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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Goldstein was a true believer. So fired up that he seemed, at times, in danger of self-immolation, he found that practicing Maverick’s kind of law was the perfect outlet for his passions. It satisfied his desire to make a difference (“Law is the primary vehicle for social change,” he likes to say) and his craving for the dramatic and the unpredictable (“It’s first-rate street theater,” he also likes to say). Being anti-war and anti-government was not just morally justifiable but glamorous then, a seductive combination for an angry but ambitious young man. Over the next decade, Goldstein, often with Maverick’s help, took a host of heroic stands against the status quo. He represented black clients against racist forces in East Texas, sued for reforms at the Bexar County jail, and served as the call of last resort in death-penalty cases. If veteran liberals like Maverick were fueled by failure—his losses were victories, proof of the enormity of the struggle—Goldstein, craving accolades, played to win. He was thorough, relentless, creative, and intellectual, which was unusual in a trial attorney; early on he distinguished himself as a good book lawyer, swiftly able to turn the tiniest drop in the vast sea of case law to his advantage. “Once he signed on, he would do whatever he had to do to get the perfect defense, even if he had to pay for it out of his own pocket,” says Ed Mallett, a Houston lawyer with whom Goldstein tried many cases. Of course, Goldstein wasn’t as strapped for cash as many of his contemporaries because he had the backing of his father’s firm. “What a lucky little sucker I was to do all this and not starve to death,” Goldstein says.
But after being in practice for just a few short years, Goldstein had found another method of keeping the wolf from the door. The conscientious-objector business was often accompanied by the drug business—in those days, smoking marijuana was part of the left-wing political package. It was then a counterculture credo that marijuana was harmless; nevertheless, the government was leveling harsher and harsher penalties for its use. Pot smokers barely out of their teens could find themselves sentenced to life in prison for having an ounce of the drug. To Goldstein and many others, defending drug users was the moral thing to do. “In those days we only defended nonviolent criminals—our friends in law school, for instance,” says Tom Pearl, an Austin attorney who tried cases with Goldstein.
But taking drug cases had other advantages. San Antonio was then a small city with few lawyers interested in such work; fewer still who were interested in the intricacies of constitutional law. It didn’t take long for word to circulate among local Mr. Bigs that there was a sharp Jewish kid who knew his lawbooks. Goldstein had no problem representing them—their Fourth Amendment right to be protected from illegal searches deserved to be guarded as much as anyone else’s. “How we treat the least of us is how we can ultimately expect to be treated ourselves,” he says. “Bottom line, the Bill of Rights was not designed to protect the majority—it was designed to protect the most offensive and despicable among us.” If his skills got the baddest guys off, well, sometimes an ethical, adversarial system worked that way. Lawyers weren’t paid to make judgment calls.
In 1970, just two years after his admission to the bar, Goldstein had caught the attention of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)—he represented the founder, Keith Stroup, after a drug bust. From NORML came a string of referrals, which further enhanced Goldstein’s reputation. At age 34, he made an even bigger name for himself with his work in the Piedras Negras Jailbreak Case. Though the defendants, Sterling Davis, Sr., and William McCoy Hill, became heroes in Texas for freeing fourteen Americans incarcerated on drug charges under harrowing conditions in a Mexican jail, the Mexican government was outraged and demanded punishment. Bowing to international pressure, the U.S. government indicted the two men on the grounds that a sawed-off shotgun they had used violated gunrunning laws, for which they went to prison. In his appeal, Goldstein argued that the two had unwittingly, as opposed to intentionally, violated U.S. law because neither had known the length at which a sawed-off shotgun was illegal. He won. “You don’t often find a case where ignorance of the law can be cited as a defense, but this particular statute requires an individual to have specific intent to violate known legal duty,” Goldstein told Playboy.In another big case, he represented Carlos Gerdes, who was believed to be the moneyman for the so-called Cowboy Mafia, in a marijuana-smuggling conspiracy case that involved fifteen other defendants.
He was a star. It had not taken long for Gerry and Christine to abandon their hippie digs, which were near the site of what is now Fiesta San Antonio (old friends recall with fondness the lack of potable water, the barber’s chair in the living room, and the frequent explosions from the limestone quarry nearby), and move into a house in the King William Historic District. (Helping them with the restoration was a client, the founder of the local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, who faced charges of assaulting a police officer and for smashing a pawnshop window during the Fiesta parade and throwing guns into the crowd. “He thought the revolution had begun,” Goldstein cracks). Goldstein could be seen tooling about town in an old Bentley he had taken in lieu of a fee from a drug client in Austin. He liked the finer things in life, sure, but he had stayed true to his beliefs. Why should you suffer for success?
“Think about this, Maury,” Goldstein posits, back in the present, stabbing his tomato and basil salad with a knife and fork. “Think about the federal sentencing system. Minimum mandatories. The only way you can get around ’em is to satisfy a prosecutor… You get off only if the truth helps the prosecution! Can you imagine?” Something catches Goldstein’s eye, a small distraction. He picks up his napkin and tenderly dabs at a spot on Maverick’s beleaguered tie. “I don’t see how you can call a system fair that metes out justice that way,” he says, continuing his diatribe without missing a beat.
ON A BLUSTERY NIGHT IN ASPEN,Hunter Thompson is late for dinner, but no one seems to mind. “Hunter helps Gerry keep his edge,” Christine Goldstein offers, as if this was a critical role, but not one she aspires to. In that way Chris resembles the wives of venerated rock stars: A striking, reed-thin woman with a tumble of blond hair, she is cool and glamorous and has constructed a life that does not require her husband’s presence. Hence, Aspen: This sprawling, airy log cabin with its impeccable interiors began as a home away from home, but as Goldstein’s passion for skiing grew and his passion for privacy along with it, the vacation home became, essentially, the real one. Aspen might seem a curious choice for a civil rights attorney; it is by Goldstein’s own admission “full of healthy white people,” so fatuously devoted to the rich that it makes New York’s Upper East Side or Beverly Hills look positively proletarian. But the Goldsteins’ sense of the place was shaped by an earlier time, when Thompson ran for sheriff and the town was divided between hip, dope-smoking kids and doughy middle-aged, middle-class types.
Goldstein has had the kind of day that would exhaust a normal man, even a normal attorney. Up at six in the morning, he has flown from San Antonio to Denver for various appointments around town and then, in the afternoon, represented a client in a hearing in federal court. The woman, a pretty blonde in her forties, was facing a ten-year mandatory sentence for the delivery of one pound of cocaine; he had represented her before, a decade or so ago, in Texas. Anyone who spends time with Goldstein cannot help but notice how much the drug culture has become his culture. He has rescued friends time and again from jams, some who are now nothing more than walking casualties of a different sort of war, a fact he seems oblivious to.
Thompson could fall into this category. The erstwhile gonzo journalist, whose drug experiences were extensively chronicled in the brilliant Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,now has, at 56, the air of a wounded veteran. He’s a tall, anxious, bald man with a penetrating but perpetually shifting gaze, someone whose sentences dip, soar, and then trail into the unknown, like an aircraft on a reckless but unavoidable mission. How much of this is the result of decades of substance abuse is impossible to tell, and of no consequence to the Goldsteins, who dote on him like an errant child. “Do I have a claim on this, Gerry?” Thompson asks, displaying a newspaper ad for a new cable TV cartoon character called Duckman, which quotes from Thompson’s work.
“Sure you do,” Goldstein says.
Because Thompson is not only a friend but also a client, dinner—Chris’s stunning creation of leeks and salmon in a fish-shaped puff pastry, salad, and pasta puttanesca—must wait just a bit longer while Goldstein attends to business. Thompson was arrested for impaired driving last November and, with Goldstein and four other lawyers, is looking forward to his trial. Goldstein has alleged that the police had no probable cause to stop the car, and he shows Thompson how the transcripts of police radio conversations can be read to support his claim. “Okay, okay, Hunter,” Goldstein says, excitedly scrolling the text on his computer screen to highlight places where the police seem to be speaking in code to protect themselves. “Now we’re getting some fun here.”
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