Single Jeopardy (2 page)

I pointed out to him that the Ventura Boulevard business office address and telephone number printed on the letterhead weren’t accurate, and showed him my present business card. He admitted that he didn’t use the phone number on the letterhead because due to our previous dealings my number was still in the speed dial of his phone. The only way to get to the bottom of this situation was to visit the address on the letterhead and meet with ‘attorney’ Hansel.

I kept thinking that this is unbelievable. Ricky was the nicest guy you could ever want to meet… and a hard worker. One time I had a case where title to a classic car was illegally transferred. Ricky worked on it almost full time for over a month until all the paperwork was properly filled out and we were able to repossess the vehicle for the client. Everyone liked him and there was no doubt that when he finished law school he’d quickly build a successful practice. Little did I know that he didn’t want to wait until finishing school – or becoming a lawyer to start building his law practice. We both drove over to the business address printed on the correspondence and saw that it was one of those storefront private Mail Box places whose customers use their box numbers as ‘suite’ number on stationery. We were told that pasted on the clerk’s side of the box was the directory label ‘Peter Sharp & Associates.’

After a convincing argument from me plus a twenty-dollar bill, we convinced Jack Bibberman, the store’s mail clerk, to reveal who rented that box. My suspicions were confirmed when he named my former paralegal Ricky. Jack told us that he never met the guy… the box rental transaction was all done by mail and the guy only came in once to pick up a UPS package delivery… probably stationary. All mail pickups from the box were probably done at night after the counter closed.

The adjustor finally seemed to believe me and I thought the matter was closed. Our local legal newspaper, The Los Angeles Daily Journal, carried the story several months later: Ricky was arrested, convicted, fined and sentenced to several years of probation for the misdemeanor of practicing law without a license. Needless to say, his chances of ever being allowed to take the California Bar exam were greatly diminished, if not gone forever. What I didn’t expect was what the insurance company did next... they turned the matter over to the State Bar for a full investigation… of me.

The State Bar filed charges against me for ‘negligent supervision of an employee’ and ‘aiding in the unauthorized practice of law.’ Usually those types of charges don’t result in a serious disciplinary sentence. In fact, I thought my hearing was actually going quite well… until they brought out their files from the past fifteen years and the State Bar’s prosecutor told the hearing judges about my alleged previous ‘attitude’ towards the Bar’s investigation attempts.

The first recital was about when I began my practice in a Van Nuys storefront office on Sylvan Street, a block away from the Van Nuys courthouse. The small coffee shop next door to my office was going out of business, so I bought and re-named it “Peter Sharp’s Division 86.” At the time, there were eighty-five divisions in the Los Angeles Municipal Court system, ergo our name and the double intendre of being “86’d.” In those days, the Bar didn’t allow attorneys to do any type of advertising: They considered it to be conduct described as ‘unprofessional.’

Most people got a kick out of the place’s name, but some jerky attorneys in the neighborhood (are there any other kind?) complained to the Bar that because my name was on it, that I was unethically advertising. When the complaint letter from the State Bar came in, I informed them that I heard Ralph Williams (the largest auto dealer in the San Fernando Valley at that time, with more than twelve dealerships on Ventura Boulevard) was going to attend law school and then open up an office in the Valley. I requested that we hold off on my hearing until Ralph opens his law office, so we can see how well the Bar does in getting him to remove his name from all twelve of those car dealerships.

The Bar didn’t care for that response, but it must have struck a proper chord, because I didn’t hear from them again for another two years. This time it was another nasty letter telling me that I was once again being accused of wrongfully advertising because of my personalized license plate – “PS ESQ.”

I did some quick research with our state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and informed the State Bar that they finally caught me, and I would be looking forward to my hearing, assuming they would be holding it in the downtown sports arena, so that the other three thousand two hundred fifty one California lawyers with “ESQ” in their license plates could also attend with their attorneys and defend themselves.

Once again they backed down. I never had any problems with the State Bar again over unethical advertising – but they finally got their pound of flesh: any other attorney in the same situation would probably have gotten a slap on the wrist and a severe warning to straighten out his act. I was expecting a suspended sentence and maybe a fine, but it’s not a perfect world.

In view of my past experiences with our revered State Bar Association, along with the fact that Ricky appeared as a witness for the State Bar and blamed everything on me, testifying that I set him up with the mail box and shared the fees, the prosecutors took Ricky, the convicted criminal’s word over mine. Several years before my hearing the State Bar lifted its ban on advertising; the judges didn’t care – they admitted the recitations anyway, as evidence of my lack of respect for them. The Bar must have decided that it was time to make an example of another attorney, so I wound up with a two-year suspension and probation. Go figure. An immediate appeal might have delayed the suspension for a while, but considering all that was happening in my life at the time, I thought a break from the active practice of defending scumbags for a while might be a good thing… an appeal could always be done later… and that’s why I’m sitting in a back yard on Waterford Street in Brentwood Glen, trying to talk my friend Stuart out of going ahead with a suit against the Federal Government. I’ve had enough of going up against the establishment for a while.

The suspension was bad enough, but it had a profound effect on my prosecutor wife and her mad dog associates. I was now looked upon as a common criminal… because for the next two years I would be reduced to doing legal research, private investigating and process serving for other attorneys. In their eyes there were only two types of criminal defense attorneys: those who had been suspended for unethical behavior and those who hadn’t been caught yet... and neither category met with their approval.

With the help of her associates, my beloved wife finally came out of the ether and decided that I was a social liability that had to be cut loose, so she decided to downsize the household. Therefore, I am now sitting on the aft deck of my liveaboard yacht enjoying the surrounding sea of grass, while she conspires with Gary Koontz, her beady-eyed divorce attorney… a former classmate of mine. I never liked him back then in law school, and still can’t stand him.

Amazingly, our divorce proceedings went quite smoothly, in spite of our respective attorneys’ efforts to screw up the case and build up their fees. My attorney specializes in representing male members of the Bar, so having only lawyers as clients, he didn’t think it was too big an oversight to miss a court appearance. In my case, he didn’t show up the day of the hearing, so the judge filled in for him by asking me the stock questions off of a prepared sheet that contain the ones that judges usually ask unrepresented women who come in for their default divorce hearings. Everything went fine. I knew the judge from past appearances in other court matters, so as a courtesy he even offered to give me back my maiden name. Everyone wants to be comedian.

The Property Settlement Agreement was quite simple: she owned the house we lived in before the marriage, so she kept it afterwards. There were no kids involved. In a community property state like California, the courts can treat appreciation in real estate value during the marriage as a joint asset, so we decided to forgo that argument and in exchange I’d keep clear title to my old back-yard Chris Craft.

As any married man knows, there are times when the absolute truth just doesn’t apply. One instance is the classic situation of when the wife turns around in front of you and asks if the dress she’s wearing makes her look fat. The problem is that in most other cases a little fabrication can usually come back and bite you in the ass.

Before having that old wood Chris Craft lifted by crane off the truck and dropped into our yard, I may have mentioned to my wife that even if she doesn’t particularly like boats, this one will be worth at least fifty thousand when I’m finished fixing it up, so it’s really a good investment, considering the fact that I got it for only eight thousand.

That came back to bite me when her lawyer was making up our ‘simple’ property settlement agreement. In order for me to keep the boat for myself, he took that ‘future value’ into consideration, and in order to keep the boat and not look like a liar, I had to give up my entire interest in the appreciation of the house while we were married. The matter of alimony was settled by my promising to give her fifty percent of the net profits from my law practice for two years. This provision was added just before my suspension took effect and was another reason she was pissed off. Now she might have to wait several years before I started earning money again as an attorney – and then it would be a slow curve to build up a new practice. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I never handled a divorce case past the property settlement agreement stage... a decision made out of fear. Several years ago an associate in my former law firm asked me to fill in for him late one evening. A divorcing couple had worked out the division of their property and wanted to come to the office after work hours, to have it finalized on paper. They were both deputy sheriffs. Everything went fine until we got to the stereo, which she claimed was supposed to belong solely to her. The husband immediately jumped up and declared “over my dead body!” to which she replied“ that can be arranged!” At that time they both made gestures towards their respective holsters. This type of experience was not exactly what I expected when starting law school. I managed to calm them both down before the office became the OK Corral and haven’t handled a domestic relations case since then.

But enough of what should only be minimally interesting to Dr. Phil, because another problem needing urgent solving just popped up. With our divorce coming to a close, I knew the back yard would no longer be available as a place to dock my boat for too much longer. Gary Koontz, schmuck at law, snidely relayed the eviction notice to me. This meant that a slip in some Marina must be gotten, because they frown on live-aboard boaters in the public park - which brings me to the reason why I’m now looking down at my law school alumni directory and trying to get up the nerve to call Melvin Braunstein – one of the most disliked persons in our old law school class… the other was Koontz.

Some people are born with traits that become more pronounced as they get older. Melvin Braunstein was a putz all the way through high school and college and seventeen years ago he achieved the uppermost level of putzdom… he became an attorney.

When my wife and I first started dating she was a naïve legal receptionist. The first time she heard me refer to another attorney as a schmuck, she was shocked... not by the word, but by the denigration of a professional attorney! I tried to explain that if a schmuck goes to law school, the education he gets doesn’t remove the schmuck part of his personality - all it does is add the knowledge of the law, and you wind up with a
schmuck attorney
. If you look up that phrase in the dictionary, you should see pictures of Gary Koontz and Melvin Braunstein, along with numerous other members of the bench and bar.

But Melvin is no longer Melvin: he has now become Marcel Bradley, a very nice gentile-sounding name that he thinks killed two birds with one stone: it changed his religion and still allowed him to use his embroidered shirts and hankies... which doesn’t really help much, because no-one with an ounce of class would ever be seen with him. Melvin only developed one people-skill: he had the unique ability to make everyone he met detest him because of his rude sense of non-deserved superiority and antagonistic views about society – and women, in particular. You can tell how out of touch with people Melvin was when you realize he thought that making people think he was
French
would mean they’d like him more.

I went to law school with Melvin in the Los Angeles San Fernando Valley, at a non-accredited 4-year evening school we affectionately nicknamed Betty Crocker College of Law, on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys. During those four years of evening classes I learned to tolerate him because twice a year he ran the school’s bookstore, and by working for him a week each semester I received my casebooks and textbooks free of charge, saving me hundreds of dollars. I was working my way through school by being a process server during the day and playing piano in saloons at night, so the free books were a great help and I felt I owed him something for that.

During our second year of law school Melvin thought it would be cute to have a bumper sticker that said, “Let’s give Apartheid a chance!” The sticker only had a bumper-life of about three minutes after his car was parked. That evening after class, Mel saw the remains of the sticker, still pasted onto the bumper. Unfortunately, what he didn’t see was the rest of the car. It was gone. Melvin called the police to report the theft and then smugly smiled, claiming that he was right: “if there were Apartheid, no one ‘of them’ would have stolen my car.”

Melvin was never wrong. He was right and the rest of the world was wrong. The only clients he seemed to be able to attract were chauvinistic men hiding their assets while going through nasty divorces. Maybe it’s because they appreciated Melvin’s philosophy that the Saudis got at least some things right: their women aren’t allowed to vote or drive.