The High Times of Gerry Goldstein
The San Antonio lawyer started out defending friends who had been busted for smoking pot. Twenty-five years later, his clients are big-time dope dealers and international cocaine kingpins — and he believes he’s saving the world.
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So, predictably, when it comes time for Goldstein’s speech, drugs aren’t the problem, the government is. The subject of the seminar is “Motions That Win Cases,” and Goldstein’s topic is “Bail and Detention Hearings: Making the Best of a Bad Situation,” but it’s really the Gospel According to Gerry. He flips through case after case on the overhead projector, using an illuminated pointer for emphasis. His voice picks up velocity as he speaks; five minutes into his subject, he is furious. “No, no, said the Queen,” he intones, paraphrasing his favorite quote, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “First the punishment, then the verdict.” To Goldstein, we are seeing a serious threat to liberty as we know it. The evidence: minimum mandatory sentences in drug cases; the Comprehensive Crime Act of 1984, which revamped the federal criminal code to make way for more police officers, more prisons, and more prosecutors while eliminating parole (“The Incomprehensible Crime Act,” he calls it); paid informants as witnesses for the prosecution (“What do you think they’d do to you or me if we paid five hundred thousand dollars to a witness?”); Senate Bill 3, which proposes to make it felonious for an attorney to incorrectly cite the law in a criminal case (“They would indict us like a ham f—ing sandwich if they thinkwe misspoke”); cops who beat prisoners (“I call this the South Texas Miranda warning… you have the right to remain silent as long as you can stand the pain”); the national disgrace that is the warehousing of young African American males, one out of three in California either awaiting trial, in prison, or on parole (“They could be sending these f—ers to Harvard for thirty thousand dollars a year!”).
In Goldstein’s world, every person is always just one lawyer away—one clever motion, one shrewd objection—from jackboots kicking in doors at the direction of elected officials. “There really is just us,” he warns, pronouncing the words as one.
Two hours later Goldstein is still in overdrive. He’s back at the airport, heading for home—San Antonio tonight and then, for the next few days, a frenzied itinerary that includes Houston the next morning, another swing back to Miami, and as soon as possible, a return to Aspen, where Goldstein has a second home and where he indulges his passion for skiing. If he lives in flight, so be it. Life is good, you can have it all. You can have a house in Aspen and your business in San Antonio. You can be a civil liberties hero and a kingpin-defending pariah. You can live on the edge and you can be part of the establishment. You can be a man of ideas and a man of action. You can, you can, you can. Even an airport yogurt dispenser, offering two distinct and traditionally opposing flavors, gets the Goldstein treatment. Faced with the choice of vanilla or chocolate, he opts for a swirl. “I hate giving anything up,” he mutters, an admission that speaks to far more than his preference in snacks.
"YOUR MAMA WAS FINE," GOLDSTEINsays, consulting a client on a phone he has answered, with a cuff-shooting flourish, at the reception desk in the lobby of Goldstein, Goldstein, and Hilley. “Your family looked good. I explained to them what I thought was going to happen.” It’s a jail call, a client trying to decide between copping a plea or risking a trial. “Often,” he continues, “we have to choose between difficult and unsatisfactory results. We have to choose between what’s bad and what’s worse. There was a large quantity of drugs found on those premises. You were charged with possession. It’s almost a slam dunk.” Goldstein listens for another moment and then takes off his glasses. Today he wears a blue blazer, gray flannel slacks, and a yellow tie, somewhere between canary and lemon. His cowboy boots are buffed to an inky black. “She’s your mama,” he says patiently. “She’s gonna hear what she wants to hear. She’s a wonderful mama and she’s right there. And it’s downhill from here. The court has ruled in our favor and has agreed not to add the gun charge…”
So begins a real-world morning for Gerald Goldstein. The office on the top floor of San Antonio’s Tower Life Building looks like it could have belonged to a criminal lawyer practicing in the sixties: thirty-year-old paneling, dingy floors, fluorescent lighting hanging from oppressively low ceilings, worn leather chairs, and fraying rugs. Maintaining the decor is to some extent a tribute to Goldstein’s 87-year-old father, Eli, who founded the firm, a business-law practice, as a young man. But it also speaks to an essential truth about Gerald Goldstein: He has always been more a creature of time than place, and that time was the civil rights era.
He is a descendant of rabbis and scholars; his great-grandfather played chess with Venustiano Carranza, the great Mexican revolutionary who was elected president in 1914. Goldstein was an only child, pampered, indulged, and inculcated with the liberal politics that were an article of faith in many Jewish homes of the fifties and sixties. “About forty-one years ago his parents were living around the King William area,” Maury Maverick, Jr., explains, in a rumbling, grumbling godlike voice that befits his role as the long-standing liberal conscience of San Antonio. “I was at this Hanukkah party. All of a sudden there’s this little boy who is about ten years old and is being this absolute pain in the ass. ‘Who is that little boy?’ I asked Aileen Goldstein. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He must be some kid from the neighborhood.’”
It’s lunchtime and Goldstein has driven his ancient bronze-colored Mercedes to the Liberty Bar, a social nexus of San Antonio’s arts and politics set. Goldstein and Maverick, 75, try to meet for lunch at least once a week—maintenance on the father-son relationship they’ve forged over four decades. They make an odd pair: the rumpled, contentious, barely solvent son of a much-beloved congressman and mayor, and his rich, polished protégé, but the affection between them is palpable. “Maury represented an attitude that I thought was righteous and wanted to emulate. He radicalized my concept of the practice of law,” Goldstein says.
“He’s made so goddam much money it’s unbelievable,” Maverick counters when asked for comment on Goldstein’s career. “And he’s spent twice as much.” Goldstein grins gamely but squirms a little under the ribbing.
“I expect to see Tigar tomorrow,” he offers, a reference to an appointment in Denver. He’ll be meeting with members of a law firm there who, along with Michael Tigar, a University of Texas law professor, and former federal prosecutor Ronald Woods, are currently representing Terry Nichols, who is accused of murder and conspiracy in the Oklahoma City bombing case. (Such is life now for high-profile guardians of civil liberties. With the country’s swing to the right, they have found themselves representing not draft resisters, civil rights marchers, and marijuana puffers, with whom they were politically simpatico, but drug lords and religious or property-rights fanatics like the Branch Davidians or Randy Weaver, whose wife and child were killed in an FBI raid.) Goldstein speaks rhapsodically about the firm Tigar is dealing with in Colorado. “It’s all public defenders,” he says, “top to bottom.”
“Gerry takes every now and then some death-penalty cases and poor-boy cases,” Maverick says, ignoring Goldstein as he thoughtfully slathers goat cheese on a piece of bread. “He’s better about that than most lawyers. He’s got a lot of old-time Jewish radicalism in him.”
In the spirit of compromise, the two drift into storytelling. In the late sixties Goldstein had a bachelor’s degree in art from Tulane University and a law degree from the University of Texas, but he lacked… direction. “His problem was he was bored to death with his father’s law practice,” Maverick says. “He came to see me and said, ‘My father is having me send collection letters to people who can’t pay their bills.’” Rather than continue, Goldstein had decided to light out for Europe with his soon-to-be wife, Christine Sayre, a stunning blonde with a British pedigree. (The Goldsteins’ 1969 wedding reception—which could have doubled for a Hairmovie set—was a high point of the hippie era in San Antonio.) Maverick had a better idea: The Vietnam War was raging, and he needed help defending conscientious objectors. Goldstein, who had a medical deferment, took to the work instantly, traveling around the country in a Volkswagen bus equipped with a Persian rug and a slobbering St. Bernard. He had found his calling.
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