The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

After learning what it’s like to sit as a criminal defendant in the most arduous courtroom drama of his career, Geoffrey Fieger is still a free man and savoring his status as a legal Houdini. How he and partner Ven Johnson broke the bonds and loosed the chains of political prosecution

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Photograph by David Baditoi

They chose to visit those on their list at night, a little after suppertime, when most people are home.

At least 80 and as many as 100 federal agents, nearly all of them volunteers, spread out and started approaching doorsteps on the last day of November 2005. They assembled a small army because they didn’t want any of their targets to have a chance to “get their stories straight.”

Two were fitness trainers. Two were paralegals. One was a writer, who, like another subject, was asked if she’d had sex with her employer. Many were lawyers, and many were asked how they voted in the 2004 presidential election or if they’d voted for Gov. Jennifer Granholm. They were told they were guilty of a federal felony — though the agents didn’t know if this was true and were not at their homes to arrest anybody. Some were told these things as their kids or other loved ones looked on.

All of the people confronted that night by the FBI, and a few by IRS agents, had contributed $2,000 to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards, a Democrat. It hadn’t been a financial strain for even the lowest-paid among them. They were all reimbursed by their employer, Geoffrey Nels Fieger.

Geoffrey Fieger is a very high-profile man who breathes publicity — a degree-holding theatrical performer who denies ever being anything but sincere. He is often bombastic by definition, but complains that many of his most outrageous public utterances were attempts at humor, snatched out of context. There’s very little middle ground in his audience.

Fieger says flamboyant is the most common of the many words used to describe him, “like I’m some kind of peacock.”

By contrast, Fieger’s law partner Vernon “Ven” Johnson doesn’t cut much of a public profile. His style is more contained, although he has shouted at Fieger when the two were in court, trying a case together. All of those visited by federal agents in 2005 were subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury and, in some cases, later called as prosecution witnesses in the United States of America v. Geoffrey Fieger and Vernon Johnson, the campaign-finance trial that played out over the course of five weeks in 2007.

Both men were charged with conspiracy and illegally contributing to the Edwards campaign in the names of employees, relatives, and friends by collecting their donations and repaying them with salary bonuses or other means.

Neither man denied reimbursing any of them.

Though the word “reimbursement” does not appear in the federal laws under which both men were charged, the judge ruled before trial — and later told the jury — that it is illegal.

Fieger and Johnson were found not guilty on all counts.

Unless he has a change of heart, the trial was the last for a tall, leather-fringe-and-cowboy-hat-wearing, long-haired lawyer from Wyoming, now 79, named Gerry Spence, commonly regarded as the best trial lawyer in America —  even by his client, Fieger, who reckons himself among the nation’s finest.

Johnson was defended by a local trial lawyer who grew up on the streets of Detroit and rose to be one of the most respected practitioners in Detroit courtrooms. Spend any time there, and you’ll hear cops, lawyers, and judges all say “Fish is good.” It’s the affectionate nickname hung long ago on Steve Fishman, used even by the judge in the Fieger/Johnson trial.

After Spence introduced himself to the jury, and told them where he came from, Fishman followed, making himself real:

“Good afternoon. My name’s Steve Fishman. I’m from Wyoming — Wyoming and Curtis, Mumford High School. This is Ven Johnson, and he’s my client.”

The trial is history and, in the winning side’s estimation, historic. For the record, the U.S. Department of Justice declines comment on any of it.

It’s important to tell an interesting story and to tell your story in an honest and interesting way. There are players in the courtroom. We didn’t have a choice as to who those were. So these are the players in this drama, and it is a drama. I think a good trial lawyer has to be aware of what’s happening in the courtroom — that is, what kind of a drama is occurring. Who are the bad people and the good people? Who is the villain and who is the hero?
—Gerry Spence, Aug. 27, 2008

U.S. District Judge Paul D. Borman, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, was the boss, and there was never any question about it in his often-crowded downtown Detroit courtroom. A little more than three weeks of the trial were taken up with evidence, including testimony from nearly a score of prosecution witnesses. There was just one witness for the defense — Fieger himself. Most of the remaining time was spent on legal arguments by both sides, including an inch-thick pretrial defense motion to throw out the government’s indictments and its case.

The gist of the document was that the federal government, specifically the George W. Bush White House and the Alberto Gonzales U.S. Attorney General’s office, had been selective and vindictive in targeting the defendants for criminal charges because Fieger had been an outspoken critic of both. Ven Johnson, in light of this argument, was a victim of circumstance.

The defense claimed that “prominent Democrat” Fieger, who had challenged and was soundly beaten by incumbent Republican John Engler in Michigan’s 1998 gubernatorial race, was targeted, in part, because he had “encouraged the people of Michigan to vote for John McCain and against Bush which caused (sic) droves of Democrats to the polls and gave McCain a win” in Michigan during the 2000 presidential primary.

To support their claim that a malicious White House was out to get Fieger, the defense pointed to a Bush speech at Southfield’s Lawrence Technological University the day after the primary. In it, Bush made clear that he was aware of Fieger’s political activities, referring to him in the name of Fieger’s best-known client, right-to-die poster boy Jack Kevorkian.

“Somebody was telling me that this Dr. Kevorkian’s lawyer’s making noises,” a clearly angry and animated Bush said. “Somebody told me that he is, uh, going into our primary to try to influence it. There’s nothing we can do about that except for this: We can rally our friends and neighbors. We can rally like-minded folks to go the polls and say to Kevorkian’s lawyer, ‘You’re not gonna get to pick who the nominee of the Republican Party is!’”

The defense alleged that Alberto Gonzales personally approved the “grand-scale raid” on Fieger’s law firm and sent Justice Department lawyer M. Kendall Day to join Detroit Assistant U.S. Attorney Lynn Helland in prosecuting Fieger and Johnson.

It was, the defense argued, an example of the “highly publicized highjacking (sic) of the Department of Justice” by the Bush White House and Gonzales “to carry out politically motivated investigations and prosecutions targeting Democrats.”

Judge Borman didn’t buy it.

He refused the motion and went further, forbidding the defense to utter the names of Bush, Gonzales, and others they claimed were out to get Fieger. Borman allowed reference only to “the powers that be” in Washington.

And he made another signal pretrial ruling, later included in his instructions to the jury. Although no case law specifically defined reimbursement of campaign contributions as illegal, Borman said it was.

“Nobody believes it, that the judge actually instructed the jury that I was guilty,” Fieger says. “I mean, that shocks lawyers. You don’t instruct juries that what a party did was wrong. That’s the decision for the jury. When they start finally recognizing the historical value of this trial, besides the fact that it was Gerry Spence’s last trial, they’ll see that the court instructed the jury that we were guilty.”

Meanwhile, Spence wasn’t coy about his reputation as a sight to see in the courtroom. His many big wins include the acquittal of former Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos against federal racketeering charges, and a $10.5-million verdict against defense contractor Kerr-McGee in the suspicious death of whistleblower employee Karen Silkwood. (Her story was told in the 1983 Oscar-nominated film Silkwood, with Meryl Streep in the lead.)
Spence is a self-described country lawyer in the way that Clarence Darrow, Abe Lincoln, and Atticus Finch were country lawyers, and is known to push the limits of trial judges’ patience. His detractors (as have Fieger’s) have called him uncontrollable.

“I think that my reputation as a trial attorney and as an author made it more difficult for me, because I’ve written a good deal about trial work,” Spence says. “These prosecutors tried to make it appear to the judge that I wouldn’t be controllable, that I would run wild and loose.
“They quoted to the judge from my book, called

Win Your Case, out of context to make it appear that I really was a bad rogue in the courtroom. In response, I provided him the whole book to look at.
“What he took from the book, I can’t say. But I have spent an entire lifetime in the courtroom, over 55 years, and I have never been cited with contempt — never even threatened with contempt. No kidding.”

Fieger, on the other hand, has felt the wrath of judges both inside and out of court, and it was up to Spence to control him as he sat at the defendant’s table with his law partner, both accused felons. It was the most important case of Fieger’s life, and it wasn’t his to argue.

“Here I am defending probably the best trial lawyer in America,” Spence says. “I think he’s as good a trial lawyer as I’ve ever seen, and certainly he’s better in his prime than I am in my waning years, I would think. He has more energy, he has courage, and he’s a fighter.

“And although that may take him over the edge sometimes, so far as judges and prosecutors and insurance companies are concerned, it’s the characteristic that he has that has made him a really great trial lawyer.

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