The Winning Loser

Every first-rate criminal lawyer has a consuming passion: to get his client acquitted. It is a passion that troubles many Americans. If the accused seems to be an obvious crook, how can any honest lawyer fight for his freedom?

No one provides a better answer to that question than Edward Bennett Williams, 46, the country's top criminal lawyer. Williams has passionately defended ex-Teamster Boss Dave Beck, Bernard Goldfine and Adam Clayton Powell, to say nothing of assorted Communists, spies and murderers. Williams helped Jimmy Hoffa beat a bribery rap, got Tax Evader Frank Costello out of prison, opened the mails to the peephole magazine Confidential. Happily for moralists, he is also a loser on occasion: he failed to foil Senate censure of the late Joe McCarthy, and last week he lost the case of Bobby Baker, who was found guilty of, among other things, pocketing $99,600 that California savings-and-loan bankers had handed him as Senate campaign "contributions" (TIME, Feb. 3).

Crucible Test. Disheartened as he was to hear the jury declare Baker a thief, tax evader and conspirator, Williams could not--and did not--complain. The trial confirmed the very creed that drives and goads him. "The Sixth Amendment gave every accused the right to have the assistance of counsel for his defense," says Williams. "The framers did not say every accused except gamblers, thieves and robbers."

The evidence, continues Williams, must be "tested in the crucible of cross-examination." While the accused may not lie, "he is entitled to sit silent and force the proof of guilt." To Williams, guilt is a legal rather than a moral concept: "If you should one day find yourself accused of crime, you would expect your lawyer to raise every defense authorized by the law of the land. Even if you were guilty, you would expect your lawyer to make sure that the Government did not secure your conviction by unlawful means."

Self-compelled to make painstaking preparations, Williams typically slept only four hours a night during the Baker trial. In the courtroom, he is in complete control. He has a computer memory for the remotest dates and details; his material is so well organized that documents flash into his hands like a magician's rabbits. His hair wavy, his calm buttoned down, he cross-examines hostile witnesses with utter courtesy; he seems never to be trying to trip them up, only to help the jury get things straight. He shuns anger: "It's not a useful emotion." Yet in summing up, he pulls all emotional stops: his rhetoric sweeps and soars. Williams is inevitably compared with F. Lee Bailey, a more recently risen criminal lawyer. The main difference between them lies in the cases they handle. Bailey specializes in violence-tinged sensation involving such up-from-nowhere types as Dr. Samuel Sheppard, Carl Coppolino and the Boston Strangler. Williams is more the seeker of equal justice for well-known but scandal-haunted clients.

Declasse Profession. Unlike many civil-libertarians, Williams acquired his lofty ideals in courtrooms rather than classrooms. The son of a Hartford department-store floorwalker, he helped support his family as a filling-station attendant. A flawless student, he was awarded a scholarship to Holy Cross and graduated summa cum laude in 1941. Because he hurt his back in a plane crash, Williams was medically discharged by the wartime Army Air Corps after two years, went on to Georgetown Law School. By 1945 he was working for a big Washington firm. Although criminal law was then considered declasse, Williams willingly switched to it in 1949 and opened his own firm, which now includes 14 lawyers.

Williams first made major news in 1953 by winning the first successful libel suit against Columnist Drew Pearson ($50,000 for former Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell). As his reputation grew, he constantly upbraided the Government for stooping to seamy means in order to conquer seamy defendants. He sprang Costello by showing that the U.S. prosecutor had secretly scanned the tax returns of 150 venire-men to get a "goldplated" jury in the gambler's tax trial. In the 1956 perjury trial of ex-OSS Lieutenant Aldo Icardi, who told a congressional subcommittee that he had not murdered his commander in Italy, Williams succeeded by arguing that the committee had exceeded its powers by questioning Icardi solely in order to create the prosecution case.

Friendly Enemy. Some skeptics regard Williams' civil-libertarianism as a mere tool for winning juries and influencing judges. His admirers, on the other hand, laud him as a "guardian at the gate" of constitutional rights. Whatever the truth, the result earns Williams more than $200,000 a year and involves him in such diverse roles as president of the Washington Redskins football team, adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, and general counsel of the Teamsters Union (though he no longer acts as the personal attorney of Jimmy Hoffa). He has a lawyer wife, seven children and a handsome home in Maryland's suburban Tulip Hill.

At the Baker trial, it was a tribute to Williams' abilities that his 2 1/2-hour summation virtually mesmerized judge and jury--and yet the trial "crucible," in which he so firmly believes, condemned his client. The winner in the Baker trial, U.S. Prosecutor William O. Bittman, is a Williams fan too. Says Bittman: "If Bobby Baker had come to see me with the same facts he put before Edward Bennett Williams, I'm sure I would have fought just as hard--maybe not as well."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.