Marvin Zindler, Consumer Lawman
A stylish, self-proclaimed public protector battles deception in business and poor taste in fashion.
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The fifth, and, at this writing, last story to come out of Zindler vs. the appliance store, occurred when Zindler and the store's general counsel called a press conference to announce that the manager had paid a fine on one of the three charges, Zindler had recommended dismissal of the other two, and the store had dropped its suit against him.
Zindler chose his office as the scene for the press conference, thereby adding considerably to its noise and turmoil level. As two TV cameramen scurried to set up their lights, and two newspaper reporters lounged against the walls, Zindler moved a bemused complainant to another chair so the man wouldn't be in the picture. Then, with lights glaring and microphones in front of him, Zindler and the store's lawyer, looking slightly embarrassed and confused, made their announcements. The whole performance was repeated a few minutes later when a third TV crew arrived. Zindler, always eager to cooperate with any newsman's request, agreed to the instant replay even though the attorney was worried about missing his plane back to Miami.
Almost as an afterthought, Zindler told reporters as they were leaving, "And you can put in your stories that this is not a trade out. If they violate the law, I'll file on 'em again."
Such rebounding and multiplying stories, plus his continual concern with getting his story to the people, have led local reporters to regard Zindler with some suspicion and a little antagonism. Zindler sheds such feelings with ease. "I can't let them bother me," he says. He doesn't carry a grudge and either agrees with criticisms or turns them to his advantage.
During Enright's trial, the defense attorney attacked Zindler for his role in the case. Zindler had taken the witness stand, and, when asked what his job was, had turned toward the jury and proudly said, "I am Harris County's consumer protector." The lawyer, in his closing argument, charged, "When you pull back the curtain there is an individual who is not a consumer protector but is an assistant deputy sheriff who is apparently an egomaniac."
"Hell," Zindler said later, "I would have stipulated to that."
A visit to Zindler's comfortable, middle-class home in suburban southwest Houston provides a trip through long years devoted to collecting the printed name and picture of Marvin Zindler. Rummaging through boxes of clippings, scrapbooks of Houston Press photos, and high school and college yearbooks, Zindler details high points of his life since he was born in the home of A. B. and Udith Zindler in Houston in 1921. The elder Zindler was to make more than $1 million in a clothing store and land dealings and become mayor of the city of Bellaire. Marvin estimates that his share of the family estate, left to him in a trust fund, is worth about $1 million now, depending on the value of the four Zindler stores and land, in which he owns a quarter interest with his three brothers.
His 12-year-old house belies any connection with great wealth. It is roomy and tastefully furnished in Middle-American, but it is a tract house, much like one an advertising manager or car repair company owner or roofing contractor might buy. This particular evening Zindler is at home with his wife, Gertrude, Marvin Jr., one of his five children, and Marvin Jr.'s wife, Carmen. "It is a close family," Zindler says. His daughter-in-law echoes the sentiment. Even though she and Marvin Jr. have their own apartment, they visit at Zindler's "almost every day."
The family is sitting in the den, watching an old Roman gladiator movie on the color TV. Zindler has just returned from making a Sunday afternoon speech—he averages about one a day—and launches into tales about his career. The other family members listen patiently and attentively, contributing details that he leaves out. They seem to enjoy the stories of his exploits, even though they've undoubtedly heard them many times before. Toward the end of the evening, as Zindler searches diligently for a picture from an earlier time, before his facial operations, Marvin Jr. says, "Most people just walk out the front door on him when he starts going through the clippings and photographs. He's like a man with a million slides of the Colorado River."
The clippings at times do seem to be endless. He first hit the papers when he won a national twirling contest in high school. He was in the band, he says, playing the flute and piccolo because they weren't so hard to carry as bigger instruments, when the band director told him to start learning to be a drum major.
He spent a year at Tarleton State College then came home when World War II got underway, went to work buying men's clothes in his father's store, and in 1942 married Gertrude, his high school sweetheart, in the Plaza Hotel. "She was Methodist and I was Jewish, so we had to get married in a hotel."
He joined the Marines but lasted only a month before they booted him out for flat feet. "That should give you an idea how I got started being a cop." Then, "because everyone else was in the Army," a radio station whose owner knew Zindler through his father, invited him to be a disc jockey and newsman. He still has some tapes from spot newscasts. "They're really awful," his son says, chuckling. "He would ask a man who had been in a wreck, 'Does it hurt? Do you think you're gonna die?'"
The radio job led to part time work as a TV cameraman and photographer for The Houston Press when that paper was in its glory days as the scandal sheet of Houston. His pictures were nearly always of traffic accidents or crime scenes and often filled more than half a Press front page.
In 1962 he decided to get out of reporting law enforcement and become part of it. He joined the sheriff's office in January. "He should have been a lawman at 19," Gertrude says. "We'd go on a date in high school and he'd drop me off at 9:30 or 10. His mother would call at 11:30 or 12, wanting to know where Marvin was. He'd be out riding around with the Bellaire Police Department."
His early years with the sheriff's office were in the civil division, where he served and collected judgments, and on the fugitive squad where he picked up criminals arrested in other jurisdictions all around the world. He began making the papers when he collected strange judgments or unveiled a new wrinkle in transporting prisoners: He had a furrier make a pair of mink-lined handcuffs for lady prisoners. "They looked like the lady might be wearing a wrap," Zindler says. "It wasn't so embarrassing for them."
Even then he was known as "The Dapper Deputy" because of his always smart, always in-style clothes. Pictures show him in a sheriff's car, nattily dressed with a snap brim hat on his head and a box of cigars on the car seat. He has since given up the hats ("I quit wearing them when everyone else did") and the cigars ("I quit smoking them because they burned holes in my new double knit clothes and you can't get those mended.")
Zindler hasn't parted with the extensive wardrobe. If anything, it has grown. On a recent trip to New York he bought about 60 suits. He thinks he may have more than 100 altogether, counting "those in the closets, some in the cleaners and some downtown at the store." His clothes have forced his wife out of their bedroom closets. He doesn't plan to let her recoup, either. Talking with a visitor at home, Zindler says his wife gets mad at the money he spends on clothes because she doesn't get to buy any herself. Well, the visitor asks, why can't she buy some clothes? "Because I'm buying em," Zindler responds.
His concern with appearance is not limited to attire. He owns "three or four" toupees, valued at about $300 apiece. (Last year when the attorney for an organization Zindler was trying to shut down threatened to have Zindler's scalp, the deputy carefully boxed one of the hairpieces and delivered it to the lawyer.) Zindler got the first toupee in 1954, and, he proudly says, "no one's ever seen me without it." How does he manage that? "You knock on the bathroom door," his son says, "ask if you can come in, and you hear, 'No. Get out of here, goddamn it.'"
The same year he bought the first toupee, Zindler had his chin lifted and a nose job. "The nose job wasn't right, so I had them do it again," he says. (He says he had the plastic surgery because he looked too Jewish. "Houston was more prejudiced then. It may be my imagination but right after the operation I started getting invitations to join organizations, requests to serve as an officer of clubs, things that had never happened before.")
The effort that goes into the total Zindler look includes a small makeup table in a closet. The makeup and a sunlamp give him a healthy, tanned appearance even in the middle of winter. The sunlamp sessions are not without pitfalls. About a year ago Zindler appeared at the courthouse wearing sunglasses all the time, even indoors. "I burned my eyes under the sunlamp," he explained. His favorite eyewear now is a pair of purple tinted glasses, adopted after short, unsuccessful tries at a monocle and a pince nez.
The appearance dictates some concessions in the equipment he carries to perform his role as a deputy sheriff. He has a chrome-plated, pearl-handled .45-caliber automatic pistol. It stays at home in a drawer while he carries a smaller, 9 mm gun. "The .45 doesn't look right under my coat," he grins.
Zindler wears suspenders as well as a belt, not because of an excess of caution, but to help support the extra weight of the pistol and handcuffs he carries around his waist. He only carries the weapon and cuffs because sheriff's department policy dictates it, he says.
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