He’s a criminal defense attorney and he’s one of the best. Who says so? Why none other than the State Bar of Texas. In 1994, they named him “Outstanding Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year.”

He was in Waco representing David Koresh during his standoff with the FBI and the ATF. He pushed Barbara Piotrowski’s wheel chair into the courtroom after she was allegedly shot by exercise mogul Richard Minns. He sat by Lilla Paulus in Houston when she was tried for her involvement in the murder of John Hill. He stood with U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson while she was fighting for her political life against DA Ronnie Earle in Austin. He represented Ramsey Muniz, La Raza Unida’s candidate for Governor, as he fought a losing battle over drugs and he took up for Juana Leija, the mother who tried to drown all six of her children and herself, when the DA wanted the death penalty.

Right now he’s toe to toe with the FBI, defending former Houston Port Commissioner Betty Maldonado against charges made against her, two current and two former Houston City Council members by a federal grand jury.

His name is Dick DeGuerin. He and his wife Janie have a little “ranch” near Burton, not ten minutes from Round Top.

I have a little history with him. Almost twenty years ago in Houston, my wife was a Montessori preschool teacher in Houston. One of his daughters was in her class. So was my oldest son.

I knew another DeGuerin a little better, Dick’s little brother Mike. Mike and his wife Gail were the caretakers of that little Montessori school. Mike was the Chairman of the Board and Gail was the Director before my wife had a turn at the job. I always thought they were good folks. Mike’s a pretty well known attorney himself. He ended up taking over Percy Foreman’s practice.

Anyway, because of that small personal connection, we always kept up with the DeGuerin boys. It wasn’t hard to do. They make it into the papers a lot.

A while back, Janie called and wanted to know if I could find her an old farm house to work on. I did. We moved it on to their place and she’s been working on it ever since.

Because of that little piece of business I got the chance to meet a few of the other members of their family and... I got the chance to do this interview.

As I walked up to the restored old depot with an attached railroad car that is their country home, Dick came out to meet me. His first words were, “You know, crows are smart.”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about until I heard the cawing over my shoulder. “They know when I’ve got a gun and they won’t come close.” he added with a smile.

There was a look on his face that, upon reflection, I think summed up the man. He loved those crows. He wanted to shoot them but he loved them. He positively loved having an intelligent adversary. It excited him.

Here’s that interview...

You’ve been a pretty high-profile attorney for almost 20 years now. You’ve handle a lot of high-stress, highly publicized cases. You put yourself under a lot of pressure. Why do you do it?

I enjoy it. I feel lucky that I found something so young...that I am happy with. I like the challenge. I don’t always win every case. If I did, the challenge wouldn’t be there. It’s stressful but it’s stressful in a way that I like. I’ve been on some awfully hard cases under some unpleasant circumstances but I always gotten through ‘em. I know that I can make it through them. I like helping people and that’s really what I do. Sometimes a lot of people think that the people I help aren’t really worth helping but I’ve found that there’s good in everybody.

It’s like living in the country. It’s not like it was a hundred years ago but the fact that it’s a little harder gives me a sense of satisfaction...What does not destroy me makes me stronger.

Tell me about Percy Foreman. and the influence he had on your life.

I think about Percy every day. He was a very strong person, very strong willed and he was a genius in the true sense of the word. He worked hard every day. He never rested on his laurels to the day he died.He had a great insight into people, which was probably his strongest attribute. He could size somebody up in a heartbeat, and that meant clients, or judges, or jurors, or prosecutors, or police officers, or witnesses...people in general. He taught by example and by osmosis. I was around him every day for twelve years. He’s with me all the time now. I feel his presence in every tight situation. It’s common for me to think, “What would Percy do?”

I’ve been real fortunate to have a series of mentors. I believe in the mentor system that goes back to earliest times. Some people aren’t that fortunate and I believe you can see it in the quality of a person’s work. Of course my father was my earliest mentor, then Joe Moss was a guy in the district attorney’s office that was a real maverick. He was Jack Binion’s cousin. Jack Binion was another mentor of mine. Frank Knapp from the same law firm was a mentor. Then Percy of course.

That’s pretty tall cotton. Of all those, the only one still alive is Frank Knapp and he doesn’t practice law any more. I still draw on the advice and the...experience I got from those folks every day.

Many of the people you represent are poor. There’s no great economic benefit I can see to taking on their cases. Why do you agree to represent them?

Well, its not all that altruistic. I’d like to say it is. Even persons on the low end of the economic ladder have friends or relatives, some manner of raising at least adequate funds to mount a defense. There are always other people that can well afford a defense and it kind of evens it out. My fees...fit the client and the case. Sometimes, I’ll take a case that I know I can’t get paid for but that’s really an exception. I’m not a knight on a white charger. I’m in it to be successful, but when you can get a case and have those that you are responsible for survive, even though you can’t get a fee, it’s pretty gratifying. There have been some cases that gave me a lot of satisfaction just because the person needed it more that anybody else.

On good example of that is Juana Leija, the woman who tried to drown all six of her kids and herself. She saw no other way out. She was physically and sexually abused every day of her life and so were her kids. Every social organization..., except the church, failed her and the church couldn’t do much.

The manner she chose was something that was culturally acceptable. In Mexican and Mexican- American culture, there is a story about a woman called La Llorona, “the crying woman.”

The story is that she fell in love with a very wealthy man who had a family already and she had a child by that man and she didn’t want to dishonor him or herself or her family so she threw the baby in the creek and drowned herself and then because she killed her baby and herself, she had to walk the wilderness, crying. The called her La Llorona. That legend is very well known in Hispanic culture. That’s what she (Juana Leija) chose as her way out.

I got a call from a priest who knew her situation. He asked me to represent her and I did. There wasn’t any money at all in it but it was the right thing to do. When I got involved, the DA’s office wanted to put her to death. Two of her kids died and another got some brain damage. She was not a criminal. She didn’t need to be treated in the criminal justice system. She was literally at her wits end. Her husband had driven her crazy. I though I could do her some good and I did.

You’ve also represented a number of wealthy or influential people, Carolyn Farb, Ron Darling of the New York Mets, former Alley Theater Artistic director Pat Brown. What is the main difference between the wealthy clients and the impoverished ones.

Money. (Laughter) People are people. We really tend to forget that. We get insulated in our lives and we forget that people from a different economic strata or a different cultural background are human beings. People are pretty much alike. There are cultural influences and language influences, things that make the details different but people are pretty much alike. When you get in trouble, you need help. It doesn’t make any difference if you are extremely wealthy or extremely poor. That’s the way I look at it.

Some people, who have had money all their lives or have come into it lately and gotten spoiled...when you get through that veneer of entitlement that they feel, they’re still people. Sometimes, people with a lot of money need help more because they can’t understand the kind of trouble they’re in. When someone on the lower end of the socio-economic strata gets in trouble, it’s not so new to them because they’ve had to scrap and scramble all their lives. They’re a little bit easier to get to understand their predicament.

Some people have a hard time understanding why a Juana Leija deserves top quality representation. Why should a person who has obviously committed a ghastly crime receive the best possible defense?

Why not? Under out system, every person, no matter whether they’ve committed a crime or they haven’t or it’s somewhere in between...and it usually is in that grey area...deserves representation in court. Until we go through the process of legal determination of guilt, that person is presumed to be innocent. Things aren’t just black and white. Almost everything is grey. In Juana Leija’s case, she was driven to do what she did by a cruel, abusive husband who abused not only her but her children in some of the worst ways...bringing his drunk friends and having his daughters go to bed with them, receiving money for that, slapping them around...some of the worst stuff you can imagine.

Now the crime of taking another person’s life...the punishment range for that crime can be anywhere from a probated sentence to the electric chair, depending on a lot of factors. There’s a wide range (in the law) of what the punishment should be and that reflects an understanding that there are all sorts of circumstances that, perhaps can’t justify taking another life, but at least explain it and why the maximum punishment is not appropriate.

By the same token, there can be circumstances... that shows such a callous disregard for the taking of another life that the maximum punishment is not enough. In Juana Leija’s case, while she did intend for her children to die and for herself to die, there were factors involved that justified leniency, at worst, and perhaps even not being convicted. She was also legally insane. At the time she did that, she did not know the difference between right and wrong. She saw what she was doing as the right thing to do and the only thing to do.

If a jury had found that she was insane at the time of the commission of those acts, then the law says that she would have to be found not guilty. It doesn’t say innocent, but not “not guilty.”

We compromised her case. The compromise was a good one. She was placed on deferred adjudication..that means that the judge just withheld judgement...and put on probation. As it turns out, she successfully served that probation. She’s been terminated from that probation. She learned English and got a job. She took care of her kids in ways that she hadn’t been able to take care of them before. She didn’t get full custody but she saw them very frequently. The solution to what had happened was far better in the way that we got it worked out than if she had been sent off to prison and her kids left to fend for themselves.

So, why did she deserve someone who could try to work that out. I think she and the system and the people and the state of Texas got the right result. I see a lot of lawyers who practice criminal law that don’t care about their clients, about the results. They’re just there to make some money. I really don’t do that.

I think Juana Leija deserved that, regardless of how bad her acts might appear at first blush. I think any human being deserves that. It just so happens that Juana Leija was indigent, didn’t have a penny to her name but the same circumstances or very similar circumstances could have happened to someone who lived in River Oaks. That person would deserve to have their story told.

It has been said that the rights of the greatest of us are only as secure as the rights of the least of us. As American citizens, what should concern us about the state of our civil liberties?

Complacency. The vast majority of our citizenry are pretty happy with their lot. A great majority of the people never fall afoul of the law and so they don’t realize that the law is there for everybody, not just those that get in trouble. If you think that the law is not there for you and only there to protect people who get in trouble, then you don’t care what the law does or says and you aren’t as protective of the rights we all have as you would be if you expected to use them. People who are complacent don’t expect to have to use the laws so they don’t care if they get ignored or changed or lessened in some way and that’s a great danger that I see.

I remember fifteen or twenty years ago, a reporter, I think from the New York Times, took a kind of informal poll of people. He stood out on a corner and read various lines to people and asked them where it came from and if it was a valuable right, etc. A lot of people said “Well it must be the Communist Manifesto” or some radical writing or we don’t need that.

What he was doing was just reading the Bill of Rights.

People don’t realize how important it is that those rights are there. People tend to think it’s okay if we don’t observe those with some people. Right now, it’s popular to think that for two things, if you’re charged, you’re guilty and you ought to go to prison forever. One is drugs and the other is child abuse. I’ve found that juries need a lot of educating. They come in off the street and they haven’t come across the criminal justice system and walk into the court and the indictment is read to them and charges child abuse, they all fold their arms and their legs and squinting their eyes and wondering about the slick defense lawyer up there. They just automatically believe...it doesn’t matter what the evidence is, doesn’t matter what rights were violated, the person must be guilty. “If they say he’s guilty, he must be guilty.”

That is a lessening of our rights. That is a danger to the rights that people are guaranteed by the bill of rights and by the procedural constraints on the conduct of the trial and the evidentiary rules that rule that some things get into evidence and some things don’t.

So, complacency, and a lack of understanding for the reasons for all these rights, is the greatest danger facing us.

In what ways do you think our civil liberties and the ways they are protected by the courts have changed in the last thirty years?

I’d have to say that the pendulum has swung far to the right. Nixon and Ford and Reagan and Bush...greatly expanded the powers of the federal police, the F.B.I., D.E.A., Customs, Immigration. They greatly expanded the federal criminal code. They tried to remake the federal judiciary and have just about succeeded with some notable exceptions, by appointing federal judges at the trial and appellate level to reflect their more conservative, less civil-liberties leaning (view) of the law. That includes police officers, prosecutors, judges and administrators of all of the agencies, including the justice department.

They have succeeded in reversing the trend that began with the Warren Court, and actually it began before that, of recognizing and empowering the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights...primarily the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth and fourteenth amendments.

The trend has been away from the importance of the individual and towards empowering the collective, the state, the government. Even though the Republican party says it’s the party of smaller government, what has happened in the last thirty years is a great empowerment of the government, particularly the federal government...though the state government has been the beneficiary of that in that state police agencies find their powers of enforcement have come up stronger against the individual.

That sounds almost like heresy because most people think “Ah, the courts are liberal and they’re too soft and we’re too soft on crime.” That’s a fallacy! That’s a false impression, created by those in power to get more and more legislation at the state and federal level authorizing more money for cops...more prisons, more laws, longer sentences. All that is a trend that is very dangerous. I think we are creating an underclass of persons that have been convicted of crime that can never be reintegrated into society. It’s wrongheaded in that, by the way we are treating persons that are convicted of crime, we’re assuring ourselves that we will forever have to alienate them from ourselves in order to protect ourselves.

When you put a person away for ten years...think about taking ten years out of your life. It would destroy you and whatever you know now. It would destroy your family. It would destroy your career so that when you got out, you wouldn’t be able to support yourself. You’d not be able to find a job so you’d have to go back to a life of crime. That’s a great simplification but the sentences now are getting worse and worse. We’re locking people up for twenty years without parole...for even longer than that so that they have absolutely no hope. If you put someone in prison...and all he gets is warehousing and being with prisoners, what does he learn? He learns only the values you learn in prison which are: steal all you can, kill, rob, sexually abuse.

It’s wrongheaded. If you really want to do something about the crime problem...and in the first place, I believe the crime problem is far overstated. It’s perceived to be far worse that it really is... the way to do it is to redeem those people. Give ‘em some means to be at least self-supporting, useful citizens that don’t have to go back to crime when they get out.

So, I see a trend in the last thirty years of being unjustifiably harsh, of trying to limit constitutional rights. It disturbs me.

Because of the people you defend, you are sometimes pitted against the police. On some occasions, the Mets case for instance, you have suggested that the police have used too much force while doing their jobs. As you know this is a big issue in some cities, Los Angeles for instance. What is your experience with the police in this regard?

I think it’s endemic. You can talk about the causes all you want but what happens is that police are put in a very stressful situation and are often taught to be the aggressor, in that by being aggressive, they can take control of a situation. It results in their often being overly aggressive. Another cause of it is a lack of supervision. A police force is a team with a high degree of esprit de corps and camaraderie and that’s encouraged. They do have a tough job and it is a dangerous job. But by this banding together, in a kind of mentality that it’s the cops against the crooks...so if you’re not a cop, you’re a crook...where they distrust anyone who doesn’t wear a badge, they tend to not care how much force they use. If they do use too much force, everybody that’s there tends to cover up for them.

Another common experience...it’s very rare for a police officer to blow the whistle on another officer that uses too much force. It’s common knowledge among the police and lawyers that practice on both sides of the question, that, if a police officer does use too much force in making some kind of arrest, he’ll usually file some kind of exaggerated charge against the person to cover up what he does so a person is required to defend themselves first in court before complaining about the police. You could do it simultaneously but it falls on deaf ears because it’s like the little boy crying wolf. The public thinks he’s just saying they used too much force because he’s accused of a crime.

The police have the first access to the prosecutors. If a policeman and a citizen walk in at the same time theoretically, and the policeman says “I caught him stealing a hubcap” and the person says “He beat me up and he’s just saying that to cover up,” the prosecutor’s going to take the policeman’s word every time. In my experience, and I prosecuted before I became a defense lawyer, I’ve seen time and time again that police officers do tend to use too much force and they do tend to stick together and cover up for it when they do.

In the Mets case, it was real clear what happened. These two cops were off duty and working as bouncers in a night club. They had been drinking themselves. They got into a situation...the club was letting out, there were a lot of people in the parking lot. It was kind of a wild situation and they went overboard. None of those four guys had done anything wrong and the cops just got too aggressive. As soon as they had Tim Teufel in kind of a head lock, Ron Darling came up and tried to stop it and calm everybody down. The other cop grabbed Ron Darling. It just escalated. They filed the charges against the four guys to shut them up, to make the four guys look bad rather than the cops. The prosecutor told me after the case was over.... The prosecutor told me facing to Ron Darling. “I don’t know why you guys were charged.”

None of them should have pled but there was some front office pressure on that...only two of them pled and that was for a deferred adjudication with a hundred dollar fine just to get the case ovr with.

That kind of case happens every day, dozens of times a week. It just got a lot of attention because these were four New York Mets baseball players. Usually it doesn’t get the notoriety and the cops get away with it.

I’m going to read off some names. Tell me the main things, from your point of view, that people should understand about these people and what happened to them.

That seems like the case that never would die. It’s still going on. She came to me before she was shot, after Dick Minns had charged her with theft.

He’s an egotistical maniac. He’s an awful person. His ego could not take the fact that she moved out on him. She moved out of the townhouse that they shared and took her property. He came home and she wasn’t there and he just went bananas. He took some of his property and put it in storage and then called the police and told the police that she had stolen it. It was a lie. He got some cops that had worked for him and others that he was friendly with him and went and searched her apartment. They didn’t find anything but they claimed that they found some furniture that was there that she owned that they claimed he owned, so they charged her with theft.

She came to me and told me how this guy was just a maniac and she was very much afraid of him. He had pulled all of his influence to get her charged. She kept saying “I’m really afraid he’s going to hurt me.” I told her that “the only real protection you have is be with someone at all times. Don’t be alone.” She took the advice for the most part but then one morning, he was successful, or the guys he hired were successful in catching her alone and they shot her. I heard about it within hours of when she was shot and I rushed over to the hospital. They were treating it as a foiled robbery. I’ll never forget that. Her father had flown in from California. There were tubes running all around her. It was already known that the bullets had severed her spine. She reached up and grabbed my hands and said “Dick did this. Dick Minns did this.”

So, I called the police, some detectives that I knew, and got them on the case right away. Armed with that knowledge, they were able to get the shooter and the getaway driver to implicate up the line and get some other people. The difficulty is that they’ve never been able to get the guy that was between Dick Minns and the killer to implicate Dick Minns. Dudley Bell, the private detective who hired the killers, has never implicated himself or Dick Minns. I think Minns is being blackmailed and is paying it. So the DA has never charged Minns with that, although the cops think they have enough evidence. I heard that Minns had tried to hire a hit man to kill Dudley Bell and somebody else in Houston. I don’t know who that person is but I’ve got a fairly good idea.

The real story is Barbara. It’s common for someone that suffers a catastrophic injury...to have tremendous psychological problems as a result. She was movie star beautiful, in top physical condition and now she has an injury...a complete severance of the spinal cord. That means she has no bladder function, no leg function. She has to live with the injury. She has shown an amazing will to live and to succeed. The real story is how she was so devastatingly injured and has survived it, not just survived it but gone ahead.

The part about Dick Minns...it’s almost denouement. He escaped any kind of responsibility. He hid his money all over the world and he’s running. I hope his life is miserable but I don’t think it is. I’ve done my best to make it miserable. We’ve sued him and he continues to fight that lawsuit. He’s in Ireland or London or Switzerland or someplace. I don’t think we’ll ever see him again over here. (Dick DeGuerin and other attorneys were successful in gaining a $32.1 million dollar judgement against Minns but it was never collected. Barbara Piotrowski and Dick Minns are the subject of the book, Sleeping with the Devil.)

Lilla was a fascinating woman. The legend was that she was a Madame, that she had whorehouses but that’s really not true. She had very colorful background and she was wild in her youth. She was married to a gambler named Claude Paulus. He was a gambler. Old Houstonians will remember that he owned a wide-open gambling club right down town, one block from the federal courthouse.

That’s how she got her reputation. She knew a lot of characters. She also knew a lot of nice people. Percy had known her for a long time.

She had known Ash Robinson but as she said in her trial, she’d never had a personal conversation with Ash in her life. Ash had asked her to get whatever information she could on John Hill. Ash thought because Lilla had friends in low places that she would be able to find out derogatory information about John Hill that would help in the criminal prosecution of Hill, because Ash was pushing that prosecution.

Lilla set out to find that information. She had living with her, Marsha McKittrict, a whore from Dallas and I think what happened was that Marsha got the idea from Lilla’s talking around the house about Ash and how he hated John Hill...she got the idea, along with her boyfriend, that John Hill could be easily robbed. They set up a robbery and it went bad. John Hill fought Bobby Vandiver, the robber, Marsha McKittrict’s boyfriend, and I think he shot John Hill because of that. John was supposed to be coming home from Las Vegas. He was supposed to have gotten some money in Las Vegas to pay Racehorse Hanes. That’s what Marsha said but she would never testify to that. Bobby Vandiver was dead before the trial.

One of the worst parts of that trial was that Lilla’s daughter testified against her.

She testified that over Thanksgiving dinner, Lilla said that “Ash Robinson is looking for someone to kill John Hill.” I don’t believe she said that.

Mary Wood was her name. Lilla’s daughter hated her mother. Lilla was pregnant when she married Claude Paulus. Lilla never would tell me, if she knew, who the real father was but Mary Wood was not Claude Paulus’ daughter. Claude did have a son by Lilla and Claude’s will left all his property to his “natural born issue.” The son got into a squabble with Mary over whether she was the natural child and Lilla testified in that trial that she was already pregnant when she first met Claude Paulus.

I didn’t know that. Lilla didn’t tell me that until after the trial.

She’s a strong lady. I knew Kay in college. She’s a year or two younger than I am. I knew who she was...everybody knew who she was. She was a cheerleader, one of the ten most beautiful freshmen and a great person, very unaffected by all that popularity...easy to know and meet.

The only reason she was indicted was the great fear that the Austin politicians had of Texas becoming a state that was represented by two Republican senators. That was it. She didn’t do anything wrong. She did everything right. She saw a problem, she tried to correct it. People were coming out of the woodwork trying to help her and they were doing all kinds of things that she didn’t know about. One guy was so enthusiastic that worked on her staff, he actually did use a computer to address some solicitations for money. She found out about it and fired him. She really didn’t do anything wrong.

She was a victim of Ronnie Earle’s very poorly run office in Austin as well as Ronnie Earle’s own political ambition. He was the first person to apply for appointment for the senate seat that was left vacant by Bentsen resigning to take (the position of) Treasury Secretary. He didn’t get it. Anne Richards nominated Krueger from San Marcos but Ronnie wanted it. He would have been rewarded somewhere down the line had he been successful at derailing Kay Bailey Hutchison...but of course he didn’t, and now, he is dead in the water. He’ll never be anything except what he is.

It was really a pleasure to represent her. She’s very, very smart and her husband Ray is...also very smart. They completely understood the situation they were in. She had no naivety about it at all like some people who reached prominence have.

You get a lot of arrogance in some prominent people. That’s endemic to prominent people just like violence is endemic to police officers, but she wasn’t that way. She was ready from day one to do whatever she needed to do to help me represent her, and so did Ray. It was a real team effort. She also understood that, even as guiltless as she was in fact, that she could very easily be convicted because of the tremendous effort to get her.

History tells you, that since reconstruction, there had never been a lack of a Democratic senator from Texas and you realize what that means in terms of money to everybody that depends on the fact that we had Democratic representation in the Senate and all the pork barrel that means. There were a lot of powerful people that wanted to prevent her from being the second Republican senator from Texas.

That was a real challenge. The challenge came not from him being so difficult, although he was difficult. It came from having limited access to my client and limited access to the court. There wasn’t a neutral court that I could go to for the relief that we were entitled to. I had to depend on the largesse of the FBI, which is notoriously thin, for anything that I wanted. As a matter of fact, the agents that I dealt with were very understanding of what I needed and contrary to the popular desire of the rest of the FBI agents they had to deal with, they stuck their neck out to get me in there.

What I found was a bunch of people who were devoutly religious and dedicated to their beliefs. They weren’t dedicated to David Koresh. He wasn’t to them a savior or some person who held their rapt attention or controlled their actions at all. He was just the latest of their prophets and they believed his view of the Bible but it wasn’t that he was controlling what they did.

He was difficult in that his religious agenda was more important than his personal agenda.

I could make him understand logically that the best thing for him to do was to surrender and go to court and fight in court whatever battles were ahead.

I could also make him understand that he would be better off if he voluntarily walked out with me than if they had to come in and get him.

I could also make him understand that the people who had him surrounded wanted to kill him. They didn’t want him to survive...that we would have to make it work to have him survive. I didn’t predict the fire. I didn’t predict that they were all going to be killed but I told him in no uncertain terms, “Don’t get by the window. They’ll take you out.” I believe they would have. They had snipers all around the place.

I could make him understand that too but his religious agenda was that he was not going to be forced to the logical conclusion that I was telling him. He was going to wait until he received some kind of message from God. He believed that he would get that message. Not that a booming voice was going to come down to him and say “Okay David, go on out.” but he believed that the message was going to be revealed to him by his readings...of the Bible. And all the rest of them believed that too.

They held their beliefs so firmly that they could not imagine giving up their beliefs. The FBI, on the other hand, belittled his beliefs. They thought it was just a sham...They ridiculed his beliefs even though they had religious experts available to them that could easily explain what was going on and how important it was that they observe their religion.

So you had these two groups of hard headed people that had no middle ground. That was the recipe for the disaster that happened. I think still it could have been avoided.

We even had it all arranged the way we were gonna come out. Knowing that the world was watching, I had arranged to have David and me walk out together and surrender to one Texas Ranger. David liked that idea too. He thought it would be a slap in the face to the people who had been tormenting him. The FBI wasn’t real interested in that.

I don’t think that the FBI in Waco was giving full information to Janet Reno or those in Washington that were making the decisions. They had this agenda that they wanted to do this tear gas thing and force them out and make it so the FBI could be the heroes. They didn’t give them the reasons not to do it. They lied to them about child abuse going on at the time. They gave them false information about the type of tear gas that was to be used. It was a deadly form of it. The people became completely immobilized...it wouldn’t have forced them out. Those that got subjected to a heavy does of it would just collapse. They couldn’t come out. It did create a tremendous fire hazard. A lot of the autopsy reports show a high degree of cyanide in the blood streams of those people who were in a position to have breathed some of the gas. What happens with CS gas is that, when it burns, it creates cyanide gas, the same kind of gas that is used in the gas chamber.

It was a terrible disaster that could have been avoided.

Nice guy. A very charismatic person. He’s handsome fellow and well spoken, a smart guy. He was, for Hispanics in Texas, at the time he appeared, the right person when he ran for governor the first time. He galvanized Hispanic Texans, and politics in Texas has never been the same since then. Now, all over South Texas, Hispanics control elections in municipalities and county-wide elections. It changed South Texas and he did it. He was the focal point. He was the head of La Raza Unida.

That was a lot of pressure to put on a guy who had simply been a struggling lawyer. He was a football hero at Baylor. When he came back (home), he was just a struggling lawyer and by a quirk of fate, got involved with the La Raza Unida movement. He was an attractive candidate and they put him up. Every where he went, the crowds just went crazy.

If you analyze how he got involved in drugs. Some folks said he got involved in marijuana to raise money. I don’t know if it was so much that as a rebellion and his involvement was far less than what the first case against him accused him of being.

In fact I represented his right hand man, his closest friend. We divided it up into two cases. We won his case. The witnesses were all the same. The evidence was all the same.

I’m not trying to paint him lily white or make him a saint or anything. I’m not saying he didn’t smoke marijuana but he wasn’t guilty of what he was charged with, which was being part of a big smuggling ring. Ramsey, being charged with this and having his name spread all over the papers as being accused of this...he was a target; they wanted to bring him down...he felt he was such a great disappointment that instead of staying and fighting, he ran... jumped bond and went to Mexico...crazy.

That was the thing that changed his life forever. If he would have stayed and fought, I think he would have won his case and history would have changed. But instead he ran. When he ran to Mexico, the only people who would have anything to do with him were people that were criminals and he got involved in Mexico. Basically, what happened in Mexico was that people down there blackmailed him and when he couldn’t pay any more blackmail, they brought him to the border, beat him up and turned him over to U.S. authorities on New Year’s Day.

That got headlines all over. So he gets back after running and he’s still got the first case and they indict him in San Antonio in a separate case and he sees that the world is crumbled around him and he gives up...pled guilty and went to prison.

That might have been the end of the story but he got out. He had been a lawyer. Everybody knew who he was and a lot of people thought he got a raw deal, particularly Hispanics in South Texas, particularly poor Hispanics.

It’s so common in Hispanic culture that when your name is well known, people think you can solve problems, so he became a person to whom Hispanics all over Texas would turn to if they didn’t know anything else and needed some help. He’d try to find the right lawyer for someone if they needed a lawyer. He’d tried to find the answer with social services.

He started building a good business with that. He got back involved with lawyers. I guess you might call him a case runner, some people did, but that wasn’t really what he was.

He was a focal point of attention from people that needed help and he’d try to help them. He made money out of it of course. A lot of those cases that he referred to other people were criminal cases. What got him involved this last time was a criminal case in which a guy wanted to get him to hire me to represent somebody and Ramsey told him he’d need a lot of money.

The guy set out to get the money. Well the way he was gonna get the money was in a cocaine deal because his brother was in a cocaine deal. So Ramsey went up to meet him north of Dallas. He was right in the middle, without knowing it, of all this cocaine dealing going on around him. This guy’s trying to deal enough cocaine to get enough money to give it to Ramsey to hire me. That’s what happened this last time.

Having been previously convicted twice before, his sentence was an automatic life sentence. Awful. The case has been appealed as far as it can go. I think the next step is a writ of habeas corpus. He’s got people that are still devoted to him and want to help.

He’s never been a complainer. I’ve seen him in dirty jails and now in Levenworth, which is a pretty tough prison and he doesn’t complain. He’ll accept whatever comes to him.

When he was arrested north of Dallas, he had his luggage with him. He was on the way back to South Texas. They kept his luggage for a while and I was going through it, determining whether to use anything that was in there... for the trial, and there was a copy of Plato, and Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and either the Iliad or the Odyssey...all in paperback. Those were the only books that he had in his luggage.

She shared a few things about their life in Burton. It’s not high profile. It’s not high stress. There are no reporters or television cameras. They do a lot of simple things. I asked Dick about that.

You have this place in Burton. You raise cattle and spend a lot of your free time up here in the country. You’ve got a comfortable home in Houston. Why are you up here so often?

This is a...refuge. It’s like recharging my batteries to be up here. I can get here and still be just an hour and a half away from Houston in case of an emergency. It’s like being in the wilderness. It’s just been a lifesaver.

I’ve always had an interest in the country. My mother’s family was from the ranch country in South Texas and so I got a lot of that growing up. It’s kind of in my blood. I love being able to look out and see nothing but...nothing. Even if I do nothing more than walk around or... sit around, I just love being out here.

I’ve always loved horses. I like to work, mow and build things...It gives me the strength to continue in a pretty stressful occupation.

Janie says you like to sit around the campfire and play the guitar too...

I love that. I started with the ukelele when I was 8 or 10 years old. My mother...taught me how to play the ukelele. The first song I learned was Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue...

Gitchee...gitchee...gitchee goo

Some time in high school, I sent off to Sears for their cheapest guitar. As long as I’ve been playing, I ought to be able to play better. I’ve got a little campfire arrangement set up out here and last year, for Christmas, Janie gave me a chuck wagon, a hundred and twenty-five year old chuck wagon. I roll that out ever now and then and put up a hundred-year-old range teepee and do the whole deal.

You’re mentioned that you’re from an old ranching family. I understand you ride in the Salt Grass Trail Ride. Do these activities take you back to an earlier time?

This will be our tenth year, I think, to ride in the Salt Grass Trail. When I was in junior high school, I would work on my uncle’s ranch. That was about as early as we could do some real work.

The kind of work they did was horseback...movin’ cattle from one place to another, checkin’ fence...real work...and until you could control a horse, you couldn’t do real cowboy work. They still worked cattle in the old way. They’d brand by ropin’ the cattle and throwin’ ‘em down and brandin’ ‘em on the ground. They didn’t use a squeeze shoot.

I always had an interest in that. When I was in high school and college, I would spend summers on the ranch. It was both work and fun.

When I get out here, I try to emulate that. We don’t have anything like a ranch here but I call it a ranch. As of last week, we have 24 head. We had a real nice calf crop this year. Five bull calves and a heifer...all longhorns. Now that’s not a real herd, but I can play like it is. (Laughter)

We do the same thing, rope ‘em and tie ‘em, brand ‘em and castrate...it’s kind of like havin’ my own ranch.

The Salt Grass Trail is another matter. There’s much more pretending to that than the way I pretend. It try to be kind of authentic in what we do out here. The Salt Grass Trail is fun because most of the people there really do like horses and try to preserve the cowboy as a cultural phenomenon.

There are some real working ranches that are serious and will be well into the next century, but still, there are fewer and fewer people that know about that. It’s not glamorous by any means but it is colorful and its...honest, hard work. To me, it’s something I want to be a part of. This place gives me an opportunity to indulge my fantasies in a non-harmful, moral way...

Unless you get kicked or gored...

That happens too. So far I’ve escaped really serious injury. I broke four ribs a couple of years ago. I got thrown a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been stepped on. I haven’t been kicked...hard anyway. I didn’t break anything. That’s part of the deal.

What is your favorite thing about your country life?

I don’t think there’s any one thing. It’s a way of life and a way of life has more than one facet to it. I like the outdoors and fresh air and things that grow and cattle and horses and cats and fire ants...

You like fire ants, huh?

I say fire ants are the reason we don’t have a big snake problem around here. I’ve been stung so many times now that it really doesn’t bother me. Bad part about it is you don’t have many ground dwelling animals...you don’t have quail.

You find problems between people no matter where you are, in the big city, a small town, no matter where you are, but it’s (country life) a little bit slower. I guess that you can broadly generalize that people are a little more honest with each other. I think the reason behind that is that there are not as many of us and when someone is dishonest, word gets around and that’s the end of them. You can be dishonest in Houston and all you have to do is move a couple of blocks and you’re okay.

It gives you the opportunity to withstand a little more hardship than you would living in a fancy house in River Oaks. In the winter it get pretty cold and some times the heat doesn’t work. In the summer is hotter than hell. It’s not as easy to run down to the 7-11 and get what you need so you have to plan a little better. Burton’s only six miles away but we don’t get there very often.

Being able to see the stars at night. Sometimes we sleep outdoors. We have an old cowboy bedroll and I throw it out...by the fire and listen to the sounds.

It’s said that you spend more time with your family than did earlier in your career. How have your values changed in that regard over the years?

They have changed tremendously. I never was an angel, either growing up or in my first two marriages. I got married this last time, and this is the last time. I’ve learned since then what I want out of my family life. I’m very, very happy. I was not a good husband or father before that but I think I have become both now. It’s given me a great sense of serenity and security. I really enjoy being with my family, all of them. I wish I’d found that at the same time that I found my career...but at least I have found it now and that’s a good deal.

Though you’re still young, you’ve had a long and successful career. At this point, what still remains to be done?

More of the same. I don’t want to quit. I don’t want to retire. I really enjoy what I do. Every day something new happens. Even when the cases are similar in the charges, they’re different in the people and the background. I can experience a lot of excitement vicariously just by understanding what is happening in some pretty exciting cases.

If I was to handle them in the way that a lot of lawyers do, which is categorize them like...this is a murder case and this is a dope case, this is a robbery case and treat them like that, I’d probably burn out pretty quick. But I don’t do that. I think every case is different. I learn something from my clients and from the facts and from the cops and from everything about it. Its an exciting, fascinating job.

So what’s next is more of the same. Who knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow. What’s kind of case is gonna come in tomorrow?

Like this Betty Maldanodo case. It’s fascinating. I don’t want to talk too much about that because a lot of that’s going to come up... but to see what the FBI can do to you or me or someone like Betty with impunity. It’s horrifying to me.

I can talk a little bit more about one that’s already over with and that’s the Operation Lightning Strike. This which is so similar to what the FBI did with Betty and the sting against city council.

The FBI created a company. They gave it a D & B background, Dun and Bradstreet cooperated with them and gave them false documents. They got a CPA firm in Atlanta to create false financial records for them. They got a bank, Nations Bank, to give them false letters of credit. They took a 54 ft. Hatteras boat that they had seized from somebody, they’re using that all over, in Ft. Lauderdale to take people out on and show them a big time. They picked up a guy... at the airport in Baltimore in a Rolls Royce convertible. They wined him and dined him and promised him a million dollars.

The FBI committed fraud in order to induce somebody to commit a crime so that they could then threaten him with prosecution and obtain his cooperation to induce more important people to commit a crime. It didn’t work but it did ruin him and the twelve or thirteen other people that they tried this approach on. Ruined them! They can never get a job. They’ll have to wash dishes or dig ditches.

I represented Dale Brown in that case. Here’s a guy with no criminal background at all. In fact, he wanted to be an astronaut! They took him and promised him, literally promised him an Isle of Gold. They told him they were going to make him the Chief Operating Officer of a destination resort in the Caribbean, an island with a marina, condominiums and hotels and a landing strip. They were going to make him President and Chief Operating Officer and all he had to do was give this guy who was coming into town some entertainment money ($500.00). In varying degrees, that’s exactly what they did in the city hall stuff.

In fact, it’s in the indictment. It’ll come out that they took Ben Reyes down to Florida...took him out on a boat...same boat. (laughter)

Useful boat...

Oh yeah. They tried to get Wayne Duddleston (Houston developer) to do that. Tried to get him through someone else and he said. “I don’t fish.

If it was said after your death that you accomplished one thing, what would it be.

That I was a good father to my kids. That’s the bottom line.

I know your career is very important to you and that you really enjoy it. I know you said you’re not a “knight in shining armor” and I’m not pretending that you are... but you are a fighter. You’re a person who’s had an interest in fighting for justice, and whether you’ve made money off that or not doesn’t change the fact.

What I’m interested in is what drives that. You’ve done this a long time and seen a lot of ugly things. You’ve got to be cynical at some level about many things but something inside you is not.

You still believe in right and wrong. You still believe that all people deserve a just hearing, even the underdog. Talk about those values and how they relate to your life.

Growing up, I was always the smallest kid in the class. For one thing I was a year younger than most people because I started school early. But also I’m small in stature. I’m not a big Adonis. I got picked on a lot.

I don’t like bullies and I see a lot of what I do as dealing with bullies.

What I learned gettin’ beat up is that if you stand up to people, you feel a whole lot better about it. You might still get beat up but chances are you won’t. It’s not always physical strength that is so important in a confrontation like that. Sometimes you can outwit somebody, sometimes you can just be smarter, sometimes you can bluff ‘em. Sometimes you can make people scared.

I tell a story about Mike (his younger brother). Mike’s smaller that I am but he never knew was small. He never had a concept in his mind that he was small.

There was a guy that played football for McCallum High School the same year that Mike played for Austin High School. His name’s Ed Small. He and Mike became very good friends. He’s a lawyer in Austin now. Great big guy! Ed Small is 6'5" and weighs 300 pounds. Huge guy.

He and Mike played opposite each other. Mike’s about 5'6" but he’s as tough as nails. He had Ed Small intimidated because he just wouldn’t stop.

I think that’s kind of the attitude I have about going up against the FBI or the police department or the Justice Department, the “Just Us” department.

Maybe that drives me. I’ve found kind of an equalizer in the laws. I know the procedural rules. I know the evidentiary rules. I know what you’ve got to do in court to play within those rules and they are the great equalizer. It’s like having the same size pistol as everybody else... so I’m no longer the smallest kid in class.