The San Antonio lawyer started out defending friends who had been busted for smoking pot. Twenty-five years later, his clients are big-time dope dealers and international cocaine kingpins — and he believes he’s saving the world.
by Mimi Swartz as published in Texas Monthly in April of 1996
The arrest and extradition in January of reputed Mexican drug lord Juan García Abrego created something of a stampede among criminal lawyers. The McAllen office of Abrego’s longtime counselor, Roberto “Bobby Joe” Yzaguirre, was overwhelmed by sales pitches from attorneys all over the country, forceful or flattering letters and faxes explaining why they and they alone should be hired as part of the defense team. Farther north, in Houston, speculation about who would get the job was rampant. Florida dope lawyers pumped their Texas colleagues (“Is it you?” they wanted to know). One lawyer sparked a blaze of gossip after spying the name “Frank Rubino” on the visitors log at the Harris County jail, where Abrego was incarcerated. (“Wasn’t me,” the Miami attorney for dictator—drug smuggler Manuel Noriega said.)
Though Abrego could be quite charming and humorous—“You’d feel very comfortable if he was selling you a car,” said one acquaintance—he would not hold much allure for the average person. After all, the 51-year-old car thief turned kingpin was alleged to have presided over the flow of Colombian cocaine through northern Mexico into the U.S., an operation that reaped $20 billion a year, according to estimates by the Drug Enforcement Agency. He was believed to be armed and dangerous—Abrego’s indictment charged him with authorizing “the murders of numerous individuals,” which were thought to include everyone from business rivals to nosy journalists. There were additional charges of money laundering, drug smuggling, and attempted bribery. There were dark hints of political assassinations, of corruption within the now tainted administration of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. There was the dubious distinction, in 1995, of a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Innocent until proven guilty, okay, but either way, Juan García Abrego looked at best like a pretty bad guy.
Unless, of course, you were a criminal lawyer: then you knew that everyone was entitled to the best defense possible, that if society cannot treat the worst of us with fairness, then what of the rest of us? Maybe the extradition wasn’t legit. Maybe the investigation was fishy—the DEA and the FBI were rumored to have cut deals with more than seventy felons to get their man. There were lots of maybes, except, of course, for one: The Abrego case was the legal equivalent of a gusher. Along with a fee that could hit seven figures, it offered lots of media coverage that doubled as free advertising—in other words, big money up front and down the road in the form of future clients. Juan García Abrego might get life without parole, but the lawyer who represented him couldn’t lose.
Roberto Yzaguirre knew this as well as anyone, of course, but as the only lawyer actually hired by Abrego, he had other concerns. Having represented clients facing drug-related charges in the Valley for more than twenty years, he knew that alone he lacked the resources to go against the federal government in a case of this magnitude. And as a man whose courtliness belied his shrewdness, he had known whom he wanted as partners from the beginning. Tony Canales, a criminal lawyer from Corpus, was an obvious choice: The former U.S. attorney was an old friend who spoke Spanish and knew the ways of the federal government, particularly the federal government in South Texas, better than just about anyone. But Yzaguirre needed someone else to complete his team, someone who was not just a great trial lawyer and a great drug lawyer but a great book lawyer, someone with the intellect to, at a moment’s notice, tip the vagaries of the Constitution in his client’s favor. Someone who, if need be, could work out the negotiations should Abrego decide to cooperate with the government, testifying against an even bigger fish like, say, Salinas himself. Someone who had no problem representing the worst of us and, in fact, saw that as a matter of conscience. When you came right down to it, there really was just one man for the job.
“Goldstein!”
“GOLDstein!!”
“GOLDSTEIN!!!”
THE ATTORNEYS GATHERED IN MIAMI’S fountainebleau hotel for the 1996 midwinter meeting of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers make way for Gerald Goldstein like supplicants in a temple. He has flown in from his San Antonio home this morning and will fly out shortly after his speech. Whipping a cart of visual aids through the hotel’s gilded warrens, he has the air of a man unable or unwilling to downshift. Even without his haste, Goldstein would stand out amid these cheerful conventioneers in their sport shirts and jeans. His salt-and-pepper hair is slicked back, taming curls that twenty years ago approximated an Afro. Long past the age of love beads and bell-bottoms, when he first made a name for himself defending conscientious objectors, Goldstein now wears scholarly tortoiseshell glasses, which complement his impeccably crafted sport coat, which is enhanced by a contrasting orange-and-green tie and the crispest white shirt. At 52 he is trimmer than he was at 42, his hawk-like nose and deepening crow’s-feet telegraphing wisdom, not age. The enfant terrible has become an éminence grise, simultaneously elite and egalitarian. “Hey, brother! Hey, brother! Hey, broth-er!” he says by way of greeting, having his cake and eating it too.
So it has always been with Gerald Goldstein, a man who has made his reputation championing civil rights and his fortune defending dopers, two activities that frequently and fortuitously overlap. He has never shied away from a controversial case—in 1974 Goldstein, no fan of government censorship, defended a San Antonio theater manager’s right to show Deep Throat and, in 1990, rap group 2 Live Crew’s need to be as nasty as they wanted to be; infuriated by overzealous prosecutors, in 1980 he represented one of Texas House Speaker Billy Clayton’s cronies in the kickback scandal known as Brilab. Even so, it is safe to say that drugs have been Goldstein’s life. It was his 1978 appeal that reversed the convictions in what has come to be known as the Piedras Negras Jailbreak Case, in which two Texans stormed the border city’s jail and, Rambo style, freed fourteen American inmates charged with drug offenses. Goldstein was an early and influential supporter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He is a counselor and loyal friend to superhead Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, wrote an amicus brief on behalf of Noriega, and has defended on drug charges the sons of such prominent men as BeBe Rebozo and assorted San Antonio swells. The majority of newspaper clippings framed on his office walls have to do with his victorious work in the field of drug-related defense work: a 1979 High Times article that named him one of the top ten dope defenders in America; a 1983 San Antonio Express story headlined POT CONVICTIONS THROWN OUT, POLICE SURVEILLANCE WAS TOO ORWELLIAN; a 1985 Texas Lawyer story titled “U.S. Must Return $10 Million to Drug Smuggler”; a 1989 San Antonio Express-News story headlined FEDERAL CASE DEAD IN RECORD DRUG DEAL. Let the general public scowl—“Rich libertarian is druggie mouthpiece” the late, irascible Express-News columnist Paul Thompson declared in another clipping on the wall—Gerald Goldstein loves his work.
And why shouldn’t he? It has earned him the profound respect of his colleagues, who elected him president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association in 1992 and president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in 1994 and 1995. He is a sought-after commentator on CNN, a frequent contributor to op-ed pages, the kind of guy whose number is in the Rolodexes of reporters around the nation. If Americans are ambivalent about drugs—outraged by their destructiveness but bitterly divided over what to do about them—then Gerry Goldstein is the embodiment of that ambivalence, and has profited mightily from it.
Nowhere is this ambivalence more apparent than here, in Miami, a place revitalized in part by a TV show about two drug-busting cops in silk suits, a place that now pays the price for its drug culture in the form of murdered tourists. The lawyers gathered here seem immune to this irony, absorbed in the investigative databases on display or in swapping war stories (“I got a reversal in my drug case—that means my client will only have to serve ten years back to back,” says one. Says another: “I just won a two-billion-dollar forfeiture!”) They gossip—“I hear Abrego’s cooperating, so it’ll be an easy case for y’all,” one lawyer says, baiting Goldstein—or they make plans for drinks at the Delano, the hot new hotel owned by Ian Schrager, the man who helped make cocaine a glamour drug in the eighties with his club in Manhattan, Studio 54. The drug culture isn’t just a culture nowadays but an economy, one that is so pervasive that many Americans regard it as unavoidable.