm, and has lectured at more than 30 law schools around the country. At a convention of trial lawyers last summer, Cooper tapped him for the Sirhan team. He has his hotel and expenses covered but gets no fee. He will give the opening statement for the defense, a ritual at which he is particularly gifted, and will probably handle the medical witnesses.

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