The Great Defenders
How did natty, flashy Dick DeGuerin and his quiet, determined brother, Mike, become two of the best lawyers in Texas? By learning everything they could from their mentor, the legendary Percy Foreman.
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But it wasn’t just the kid’s tardiness and fiscal irresponsibility that rankled the old man. The fact was that Dick DeGuerin had now made a name for himself. At first Foreman encouraged this, though with a certain ambivalence. As early as 1973 he had hired another associate, DeGuerin says, “just to put me in my place after I’d had a long string of successes and he was worried I might leave.” Instead it was the new fellow who left. But by 1980 clients were coming directly to Foreman’s younger associate; now reporters were asking to speak to Dick DeGuerin. Foreman began to make snide comments whenever he overheard DeGuerin returning a reporter’s call. It was a little hypocritical of him, considering that Foreman often said, “Hell, I know the press made me.” But he was still Percy Foreman. Nobody rubbed anything in his face.
Dick DeGuerin’s apprenticeship made a great lawyer out of a good one. Now it was time to move on. He discussed the decision to leave with his brother, Szekely, and Dickson. The latter two said they would jump ship with DeGuerin. In June 1982, DeGuerin walked into Foreman’s office. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of this, but I need to make a name for myself,” he told the old man. “I don’t want to be one of those kinds of lawyers who tries to take over the older lawyer’s business. So I need to start my own deal.”
Foreman took it well, though his eyes were teary. They shook hands and agreed that DeGuerin would stick with the firm through September, when all of the cases he handled would be cleared. What they failed to discuss was what to do with the new cases that would come DeGuerin’s way in the meantime. On the morning of Friday, July 2, Foreman poked his head into DeGuerin’s office. “These new cases that have been coming into the office that you’re taking,” he said. “Do you intend to keep the fees?”
“Yes, I do,” said DeGuerin.
Foreman exploded. “By God, as long as you are working in my office, the money that comes in here is mine!” he roared. “I want you to turn over the money that they’re going to pay you, or I want you out of here!”
DeGuerin, stubborn to the end, said,”Then I’ll leave.”
By the lunch hour, Percy Foreman had locked Dick DeGuerin out of the building. Later, Charles Szekely informed Foreman that he was leaving as well. When it came Dickson’s turn, the old man was despondent. “Why not stay here with me and see how Dick does?” he asked and offered to quadruple Dickson’s salary. Dickson looked his idol in the face and turned him down.
“I’m sure it was devastating to him,” Dick DeGuerin says today in that even, mentholated voice of his that betrays scarcely a drop of whatever emotions circulate within. It is the belief of Mike DeGeurin, the mediator, that Percy Foreman staged the whole disagreement himself purely as a means of kicking Dick DeGuerin out of the nest. But that scenario does not square with the behavior of Foreman, who refused to speak to DeGuerin for a long time thereafter.
Dick Deguerin, prodigal son, lawyer without an office, showed up at the building occupied by his friend David Berg. Berg let DeGuerin encamp in his conference room. “I stayed there for two months,” he says, “and in David Berg’s conference room I made more money than I had made in the past three years with Percy. Literally.”
The rise of DeGuerin surprised no one. He was slick and camera-ready but also a tenacious streetfighter. In the 1983 book The Best Lawyers in America, he was named by his colleagues as one of the nation’s best criminal defense attorneys. His fame culminated in 1986 with the successful defense of Hurley Fontenot, an East Texas principal accused of murdering a football coach; the acquittal of three New York Mets baseball players after a barroom brawl with a few Houston police officers; and the release of immigration lawyer Edward Gillett, who was found not guilty on more than eighty counts of immigration fraud.
Meanwhile, Mike DeGeurin tended to Percy Foreman’s business. It was just the two of them now, and the heavy workload required Foreman to return to the courtroom. It was obvious the old man lacked the fortitude of his earlier days. He spent much of the day napping on his couch or issuing blistering memos to the fire marshal and charity solicitors. It was never necessary to vent his ire on the younger brother. As Lewis Dickson says, “He yelled at Dick knowing he would be ignored and yelled at me knowing he would be heeded. Mike he simply shamed into following his will.”
The two had become extremely close, even more so after DeGeurin’s father died in 1982. One day the old man said to the younger brother, “There’s a reason people say life begins at forty. It takes forty years of life experiences to know who you are, what your purpose is, how you fit in. But if you can find someone who’s much older than you who you can trust and who will hand you distilled knowledge so that you don’t have to go through what they did—well, then I will be that person for you.”
Overwhelmed, Mike DeGeurin said yes. “And from then on until his death,” he says, “every day he would hit me with at least one new piece of distilled knowledge. Yes. What we had was special.”
In 1987 Mike DeGeurin won a rehearing for Clarence Brandley, a Conroe janitor who spent seven years on death row for the murder of a high school cheerleader. DeGeurin’s dedication to the case and his interrogation of the law enforcement officials who had collared Brandley were breathtaking; ultimately, Brandley was freed. Now Mike, like his brother, was ascending. That same year, Percy Foreman received an award for World’s Best Lawyer. As he stood onstage, eyeing the gigantic plaque he held with both hands, Foreman seemed not to know where he was. A sick murmur arose from the young lawyers in attendance. The old man had clocked out.
At last, Percy Foreman said slowly, “You know, I feel like the cowboy on the corner with a saddle in his hands. I can’t remember whether I lost my horse or found a saddle.”
In the summer of 1988, at the age of 86, the great man’s heart failed. He was rushed into intensive care and was there for several days. Mike DeGeurin showed up at Methodist Hospital with news he hoped would cheer up the old man. “Percy, I’ve got a gift for you,” he said. “I’ve got a client in Cincinnati who’s charged with murder, and he says that he’ll give me his ranch in California if I represent him. So there’s another ranch for you.”
At that moment a doctor poked his head in the door. Through the tubes and the machines, Foreman managed to bellow, “Get out of here, goddammit! We are consulting!”
The doctor fled, and Percy Foreman summoned his last bit of legal advice: “You’d better get photographs of the ranch. What they call a ranch in California is not what we call a ranch in Texas.”
The property, as it turned out, was a mere three acres with a trailer. Had it been a thousand, the old man would not have been around to enjoy it. He died soon thereafter. At the funeral on August 29, both brothers gave speeches. Dick spoke in his clear, dispassionate voice. “Finally I can tell you how I feel,” he said, daring to address his wrathful father directly, “without fear of interruption.” Mike gave his speech in tears, sobbing all the way through it, but anyone who knew the younger DeGeurin knew that he would finish the speech, and he did.
The Harris County Courthouse closed down that morning. It was what you did when a giant said good-bye.
The courthouse is now filled with a new generation of lawyers, and the idle conversation among them suggests a certain revisionism. Percy Foreman, to hear some of them tell it, was nothing but a grandstander and a drunk, perhaps even a crooked lawyer who rigged juries. As to the latter charge, there is only hearsay. But wiser souls in the courthouse acknowledge the pervasiveness of Foreman’s influence. “I think Houston has the best criminal attorneys in the nation, on both sides,” says 228th state district judge Ted Poe. “And I think Percy Foreman is one of the chief reasons for that. He raised the standard not only for defense attorneys but for DAs, who knew they’d have to get good if they had any hope of beating Percy.”
Erwin Ernst agrees but sees where most of the Foreman legacy is concentrated. “He taught those two boys all of their pizzazz, and today you hear them use a Percy quote for every situation,” he says. “Hell, he’s still guiding them.”
Of course, Dick DeGuerin runs his business his way. Lewis Dickson is a partner and draws a share of the business as well as a salary. DeGuerin believes Foreman at times went overboard with the number of clients he took on. “I don’t want a law factory here,” he says. As it is, DeGuerin has pushed aside all other cases while concentrating on Kay Bailey Hutchison’s defense. “We could use another hand around here,” he concedes, “but it would have to be someone I can trust. Actually, I’ve always had a dream that Mike and I would get back together someday. He and I have implicit trust in each other, and Paul Nugent’s a fine attorney. But you know Mike. He’s the little brother. He doesn’t want to be under his big brother’s wing.”
Mike DeGeurin smiles warily at the topic. “I enjoy making decisions without having to argue with my brother about it,” he says. And there are other things at stake. When Percy Foreman died, he willed Mike his business—and he willed him his name. The actual name, “Percy Foreman.” How could Mike DeGeurin desert all that? This was his firm now, though always the old man’s. Percy would have had something to say on the subject, something about spiritual destiny. Then again, the two of them never got a chance to talk about religion.
The younger brother looks up from his mood and peers out the doorway. “Mary,” he calls out to a secretary. “Mary, there’s a client out there in the waiting room.”
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