The New York Times, February 17, 2005, Thursday

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

February 17, 2005 Thursday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section C; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: A Folksy Lawyer With a High-Powered Client

BYLINE: By KEN BELSON and JONATHAN GLATER

BODY:
The first four weeks of the trial of Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, have moved like mud. Witness after witness has testified about a blizzard of arcane accounting details and their various roles in the $11 billion fraud that sank the telecommunications company in 2002.
Like the jury, Mr. Ebbers's lawyer, Reid H. Weingarten, has endured the hours of tedious testimony. With his weathered briefcase, slightly askew necktie and affable demeanor, Mr. Weingarten has listened intently at times and appeared lost in thought at others.
But Mr. Weingarten was anything but casual yesterday when he began cross-examining the government's star witness, WorldCom's former chief financial officer, Scott D. Sullivan.
Defending Mr. Ebbers, who is accused of conspiracy, securities fraud and filing false reports with regulators, may be Mr. Weingarten's biggest challenge ever. But in his questioning of Mr. Sullivan -- who thus far has been imperturbable -- he showed why he has earned a reputation as one of the country's best defense lawyers.
From the outset, he attacked Mr. Sullivan's credibility, forcing him to admit that he lied to his co-workers, his friends, shareholders, auditors and WorldCom's board. Mr. Weingarten also added a burst of theatrics to the otherwise plodding testimony. After Mr. Sullivan conceded that he misled the company's board, Mr. Weingarten asked him, ''So you looked those 12 people in the eye and lied your head off?''
Judge Barbara S. Jones jumped in. ''O.K., Mr. Weingarten,'' she said, as if to wag a finger. The courtroom burst out in laughter.
The episode, though, was typical of Mr. Weingarten's strategy of acting more like a basketball coach than a big-time litigator. He bounces on the balls of his feet, often pointing his glasses for emphasis. And in asking the simplest of questions, he sounds sincere without being condescending.
''Trial lawyers are performers, and you start with a certain set of tools and with a certain personality, and then you hone it,'' said John Carroll, a partner at the Clifford Chance law firm in New York, who first met Mr. Weingarten more than a decade ago. ''A lot of guys in court come across as more academic. Reid talks to people, he comes across in a very down-to-earth way.''
The strategy has worked well for Mr. Weingarten, who declined to comment for this article. Last year, he won an acquittal for Mark A. Belnick, the former general counsel at Tyco International who was accused of larceny and fraud. He has also successfully defended Mike Espy, the former secretary of agriculture, and Ron Carey, the former head of the Teamsters. He now represents Richard L. Causey, Enron's former chief accounting officer.
But he has suffered defeats, too, during his nearly two decades at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington. One of his more notable losses came in 2003 when a federal jury convicted Franklin Brown, the former chief counsel of Rite Aid, of conspiracy and other charges.
Mr. Weingarten, colleagues say, likes to take on hard cases, and the one against Mr. Ebbers may be the hardest. Prosecutors have spent years building their case against Mr. Ebbers and have already won guilty pleas from five former WorldCom executives for their role in the fraud that led WorldCom to declare bankruptcy, from which it emerged as MCI last April.
On Sunday, Verizon Communications agreed to buy MCI for $6.7 billion, a sad if fitting coda for a company that was once worth nearly $150 billion at market.
Four of those former WorldCom executives have testified against Mr. Ebbers, including his close confidant, Mr. Sullivan. Throughout the trial, Mr. Weingarten has not questioned whether the fraud took place. Rather, he has said it was perpetrated by Mr. Sullivan and his deputies and that Mr. Ebbers was a big-picture strategist who left the accounting to subordinates.
His central strategy has been to attack Mr. Sullivan's truthfulness; Mr. Sullivan is cooperating with the government in hopes of reducing his own sentence for participating in the fraud.
In questioning Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Weingarten repeatedly emphasized one of the biggest potential flaws in the government's case: at all the meetings where Mr. Sullivan said he told Mr. Ebbers about the accounting fraud, they were the only two present. Mr. Sullivan said on the stand yesterday that ''those conversations were always Bernie and I.''
No written or taped record of those meetings have been shown at the trial, a fact that could well be crucial to the defense.
''The true hallmark of a master at this is somebody who masters all the facts and then figures out where to focus the attention,'' said James M. Cole, a former colleague in the Justice Department and a partner at the law firm Bryan Cave. ''He is discerning enough to know what matters.''
Mr. Weingarten, lawyers say, is adept at using his folksy manner to play to the jury. In closing arguments during Mr. Belnick's trial, he summarized the prosecutors' charge that Mr. Belnick helped cover up a payment to a Tyco board member. But rather than revisiting the testimony of Frank Walsh, the Tyco director who received the payment, Mr. Weingarten instead showed that he empathized with a weary jury. ''I mean, I am Walshed out,'' he said. ''You heard about that yesterday.'' The jury acquitted Mr. Belnick.
Mr. Weingarten has a hands-on approach to his cases and relies less than most well-known lawyers on his subordinates, according to colleagues who say his strengths are his opening and closing statements.
An hour before opening statements in the Ebbers trial, Mr. Weingarten sat alone in a corner of the cafeteria at the federal courthouse in New York. Clutching a bottle of juice with his eyes half closed, he appeared to be quietly rehearsing his lines. By the time he rose before the jury, he was telling them a story they appeared to comprehend, not merely reciting the arcane accounting details or convoluted legal arguments.
He deftly compared the prosecution's case to a docudrama where, if facts do not fit the case, ''you just leave them out.''
Mr. Weingarten's easygoing style harks back to the years when he was, in his words, ''a child of the 60's.'' Born in Newark in 1950, the son of a grocer, he was an avid basketball player and attended Cornell University, where he studied philosophy and labor relations. He took a year off from college to travel, for a trip down the Amazon and another across the Sahara.
He first entered the courtroom three decades ago after answering an ad for a job in the district attorney's office in Dauphin County, in eastern Pennsylvania, while he was finishing his last year at Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, Pa.
His boss at the time, Roy Zimmerman, promised him that if he stayed for two years, he would turn him into a trial lawyer.
Mr. Weingarten left that office in 1977 to take a job with the Justice Department's new Public Integrity Section. During the following decade, Mr. Weingarten helped convict several politicians who ran afoul of the law, including the former South Carolina congressman John W. Jenrette.
He also played a role in the Iran-Contra investigations.
It was at the Justice Department that Mr. Weingarten also met his best friend, Eric H. Holder, who went on to become deputy attorney general in 1997. Their friendship led to speculation that Mr. Weingarten had an unfair advantage defending clients being pursued by the government, accusations that Mr. Weingarten has dismissed.
Mr. Weingarten and Mr. Holder, who now works at Covington & Burling in Washington, helped form the See Forever Foundation, an organization that established a charter school in Washington focused on helping disadvantaged children. Mr. Weingarten has also coached the basketball team at the school and taught Western philosophy there.
''He's a firm believer that we need to create systems that create fair opportunities,'' said David Domenici, the foundation's executive director. In his philosophy class, Mr. Weingarten ''did everything to make the class relevant to kids growing up in the city. He posed questions and the dilemmas in them.''
The question facing jurors is whether Mr. Weingarten can convince them that Mr. Ebbers, the man who presided over WorldCom's startling rise, was somehow unaware of its downfall.