Personal injuries

CHAPTER 4

Every successful negotiation is susceptible to Tolstoy's observation about unhappy families: they end up in the same place, but each one gets there its own way. For his part, Feaver set simple goals in bargaining with the government. Unlike most lawyers I'd represented, he seemed resigned about the loss of his law license. It was inevitable anyway for someone who admitted bribing judges, and by now practice had made him rich. Instead, he hoped to maintain his bundle in the face of the forfeitures and fines the government could exact. More important, he wanted no part of the penitentiary, not so much for his own sake, he said, but so he could attend to his wife during her inevitable decline.

On his side, Sennett's foremost requirement was that Robbie go about his bad business wired for sound, and agree to testify later. For that reason Stan also insisted on a conviction, knowing it would enhance Feaver's credibility before a jury if he'd pled guilty to what he was accusing others of doing. Finally, Feaver's role as government operative had to remain an absolute secret, particularly from Dinnerstein, who might spill the beans to his uncle.

After days of haggling, we made a deal that required Robbie to plead to one count of defrauding the public by bribing various judges. Assuming Robbie delivered on what he'd proffered, the government would depart from the federal sentencing guidelines and agree to probation with a $250,000 fine.

Everyone felt reasonably satisfied with these arrangements-except the Department of Justice, more specifically UCORC, the Undercover Operations Review Committee, which controlled all clandestine operations directed at public officials. UCORC had been established in the wake of ABSCAM, the FBI sting aimed at the Capitol, to calm Congress's newfound agitation about the perils to innocent citizens posed by undercover operations. The innocent citizens whom UCORC was concerned about now were the people on the other side of the cases Robbie would be fixing. UCORC said flatly that the government could take no part in depriving the opposing parties and their lawyers of an honest day in court.

Sennett flew to D.C. to butt heads several times. Eventually, UCORC agreed the problem could be resolved if Feaver were to fix only sham cases. The idea was that just as FBI agents had played Arab sheikhs in ABSCAM, they could act the part of the defense lawyers and parties in fictitious lawsuits Feaver would file. All of that make-believe, however, would entail a far more elaborate and expensive operation than Sennett had envisioned. Many weeks passed while Stan did combat within the Department to wring the approvals for his budgetary and manpower requests. It was late October by then, and naturally, at that point UCORC said no again.

The difficulty, they now realized, was that Robbie Feaver was an acknowledged felon. The government could hardly allow him to keep practicing law on the honor system. If he got into any of the mischief that could be expected of a crooked P.I. lawyer, it would be blamed on them. More pertinently, Sennett's plan offered no safeguards to keep Robbie from continuing to secretly pay off on the real cases on which he'd still be working in order to maintain his cover.

In essence, UCORC demanded that Feaver practice under police watch. Robbie chafed, but in the end he agreed that an FBI agent could be planted in his office to pose as the new paralegal Mort and he had already agreed to hire to enable Feaver to spend more time with his wife. To account for the fact that the paralegal would be virtually welded to his side, Sennett suggested that a female agent be assigned, someone who could pretend to be the latest of Robbie's many office liaisons. Late in November the woman proposed for the role, known as Evon Miller, flew in so we could all meet face-to-face.

At Sennett's direction, we each arrived separately at a room in the Dulcimer House. Jim, the agent who'd attended Robbie's proffer, was sitting with Stan when I got there. Jim had become a fixture and I'd realized by now that UCORC had designated him to run the operation. The new agent came up last. She spoke the code word 'Petros' and the door parted to reveal a woman in her thirties of medium height with a sturdy athletic build and agreeable looks. The first impression was of a pert, pug-nosed girl-next-door with a sincere, unassuming style. She wore jeans and a polo shirt, and a trace of eye makeup beneath her narrow wire-framed glasses; her brass-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Yet even there on the threshold, she was noticeably ill at ease. Her brow was pinched and she advanced flat-footed into the room, shaking hands without meeting anyone's eye. Attempting his usual gallantry, Feaver fetched her a juice from the minibar, which she accepted with a polite smile.

"So, Evon-" Robbie pronounced the name as we all had, as if it was a variant on 'Yvonne,' but she shook her head.

"Evon," she said. "Like `I'll get even.' My mom meant it to be said the other way, but no one ever did."

I caught Sennett's quick grin, a fox in the brush. 'Evon Miller' was a nom de guerre, invented for her, along with her driver's license and social security card, at FBI headquarters in D.C. Robbie did not realize that she was, in the parlance, `telling her myth.'

"That's just like me," Robbie told her eagerly, "my last name. People get confused all the time. Mine's like `Do me a favor."'

She managed a lukewarm grin, but did not seem fully persuaded they had much in common. Feaver plowed on, intent on winning her over.

"Which reminds me," he said. "I ask people all the time when I meet them: Which do you like better? Even numbers or odd?" From her narrow look, I could see she recognized it as a bar line. Clearly, she'd been warned about Robbie and had no use for his flirting. "I like even numbers," he added, with a futile little smile at his pun. She nodded rather than say anything else and moved to the other side of the room, before Sennett hailed us to our seats so we could talk over the necessary arrangements to be sure no one in Feaver's office questioned Evon or the fictitious cases.

"Did you say she was a Bureau agent or a prison guard?" Feaver asked afterwards. To my eye, she'd been no worse than correct. Robbie, I suspected, was upset by the reality of being watched twelve hours a day in his own office. The truth, though, was that none of us-Robbie, me, even Stan-knew anything about Evon Miller's true identity, any more than we did about Jim or the other undercover agents, the so-called UCAs, who eventually came to work on the case. Project Petros, as the operation was now labeled, ran strictly on the rule of need-to-know, meaning that all players, whether the agents or Robbie or Sennett, were supposed to receive only the limited information required to act their parts. That would minimize the chance that critical secrets would slip out and bring down the entire facade.

The only facts we eventually gleaned about Evon Miller's true background came to us in a roundabout way, largely because Stan had initial reservations about her. He'd found her more tentative than he'd hoped, and was also afraid her low-key style might give her away, since she appeared an unlikely match for someone as flashy as Bobbie. Privately, Feaver found that concern entertaining; he said he was not known as `especially picky.' In any event, Jim, who'd been given control over the agents by UCORC, stuck by his choice. He was impressed by her personal history, which made him believe she had the resilience to handle the rigors of life undercover.

"Apparently, she competed in the Olympics," Sennett explained to me one morning. He tipped a shoulder, knowing no more than that. We were in Warz Park, where Stan ran several miles at 6 a.m. Stan's mania for secrecy was so intense that he had not yet even informed anybody in his office about Feaver. Thus, to avoid questions, we often met here. I'd bought a snappy running suit and followed him once or twice around the tarred oval before we would appear to happen upon one another on a bench. We had gotten together today so that I could hand over documents-the final, signed copy of Robbie's plea agreement and his acknowledgment that he'd reviewed the lengthy written protocol for the undercover operation UCORC had generated-both of which were hidden in the folds of the morning's newspaper. By now it was past Thanksgiving, and winter, like an infection, was beginning to breed in the wind.

As Stan casually picked up the paper, he told me the little about Evon Miller he'd learned. In confidence, Jim had let loose this lone detail about the Olympics in order to reassure Stan. Sennett's motives for telling me, again as a supposed secret, were more pointed.

"Make sure your guy knows she's tougher than she looks," he said. "Don't let him think he can roll over her or outfox her. He plays games, we'll know." A smile tempted me, as it often did confronting Stan's prosecutorial macho, but that riled him. I was jogging in place to keep warm, and Stan stood up from the bench and showed me the newspaper where the signed documents were concealed.

"I have all my cookies on the line here, George. Every IOU and benny. There's nothing left in the favor bank. Don't let him mess with me. And not just for my sake. For his. He screws around, and the way D.C. wrote the guidelines, we have to roll it up and land on him with both feet. Make sure he understands."

I assured him Robbie recognized that if Stan caught him lying he was certain to end up in prison. But Stan laid a finger on my chest for emphasis.

"I'm telling you this as a friend," he said and repeated himself once more before he took off again down the path in the lifting darkness: "We'll know." As I said, this is a lawyer's story. I mean that not only because it is an account of the law's fateful impact but also in the sense that I tell it, as attorneys often do, for those who cannot speak for themselves. I witnessed many of the events of Project Petros firsthand, inasmuch as Robbie always insisted, as he had from the moment Sennett appeared on his doorstep, that I be present whenever Stan was. My memories are enhanced by the hundreds of hours of conversations I have had over the years with the participants, and also by the kind of historical detritus the law often leaves behind: tapes and transcripts and volumes of FBI case reports, called 302s.

Yet, left at that, the tale would be incomplete. The law's truth never ends strictly with the evidence. It depends as well on what attorneys call `inference' and what less restricted souls refer to as `imagination.' Much of Robbie's day-to-day activity was observed only by the agent codenamed Evon Miller, and for the sake of a full account, I have freely imagined her perspectives. Whether she would agree with everything I attribute to her, I cannot say. She has told me what she may, but much of her version is forever locked away behind FBI regulations. My surmises, my conjecture and inference-my imagining-would never pass muster in a courtroom. But I regard them as the only avenue to the whole truth that the law-and a story-always demand.

As for my own role, I hope not to appear like those old warriors whose glory only seems to grow over the years. There was nothing heroic about my part in Petros. The uncomfortable truth is that as soon as I heard what Stan Sennett had in mind that first day in his office, I wanted no part of representing Robbie Feaver.

As a lawyer, I lived by a solemn watchword: Never offend a judge. I laughed at all their jokes. When they ruled against me, even stupidly, I said thank you. I solemnly refrained from any discussion about the ability or temperament of anyone on the bench, living or dead. I have rarely seen a judge who did not bear grudges-it is one of the perks of unquestioned power-and I knew the grudges formed against the person who represented Robbie Feaver would last. Not because all our judges were corrupt. On the contrary, most of them felt, with good reason. That they'd been lifting their skirts high for years to avoid the muddy playing fields of Kindle County. Now they'd be soiled nonetheless. The newspapers would print editorial cartoons representing the courthouse as a cash register; drunks at ball games and bars would make crude jokes whenever a judge took a $20 bill out of his pocket. Having traded the bounty of private practice for the esteem of the bench, they would feel swindled in life's bazaar. And the first person they'd pick on was me, who, unlike Stan or Robbie, would be seen as having chosen to participate for the grubby motive of a fee.

So as I wandered down Marshall Avenue, returning that mid-September day from Stan's office, I was trying to figure how I could get out of the case. I could ask for a staggering retainer. Or claim that I'd been suddenly called for a trial that would consume all my time. But I knew I wasn't going through with any of it.

In the simplest terms, I couldn't stand to draw so dismal a contrast between myself and Sennett, who'd just given me his valorous speech about his Uncle Petros. I never fully understood my lifelong contest with Stan, but I always felt I was running behind. Part of it was that I'd chosen the lucre of private practice, while he lived the more chaste life of a public servant; part was because, as a defense lawyer, I circumvented and thwarted and apologized, while he, as a prosecutor, smote hard blows for what he believed was good and just. Yet now, in the wake of my father's death, I realized there was a way in which I'd always compared myself to Stan in fear.

At the age of twenty-two, with my degree from Charlottesville, I'd become a hand on an ore freighter, which had brought me in time to Kindle County. Ostensibly I'd joined the Merchant Marine to avoid Vietnam. But I was really fleeing my parents' hermetic world in southern Virginia, escaping from my mother's relentless social pretensions and, even more, from my father's call to the inviolable credos of a Southern gentleman. A lawyer before me, my father adhered to what he regarded as the right things Christ and country, family, duty, and the law. He found late in life, as he watched less able and principled colleagues promoted to the spots on the bench which he craved, that his unwavering virtue marked him in many eyes, probably including his son's, as a bit of a fool.

In the raw democracy of Kindle County, where honor was not a matter of social attainment, I'd felt free to live a life of reasonable adult accommodations. But with my father gone, I suddenly feared I'd cast away too many things he had exalted. I was a decent man, but seldom brave. That was why Sennett for the moment seemed so formidable. Like my father, he was a person of rigor, of standards, a purist, who believed powerfully-and uncompromisingly-in the wide gulf between evil and good. As a boy, Stan had briefly been a seminarian preparing to enter the priesthood of the Greek Orthodox Church, and I always sensed that in his mind-as in my dad's-law and God were not far apart. Yet, unlike my father, Stan had the fiber to recognize that in this world good things do not happen by accident. I realized now that a piece of me had always seen Stan as the man I might have been were I more determined to be a loyal son.

So I knew I'd have no peace with myself if I turned away from Robbie Feaver. I remembered the lines from Frost about the road not taken. And then, like the poet, turned to follow Robbie and Sennett down that unfamiliar path.