Richard Hibey Interview 5

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Oral History of Richard Hibey, Esq.
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is James Rocap, and the interviewee
is Richard Hibey. The interview took place in Dick Hibey’s home on Cathedral Avenue on
Wednesday, July 12, 2023. This is the fifth interview.
MR. ROCAP: Good afternoon, Dick.
MR. HIBEY: Good afternoon.
MR. ROCAP: When we last spoke a week ago on July the 5th, we had started with your changing
from criminal law at the US Attorney’s Office to joining Surrey Karasik and
Morse, and we talked a little bit about one of the first cases that you worked on,
which was the Donohoe Construction case. There are a few other things that I
know we want to talk about regarding your years at Surrey Karasik, but I think it
might be interesting to reflect a little bit on what kind of a sea change this was for
you moving from six jam-packed years of criminal law to civil law and how that
affected you, how you met the challenge of the change, how you found the change
to be in your practice, whether you liked it, whether you didn’t like it, and so on.
So maybe I’ll just ask you to reflect a little bit about what it was like to go from
all criminal law to civil law in a private law firm.
MR. HIBEY: Whatever adjustments I had to make I was not daunted by them. I harbored the
view that the shift was not so great. The burden of proof was, and that’s what I
had to keep my eye on. If I was in a civil case, I had to understand all the facts
just as I would in a criminal case. My preparation fundamentally did not change. I
was totally engrossed in the facts of any litigation that came my way. I was young
enough to be doing my own research, which just called upon me to pull different
books off the shelves in the library.
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So I approached all of this with great confidence. I really don’t recall
trepidatious moments, if there’s such a word. As I reflect on it now, I have to
laugh. Mike Nussbaum asked me within two weeks of my joining the law firm to
try a property damage suit, which we talked about, against the Donohoe
Construction Company, and I guess I was just fat, dumb, and happy. I just went
into it and realized that the skills that were going to be called upon for an effective
trial presentation were the same as those in a criminal case whether I’m a
prosecutor or public defender. So I felt really prepared. I’m sure there were little
surprises along the way, but nothing that would throw me off my appointed task.
MR. ROCAP: So like the true trial lawyer that you are, you focused on the trial. We know that in
1966 there was a watershed change in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that
went from basically not very much pretrial discovery to a lot of pretrial discovery.
By the time you join Surrey Karasik, those rule changes had been in effect for
about five years, I think. Did the pretrial procedures aspect of civil cases cause
you any pause at all having to learn that procedure?
MR. HIBEY: No. I thought it was a bit of a drudgery but necessary. I didn’t know any better, so
that’s the world I walked into. I was not overwhelmed by it.
MR. ROCAP: We have about four or five matters that you worked on while at Surrey Karasik
that give a pretty good idea of the range of experiences that you had, some of
them short, some of them longer. I understand that Mike Nussbaum early on
asked if you would handle a matter that involved Ralph Nader. Maybe you could
give a little bit of background as to how Ralph Nader happened to come to Surrey
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Karasik and then what the matter was about and what your interaction with Mr.
Nader was.
MR. HIBEY: He was Mike’s client entirely. I don’t say that with a negative possessory
implication, but that’s how I understood Ralph came to the firm. Mike was
associated with a number of liberal causes, and I’m proud to say as far as Ralph
Nader was concerned, I thought he was a great American. He had a disgruntled
secretary who made off with his rolodex.
MR. ROCAP: Which in Washington is close to a criminal act.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. And it wasn’t that it wasn’t prosecutable as a criminal act, but Ralph didn’t
envision that as the way to go. So substantial efforts were made to persuade the
person and her lawyer to return the goods. It didn’t work. I think she wanted face
time with Ralph to be honest with you. So a suit was filed. I cannot remember
whether we were plaintiffs or maybe we were sued by the employee. But it
required some time together with our client to get ready for the next step. The step
I recall was to take discovery from her by deposition. Prior to that, we were going
to a meeting in her lawyer’s office. I had the address and it was adjacent to one of
the parks or squares here in the Northwest part of the city. It was also walking
distance, so Ralph and I walked to the office of the lawyer representing this
woman, except we got on the wrong side of the street. The offices were not only
on the other side, but they were on the other side of I think McPherson Square.
We realized this mid-block, and I started to cross to get through the square and to
the offices of our opponent. I turned around as I was going to the curb mid-block
and he’s not there. I’m looking around. He was going to cross the street, but only
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at the corner where there was also a traffic light. I thought to myself man this
guy’s the real deal. He talks the talk, and he walks the walk.
The other aspect of this was we had to prepare written discovery and we
had to pose interrogatories, answer interrogatories, and we scheduled a meeting
between Ralph and myself at our offices to accomplish that task. The meeting
started, as far as I was concerned, late, but I’m sure it wasn’t for him. It was dark
out, so we did the work, and then after several hours, which brought us past
midnight, I said to him let me give you a ride home, and he said well I can’t ride
home, I’ve got another meeting. I said it’s close to 1:00 a.m. He said, “If Harold
Geneen can hold meetings at 3:00 in the morning, I certainly can.” I can’t
remember what company Geneen was affiliated with, but it might have been ITT,
something really big. But that was his mindset. He just flipped it off. I said, “I’ll
drive you anyway.” We both went to the public garage where I had a parking
spot and I realized, as the parking attendant at that ungodly hour had to go and get
my car and bring it up, that the seatbelts in my car were forever buried behind the
cushion of the front seat and hadn’t been seen in years. I thought, “Oh my
goodness, what’s he going to say?” Oh well. When the car came up, I very
quickly jumped in on the driver side and frantically searched and happily found
the strap for the passenger which was a long, greasy dirty, accoutrement to the
car. He never said a word about it. He just strapped in, and I took him to his next
meeting.
MR. ROCAP: It would not have been good form I suppose to have shown up in a Chevy Corvair
or whatever the car was that he focused on.
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MR. HIBEY: I think he had specific findings about the Corvair. Mine was a Plymouth Valiant
convertible.
MR. ROCAP: And at least it had seatbelts.
MR. HIBEY: It did.
MR. ROCAP: That was a good move for a good client. So let’s move on to a more complicated
case. This may have been one of your first cases in federal court in Virginia, not
in D.C. I know you refer to it as the Leroy Blackwelder case. There are several
reported opinions on it. And then we’ll talk a little bit about your experiences with
the case, but I think we agreed that I would set the stage a little bit because of the
procedural complexity of the case. I should add that with this introduction that
we’re leading up to the point in the case where you are representing a gentleman
by the name of Richard Millman who was a lawyer for a property owner. So with
that in mind, I’ll give a brief overview of the case.
First of all, it involved a property in Virginia called Moorefield Farm,
which back in the 1950s, like many pieces of property in Virginia, was waiting to
be developed. There was a gentleman named David Sterling who knew Leroy
Blackwelder. Mr. Sterling had an ownership interest in Moorefield farm.
Mr. Blackwelder was a developer, and they entered into an agreement by which
Mr. Sterling would contribute the property, and Mr. Blackwelder would
contribute his developer skills in order to develop the property. This all began in
the middle-1950s. There were soon fallings out between members of the Sterling
family, David and his brother John. Mr. Blackwelder appeared to be having some
financial difficulties and so he needed to place his trustee relationship with respect
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to the property with his wife. That ultimately led to a court-approved sale of the
property for $1 million in 1967. The judge who was in charge of that was Oren
Lewis, a very well-known federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia.
That sale then fell through, and then there was a second sale engineered by
John Sterling, David’s brother, who had received 50% of David’s interest in the
property from David. The second sale was to a gentleman by the name of Lester
Dworman for less money than the first sale. Mr. Dworman turned around and
sold the property for significantly more than he bought it for, within a very short
period of time. There were court proceedings with respect to that in which
Mr. Millman was representing John Sterling. You aren’t involved yet, but Surrey
Karasik is. Facts were brought to the attention of the Fourth Circuit that they felt
suggested that Mister Millman had not been acting appropriately in some form or
another, and they asked Judge Lewis to hold a hearing and then report back to the
Fourth Circuit.
In May of 1970, Judge Lewis suspended Mr. Millman from practicing in
the federal bar in the Eastern District of Virginia. That was stayed by the Fourth
Circuit, and then there was a challenge to Judge Lewis’s order. This is where
Surrey Karasik comes in. Mike Nussbaum at that point was representing
Mr. Millman, appealed Judge Lewis’s order, and then in March of 1971 – this is a
reported case – the Fourth Circuit found the appeal to be moot on the ground that
the disbarment was no longer effective, found no grounds for disqualification to
begin with, and ordered Judge Lewis to recuse himself from the case.
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A year or two later, Mr. Blackwelder is back on the scene, and he sues
Mr. Millman and Lester Dworman and a couple of other entities or individuals for
fraud in the sale of the property to Mr. Dworman back in the late 1960s. This case
was assigned to Judge Bryan in the Eastern District, and he dismissed it as being
time barred. Then Mr. Blackwelder I believe might have filed another case. I’m
not sure if I’ve got the procedure exactly right here, but I don’t know that it makes
a difference to the narrative. That case then went up to the Fourth Circuit, and at
that point you are representing Mr. Millman in this case by Leroy Blackwelder
against Mr. Millman and Mr. Dworman.
I should add one thing here. In a prior case, Mr. Blackwelder had tried to
amend his complaint, and the judge in that case, Judge Bryan, had refused to
allow him to do it, and then he filed his independent case in March of 1973. I
apologize for the oversight in the chronology.
At any rate, how did you get involved in this case when at some point
Mr. Blackwelder was going after Mr. Millman accusing him of fraud involving
his representation of Mr. Sterling in the sale of the Moorefield farm?
MR. HIBEY: It was just a matter of building up my workload. Mike asked me to take the case
over because he foresaw that we would have a fair amount of litigation in the
Eastern District of Virginia, and therefore he decided to hand the case to me. I’m
trying to figure out, because this goes back a lot of years, how we ended up in
front of Judge Hoffman.
MR. ROCAP: That was my fault in my chronology. The first time that Mr. Blackwelder
attempted to sue Richard Millman for fraud was in a case that was pending before
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Judge Hoffman, and then Judge Hoffman declined to allow him to amend. But it
was in that case, I think, that you had your first run in with Mr. Blackwelder.
Then there was the subsequent case by Mr. Blackwelder against Mr. Millman that
was separately filed after he could not amend his first case, and that went before
Judge Bryan. I think I’ve gotten it correct this time. But at any rate, you were in
front of Judge Hoffman. What were your dealings like with Mr. Blackwelder?
MR. HIBEY: Blackwelder was an evil man. I have run into some bad people in my career, just
as anyone involved in criminal law would. This guy was unique. He had a death
grip on the emotions of David Sterling. David was at the point where he would do
anything that Blackwelder told him to do. For example, I did not witness this, but
I was told by those who were in the case before me who would know this story.
He had such control over David Sterling, who as I recall might have been an
alcoholic, came from a very prominent Virginia family. He would dictate whether
David should gain or lose weight. David was married to a woman whose name I
can no longer remember, but she was in Jackie Kennedy’s wedding. They had I
think at least two children. Blackwelder once instructed David to live in Florida
away from his family so that he could get his mind straight, which really meant so
that he could be controlled. Occasionally he was given the privilege of coming up
here from Florida and visiting with his family on strictly controlled
circumstances. It became known to I think one or more of the lawyers during this
saga that David flew up to Washington. His family was waiting for him. He got
off the plane, and before he could embrace his family, Blackwelder ordered him
to weigh in. In those days, public places had big scales that you put a dime in and
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get your weight. He was two pounds over, and he was made to go back to the
plane or to another plane without leaving the airport and fly back to Florida,
leaving his family heartbroken they couldn’t be together. It’s no surprise the
marriage broke up. David disintegrated during that time. Leroy Blackwelder
controlled the property through David, or at least David’s interest in the property,
and that set off the kind of litigious disputes that you summarized. Blackwelder
wanted the entire property. Blackwelder wanted control over the Sterling fortune,
to the extent that David had any of it left.
Those of us who weren’t burdened by representing David knew what the
story was, and it was a tragedy that continued to unfold for all the years that this
thing was going on.
Blackwelder in my view was also an anti-Semite, which explains
somewhat his furor when dealing with Dick.
MR. ROCAP: Dick being Richard Millman?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. We found documents. I don’t know how we got them, of these anti-Semitic
screeds which we used against him in the trial. Blackwelder’s persona pervaded
everything. He accused Dick of undisclosed self-dealing, and therefore fraud, and
that’s where I got involved in the long history of this case.
There came a time when I needed to depose him, and as I recall, I ended
up in Richmond. Whether the deposition began in Alexandria is no longer clear to
me, but there was a time when I deposed Blackwelder. The only thing I can
remember besides his incredibly hateful disposition was I asked him a question, I
can’t even remember what it was, and he came out of his chair to attack me.
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MR. ROCAP: Physically?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. It didn’t come to fruition that we came to blows. I’d seen enough of this guy,
so I filed a request to order him to behave and things like that, and it came before
Judge Walter Hoffman, who was ruling on a very important part of the litigation.
Hoffman heard enough and ordered the resumption of the deposition in front of
him in Richmond. So I spent a few hours deposing Blackwelder in front of Walter
Hoffman in his courtroom. During that deposition in front of Judge Hoffman,
Blackwelder started getting out of his chair again. The judge enjoyed the
nickname among his peers of Beef, because he was a big man and he had a big
voice to go with it. He shouted this guy down and ordered him to sit and answer
the questions, and said that if he persisted in his behavior, the judge would take
extra steps to tame him. In any event, that was that episode.
MR. ROCAP: Let me ask just one question. The Eastern District is known as the rocket docket,
and I think it certainly was the rocket docket even back in the 1970s.
MR. HIBEY: It most certainly was.
MR. ROCAP: And you had to come to court with your exhibits at the pretrial. Do you recall
doing this in front of Judge Bryan or Judge Hoffman?
MR. HIBEY: Judge Bryan.
MR. ROCAP: As I mentioned in my hopefully not too confusing introduction to this, there was a
lawsuit filed after Judge Hoffman denied the motion to amend by Blackwelder.
He filed a separate lawsuit, and that was in front of Judge Bryan. The second
lawsuit went up to the Fourth Circuit. You had won a motion to dismiss on statute
of limitations grounds. The Fourth Circuit reversed that and remanded it for trial,
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and then you went to trial against Mr. Blackwelder in front of Judge Bryan. What
was the pretrial like?
MR. HIBEY: Let’s put it this way, it’s like nothing I have experienced before, and of course,
that’s easy to understand because I hadn’t had that much civil practice, trial
practice experience by then. And I can tell you I’ve never had anything like that
since. The lawyers were called into chambers a week before the trial for the
exchange of exhibits. I went over there without my exhibits because the Xerox
machine had broken down and the Xerox people didn’t get to the office to fix it,
so I kind of blew into chambers and sat down and the parties start to exchange
their exhibits. I said rather cavalierly, “Judge, we had an equipment breakdown at
the office and I couldn’t get my exhibits copied, but I’ll have them here tomorrow
morning.” In that very soft southern Virginia tone, he said, “You don’t have to do
that, Mr. Hibey. Because you didn’t meet the deadline, you won’t be able to
introduce any of those exhibits.” I thought to myself, my career has just ended.
Grayson Hanes, who was in the case for one of these defendants, leaned over to
me and said, “Don’t worry about it, you can use my exhibits because I’ve got
everything marked and I’m sure what you would want to use is here.” And that
was true. So a few minutes later, my heart went from my mouth to my chest
again, and I proceeded to try the case with Grayson Hanes’s exhibits.
MR. ROCAP: The Eastern District probably hasn’t changed much. They’re pretty tough, at least
on procedure.
MR. HIBEY: They are. It turned out that the Millman case – Blackwelder, Sterling, that whole
line of litigation – was one of the longest in the history of the Fourth Circuit.
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MR. ROCAP: There are many reported cases in F.2d. to prove it. So, of course, everybody
would be dying to know what ultimately happened after you went to trial.
MR. HIBEY: We won it all. I can remember running to a payphone to call back to the office
because this was a huge win, and it was new territory for me in a civil practice.
MR. ROCAP: Was this a case that you tried on your own?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. I tried it on my own.
MR. ROCAP: Reflecting back on the way things have changed, do you think a case like that in
the 2000 to 2010 period would have had just you as the trial counsel?
MR. HIBEY: No way. It would have a cadre of a minimum of two associates and a paralegal on
a thing like this. Trying a case by yourself really wasn’t realistic when discovery
and the Rules of Evidence liberalized and caused lawyers to cast a broader net to
cover the issues they were dealing with or to raise new ones.
MR. ROCAP: Back in the 1970s, a large document case might have maybe 4,000 or 5,000,
maybe up to 10,000 documents discovered, and that would be a large document
case. Of course, no emails, no electronic communications and so on. A bit
different today, I suppose.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. We’ll talk about it later, but the Clair George case was two million
documents in a SCIF that’s larger than this apartment. The Jonathan Pollard case
contained, as I recall, maybe 100,000 documents. Those things reflect at the high
end what you could encounter with appropriate discovery.
MR. ROCAP: So a large wave of change in litigation during the period that you were involved.
Let’s move on from Mr. Blackwelder and Mr. Millman and talk a little bit about
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Norman Braman, who even has his own Wikipedia page. For those uninitiated,
can you explain who Mr. Braman was and how you came into contact with him?
MR. HIBEY: He was again a client of the law firm. Our people did all his tax work. His brother
went to the bench here in the District as a Superior Court judge of great integrity
and renown. Judge Braman went from the Surrey firm to the bench, so I was
penciled in, you might say, to be a trial lawyer they needed in addition to the one
they already had. So Norman was law firm family. He was a very successful
businessman. Even today, the name Braman in Florida is prominent. He was a
benefactor of I think Mt. Sinai Hospital. He was owner of the Cadillac franchise
in Florida. For a while, he was an owner of one of the professional teams in
Philadelphia, the Eagles. He was a pleasant man and very generous.
MR. ROCAP: This is another in a long line of very interesting individuals that you had the good
fortunate to meet, as we mentioned in our last session, that he came to the firm
with a legal matter. What was your personal involvement in that?
MR. HIBEY: I got him ready for his testimony on the Hill. I can’t tell you sitting here today
what the issue was that the Congress concluded in one of its committees that it
needed to interview Norman. So I got him ready for his testimony. That was a
night-time affair as well in the sense that our preparation for his appearance the
next day ran into the early evening hours, 7:00 to 8:00. Our offices were across
the street from the Madison Hotel where he was staying. When we were done, he
said to me, “Come and have dinner with me, your wife doesn’t want to have to
cook for you now. You’ve got two little ones at home.” I said, “Actually, I think
you’re right.” So we went across the street to the Montpelier Room, which, in
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those days, was considered one of the premier restaurants in the city. The maître
d’ took us to our table, and the sommelier showed up with this huge chain around
his neck. Maybe he could qualify today for being a professional athlete, but this
thing was enormous. He recognized Norman. He said, “May I interest you in
something from our wine cellar?” Without skipping a beat, Norman ordered a
$175 bottle of wine, which simply knocked me off my pins. It was also the case
that I don’t drink. I told him, I said, “Norman, I don’t drink. You’re wasting it on
me.” And he said, “You’ll love it.” So he told the sommelier to get it. The
sommelier went off, came back a few minutes later, and said they didn’t have it in
their stash. Well, they didn’t have the next bottle in the stash, and so we had to
settle for a $125 bottle of wine that night.
MR. ROCAP: Back in the 1970s, that was actually a lot of money.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. But wasted certainly on a person with my limited tastes.
MR. ROCAP: There was one other civil case that I know we wanted to talk about involving a
building at 2720 Wisconsin Avenue in a cooperative that had been set up there by
the tenants and a fellow named Mr. Laurins, and that was a civil case that I think
was near the end of your tenure at Surrey Karasik in the later 1970s. Maybe you
can talk a little bit about what that case was about and your involvement in it and
then we can walk through it a little bit.
MR. HIBEY: I wish I could remember how it came to me, but it did. A cooperative located on
Wisconsin Avenue was promoted and developed by an individual named
Aleksandrs V. Laurins. I represented members of the cooperative who were being
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squeezed by Laurins and his corporate entities into taking on more debt and
making it economically financially impossible to shoulder that ownership interest.
MR. ROCAP: As I understand it, Mr. Laurins was the promoter to turn this building, 2720
Wisconsin Avenue, into a cooperative building, and so he was in a contractual
relationship with your clients, the members of the cooperative, but he was the one
running the show.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. He created the entity known as the cooperative. He created the corporate
entity that controlled the debt on the property and increased the burden by levying
various charges in a way that would make it difficult for the people to continue
servicing the accumulation of additional debt. The safety in the building was
being compromised because one of the ways in which he would squeeze more
charges out of the people was to cut off the heat during winter and generally
impose charges on them that I think might have been described as arbitrary,
capricious, vexatious, and oppressive.
MR. ROCAP: This case ended up with at least two reported opinions. It was in the Superior
Court, I believe in the D.C. Court of Appeals, and you were with this case from
the beginning, I believe. Is that right?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: And there was one incident in the early part of the litigation in which you had
approached Judge Belson in the Superior Court seeking injunctive relief against
Mr. Laurins and some of his practices. Do you remember how that went?
MR. HIBEY: I’m sure I got the relief. As it turned out, the courts decisionally were very
supportive of our position, so that is what I know. You have to understand, it was
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before Jim Belson, Judge Ted Newman, Bill Stewart, those are three judges I can
remember, and they were granting me relief in one form or another with Bill
Stewart providing, shall we say, the final blow. We didn’t lose a bit on appeal.
MR. ROCAP: The appeal decision was reported in 1982, and so you began the litigation, I
believe, back in 1975 or 1976, but it did take a long time.
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: Was there a trial before Judge Stewart?
MR. HIBEY: Oh yes. There was a trial. One of the challenges that the court had was to choose a
venue among the buildings of this Court of General Sessions that would
accommodate 25 plaintiffs. So we ended up in what I think was a stand-alone
courthouse. I’m pretty sure it was where Ezra Pound was tried for treason, but that
doesn’t precisely describe where the courthouse was, only that it was old and it
was on the park property across from what is now the front door to the Superior
Court.
MR. ROCAP: The old Pension Building?
MR. HIBEY: No. We didn’t have to go that far. I wish I could do a better job remembering the
name. This building is a lovely building, but it’s gone through so many different
incarnations. I can’t remember what the popular description was, but I think there
was a time that the D.C. Court of Appeals used that building for its own court,
separate from the trial court that’s in the Moultrie Courthouse today. We had 25
clients.
MR. ROCAP: How long did the trial take?
MR. HIBEY: Non-jury, it took at least two weeks.
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MR. ROCAP: Did Mr. Laurins represent himself at that time?
MR. HIBEY: No. He didn’t represent himself during the trial on the merits, but what he did do,
and this turned out to be another unique experience for me, I was awarded
attorney’s fees and costs. I filed in my name an affidavit that provided the court
with the records to support our claim for attorney’s fees and costs. What I’m told
is that ordinarily when a lawyer does that, the submission is examined by the
opponent, and almost invariably, the opponent will say we don’t contest the
numbers because everything had a backup and time sheets. This guy, Mr. Laurins,
terminated his trial counsel, entered an appearance pro se, and cross-examined me
for a whole afternoon.
MR. ROCAP: On your fees?
MR. HIBEY: On fees.
MR. ROCAP: Was he successful?
MR. HIBEY: No. We took a haircut only because at that time the jurisprudence hadn’t
developed to the point where a paralegal’s time could be included.
MR. ROCAP: So the court docked the paralegal time but nothing else. I understand Mr. Laurins
had a subsequent history with the law out in California?
MR. HIBEY: So I’m told. A few years later, I was still at the Surrey firm. I get a call from the
Assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco. I had nothing going on out there at the
time, so this was a cold call for me, and it was an Assistant U.S. Attorney who
wished to share with me the bitter news about a guy I formerly sued, namely
Aleksandrs V. Laurins. To make a long story short, which I’m sure you’ll be glad,
Laurins tried the same gimmick as he did back here in our case, only apparently it
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was more egregious, and he ended up getting an at least seven-year prison
sentence in the federal system. This prosecutor was the one who brought the case.
He knew all about our case and wanted to share the news, which frankly was quite
welcome.
MR. ROCAP: Near the end of your time with Surrey Karasik in 1978, which is roughly the time
that you were very much involved with the 2720 Wisconsin Avenue case, you
actually had a couple of fairly high-profile congressional representations. I’d like
to talk just briefly about those before we move on to the next law firm that you
helped form in 1981.
So first, you represented a fellow by the name of Ed Roybal, who was a
congressman from Los Angeles, a very famous congressman I believe, in
connection with the Koreagate scandal. Could you talk a little bit about how that
case came to you and what you did in connection with it?
MR. HIBEY: It didn’t come to me from Ed Roybal or anybody representing him. It came to me
through my partner Stan Anderson, who was in the Surrey firm at the time. He
asked me whether this was something I could do, and I said yes, and that began
our relationship with Mr. Roybal.
There came a time during that representation when I was investigating
what happened in connection with the Koreagate scandal.
MR. ROCAP: Was there an allegation against Mr. Roybal?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. Broadly, that he received cash from Tongsun Park, a prominent figure in the
scandalous politics of the day. As I recall, Mr. Roybal denied on the grounds of
lack of memory ever having received cash from Mr. Park in Roybal’s office on
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the Hill. Apparently that was untrue, and the House Standards Committee accused
him of lying about it.
The story included at least one other congressman who was a recipient of
cash at or around the same time that Ed was said to have received cash. That
congressman was John Rarick of Louisiana. I felt I needed to talk to Rarick to see
what he remembered about that time and particularly the date because I wanted to
see what correlation, if any, there was between his alleged receipt of money from
Park and Ed’s alleged receipt. Stan and I flew down to the little town in Louisiana
on the Mississippi River where Rarick was then residing and practicing law.
MR. ROCAP: He was no longer a congressman?
MR. HIBEY: He left I think after eight years up here. We walked into a small white bungalow,
were warmly greeted by a woman who was his secretary but also his wife. She
said that the congressman was looking forward to receiving us, and he would be
out in the moment. A few minutes later, two men came out of a small office. One
was the congressman, and the other was a local lawyer. I don’t remember his
name. We introduced ourselves to the congressman, and the congressman
introduced us to the person whose name I don’t recall. He said, “These two
gentleman here are ‘n****r lawyers from Washington.’” We were startled by that.
I was quite indignant. We both had a good mind to simply turn tail, but we were
spending the client’s money with flights down here so we might as well find out
what this guy had to say. He excused his first appointment and ushered us into his
office. What was amazing to me was that, unlike every politician I ever saw in his
native habitat, there were no photographs on the wall, no vanity pictures of any
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sort, except for one picture, an old grainy photograph that was inscribed, “Thank
you for your efforts with regard to the release of my father,” signed Rudolph
Hess, Jr. I was stunned. We talked long enough for us to discredit anything he had
to say. Nonetheless, I asked him if he had any documents, diaries,
correspondence, anything that could shed light on the question. And he said,
“Well, if I do, they’re upstairs in the attic.” So on a 90-degree day, Stan and I
were allowed to climb into the attic, sweat through all of our clothes, only to find
literature about what we would now call white supremacy. The mission was a
total bust.
A few weeks later, we were haled before the Committee to answer the
charges that Roybal had lied to investigators about receiving money. We went
through the exercise. Bill Hundley represented Tongsun Park. In a brief sidebar,
Bill forecast what Park might say in response to a few questions. The hearing was
convened, the entire Committee was present. There wasn’t an empty seat amongst
the members. Park, who was a character, gave his testimony, was briefly crossexamined
by me, and was excused from the stand, at which point he said, “Mr.
Chairman, I’d like to make a statement.” The chairman was Mr. Flint of Georgia,
a very courtly gentleman, might have been a former judge, who said, in a thick
Georgia drawl in response to the request, “Well, this is highly irregular, but if
there is no objection from any member of the Committee, I’ll allow it.” No
objection. Then Park did something that has tickled me all these years. He said
what a pleasure it was to be before the Committee, who are his old friends, and
then, he had something very personal to say about every one of the people on the
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Committee, and there were more than a dozen. And each one, when his or her
name was mentioned, froze, not knowing what this guy was going to say. It was
really a fun moment.
MR. ROCAP: As I understand it, ultimately Congressman Roybal’s potential censure was
reduced to a reprimand rather than a censure, which is a significant difference.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. Because they found that while he might have misstated whether and when he
received the money, it wasn’t an intentional falsity, so he didn’t deserve anything
more than a reprimand I think, or a censure. I can’t remember.
MR. ROCAP: It was a reprimand, the lesser of the two.
MR. HIBEY: And then the Black caucus supported him and ultimately he got the lowest
statement of responsibility.
MR. ROCAP: I understand from public records that the Public Integrity Section at the
Department of Justice also decided not to pursue any charges.
MR. HIBEY: They had no interest.
MR. ROCAP: And then finally, Congressman Fred Richmond from New York came across your
desk at about the same time.
MR. HIBEY: He was a friend of the firm. He was not yet charged, but was going to be charged
with a sexual offense involving a young boy. His encounter with the young man
didn’t fall neatly into the category of soliciting prostitution or soliciting for lewd
and immoral purposes. Those are two separate offenses. One of them requires the
discussion of money or something of value in exchange for sex. The other doesn’t
involve money, but required under the case law at the time, that the lewd and
immoral purpose to be proved had to involve homosexuality. The facts as we
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knew them was that the encounter with the young man contained no discussion of
money and no discussion of the purpose of the solicitation, so you didn’t have a
crime in either category.
After my colleagues had researched the issue, I was convinced that there
was no crime, so I went to see my dear friend Earl Silbert, the U.S. Attorney for
the District of Columbia, a real giant of my generation, and I proposed this
defense as enough to cause no charges. My dear friend Carl Rauh, who was Earl’s
deputy in the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the time, argued vociferously against what
we call “no papering” the case.
It was concluded that the government would charge the crime I picked. I
chose soliciting prostitution. The government agreed that the plea could be
entered in Superior Court without fanfare, and that’s what we did.
MR. ROCAP: Was there any incarceration related to it?
MR. HIBEY: No.
MR. ROCAP: Did he receive first offender treatment?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: So did that mean at the time that he didn’t even have formal charges, or were the
formal charges dismissed?
MR. HIBEY: They would disappear after a certain period of time.
MR. ROCAP: That’s quite a result.
MR. HIBEY: It didn’t last long.
MR. ROCAP: The public record shows he had some subsequent difficulties that you were not
involved with and he ended up resigning from Congress.
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MR. HIBEY: Correct.
MR. ROCAP: That pretty much wraps up the things that we wanted to talk about at Surrey
Karasik. Do you have any broad reflections on your time at Surrey Karasik. We
know that you went on to form your own firm with Stan Anderson in 1981, but do
you have any final reflective thoughts on that period of your career, those ten
years?
MR. HIBEY: Yes I do. There was a remarkably generous spirit exhibited by the veterans of that
particular law firm. They received me warmly. They treated me extremely well. I
had great work there. It was a good springboard for me to initiate my experience.
They were so trusting and so willing to help me gain my progress in my practice.
MR. ROCAP: We’re going to finish here and we’ll pick up next time with the formation of
Anderson Hibey.