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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Only the most privileged could ever dream of converting their DWIs into a Fourth Amendment showdown, but that is one of the pluses of being in Goldstein’s orbit. In return, he gets access to the kind of secret social frequency that most people could never get on their dials. He knows which national celebrity has a girlfriend who needs help on her dope charge, which prominent executive had a son who narrowly escaped a grand jury indictment in Florida. Gossip, like fine food or fine wine, should be of the best quality. Someone brings up CBS newsman Ed Bradley, in town for a bit. “He’s fighting for his job,” Thompson cracks. “You know CBS is a Nazi group, don’t you?”
The conversation veers rightward to militia members and the fallout from Oklahoma City. Thompson, something of a gun nut, is not entirely unsympathetic, but Goldstein grows glum. He doesn’t see them as the same kind of freedom fighters as his generation of sixties radicals. “I fear it is that politically we were unable to effect change because we expressed a hedonistic Spock-baby philosophy,” he says.
As anyone over forty knows, the pacific hedonism of the seventies gave way to the materialistic hedonism of the eighties, and the drug of choice changed to cocaine in all its variants, a drug for the very rich or the very poor, perfect for a society losing its middle. Drug dealing was no longer a casual enterprise; the dealers weren’t just college kids with VW buses anymore, but foreigners with guns or ghetto kids with nothing to lose. And as the federal government became more successful at stopping drug smuggling in Florida, the game shifted to Texas. For Goldstein—who believes the cocaine explosion was a result of the government’s destruction of the marijuana industry—business was never better.
Throughout the eighties, he represented bigger and bigger fish. In 1985 Goldstein forced the federal government to return $10 million in assets to a Sherman drug smuggler, the largest forfeiture in the country at the time. He freed the men arrested in the biggest marijuana seizure in San Antonio history—$5.7 million worth. He represented Miami businessman Danny Vilarchao (a “mobster,” according to columnist Paul Thompson), who was charged with selling DEA agents 4 kilos of cocaine with the promise of 160 more. Florida congressman Richard Kelly hired Goldstein to represent him in the political kickback scandal known as Abscam because of his success in the Cowboy Mafia trial. In every case, Goldstein was as scrupulous about his professional ethics as he had been in the early days, when he felt protective of his father’s practice: When a client called and confessed to jumping bail, for instance, Goldstein wasted no time in ordering the man to turn himself in. “He would use words that he would be proud to hear replayed in a courtroom, because they might be,” says colleague Ed Mallett.
Goldstein became known for the kind of legal legerdemain that astonished his colleagues and, as the drug crisis deepened, infuriated the general public. He overturned the conviction of three marijuana growers by proving that the police telescope used by the investigators was too strong (powerful enough to see through partially closed blinds, it violated the defendants’ “legitimate expectation of privacy”). In what has come to be known as the Mr. Jake Case, Goldstein won probation for a client arrested while unloading 100,000 pounds of marijuana by proposing that evidence used in a previous drug trial, which produced a hung jury, should be subject to the double-jeopardy standard—and therefore was inadmissible in a second case. He went after the federal government’s drug-courier profile (used to justify searches) by proving that, counter to the objective criteria required by law, officers were using their intuition to stop suspects. “He looked like a dirtbag, but he was traveling first class” is the way Goldstein describes the officers’ modus operandi. In all cases, constitutional rights were indisputably protected and, most likely, the guilty went free. “In spite of my lifestyle and having succumbed to greed,” Goldstein told a reporter in 1989, “I’m still a child of the sixties. It’s fun to go up against that system.”
But as the eighties progressed, Goldstein looked less like a countercultural icon—an advocate for the downtrodden—and more like a prosperous member of the establishment. He began to take time off. He took up sailing, buying a forty-foot boat from Racehorse Haynes called the Esprit Libre,and raced in national competitions. Tired of sailing, he took up skiing and traveled as far as Argentina in search of perfection on the slopes. He spent money faster than even he could make it—whether he was chartering planes or finding just the right white shirt. “Anything he does, he does with a vengeance,” says one friend, “whether it’s skiing, defending somebody, or anything else.” “Anything else,” according to friends and associates, was Goldstein’s passion for drugs. Those who know him well say that he used drugs on more than a casual basis, which became a topic of local gossip. Talk of his own drug use, however, is one of the few subjects that causes the loquacious Goldstein to turn reticent. “I’m a child of the sixties,” he says. “Let’s just say I probably couldn’t pass the security check for a Supreme Court nomination.”
THE HEARING AT THE FEDERAL COURTHOUSE in downtown Houston on this February day has not attracted much media attention. In the matter of United States of America v. Juan García Abrego,there is only a bit of scheduling to attend to. Present for the government in the windowless, fluorescently lit, high-ceilinged room is special prosecution chief Bernie Hobson and the lead prosecutor in this case, Melissa Annis, a thirtysomething straight-arrow known for her prosecutorial zeal—she has devoted almost a decade to bringing Abrego to justice. Across the room sits Roberto Yzaguirre with his team, Tony Canales and Gerald Goldstein. The defense wears good suits and appears confident and amenable; these are middle-aged men, old friends at the peak of their careers, for whom a case like this appears to hold little mystery. Today the parties swiftly agree on a trial date of September 16, adjourn, meet briefly with reporters, and then head for the office or, in the case of the defense, the airport. If you happened by, the proceedings might have resembled any big corporate case, which, of course, it is.
The gossip among Texas criminal defense lawyers has been that Abrego isn’t such a big fish—he’s past his prime, they say, nothing more than a sop offered by Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo to Bill Clinton. The real guys remain in the shadows, international investors protected by their money, their anonymity, and most likely, their lawyers. The drug business is now worth billions—$60 billion is grossed annually on the black market; $100 billion is spent fighting it by the government. It is a global enterprise in which so many competing interests are involved that shutting it down seems impossible. For that reason the drug business and the epidemic of crime it has spawned looks, to most people, far, far more dangerous and all-powerful than Goldstein’s lifetime adversary, the federal government, which, however misguided, is trying to stop the flow of drugs into homes and communities. To those citizens, the larger enemy is the people who are perpetuating the enterprise that is killing American children, generations of them. Not so, to Goldstein of course. “It’s poverty, not drugs, that causes crime,” he insists.
Even so, most defenders of constitutional rights know they’ve come a long way from those suburban kids protesting the war with a toke or two. History has fashioned a test for the prominent attorneys who declare that they represent high-profile but despicable defendants for our sake. Sometime after the Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, the judge in the case, David Russell, heard Gerry Goldstein and the late Abbie Hoffman’s attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, on Charlie Rose’s show, talking about the duty of all lawyers to represent unpopular clients. An intermediary for the judge telephoned Goldstein the following morning, looking for representation for Terry Nichols, who, his defenders believe, is a victim of an overzealous criminal investigation by the government. “We had lunch the next day and [Goldstein] was freaked,” recalls Lefcourt. “Fortunately, two very good lawyers stepped up to the plate.” Representing a white male who allegedly murdered 168 innocent men, women, and children to prove his hatred for the federal government did not stoke the flames of Goldstein’s sense of righteousness. At least the drug lords’ victims, though they may be numerous, are anonymous; Oklahoma City was not his kind of war.
Goldstein is slowing down, anyway. His firm continues to do pro bono work, and he still devotes time to causes. Citing civil rights violations, he is currently fighting the Internal Revenue Service’s attempt to force lawyers to report the names of clients who paid fees of more than $10,000 in cash. But he longs for the slopes of Aspen in the way he once longed for the courtroom; he loves the feel of his body smashing through the racing flags at breakneck speed, of winning in that way.
Leaving the Houston hearing, Goldstein is undecided about his plans. Should he go to Cumberland Island, a speck of sand off the coast of Georgia, where his wife and son are visiting her family? Or should he just head home to Aspen, where he could get in a few more days of skiing? Faced with such a dilemma, he telephones his San Antonio office to consult his secretary, Diane Doege, a wise and witty woman who has worked for him for more than twenty years. “It’s not as if you’ve never been skiing before,” she tells him, and Goldstein nods, agreeing to go to Cumberland Island. “It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?” he asks her. “Isn’t it?”
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