terence sheridan

Terence Sheridan, left, with Gerald Messerman in about 1971.

Lawyers. There's so many of them, and it's so easy to dislike them simply for being lawyers. You only want one when you need one. Hard to believe that 24 of 43 U.S. presidents were lawyers, with Barack Obama making it 25 of 44.

But before I start down Memory Lane in Lawyer-Land, let's get the Shakespeare quote out of the way. Dick the Butcher, Henry the Sixth, Part Two: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Many scholars, and most lawyers, argue that Shakespeare actually meant it as a compliment. Kill lawyers, you kill law and order. Personally I think Shakespeare was not so much bashing lawyers as he was having some fun with them. Who doesn't like a lawyer joke?

I certainly did. I had enjoyed covering them as a Plain Dealer reporter. An articulate trial lawyer who knew the law and could think on his feet was great theater. But I didn't want my daughter to be one or to marry one. They were slippery people.

What a downer to find that I desperately needed lawyers to help pay the rent and buy the grits, in January 1971, at the very time two of them, Gerald S. Gold, Cleveland's former Public Defender, a man with a high IQ under a balding dome, and Robert J. Rotatori, a former assistant U.S. attorney with an impressive record of prosecuting federal felons, were going for broke.

They had recently moved out of their ratty downtown two-man office, added two partners, and opened a new criminal defense firm in the Ohio Savings Plaza building on East 9th Street. The spacious 11th-floor office was spanking new but looked like an upscale bordello, painted chiefly red, white and blue and possibly designed by an interior decorator tripping on LSD. I almost gagged.

The other partners were Gerald A. Messerman, a sharp former assistant U.S. attorney, and Harry A. Hanna, a street-smart man who knew not only how to fold a Racing Form for fast and accurate reading but could also read a page of densely written legal mumbo-jumbo and give it back to you word for word, the only man I knew who had a near photographic memory.

Two Jews, an Italian and an Irishman. "Join us," said senior partner Gold. "Interview people but write it for me instead of The Plain Dealer. You'll be the 'investigator.' I'll buy you business cards that say so."

Talk about non-refusable offers. An impossible man with a lousy personality, I had busted out at the PD and ended up in Chicago working for a weekly magazine that lasted less than a year. I was back in town, broke, and these lawyers were paying a reasonable salary plus profit-sharing and health care, dentistry and optometry included. (A generous bonus at the end of the year was a pleasant surprise.) In a flash I turned my back on a noble profession, journalism, and threw in with slippery people.

The partners were on the hunt and the firm's secretaries, led by the formidable Rosemary Grdina DiSanto, who also kept the books, were outstanding. They were like the rudder on a pirate ship under full sail. Not that the bold lawyers weren't scared, They were scared to the bone. So many lawyers, so few deep-pocketed criminals.

Still, Gold and Rotatori had contacts and a few good clients to start with, and all the partners had brains and skill. Despite the garish office, business boomed -- labor unions to rich crooks to alleged innocents with lush net worths. Most important, the clients had to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Even cops, when they got in trouble, wanted Gold, Rotatori, Messerman and Hanna.

In no time at all, Gold, Rotatori had a bountiful client list that included Teamsters boss William Presser, the New York Yankees' George Steinbrenner, and George Lawrence Forbes -- son of a Tennessee sharecropper, ex-Marine, lawyer and charismatic president of Cleveland City Council (acquitted of bribery, theft in office and extortion).

The small law firm had quickly made its nut and much more, as well as making a national rep. One week I was in Cleveland, Columbus, Akron or Youngstown and the next in Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans or Chicago, and I tagged along with Gold on a pro bono defense trip to Indian country, the Oglala Sioux's Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, during the unsettled aftermath of armed confrontation between FBI agents and activist members of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

And, to my surprise, I liked the lawyers' company. Fast, literate chatter in the office and give-and-take banter after work, around the bar at the Theatrical Grill. It was almost like being a newspaperman again.

"One small law firm standing between downtrodden indictees and overzealous authorities," I'd say to newspaper friends. "Sure thing," they'd say. "The next round is on the firm." And it was.

The fact is, though, we did have a few cases without price tags. For example, the little black guy, Hanna's court-appointed indigent client accused of robbing a bar on East 89th near Hough. The police had arrested him a few days after the summertime robbery as he walked out of a grocery store near the bar. He fit the description, a little black guy wearing dark pants, a white, short-sleeved shirt and a jaunty straw hat.

The bartender and two customers were sure he was the stickup man. They were terrified but would never forget how he pointed the pistol at them, his right forefinger on the trigger. Hanna was sure they had the wrong man. His client, a longtime cleanup employee at a machine shop, did not have a criminal record and his timecard reflected he had punched out about the time of the robbery. But he was now facing 10 to 25 years in prison.

Before I left for the bar with a picture of the client, Hanna raised his right hand, his forefinger doubled under the knuckle. His client didn't have a right forefinger. It had been severed below the knuckle in a machine shop accident years ago.

At the bar, the witnesses looked at the picture and said he was the armed robber. No doubt about it. How could they forget a robber with his finger on the trigger? A county prosecutor, Hanna's friend, was pondering Harry's demand for unconditional surrender, accompanied by an abject apology, when a little black guy wearing a jaunty straw hat was snagged on the street by police after robbing a grocery store six blocks from the bar. He had a long record, including the stickup on East 89th, to which he confessed.

Colorful bookmakers were my favorite people, and my all-time favorite bookie was Rotatori's client, an Akron gambler who called himself "Tony Conigliaro." after the Boston Red Sox outfielder who had delighted fans by recording two songs in 1965 -- "Little Red Scooter" and "Why Don't They Understand" -- 10 years before his last game for the Red Sox: Boston's beloved "Tony C," also known as "the Conig."

But apparently the FBI agents tapping the bookie's phone weren't baseball fans. The government case went down the tubes when I clapped a rubber earpiece on the bookmaker's phone, hit the record button and listened to an FBI snitch who owed the bookmaker money try to extort money from "Tony Conigliaro."

It came full circle for me -- from The Plain Dealer at 1801 Superior to the Ohio Savings Plaza at 1801 East 9th -- when the Newspaper Guild hired Messerman to defend PD reporter Joe Eszterhas, who had been fired for "disloyalty" and being a serial fabricator of facts, after writing a freelance piece for Evergreen magazine in which he massacred the PD, past and present, and its publisher, Tom Vail.

However, after cross-examination of editors by Messerman during arbitration proceedings, it was pretty much established that before the magazine hatchet job Eszterhas had been a prolific and highly regarded reporter, the undisputed prince of the newsroom.

In the meantime I was experiencing schizophrenic pleasure at Eszterhas' misfortune, for I both liked him and loathed him. Liked him for his gusto and talent, even when his work was Joe's version of New Journalism, a vivid conflation of fact and fiction; loathed him because he was given tons of PD white space that I coveted. In terms of a poker deck, if I was the Jack of Spades, a knave, he was the King of Diamonds, "the man with the axe."

He stayed fired; but young Joe, the onetime Hungarian refugee, was off to better things, a renowned writing stint at Rolling Stone followed by a rewarding one in Hollywood, as a highly paid screenwriter of such pulp classics as Basic Instinct and the unforgettable Showgirls, 16 flicks and a script doctor on others.

In any event, he lasted longer in Hollywood than Gold, Rotatori, Messerman and Hanna did in Cleveland. The usual problem. Money. As the pie got larger, the arguments over slices got more vehement. Hanna left first, then Messerman three years later, in 1980, and that was the end of the roaring '70s. There were other partners but it wasn't the same, until, finally, it was over. No Gold, Rotatori on any door.

Nonetheless, the initial oldtimers, the legal Wild Bunch of four, did perfectly well going separate ways, three of them as litigators in a brave new world of rampant white-collar crime, while Harry Hanna became Common Pleas Judge Harry Hanna, and secretary Rosemary Grdina DiSanto became the second Mrs. Gold, better known today as the Honorable Rosemary Grdina Gold, Judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations.

As far as I know, none painted their office walls bright red, white and blue. I was long gone by then, fired in 1985 by a partner whose name went on the door when Hanna's came down. He had cause. I was profanely and unforgivably rude to him. But not once, I swear, did I consider killing the wee, humorless lawyer.

Truth be told, I was always a touch homesick for headlines and deadlines, for old jobs at daily newspapers -- The Alliance Review, The Akron Beacon Journal, The Plain Dealer.

Terence Sheridan, a former Plain Dealer reporter, worked as an investigator for Gold, Rotatori, Messerman and Hanna, and as a private investigator in Cleveland.