The Lawyer of Last Resort

By Bennett H. Beach

Proudly overzealous, Alan Dershowitz fights the "cheat elite"

When Claus von Billow appeared in Newport, R.I., last week to hear himself sentenced to 30 years in prison, he had a new lawyer on his team, a slight, bespectacled fellow with reddish brown, frizzy hair, seen by some as a cross between Woody Allen and Bozo the Clown. But Von Buelow knows that Alan Dershowitz, 43, is no joke. He got the Harvard law professor out of bed at 7 a.m. six weeks ago to ask him to handle his appeal. Why Dershowitz? To be sure, he is smart, energetic and an expert in criminal law, but so are others. What made Dershowitz the right choice is that he has become, perhaps, the top lawyer of last resort in the country--a sort of judicial St. Jude--the mouthpiece, or patron saint, of hopeless cases. Says Dershowitz: "I play the devil's advocate in court, sometimes representing true devils."

Devils or not, Dershowitz has been called into cases, often on appeal, by a long list of people in serious trouble. Among them are Nursing Home Operator Rabbi Bernard Bergman ("the meanest man in New York," suggested the Village Voice), Patricia Hearst, F. Lee Bailey, a few alleged Mafiosi, Soviet Dissident Anatoli Shcharansky and Deep Throat Star Harry Reems. Now, in addition to helping Von Buelow, Dershowitz is likely to take on the appeal of Jack Henry Abbott, the inmate-writer who was convicted of manslaughter after Author Norman Mailer and others had helped to get him paroled. The "devil's advocate" does not always win; in fact, he often loses. As he explains in his book, The Best Defense, to be published this month by Random House, "The Perry Mason image of the heroic defender of innocent victims of frame-ups or mistaken identification is television fiction."

Dershowitz readily concedes that few of his clients are innocent. He writes: "I do not apologize for (or feel guilty about) helping to let a murderer go free--even though I realize that someday one of my clients may go out and kill again." To him, that is an unavoidable byproduct of the "process of challenge needed to maintain the freedoms we have." In pursuit of this goal, Dershowitz will put the government on trial, trick witnesses, use the press--in short, he will try anything right up to the edge of being unethical. "I am proud to be regarded as overzealous on behalf of my clients," he says.

The system he is fighting, in his view, is "corrupt to its core." While his book is primarily an entertaining gloss of his most intriguing legal battles, Dershowitz lays out his case against criminal justice in a furious ten-page introduction. The system is "built on a foundation of not telling the whole truth," he claims. Even respected members of the profession are part of what he labels the "cheat elite," who doctor facts to produce the results they want. They include not only police and prosecutors, he says, but defense attorneys and judges as well.

Dershowitz has been contentious since his boyhood in Brooklyn's Boro Park section, but his intellectual powers were rarely applied to schoolwork. "You know, Alan," said his high school principal once, "you're very dumb, but you're very verbal. The only thing you can be is a lawyer." At Brooklyn College, Dershowitz suddenly became a serious student. He went on to Yale Law School, where he had what he calls "my first experience with anti-Semitism." The top student in his class, he applied to 32 Wall Street firms for a summer job--and got 32 rejections.

Harvard Law School had a different view. Impressed by Dershowitz's writing in the Yale Law Journal, which he headed, Harvard representatives asked him during his second year to consider joining their faculty after graduating. Dershowitz first clerked for U.S. Appeals Court Judge David Bazelon and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. Then, at 25, he took the Harvard offer and at 28 became the youngest full professor in the school's history. Most students give him high marks as a teacher, though he has his share of detractors. Alluding to the professor's well-developed ego, one former student complains: "The course name should be changed from 'Criminal Law' to 'Alan Dershowitz--This Is Your Life.'" Dershowitz has also produced a broad array of legal writing, showing a special interest in psychiatry and law, though his work is not universally acclaimed. Says the dean of another law school: "It is more popular than scholarly."

Perhaps that is because he has been unable to resist opportunities to practice what he teaches. The first came in 1972. His client: a Boro Park contemporary facing murder charges after having made a bomb for the Jewish Defense League. Dershowitz eventually got his client off and began taking on other legal lepers. Now he laughingly asks, "Who else do you know who gets Christmas cards from murderers, rapists and residents of death row?" Not everyone is amused, not even in his own Boro Park, where one neighbor recently described him as "the one who used to be the troublemaker, and now is the lawyer for the troublemakers."

His critics contend that Dershowitz--advocate, teacher, author--has spread himself too thin. He strongly disagrees. Almost as if to prove his ability to budget time effectively, Dershowitz maintains a busy personal life that includes attending home games of his beloved Boston Celtics and making regular trips to the opera in Manhattan. In the 1970s, after being divorced and successfully fighting to gain custody of his two adolescent sons, Dershowitz would rush home every afternoon to cook the boys' supper. Rearing them, he says, was "the most gratifying" thing he has ever done. Now that both are away at college, he is ready for a new stage in his life. Perhaps a judgeship? "It would be too constraining," says Dershowitz. "It's like asking someone actively involved in sports if he wants to be an umpire." Not even a Supreme Court appointment? "I have never done anything in my life to encourage that." --By Bennett H. Beach. Reported by John E. Yang/Boston

With reporting by John E. Yang/Boston

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