A Plague of Lawyers

In his Institutes, Sir Edward Coke defines a lawyer as "one who is set in place of another." In the early years of the American Republic, many of the Founding Fathers were either lawyers or trained in the practice of law, as part of their classical education. As a result, we have maintained the fiction that lawyers themselves are personages of unimpeachable probity, so much so that in the rare occasions when a lawyer absconded with a widow's funds, it was a moment of great shock. Such occurrences have now been relegated to the era of old W. C. Fields' comedies; the lawyers no longer abscond with the widow's funds. They merely transfer them to their own bank account and then send the widow an enormous bill for "services rendered."

Charles Dickens gave us the most memorable portrait of a lawyer's techniques in his rendition of Uriah Heep; servile, insinuating, and once he has taken your funds, overbearing and demanding. Dickens also posed the great problems endured by those who found themselves delivered over to the hands of lawyers, in his rendition of the case of Jamdyce v. Jamdyce, a legal struggle which went on for generations, beggaring the clients but enriching the lawyers. Unfortunately for Americans, Jamdyce v. Jamdyce has proved to be the model on which our legal profession has modeled itself; our courts are filled with similar straggles, the least of which may come to a decision in a mere five years.

Legal Traps and Lawfare

The Rand Foundation recently completed a study of our legal profession, finding that soaring legal costs accompany delays in getting to trial, which now reach an agonizing eighteen months, on the average. The Rand noted that half of the $30 billion annually spent on lawsuits goes to lawyers. Fifteen billion a year, much of which is created by deliberately prolonging the time and expense of litigation, goes to the lawyers for shuffling a few papers. Their expenses rarely entail more than five per cent of this amount: consequently, hundred dollar power lunches, fifty thousand dollar a year memberships in country clubs, and many other perquisites must be pursued in order to sop up the excess cash.

When an American citizen hires a lawyer, he enters the office of the practitioner under the now defunct image of the profession as that closely akin to one's physician, into whose hands one delivers the vital question of one's personal health; or of one's minister, who will be glad to cooperate in one's eternal salvation. However, just as the physician is likely to give you a new drag whose side effects will be worse than what is ailing you, or that the minister will divert your financial contribution to some tart in Harlot's Alley, the lawyer may prove to be even more devastating. Few people realize that an association with a lawyer may turn out to be the most dangerous step you can take, possibly resulting in the loss of your home, job, family and life's savings. They have no idea that lawyers often engage in one or more of the following practices during a single case of litigation — subornation of perjury; conspiracy to obstruct justice; and flagrant violation of the Constitutional rights of the opposing party.

Perjury, that is, false swearing under oath, is one of the most prevalent practices in our courts, not only by witnesses, but also by lawyers, who often coach witnesses to repeat carefully directed and totally false testimony. I once appeared with an attorney in a traffic case in New Jersey, which went on for about five hours in a stuffy small town courtroom (no air conditioning). At the end of the case, the judge, who ruled against us, informed the attorney that of all the testimony heard that evening, his was the most incredible! Subornation of perjury, that is, going over the prospective testimony of a witness, and instructing him what not to say or what he should say, is the linchpin of our present courtroom drama, the adversary system of justice. Two pit bulls are released into the arena, to tear at each other until one sinks into death. This system has little to do with justice, but much to do with power, profit, and augmentation of fees. The practice arose because a lawyer who did not know what his witness might say on the stand would be sitting on a keg of dynamite, wondering when it would go off. Many cases, which have been arduously prepared, have been lost in a twinkling when a witness goes beyond the scope of a question, and volunteers further information which destroys the client's case.

For this reason, lawyers rely heavily upon pre-trial depositions, or pre-trial discovery. Once these are typed up and presented to the court, they are set in stone, removing the fear that the witness will volunteer extra information or alter his testimony. Like Congressional speeches which are daily reprinted in the Congressional Record, the testimony may be subjected to intensive editing, alteration and deletion, all without any notice to the witness or the court. The altered deposition is then presented to the court, after a lawyer's extensive changes, as "sworn testimony"! Should an error be exposed, it would be blamed on the court reporter.

The other tools of pretrial discovery are written interrogatories and requests for admission, both of which are also answered under oath. The interrogatories constitute one of the greatest abuses of parties. They were sometimes expanded to as many as fifty or even one hundred questions, some of which were so artfully phrased that the party who answered question 18 would be asked it again in question 74 so that in answering it, he would totally contradict his answer to question 18. Interrogatories are always identified as "continuing in nature" — that is, First Set of Interrogatories, followed by Second Set, ad infinitum. Some courts now limit the number of questions in a single interrogatory to twenty or thirty, but no correction of the abuse of "continuing" interrogatories is contemplated.

As I have repeatedly pointed out in Motions for Protective Orders against Depositions to the court, pretrial discovery is actually "pretrial trial." The lawyer actually conducts the hearing with himself sitting as judge and jury, with no actual judge being present. Judges have been universally hostile to my motions and have always denied them, indignant that a "layman" would question one of the most profitable and arrogant practices of the legal profession. I identified them as "bills of attainder" which are absolutely forbidden by the Constitution, being too naive at that time to understand that the law merchant or admiralty procedures of our courts ban any and all Constitutional protections of citizens. Pretrial discovery is also modelled after the ancient Star Chamber procedures; the subject of the deposition is summoned to a room where he is placed under oath, with the understanding that anything he says may be used against him. As Roy Cohn has pointed out, discovery has become the bread and butter of the legal profession. Previously forbidden by both common law and the Constitution, it is now the sacred cow of our legal procedures. Legal authority Emily Gouric pointed out in an article in Albemarle Magazine, July, 1989, that lawyers in the state of Virginia have been able to engage in this profitable practice since the early 1970s. She quotes Robert Taylor as stating, "Discovery takes a great deal of interest out of trial practice," further pointing out that it prolongs cases fivefold and makes them much more expensive.

Although we may think that the proliferation of lawyers and their willingness to abuse everyone is something new, an affliction peculiar to modem civilization, we have only to turn to the scriptures to find these warnings,

"Woe unto you, you masters of the law! you snatch the keys of knowledge.

"And Jesus said. Woe unto you, you masters of the law! You heap great burdens on the sons of men, yea, loads by far too great for them to bear. . .. Woe unto you, you masters of the law! you snatch the keys of knowledge from the hands of men; You close the doors; you enter not yourselves, and suffer not the willing ones to enter in. His words provoked the Pharisees, the lawyers and the scribes, and they, resenting, poured upon him torrents of abuse. The truths he spoke came like a thunderbolt from heaven; the rulers counselled how they might ensnare him by his words; they sought a legal way to shed his blood."

This gospel offers striking insights into the practices of the legal profession, not only in the time of Jesus, but even more so today. We should not honor this profession by calling it the "practice of law," but rather, as the subversion of the law, and the rape of the law, the all-too-familiar methods by which God's law is subverted and perverted by dedicated and professional criminals. Note the dictum, "the rulers counselled how they might ensnare him by his words." I have just identified this conspiracy as pretrial discovery. Further, "they sought a legal way to shed his blood." This too is the goal of our legal practices.

To protect American citizens from just such abuses, the Founding Fathers added certain guarantees, which they termed "the Bill of Rights," protective measures which had been cited by Sir Edward Coke earlier in his Petition of Right, and which had long been envisioned by enlightened European scholars. Of these rights, none is more important than the Fifth Amendment, which was personally authored by James Madison, the prohibition of self-incrimination. However, the legal profession has boldly circumvented this guarantee through pretrial discovery. They attempt to force a party or a witness to provide statements which will destroy his testimony and his case. "The rulers counselled how they might ensnare him by his words." In so doing, "they sought a legal way to shed his blood."

What does this mean? It means precisely what it says. They sought a legal way to shed his blood. When you go into an American court, the legal profession seeks a legal way to shed your blood. No technique associated with this goal is too vicious or too base to be excluded from the arsenal of the lawyer, even though its barely concealed purpose, openly approved by the judge, is to shed your blood. This may seem rather coldblooded, or even unChristian, to the intended victim, who fails to recognize his dilemma. The court is the reincarnation of the ancient Roman arena, where the Christians are present only because they are to be thrown to the lions. Their struggles provide amusement for wealthy but bored spectators. The court has adopted the old Roman rule of absolute impartiality, extending compassion to none in the arena, whether plaintiff or defendant. Each of them is to be equally tom and mangled until only shreds are left on the teeth of the lions. The doctrine of "legal immunity" is also an important part of the Roman games, as our courts may more properly be known. The cheering audience sits high above the arena. No lion is strong or agile enough to leap into the seating, and present a threat to the spectators. Judges, lawyers and the jury can safely watch the torment of the victims without fearing for their safety. Not a drop of blood will splash onto their silken robes. This is justice.

Our jurisprudence demands that we hire an attorney to represent us, because the legal system has grown so complex that only a highly skilled practitioner is qualified to present our case. There is some truth to this claim, but it is far from the whole story. In fact, civil procedure as it is practiced in our courts can be learned in a few hours. We are speaking now of the basic practices. The ramifications of our civil procedure are in fact infinite; the present writer has contributed his modest addition to it by observing that under our present legal system, any case is in fact endless and can be continued ad infinitum, depending on the extent of funds of the rapidly impoverished parties to the action. This writer has found most attorneys not only unqualified, but unfamiliar with many aspects of legal practice, a discovery made when I repeatedly filed motions which attorneys, both in private practice and employed by government agencies, had no idea how to answer or to argue. Their way out of this dilemma was one on which they have relied constantly during this writer's forty years of practice in the courts; they simply have the judge deny the motions without argument.

The layman will exclaim, "But that's impossible! The court's duty is to hear and to resolve all motions of the litigants." In a perfect world, this would be true. The dodge by which they ignore it is one of the most treasured privileges which judges have granted to themselves. It is called "judicial discretion." The first line of defense for the judges is "judicial independence." No one can influence a judge, because he is absolutely removed from any possibility of influence, whether family, financial or political. His second line of defense is "judicial immunity." This is the claim that when a man puts on the black robe of ancient physical and ritual sacrifice of victims, dating from the time of the cults of Babylon, he is placed beyond any criticism or retribution, and removed from any liability for violations of morality, national loyalty, or religious concepts. As I stated in a letter to the press October 12, 1985.

"The present practice of 'judicial independence,' 'judicial discretion' and 'judicial immunity' is intolerable in a free society. A judge is simply a monitor or policeman who sees to it that the statutes are observed. No one can be 'immune' from the consequences of his actions in a law-abiding society."

In a previous letter, October 10, 1985, I had noted that

"For twenty-five years I have filed suits in area courts in which the evidence in my favor was stricken or ruled inadmissible, while the evidence against me, including hearsay from mental patients and patients with brain damage, was admitted. I have sued four attorneys, all of which suits were dismissed on demurrers (insufficient cause of action) which is barred by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. I went to the U.S. Attorney with a list of forty-two consecutive motions I had filed, all of which were denied, while motions against me were perfunctorily granted. I later learned that this fellow was a political crony of 'our crowd.' I never heard from him to this day."

Of the three unholy practices of judges, the doctrine of "judicial discretion" is the most pernicious and the most frequently encountered. Briefly, this means that the judge has the option of personally ruling for or against any motion without going into its legal merits. He may also ignore it altogether by "taking it under advisement." This means that he postpones his decision for months, or even years, leaving the case in limbo. His fellow members of the legal profession, the opposing lawyers, eagerly accept this denouement, because their meters will continue to run throughout the period of the judge's monumental wrestling with the merits of the motion, until he finally reaches his decision. In truth, little or no such "wrestling" ever takes place. The judge merely buries the motion until the agonized screams of the victims force the lawyers to request that he deliver his opinion.

But what does all of this have to do with justice? asks the gentle reader. The answer to that question is in the title of this book. It is not titled "In Praise of Justice" or "The Merciful Qualities of Justice." It is only with which this writer is concerned, that is, those who are forced to submit to indignities for the pleasure and profit of others. Force, as in rape, is the backbone of all legal practices. Every order handed down within the confines of an American courtroom is delivered with a backup of force. Armed bailiffs stand on guard in the courtrooms, not merely to intimidate those appearing, but also to arrest, incarcerate, or even to beat or kill anyone who challenges what is taking place. The attorney whom you hired is a willing participant to this force. He never informs you, when he hands you his bill, that he is bound as "an officer of the court." You pay their fees, but the lawyers' primary obligation is to the court, that is, to the legal system and the practices for which it stands. A wit commented that the Pledge of Allegiance for lawyers should read, "I pledge allegiance to the legal profession and to the criminality for which it stands."

Sir Edward Coke's definition of a lawyer as "one who stands in the place of another" takes us back to a more open type of justice. In earlier civilizations, differences between citizens were settled by trial by combat. The dissenters might fight to the death, or until one was disinclined to continue. The triumph went to the battler who was left standing. Our boxing matches follow the same principles. The winner is the one who is still standing, or who has outpointed his opponent throughout the bout. The victors emerge, not only as champions, but also as leaders. This led to the hiring of "champions" to stand in for those not able to enter the lists or who obviously had no chance of winning. This is the raison d'etre for the hiring of attorneys today. Your lawyer is a "hired gun" who will go up against the fastest gun in the West, in your stead. The legal profession maintains that you have no chance of winning in our complex legal system; therefore, you must hire a champion, an attorney, to appear in your place.

Mullins vs. Lawyers

In some forty years of court appearances, I have never found myself in a legal situation in which an attorney would have been better able to represent my interests than I could do for myself. The reality is that no attorney can "represent" you. As an officer of the court, he can plead or "pray" your case before the court; in other words, he intercedes with the imperial presence of the court in your behalf. He "prays" that the lions may be called off before you are tom to bits. He beseeches the court not to award damages or penalties against you which are several times greater than your total assets, but to exercise mercy and reduce them to a sum only slightly greater than your entire net worth.

This explains why the patron saint of lawyers is Saint Matthew. In Matthew 5:40, he counsels, "And if anyone would go to law with thee and take thy tunic, let him take thy cloak as well." This is not merely an exhortation to turn the other cheek, but rather, to allow the attorney, who is making off with your tunic, to turn back and appropriate your cloak as well. For this reason, I have advised my audiences for many years that the ancient adage, "A man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client," must be brought up to date with the admonition that "A man who hires a lawyer is a fool."

Few Americans experience any qualms at turning over the most intimate details of their personal and financial lives to a lawyer, yet the risks should be apparent to anyone. For years I have counselled anyone who plans to meet with or consult a lawyer to take adequate precautions. The first precept is "Never discuss any details with a lawyer over the telephone." In one case which dragged on for three years, the opposing counsel, one of the most influential and highly paid lawyers in the state, repeatedly demonstrated that he believed he was dealing with a fool, by calling me unannounced at my home in the afternoons, and trying to obtain verbal commitments from me about various legal maneuvers in which we were engaged. I filed a complaint against him with the court. The judge never took any action, but it did stop the telephone calls. In almost every action in which I have been a party, I have had to file repeated motions with the court, complaining about the illegal procedures followed by opposing counsel, Motions for Reprimand. To date, none of these has ever resulted in a reprimand.

The second precept which I offer is that you should never go alone to a lawyer's office. In recent years, books on legal problems have suggested that you obtain a signed agreement with your lawyer, agreeing on costs, etc., before engaging him to represent you. This would have been unheard of a few years ago, and is rarely requested even today, because few lawyers would sign such an agreement. They would piously inform you that such an agreement would place too great a limitation on their ability to represent your case. The lawyer wants only a blank check from you, not an agreement before his meter starts running. He will eventually fill in the blank check with the sum of your net worth.

Also, when you go to an attorney's office, you would be wise to bring a relative or a trusted friend with you. I have taken as many as eight people into judges' chambers for motions hearings, or into a lawyer's office for a required appearance. In every instance, the judges and lawyers have not dared to voice any objection, or to ask, Who are all these people? It is also wise to tape record any conversation with an attorney. Here again, most attorneys would object to this, as it places them on notice that you do not trust them, and automatically places limits on the amount of damage they will be able to inflict.

A fatal mistake made by many citizens is their naive belief that because a lawyer is a relative, a close friend, or a longtime neighbor or country club member, he can be trusted. In fact, you would probably be safer with a stranger handling your affairs, as thousands of widows and orphans could attest. Lawyers trade upon such associations as relationship, membership in a religious or a fraternal organization, or any human contact which they can use to "bring in the business."

The Washington Post recently noted that "an ambitious associate can generate profits to a firm of $200,000 per year on gross billings of $300,000." Note these figures. They indicate that two-thirds of the billing is net profit to the firm, with costs amounting to one-third of charges. The Post noted that large D.C. law firms pay associates with two to four years' experience $85,000 to $100,000 per year, in the salary range of the attorney general of the United States. Partners of large law firms bill clients at $225 per hour, while associates' charges are $125 per hour. A typical eighty partner firm pays a mean income per partner of $360,000 per year on $938,000 of gross revenue, which means that the firm must gross $29 million annually, or $80,000 for every day of the year. Merely organizing the file and indexing documents in a lawsuit can cost from $2500 to $5,000, while the drafting and filing of a complaint costs upwards of $10,000. No wonder people sneer, "Sue me," knowing that few people can afford such expensive justice, regardless of the merit of their complaint. A single motion before the court will cost from $5,000 to $30,000.

The present writer sometimes filed as many as three motions at a time, during a period of maintaining eight or more cases in state and federal courts. None of the motions were the one or two paragraph motions such as those filed by opposing attorneys. My motions ran from five to ten pages of documented legal arguments, with ample quotations from precedents and legal authorities. I discovered that the judges rarely bothered to read these motions, much less allow them to be argued in court. I routinely filed interrogatories or answered the opponent's interrogatories, which the Post states costs $5,000 for each answer. Oral depositions are billed at $1500 to $2,000 per day per partner, with half that fee charged for the ever present associate, plus $300 to $500 per day for the court reporter and costs of the written transcripts. Litigation only a few months old can already have accrued costs of from $50,000 to $100,000, with little or no progress being made towards a solution.

In my forty years of practice, lawyers' fees for the work I did for myself would have been billed at more than five million dollars. To nip the growing tendency for citizens to appear as their own attorneys, lawyers have been urging the Internal Revenue Service to compute the legal costs of litigation for persons representing themselves, and then to tax the full amount as accrued income. To date, the IRS has not acted on the proposal.

One of the legal profession's dirty little secrets is the frequent abuse of women by lawyers. Features have repeatedly been run on such magazine type programs as "60 Minutes" about sexual exploitation of women who find themselves alone in a lawyer's office. Here again, I must emphasize the danger of going alone to any lawyer's office, whether you fear rape or not. You can expect the rape of justice to routinely take place, whether physical rape occurs or not. A woman who has been through a trying experience with her husband, and who has reluctantly decided to seek a divorce, is already distraught. Many attorneys are quick to take advantage of a woman who is already facing serious emotional difficulties. Before she knows it, she is athwart his desk and undergoing an examination which she never anticipated. One commonwealth's attorney was finally removed from office, after a series of complaints from outraged women, over a period of years, forced reluctant officials to abandon their coverup and to take action.

Legal observers conjecture that perhaps only ten per cent of such incidents ever result in a formal complaint. First, the victim realizes that despite the unwelcome nature of such attentions, she is dependent on this lawyer to salvage some funds or property from her collapsing marriage. She has already established dependency, merely by going into his office. If she storms out and goes to another lawyer, voicing her complaint about his behaviour, the lawyer, because of "professional courtesy," is obliged to call his colleague and ask if the charges are true. His peer will drop a hint that the lady in question shows serious signs of being "disturbed"; she may wind up with no one to represent her.

The iconoclastic writer, Robert J. Ringer, has inveighed forcefully against the destructive influence which lawyers inflict in the business world. He states that "the proper time to lock Legalman in his cage is when you are serious about closing a deal." Like most of us, he learned about lawyers the hard way, after they repeatedly prevented the closing of deals on which he would have netted millions of dollars. He defines Legalman as:

". . . the omnipresent defender of the nonexistent problems of people" and as "one of the players in the game of business who got into the park by sneaking under the fence, then took it upon himself to assume the role of head skimmer."

In some forty years of documenting the greatest crimes which have been committed against the American people, I discovered that in every instance, at the very heart of each of these events, like a malignant virus, were the lawyers. John T. Flynn, writing in the New Republic, May 22, 1935, chronicled Professor William Douglas's address to a convention of lawyers in Durham North Carolina, as follows:

"It is sad but true that the high priests of the legal profession were active agents in making high finance a master rather than servant of the public interest. They accomplished what their clients wanted accomplished and they did it efficiently, effectively, and with despatch. They were tools or agencies for the manufacture of synthetic securities and for the manipulation and appropriation of other people's money. In doing this, they followed the traditions of the guild. They never took seriously the nature of their public trust."

The New Republic further commented on these statements, "These great law firms have guided their greedy and acquisitive clients through the mazes of trickery that the financiers had not the wit to travel alone. No cause seems too reprehensible for the lawyers to gild with their own sadly tarnished respectability."

When you suggest a course of action to a lawyer, the usual response is, "Oh, you can't do that." This response is almost automatic, because it is incumbent upon every lawyer to discourage any client from striking out on his own strategic course. He must place his destiny totally in the hands of the lawyer, no matter how incompetent that attorney may be. Also, they are very reluctant to guarantee results from any course of action. In his heyday, financier J. P. Morgan complained that no matter what he proposed, lawyers would tell him he could not do what he wanted to do. Morgan said, "Mr. Elihu Root is the only lawyer who tells me how to do what I want to do." The result of this compliance was that Elihu Root became the preeminent lawyer on Wall Street. Financiers flocked to his offices when they discovered that no matter what manipulations they could devise, Root was capable of coming up with a legally acceptable formula to allow them to get away with it. He finally became the patron saint of America's corporations, when he worked out the strategy of setting up tax exempt foundations for millionaire entrepreneurs who wished to preserve not only their money, but also their power.

Elijah Root and Corporate Law

J.P. Morgan later chose Elihu Root to set up the agitprop operation, the League to Enforce Peace, in 1916. Its purpose, notwithstanding its seemingly pacifist title, was to involve the United States in World War I. It later took the name of "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace," headed by Alger Hiss, who later went to prison for committing perjury, when he lied about his handing secret documents to Soviet agents. After World War I, Root became the honorary chairman of the newly established Council of Foreign Relations, which had been set up as the American branch of the Rothschild policy group, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London.

Elihu Root is also remembered as the man whom President Wilson sent to Russia in 1919, with twenty million dollars in cash to bail out the collapsing Bolshevik regime. This money was taken from the one hundred million dollar Special War Fund which Congress had appropriated for President Wilson's use. The record of the expenditure of this twenty million dollars by Root's Special War Mission to Russia is recorded in the Congressional Record, Sept. 2, 1919, as authorized by Wilson's private secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty.

However, it is Root's role as the legal mastermind of the chartering of the influential tax exempt foundations which has laid his dead hand upon the throat of all living Americans. In 1909, he drew up the legal charter of the Carnegie Foundation, as its principal incorporator. His fellow incorporators were Frederic A. Delano, son of China's most famous opium dealer; Cleveland H. Dodge, of the National City Bank, and financier of Wilson's presidential campaign; and the longtime Rockefeller henchman, Daniel Coit Gilman, who had been trained by the German Illuminati in devious techniques of subversion. Gilman also incorporated the Russell Sage Foundation, and other vital undercover operations. Elihu Root then incorporated the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1921. His assistant, Philip Jessup, ran the CEIP after Alger Hiss was sent to prison.

The epitome of the great corporation law firm is the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Its founders' background provides ample proof of the ruthless nature required if one is to succeed in this bandit profession. The Cromwell who founded the firm, William Nelson Cromwell, was publicly denounced on the floor of Congress as "the most dangerous man in America!" This description was not the prose of some reckless demagogue; it is to be found in a document published by the Congress of the United States, a 736 page volume, "The Story of Panama" the House Hearings on Panama in 1913.

"In September, 1904, during the absences of Secretary Taft from Washington, Mr. Cromwell, a private citizen, practically ran the War Department. John F. Wallace, Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal, testified before the Senate Committee on Feb. 5, 1905, 'Cromwell appeared to me to be a dangerous man.'"

In these Hearings, Congressman Rainey was quoted as follows:

"The revolutionists were in the pay of the Panama Railroad and Steamship Corp., a New Jersey corporation. The representative of that corporation was William Nelson Cromwell. He was the revolutionist who promoted and made possible the revolution on the Isthmus of Panama. At that time, he was a shareholder in the railroad and its general counsel in the United States — William Nelson Cromwell — the most dangerous man this country has produced since the days of Aaron Burr — is a professional revolutionist."

And you thought lawyers were dull! Congressman Rainey used language which we might expect to describe Leon Trotsky or Al Capone; however, he was talking about the founder of the most august law firm on Wall Street. And what has been the history of this firm since the passing of its notorious founder? Cromwell trained and produced a protege who outstripped his predecessor, the famous John Foster Dulles. A relative of the Rockefeller family, Dulles was closely linked with international espionage groups headquartered in Switzerland and England. He can be described as the architect of the Second World War, as well as the man who single-handedly issued the orders which precipitated the Korean War. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the senior partner of the J.P. Morgan Company, Thomas Lamont, wrote, "All of us placed great reliance upon John Foster Dulles." History proved that that reliance was not misplaced.

In 1933, when a victorious but penniless Adolf Hitler needed funds to build his Nazi regime, his personal banker, Baron Kurt von Schroder, arranged a private conference with Hitler at the Schroder residence in Cologne, Germany. Attending this meeting as representatives of Kuhn, Loeb Co. and other Rothschild interests were John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles, who later founded the Central Intelligence Agency. The bankers, through their emissaries, guaranteed Hitler the funds to install his Nazi government. However, this did not mean that they were Nazis, or friendly to the precepts of Nazism. They were bankers who were making a sound investment in a coming event, the Second World War.

Whatever one's feelings might have been towards Adolf Hitler, there was no escaping the fact that without him, there could be no Second World War. The Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Montague Norman, whose financial manipulations precipitated the Great Depression of 1929-1933, was one of the first bankers to acknowledge this situation, and to advance Hitler funds from the Bank of England.

During the 1920s, John Foster Dulles brought to Sullivan and Cromwell as clients the blue chip firms of Wall Street — J. P. Morgan Co., the National City Co., Dillon Read, W. A. Harriman Co., and Brown Brothers, which later merged to form the firm of Brown Bros. Harrimans. Dulles' instant stature as the senior partner of the nation's most influential law firm reflected a truism of the profession, that the senior partner of such a firm is merely the one who has the greatest credibility. His word will not be challenged, his authority will not be denied, and when he exerts his influence on behalf of a political candidate, a church, a university, or any institution, funds will be raised and the goal will be reached. Behind this facade of respectability are the facts; that such senior partners have been and are deeply involved in the greatest international swindles and acts of treason throughout the twentieth century. They attain the rank of senior partner precisely because they have the talent of telling the most outrageous lies with the highest degree of credibility, whether they are launching a securities issue or the campaign of a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

John Foster Dulles ensured his place in history by sending a telegram from Tokyo to President Truman, "If it appears that the South Koreans cannot repulse the attack, then we believe that U.S. force should be used." It was this telegram which Truman used as his authority to plunge the United States into the Korean War. The use of die imperial "we" by Dulles notified President Truman that the most important leaders of the World Order wanted this war; he had no choice but to obey. Dulles was rewarded for this extraordinary act by his appointment to one of the nation's most influential posts, the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation. Ostensibly a "charitable" organization, from its inception the Rockefeller Foundation was planned by John D. Rockefeller and his legal adviser, Elihu Root as a business operation using extraordinary means. It is more properly described as a "syndicate," which was the term Roget used to describe a trust. Roget further describes a syndicate as a cartel, or a monopoly, which also is an accurate description of the Rockefeller Foundation.

The purpose of the foundation's charter was to perpetuate a corporation in perpetuity by removing it from any threat of a takeover by other interests. In a world in which everything is for sale, the shares of a corporation are the most saleable item of all. This means that no matter how profitable and powerful a corporate entity you may build, it can be bought out from under you by anyone who can raise the necessary funds. It was Elihu Root's brilliant contribution to the future downfall of American industry that a tax exempt foundation would forever remove the possibility of any outside force capable of buying control of the corporation.

Standard Oil, the Rockefeller Oil Trust, placed its controlling shares in the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. They remain there today, insulated against any outside threat. The foundation gave Standard Oil an enormous financial advantage over its competition, as Congressman Wright Patman, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, pointed out in remarks before Congress. While it could not be swallowed up by any other company, it could proceed uninterrupted on its course of swallowing up or dominating its rivals. This impregnability also made possible its profitable cartel agreements with monopolistic firms in other countries, such as its historic 1926 agreement with I. G. Farben in Germany to control the world's chemical business.

In "The World Order," I painstakingly traced the background of the officers and directors of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1913 to the present day. Very few of these directors had any background in charitable work; however, most of them had very impressive backgrounds in such "humanitarian" endeavours as chemical warfare, international espionage, munitions manufacture, cartel agreements, and so forth. On the whole, charity was lacking in their resumes.

Nest of Vipers

Although society has been, on the whole, over-respectful of lawyers in recent years, mindful of their power and their ability to inflict grief on their critics, diligent investigation discloses a few rare expressions of doubt in national organs of the media. Harper's magazine, October, 1976, featured an article, "A Plague of Lawyers," by Jerome S. Auerbach. He notes that the Constitution of Carolina declared it "a base and vile thing to plead for money or reward." The states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island prohibited lawyers from serving in their colonial assemblies, a striking contrast to today's situation, as we find that ninety per cent or more of state legislatures are now members of the legal profession. The historian Crevecoeur described lawyers as

". . . weeds that will grow in any soil that is cultivated by the hands of others; and when once they have taken root, they will extinguish all other vegetation around them."

The historian, Ferdinand Lundberg, wrote in Harper's, April 1939 about "The Priesthood of the Law," in which he described "the Purchase of the law." Lundberg quoted a historic case, Gebhardt v. United Railways of St. Louis, Mo. 1920, in which the decision noted that "the law does not make a law office a nest of vipers in which to hatch out frauds and perjuries," a withering comment on the legal practices which had come to light in this case.

The Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 2, 1933, noted in an editorial that

"When the Attorney General of the United States finds it necessary, in addressing an anti-crime conference, to refer to 'unscrupulous lawyers who aid and abet crime (the historic 'mouthpiece' Ed. Note), criminals and employing every artifice in their defense, the public cannot fail to realize that in the relation between lawyers and crime it faces a problem at once peculiar and ominous. The Attorney General went on to say that 'there is reason to believe that in many localities a certain number of lawyers are in touch with and regularly employed by the criminal element, being the scavengers of the bar. . . We find connivance and connection between lawyers and crime, with its concomitants of jury fixing, bribery and perjury.'"

One of the most astounding examples of legal conspiracy in America is described in the exhaustively detailed book, "Senatorial Privilege," by Leo Damore, Regnery 1988. The nation's leading journals have resolutely ignored this documented work. Damore relates the amazing story of a phalanx of lawyers, sworn to a Mafia code of Omerta, or silence, which formed around Senator Edward Kennedy in a conspiracy to obstruct justice shortly after the body of a young woman, who was said to be pregnant, was found in his abandoned car. The District Attorney in this case, Edward Dinis, later publicly denounced the jury system in the state of Massachusetts as "absolutely discriminatory," and "a systematic denial of justice throughout Massachusetts." He also attacked the scandal ridden probate court system as "a little known citadel of judicial patronage and favoritism operating in an atmosphere of intimidation."

The Chappaquiddick incident, as Kennedy's escapade came to be known in the national press, not only destroyed Kennedy's chances of being elected President; it also destroyed the journalistic career of Roger Mudd, who was already accepted as the coming heir to Walter Cronkite. When Mudd interviewed Kennedy on September 29, 1979, he asked the fateful question, "Do you think, Senator Kennedy, that anybody really will ever fully believe your explanation of Chappquiddick?" Kennedy made the equally fateful answer that he found his own behaviour "beyond belief." The liberal phalanx vowed to get Mudd for having exposed their champion in the lists, and he was subsequently dumped by the network in favor of Dan Rather.

This writer was exposed to the true character of the legal professionals early in a writing career. An attorney accompanied me on an afternoon outing along the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. Enjoying the openness of the newly completed superhighway, I was tooling along in a new Hudson at a comfortable ninety-five miles per hour, when I was surprised to see a black Chrysler draw up beside me. The young trooper motioned to me to pull over. When we stopped, the attorney hastily drew out his card and handed it to the trooper. He took one look at it, said "Okay," but added plaintively as he drove away, "But try to hold it down, willya?"

This same lawyer asked me to accompany him to a courthouse in a small town, ostensibly to do some legal research. When we went into the deserted record room, he asked me to wait by the door in case the somnolent clerk wandered in. I stood there while he calmly ripped out several documents from the files and walked away. I expected that we would be seized and sentenced to serve at least ten years, but we walked by the clerk, nodded a brief "Thanks" and were on our way. I later learned that it is customary for lawyers to "delete" records in this manner, to alter entries, or to prepare substitute pages which are then inserted in the files to replace the genuine ones. Whatever is on paper can be forged or destroyed — this, I discovered, is an unwritten motto of the legal profession.

On October 5,1988, the Washington Post headlined a feature on lawyers, "LAWYERS ON DRUGS CREATE PROBLEM WRAPPED WITH LEGAL, MORAL QUESTIONS." The gist of the story was that cocaine was becoming an increasingly serious problem among the lawyers practicing in our nation's capitol. One attorney admitted to the press that he frequently represented his clients in court while he was high on cocaine, stating that while he was under the influence of the drug, he felt "like nothing could go wrong." Another addict, Richard Winters, said,

"The thing that is really tragic in the legal system is this concept of the officer of the court as a superhuman. This is what keeps a lot of lawyers who are addicts, either alcohol or substance abuse addicts. . . locked up in their closets and unable to say, Christ, I have a problem, somebody please help me."

The same issue of the Washington Post recounted the story of an immigration attorney accused of preparing documents for illegal aliens designed to defraud the immigration service.

In her documented work, "The Trial Lawyers," Emily Gouric chronicles some of the successful techniques of the nation's most famous attorneys, among them Howard Weitzman, who won acquittal for John DeLorean on charges of conspiring to distribute cocaine, by first filing some fifty procedural motions, including Freedom of Information requests. Weitzman knew that the judge would probably deny all or most of them. This process is informally known as "exhausting the court." It is well known among lawyers that judges have a very short attention span; by flooding them with a mass of procedural motions, the lawyer can usually beguile the judge into a state of passivity, allowing him to proceed with a strategy for the defense of a client who is probably guilty. It is a truism of American justice that only the guilty can afford a really good lawyer. The innocent must content themselves with someone from the third or fourth echelon, who has a discouraging record of lost cases.

Gouric also describes the tactics of the famed Texas lawyer, Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, who represented Fort Worth millionaire T. Cullen Davis in his notorious Smith and Wesson divorce, as Texas style divorces are known. She also gives us Arthur Liman, who was featured in a TV series, "The Moscow Show Trials," as the North hearings before Congress were later described. Liman had been a protege of Nelson Rockefeller in an "investigation" of the Attica prison riots and killings. He is a partner in the Wall Street firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. Liman's clients include takeover tycoon Carl leahn, Lazard Freres, the investment bankers, and Pennzoil, which won a ten and a half billion dollar judgment against Texaco. Despite his role as chief counsel of the Iran-Contra Hearings, Liman recently stated on the op-ed page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, "We do not have political trials in this country." This will come as news to Col. Oliver North.

Outraged clients find that in most states, it is impossible to find a lawyer who is willing to file a suit against another lawyer. Theoretically, lawyers have no more immunity against lawsuits than anyone else; in practice, membership in a bar association, a law firm, or a Masonic lodge usually prevents or discourages any lawyer from taking a case against another lawyer, no matter how flagrant the offense may be. This was demonstrated to me in the case of the wife of a wealthy entrepreneur. Unknown to her, he had built up a billion dollar operation. After he decided that his new wealth required him to have a companion whom he could flaunt in public, he began to spend most of his time with his mistress. The wife sued for divorce, hiring a lawyer who, for reasons never revealed, placed himself on the side of the wealthy and influential husband. She stated that her lawyer summoned her to his office for a conference with her husband's lawyer. Her attorney then requested that she sign a stack of seemingly "routine" papers in their presence. Hidden deep within the stack was a document which stated that she hereby relinquished all claims against any of her husband's property. She read it and refused to sign it, even though her own attorney had conspired to get her to do so. Although she was unaware of the ways of the business world, she was not stupid. Nevertheless, she did not fire her lawyer, but allowed him to represent her through the divorce procedure.

The layman finds that it is extremely difficult to fire a lawyer for cause, due to court procedures which are designed to protect the legal profession, another little known aspect of our mediaeval legal system. You discover, as I did, that you cannot fire your lawyer, your attorney of record, as he is known to the court, without the permission of the court. What this entails is that you must find a lawyer to represent you in an appearance before the court, in which you request or pray the court to allow you to discharge your previous lawyer and hire this one. The procedure requires that you hire an attorney to file a motion that you wish to fire your first attorney; this motion is then argued before the court. Had she been appearing as her own lawyer, she could have done this herself, but few people are willing to risk everything in our arcane legal system by such an appearance. After hearing the motion, the judge then can exercise his "judicial discretion" as to whether he should allow you to fire the lawyer who has been selling you down the river. Such a motion is usually granted, with the stipulation that you must be sure to pay the fees of the lawyer who was misrepresenting you, as well as the fees of the lawyer who is now representing you.

This unfortunate lady wound up with a mere $20,000 settlement from her husband; the lawyer claimed this was all he could get from him. Her husband then called her up, to taunt her as follows: "You didn't know I was a millionaire, did you?" She was enraged to find that he was indeed worth millions, which would now be lavished on his mistress. She immediately resolved to sue her lawyer for malpractice. She told me that for months she travelled the entire state, trying to find a lawyer who would sue the attorney who had robbed her. She was always given the standard response, "You have already accepted the settlement through your attorney. There is nothing I can do to help you." I informed her that I had been aware for years that no lawyer in this state, as well as in most states, will take a suit against a fellow lawyer. The bar association claims it will hear complaints from civilians against a lawyer, but in actual practice such complaints are promptly buried, never to be exhumed.

I informed this lady that I had sued a number of lawyers in this state, acting as my own attorney. All of these suits were promptly thrown out by complaisant judges on the technicality known as "demurrer," legally making a claim that there is insufficient cause of action, but in reality, in legal jargon, saying, "So what?" The entire texts of my complaints against these lawyers had been copied verbatim from the statutes. One judge grinned at me as he chidingly remarked, "You know, Mr. Mullins, no one can expect to win every suit." I could have risked a contempt citation by replying that I would like to win one in forty years of pleadings, but I said nothing. I had already reported this selfsame judge for dismissing almost fifty consecutive motions without argument, only to find that the federal attorney was one of his old pals. That complaint was buried, along with most of my other legal pleadings. I obtained some small satisfaction from these lawsuits against our sacrosanct legal profession, when one of the lawyers came up to me at the door of the judge's chambers, whining that during the last two years, my suit against him had caused his malpractice insurance to double. Small victories are better than none at all.

The filing of lawsuits against lawyers by disgruntled, betrayed and cheated clients remains one of the great untapped oilfields of jurisprudence in the United States. On November 5, 1986, the Wall Street Journal carried a front page story about one "maverick" lawyer, Edward Friedberg, who has tapped this field, and found it a very profitable one. Friedberg, a lawyer practicing in Sacramento, California, gleefully sues his colleagues when clients inform him of their malpractice. The statement that this is an untapped oilfield is proven by Friedberg's assertion that eighty per cent of his malpractice cases against other lawyers are settled before trial. Only seventeen per cent ever go to trial. The reason was obvious; the lawyers were guilty, and they did not dare to face a jury. Friedberg says he has a great advantage in suing lawyers, and forcing them to take the stand in their own defense. "Jurors hate lawyers. We rank just above used car salesmen. Besides, lawyers are lousy witnesses. They talk too much, and they are arrogant."

Despite Friedberg's enormous financial success — he wins million dollar awards for his clients in these malpractice suits, and takes one-third, plus expenses, for his contingency fee — no champion of the public has dared to enter the lists in other states. Certainly, other lawyers are aware of the thousands of cases begging to be filed for legal malpractice, but the profession has closed ranks. It is not merely professional courtesy — it is the fear that the entire profession will be imperiled, and perhaps destroyed, if the public was allowed to go into court with the amply documented cases of malpractice. The state bar associations and the Masonic lodges will never permit their members to do what Friedberg has done. Once the extreme cases of malpractice, negligence, and conspiracy to obstruct justice begin to be argued in the courts, the profession is doomed.

The lady whose divorce case was previously cited, like most clients, was unaware of one legal tactic which is always devastating to the cause of the litigant. This tactic is called "an advisory meeting" with the attorney for the opposing client to discuss the ramifications of the case — how long it will take, what sort of pretrial discovery is contemplated, and, most important, how much each of them can milk his client of before bringing the case to its predetermined conclusion. Such conferences, known as ex parte, that is, without the parties, and without their knowledge or consent, may include meeting with the judge to privately discuss the case. Ex parte is one of the most flagrant abuses of the present day legal profession, and is strictly forbidden by law. A few indictments for this practice have surfaced in the last decade, but the chances of a lawyer being prosecuted for engaging in ex parte discussions are still closer to his chance of being struck by lightning.

By statute, private citizens are forbidden by law from filing any paper with a court, unless they have previously filed the case themselves, thus notifying the court that they are attorney of record, and are representing themselves. In recent years, emphasis has been placed on filing in propria persona, as a proper person, rather than as attorney pro se, the theory being that one thereby escapes being tainted as an officer of the court, or of being subjected to the jurisdiction of the court. However, anyone who enters a courtroom is presumed by the sitting judge to be under the jurisdiction of his court, and those who deny it can protest all the way to their serving of a six month sentence for "contempt of court."

The language of the statutes forbid any clerk of the court to accept any paper for filing unless it is submitted by a licensed attorney, or a person representing himself. You may have a document which you believe will help your case. If your lawyer decides not to submit it to the court, you have no recourse. Your attorney will try to pass it off as irrelevent, although it could win your case. The problem is that your attorney has already agreed with the opposing counsel to watch you wash away down the drain. You must accept his decision, because the public education system carefully trains you to accept whatever a professional man tells you, without protest. Your doctor will tell you that vaccination is good for your child; your banker will tell you that the Federal Reserve System is not privately owned; and your lawyer will tell you that he has your best interests at heart.

In recent years, public statements have surfaced which question the competency of American lawyers. Chief Justice Berger of the Supreme Court stated that "American lawyers are incompetent." President Jimmy Carter warned that "ninety per cent of our lawyers serve ten per cent of the people," which is probably a break for the other ninety per cent of would be clients. Nevertheless, American lawyers show no incompetence in conspiracy to obstruct justice, conspiracy to suborn perjury, or their ex parte meetings during which they agree to sabotage their clients for the common weal. This writer has observed for forty years that American lawyers are extremely competent in carrying out the abuses of the public which have enriched them throughout the twentieth century.

Tricks of the Trade

The American Bar Association issued a carefully weighed statement that "it has long been aware that the middle seventy per cent of the population is not being adequately served by the legal profession. " This may be a warning to the profession that our lawyers are overlooking seventy per cent of the available market. The almanac shows some 651,000 members of the legal profession in the United States, including judges. Of this number, the American Bar Association has enrolled some 335,000 members.

In theory, the American Bar Association is merely another professional group, whose function is to promote the practices of its profession. In fact, the principal function of the ABA, its state units, and its local bar associations, is to form an impenetrable phalanx for the protection of its members from punishment for their transgressions against the public. These transgressions include not only offenses committed against individual members of the public, but also crimes by lawyers against the public weal and the common good. Many decisions obtained by lawyers through malpractice of their profession serve not only to injure individuals, but all members of the public as well. Anyone who has ever filed a complaint against a lawyer with a local bar association can testify that the complaint is met with thunderous silence. Once filed, it is never to be heard of again. Public commissions have repeatedly verified this claim by releasing their findings. Former Justice of the Supreme Court Tom Clark headed a commission, which, after an eighteen month study of the legal disciplinary system, published its findings that "the prevailing attitude of lawyers towards disciplinary enforcement ranges from apathy to outright hostility. Disciplinary action is practically nonexistent in many jurisdictions." We are given an official conclusion that there are few, if any, areas in the United States where a citizen can obtain any satisfaction after making a complaint against an attorney.

The Clark Commission noted that ninety per cent of complaints against lawyers are dismissed without any person bothering to investigate the alleged facts. If you live in Sacramento, you might be able to hire Edward Friedberg to handle your complaint against an attorney, if there is sufficient damages involved. As for the rest of the United States, you can save yourself a stamp by not writing to the local bar association.

Outrage over the known abuses of the legal profession caused New York legislators to set aside $840,000 to fund disciplinary proceedings against lawyers. However, the disposal of these funds was left entirely to the discretion of the private New York City Bar Association, which has sole authority to hire or fire all employees entrusted with the handling of disciplinary actions against lawyers. As could be expected, the $840,000 was turned into another boondoggle for the lawyers, providing salaries for their relatives, with the understanding that they would do absolutely no work on the job.

One of the more colorful opponents of the legal monopoly is Andrew Melechinsky, the founder of the Constitutional Revival movement, which is headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. In his literature, Melechinsky forcefully states, "Yes, Virginia, there is a conspiracy. The driving force of that conspiracy is the bench/bar monopoly." A man who is willing to stand behind his beliefs, Melechinsky regularly patrols court buildings, wearing a large badge which reads, "Lawyers, Judges and Politicians Are Scum." Note that he does not qualify this statement. It does not read, "Some Lawyers, Judges and Politicians Are Scum." His characterization is all-inclusive. As an editor, I carefully analyzed his statement.

I found that despite the most stringent editing, nothing could be either added to or subtracted from it to make it more direct. Melechinsky also pickets courthouses and law schools, bearing a large sign, "The court system is utterly corrupt." One does not do this sort of thing in free America without consequences. Melechinsky has been thrown into jail, but his vast knowledge of Constitutional procedures always secures his release. There should be a Melechinsky patrolling every courthouse in the United States, but so far he has carried on his crusade alone.

Texas journalist Molly Ivins, an iconoclast herself, offers some explanation as to why Melechinsky describes our professional legal talent as scum. A lawyer named Heard was to have been named the next president of the Texas Bar Association. At the height of his campaign, he was picked up during a police raid on a nude modelling studio. The Bar Association reluctantly chose another candidate as president. Other prominent attorneys make the news on charges usually found only in the supermarket weeklies such as the Star. Marvin Mitchelson, who invented the concept of "palimony" for the discarded lovers of Hollywood movie stars, was charged with professional misconduct after complaints originated from actress Julie Newmar and Eleanor Revson, of the cosmetics family. The complaints included charging excessive fees, failing to place a client's funds in trust funds, an allegation of moral turpitude, and that he had allegedly refused to pay one million dollars for jewelry bought in Switzerland in April, 1987. The two pieces of jewelry, from the collection of the late Duchess of Windsor, had been auctioned in Geneva.

The AP story, dated Dec. 6, 1988, noted that the bar association now had more than twenty complaints against Mitchelson, which would be handled at a disciplinary hearing. On Jan. 15,1989, Mitchelson was ordered to pay interest and attorneys' fees on the one million dollars from April, 1987, when he took possession of the jewelry, although he had claimed that the money was not due until Oct. 21, 1988. His fellow California lawyer, Melvin Belli, known as the King of Torts, was written up in the Wall Street Journal as an exile from his twenty-five room San Francisco mansion, a local tourist attraction, after a court order was obtained by his wife. Now legally separated, he lives on a one hundred and five foot yacht. Although his staff has now been reduced to thirteen attorneys, Belli estimates that he has won more than $350 million in damage awards for his clients. In 1985, he lost a malpractice suit, resulting in a $3.8 million judgment against him.

Six more malpractice suits have been filed against him in San Francisco Superior Court. However, this has not discouraged his clients. He currently has one thousand cases pending, or seventy for each lawyer on his staff. He also faces Tax Court proceedings in which the government is asking for up to three million dollars on a transaction involving his San Francisco law office building. Belli vows revenge, threatening a lawsuit for malicious prosecution. Because he sold the building to his children in 1981, the government wants up to three million dollars in gift taxes, stating that the sale was invalid because no money changed hands, nor was a written contract drawn up when the sale supposedly took place. Belli's fame as "the King of Torts" was built on his mastery of courtroom drama. He pioneered "demonstrative exhibits," such as bloodstained bandages, gory pictures, and other materials which shocked the jury members into making large awards.