Switch-Hitter

John Patrick Tully, a pouty, blue-eyed cocaine smuggler and confessed contract murderer, is just the sort of criminal former Philadelphia Superpro-secutor Richard Aurel Sprague loved to put on ice. No longer. In fact, the fighting D.A. is currently serving as Tully's lawyer. Sprague, 50, who gained national fame when he traced the killing of Union Insurgent Joseph ("Jock") Yablonski and his family up a chain of conspiracy until former United Mine Workers President W.A. ("Tony") Boyle was convicted of first-degree murder, has walked through a legal looking glass and emerged as a slugging defense attorney.

Since his firing in 1974 after a feud with Philadelphia District Attorney F. Emmett Fitzpatrick (TIME, Dec. 30, 1974), Sprague has taken on--and successfully defended--clients accused of armed robbery, embezzlement, manslaughter and rape. Can a crusading prosecutor reverse course that easily?

Sprague is succeeding, in part because he seeks out cases that give him an activist's role. Says he: "Each side has a right to have its interests vigorously defended."

Sprague's overload of sharpshooting energy has led him to accept a varied collection of public interest cases. He has represented a group of local Chinese protesting the redevelopment of Philadelphia's Chinatown, offered to oversee a probe requested by local Puerto Rican groups concerned over a badly prosecuted murder and arson case, and is handling a lawsuit by Developer Sam Lefrak and the New York City Housing Authority that attempts to prove worldwide price fixing by five major oil companies. Other Sprague cases include a local data research corporation's antitrust suit against IBM, and defense of a geology professor in Lancaster County's Mennonite community who is accused of sodomizing two boys.

In the Tully case, which Sprague took for no fee "as a matter of principle," the hit man claims to have been shortchanged by New Jersey state prosecutors after turning state's evidence against members of the Newark-based Campisi mob. Tully, 36, says the prosecutors promised him at least "one day less" than the lowest Campisi sentence. Instead, he got 15 years while the other gangsters avoided trial and bargained for terms as low as three years.

Sprague sees this as Kafkaesque justice. More important, he looks upon it as a chance to fight against his pet outrage: slipshod standards in the criminal justice system. "I want to attack the plea bargaining in this case," he says angrily. "I want to make a mockery of what the state of New Jersey has done."

Sprague's initial adjustment to private practice came with deceptive ease. After joining a Philadelphia antitrust firm, David Berger Associates, he saw his $40,000 prosecutor's salary quadruple in a year. He traveled, took high-priced civil cases and decorated his office with marbled burgundy wallpaper made from old English textbook bindings "to achieve the look of a barrister's office in Dickens' day." But the drives of 17 years of public life would not relent. "In some ways," he says of his cases, "I'm still a prosecutor." Albeit without such perks of office as his enormous public visibility and his black Chrysler complete with telephone, two-way radio and police siren.

"Do I feel an urge, like an old war horse, to be back in there?" Sprague asks rhetorically. "Sure I do. But only to the extent that I don't see anyone who is in there doing anything." Such observations are enough to make some Philadelphians believe Sprague will be on the scene in next year's Democratic primary. One office at stake: the district attorney's.

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