F. Lee Bailey

Francis Lee Bailey (born 1933) is a high-profile superstar attorney and best-selling author.

"The legal profession is a business with a tremendous collection of egos," proclaimed F. Lee Bailey to U.S. News & World Report. "Few people who are not strong egotistically gravitate to it." Not many would deny that Bailey is well-suited to his vocation; he has generated significant controversy throughout his career, often due to his capacity for self-promotion. He became the preeminent superstar lawyer, appearing on television and publishing books at a time when such activities were often criticized as grandstanding. Furthermore, noted Edward Felsenthal of the Wall Street Journal, the often flamboyant attorney "didn't get to be rich and famous by being cautious or carefully following rules. His career is pockmarked with run-ins with judicial authorities and others." Bailey has been involved in a number of high-profile cases, notably the trials of Patty Hearst, the Boston Strangler, and O.J. Simpson.

Bailey was born June 10, 1933, in Waltham, Massachusetts; his mother was a teacher and nursery school director. An outstanding student, he nonetheless dropped out of Harvard to serve as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps; flying would become one of his few passions rivaling litigation. Bailey then moved on to law school at Boston University - achieving the highest grade point average in the school's history - and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar shortly after graduating in 1960. He married Florence Gott the same year; the two divorced in 1961.

Bailey attended Keeler Polygraph Institute in Chicago, where he became an expert in lie detector tests. It was in this capacity that he was enlisted by the defense in the case of George Elderly, a physician charged with murdering his wife. When Elderly's attorney was incapacitated by a heart attack, Bailey took over the defense. The doctor - whose story served as the basis for the television series and film The Fugitive - was acquitted. Soon thereafter, Bailey won a reversal of the conviction of another doctor, Samuel H. Sheppard, who was also accused of murdering his wife. Felsenthal cited a New York Times article from the period that labeled the dynamic young lawyer "the shiniest new star in the criminal law field."

This new standout did not shy away from the spotlight. Indeed, Bailey drew criticism for appearing on television talk shows and discussing various cases and was censured by the Massachusetts bar in 1970. While the idea of the "celebrity lawyer" sounding off to the press about the cases he pursues may sound ordinary, it was highly unconventional at the time. Bailey's contemptuous words regarding a New Jersey ruling so outraged the Supreme Court of that state that he was forbidden to practice there for a year. Meanwhile, he was profiled in magazines much the way a film star might be, with his second wife, Froma - formerly his secretary - standing by. He divorced her in 1972, marrying Lynda Hart that same year.

Around the same time, Bailey defended Ernest L. Medina in a court-martial over the Vietnam War's notorious My Lai massacre, an incident of extreme violence against Vietnamese civilians that gave impetus to the anti-war movement in the United States. Bailey won Medina's acquittal after calling a vast number of witnesses - including Medina himself. This victory was one of his greatest courtroom triumphs. As Felsenthal observed, Bailey "already was gaining renown for his eloquent oratory, his nearly photographic memory and his mastery at cross-examining witnesses."

Again, Bailey used this renown to further his career, writing The Defense Never Rests and For the Defense, books on the lawyer's craft for a popular audience, in addition to writing legal textbooks. He also became publisher of Gallery magazine in 1972. Though Bailey lost his defense of Albert DeSalvo, a mental patient who admitted to being the Boston Strangler - a serial killer who had murdered 13 women - the case did not damage his reputation. The same could not be said, however, for his defense of Patty Hearst. The daughter of a publishing tycoon, Hearst was allegedly kidnapped by a terrorist organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and forced to participate in a series of bank robberies. Despite her claim that she was coerced, the heiress was tried for the holdups.

Defends Hearst

Bailey conducted a spirited defense, placing Hearst on the stand along with 71 witnesses. It was his intention to show that his client went along with the SLA to save her life. The jury felt otherwise, apparently, and convicted her; she served 22 months in prison and eventually hired another attorney, hoping to overturn her conviction on the grounds that Bailey had not represented her adequately. His insufficient attention to her legal needs, she asserted, was due in part to his focus on the book he planned to write about the case. President Jimmy Carter eventually commuted her sentence, and she abandoned her claim against the attorney. Even so, a San Francisco appeals court suggested that Hearst's argument had some merit. Bailey's loss marked a turning point in the public's perception of his courtroom prowess.

Bailey divorced Hart in 1980, waiting a full five years before getting married again, this time to flight attendant Patricia Shiers. He continued to publish books, including a book about flying and a novel, Secrets; he also lent his name to ads for a variety of office machinery, collected $10,000 per speaking engagement, and stumped regularly for one of his pet causes, the necessity of reducing lawsuits. "Americans are the most litigious people in the world," he remarked in an interview with U.S. News & World Report, asserting that a variety of reforms - fewer jury trials, restructuring of legal fees to discourage the padding of hours, laws forbidding the possession of large sums of cash, and other changes - would help accomplish this goal. In USA Today magazine, Bailey claimed that he had "never seen a major trial which lacked significant perjury, and I have yet to see that perjury punished." The government, he insisted, often overlooked such mendacity when it came from its own witnesses.

In 1982 Bailey was arrested for drunk driving in California; he was acquitted, thanks in large part to the defense conducted by Robert Shapiro, who would summon Bailey to the O.J. Simpson defense team some 12 years later. The drunk driving trial so enraged Bailey that he wrote a book, How to Protect Yourself against Cops in California and Other Strange Places, which alleged serious abuses by police and argued that driving under the influence of alcohol had become "a number, not a condition." He furthermore asserted that political pressure had motivated police to go after celebrities in particular. While Los Angeles magazine called it "a small (96 pages) gem of a book," Newsweek writer Mark Starr found Bailey's mini-opus less than compelling, calling much of its advice "impractical," "sophomoric," or "just plain obvious."

Another strike to Bailey's credibility came when he took on the case of aggrieved families of passengers on Korean Airlines flight 007, which was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1983. Though he made several public statements attesting to his commitment to the case, his firm put in a much smaller number of hours on the case than did the two other law firms working on it. Bailey aggravated other clients by traveling to Libya to discuss defending two men who were charged with blowing up Pan American flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, even after undertaking the cause of relatives of that bombing's victims. To the latter, the expedition to Tripoli was a clear conflict of interest; Bailey denied that he intended to defend the Libyans, though a letter he had written to the U.S. government suggested otherwise.

Joins O.J. Defense Team

When Robert Shapiro enlisted Bailey to join the defense team of O.J. Simpson, opinion among the throngs of professional observers was divided. The football star turned actor was accused (and later acquitted) of murdering his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. In the words of Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Boyarsky, "a lot of lawyers and reporters wondered why the 'dream team' had hired a has-been." Although Boyarsky found these commentators "off the mark," he found that at times during his early Simpson trial appearances Bailey didn't follow the advice of his own books. After a grueling nine-month trial the jury on October 3, 1995, announced the verdict of "not guilty" on two counts of homicide, making it seem clear that Bailey and the rest of the team knew their jobs well.

Bailey's questioning of Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman - alleged by the defense team to be a racist who hoped to frame Simpson, who is black - was one of the most anticipated moments of the exhaustively chronicled trial. The attorney, perhaps not surprisingly, gave himself high marks. "I'm not [stalwart television lawyer] Perry Mason," he stated in Time, adding, "nobody is. Other lawyers whom I respect told me that given what I had to work with, it was good. [Celebrated author] Norman Mailer called me and said it was flawless. So I feel good." Whether it was, in Los Angeles Times commentator Boyarsky's phrase, "Bailey's test, his chance to exhibit the skills he showed when he freed Sam Sheppard, to reclaim the reputation that was diminished after Patty Hearst, to prove that this is one lawyer who's not ready for retirement," remained to be seen.

Bailey and the rest of the Simpson team insisted that they had a witness who could attest to Fuhrman's racism, and Bailey himself claimed to have spoken "marine to marine" with the witness in question, Maximo Cordoba. Yet Cordoba's testimony was so inconsistent that in the minds of many observers it compromised the defense's Fuhrman strategy. Elizabeth Gleick of Time quoted prosecutor Marcia Clark's exclamation: "This is the kind of nonsense that gives lawyers a bad name."

Gleick felt that "the defining face-off of the trial was not exactly what most observers expected," adding that Bailey, "once America's most famous trial lawyer, was, by turns, sputtering, enraged and embarrassed. Instead of regaining his former glory after nearly two decades out of the limelight, he may in the end have scarred his reputation." Felsenthal of the Wall Street Journal similarly asserted that "Americans who recently named F. Lee Bailey the most admired lawyer in the country might feel differently now that they have actually watched him in action in the O.J. Simpson case."

Perhaps most off-putting to many observers was an apparent spat between Bailey and Shapiro. Though the two lawyers had been so close that Bailey had served as the godfather for Shapiro's child, reported Felsenthal, "Bailey was accused of getting involved in a whispering campaign to the media" against his colleague. Central to this controversy was an article in the New York Daily News that was strongly critical of Shapiro while reporting his demotion from the position of lead counsel in the Simpson case; Bailey was alleged by some to have been the article's primary source.

If the celebrated attorney had indeed leaked damaging information about Shapiro to the media, said a legal-ethics expert quoted in the Wall Street Journal piece, he "was putting his own interest ahead of those of his client." Bailey himself denied having said anything negative about Shapiro. In an analysis of the defense team - which also included Alan Dershowitz, a celebrity lawyer of a different sort - Newsweek's David Kaplan wondered how Shapiro and Bailey might "share courtroom time" and concluded that "there's no way both of them can play center stage." After the trial was over, Shapiro stated he would never talk to Bailey again, and People quoted Bailey openly assaulting Shapiro's courtroom skills. "All Shapiro knew how to do was plead [guilty]," stated Bailey. "He was not a trial lawyer." Shapiro denied considering a plea bargain for Simpson.

In a television appearance, Bailey argued - as he long had - that a person "in the business of defending criminal cases is going to live in controversy all of his or her life." Whether or not this is universally true, he has certainly been exemplary in this respect. At the same time, he has demonstrated unquestionable skills as a "trial maven," as News-week's Kaplan called him, and has been a trailblazer for the superstar attorneys that have followed in his wake. And after all, as Bailey noted to U.S. News, "each lawyer makes somebody unhappy either by beating him, embarrassing him or tying him in knots."

In 1996 Bailey's reputation again came under questioning. He was jailed after being slapped with contempt of court for failing to hand over illegally obtained shares of stock and money from a former drug-dealer client. The legendary defense lawyer was released from federal prison on his 44th day behind bars on April 16, 1996 after surrendering $16 million in disputed stock and his yacht.

Further Reading

Los Angeles, November 1982, p. 325.

Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1995, p. A14; April 20, 1996, p.A4.

Newsweek, November 22, 1982, p. 91; July 11, 1994, pp. 26-27.

New York Times, October 4, 1995, p. A18.

People, November 16, 1995, pp. 55-58.

Time, March 27, 1995, pp. 65-66.

USA Today, July 1988, Magazine, pp. 30-32.

U.S. News & World Report, September 14, 1981, pp. 72-73.

Wall Street Journal, March 20, 1995, pp. A1, A8.

The career of attorney F. Lee Bailey is a celebrated one. Few criminal defense lawyers have earned as much success or notoriety as the tough-talking former Marine lieutenant, known for winning what have often been considered hopeless cases. Early in his career, Bailey built a reputation for fastidious attention to detail as an investigator who could ferret out the minutiae needed to acquit his clients. His cross-examination style— long on hard-hitting machismo—earned him comparisons to some of the twentieth century's most noted lawyers. By his midthirties, he had won a string of victories in shocking, nationally publicized cases, including an important U.S. Supreme Court ruling on pretrial publicity. His books on law became best-sellers, but controversy followed his criticisms of the legal system and his sometimes risky defense strategies. In 1994, he joined the defense team in Orenthal James ("O.J.") Simpson's trial for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Bailey might never have become a lawyer if he had not dropped out of college. Born in the Boston suburb of Waltham, Massachusetts, on June 10, 1933, he was the son of an advertising man and a schoolteacher who founded a large nursery school. In his teens, Bailey excelled at Kimball Union Academy, a prep school, and won a scholarship to attend Harvard in 1950. His goal was to study English. Yet academia could not hold him for long; he wanted adventure. Dropping out of Harvard at the end of his sophomore year, he enrolled in the Navy flight training program and eventually joined the Marines, where he at first flew jet fighters. Soon Bailey had switched gears and was defending accused service members as part of the legal staff at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina. Military life would leave its mark on him. More than forty years later, he would write articles about jets for Flying magazine and, while defending Simpson, would say that he had spoken with a witness who was a veteran, as one Marine to another.

The experience of fighting courts-martial convinced Bailey to become a lawyer in civilian life. Leaving the service with the rank of second lieutenant, he entered Boston University Law School, which admitted him on the strength of his considerable military law practice. Once again, his ambition could scarcely be satisfied in books, and the precocious student founded a private detective agency. The firm did fieldwork to help attorneys prepare their cases, and Bailey claimed to devote sixty hours a week to this endeavor alone. It paid off: he handled some two thousand cases, honed his skills as an investigator, and later sold the agency. The long extracurricular hours did not stop him from finishing, in 1960, at the top of his class with the highest grade point average in the school's history.

Bailey next studied the lie detector at the Keeler Polygraph Institute in Chicago, a tool much used in the courtrooms of the era. The skill he acquired there led to his first job, at age twenty-seven, as a polygraph expert hired by the defense in a highly publicized Boston trial, the Torso Murder case—so named because prosecutors charged the defendant, George Edgerly, with dismembering his wife and dumping the pieces of her body in the Merrimack River. Edgerly had failed a lie detector test, making the case difficult for the defense. Bailey was hired to help turn the case around. When the lead attorney suffered a heart attack, Bailey took over the case and won an acquittal for the defendant. Hisvictory in the Edgerly case was the first of several in high profile cases over the next decade. Most notable was Bailey's role in the murder appeal of Dr. Samuel H. Sheppard, who had been convicted of second-degree murder in the bludgeoning death of his wife, Marilyn Sheppard. In 1966, Bailey helped convince the U.S. Supreme Court that the trial judge had erred in not shielding Sheppard from pretrial publicity, thus denying him a fair trial—establishing an important new standard for defendants' rights (Sheppard v. Maxwell, 384 U.S. 333, 86 S. Ct. 1507, 16 L. Ed. 2d 600). He subsequently cleared Sheppard. See also trial.

The Sheppard case launched Bailey's career. Not only was he now proven in court, he was also doing well in celebrity. News magazines extolled his skills at cross-examination, with Life Magazine saying in 1967 that he was "methodical and relentless, boring in and tunneling under his prey like a determined badger" (Life 1967). Frequently, comparisons to the fictional television character Perry Mason cropped up, which Bailey resented; just as often came comparisons to the great criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, which he did nothing to discourage. Preparation and analysis were Bailey's most renowned legal skills, yet what brought him public attention was his talent for theatrics. His style was swaggering: he could thunderously tell a courtroom that the charges against his client were "10 pounds of hogwash in a five-pound bag" or declare that he had just won a "thumping acquittal." He viewed litigation as "the true substitute for gladiatorial combat." By the time the ABC television network gave him a slot in 1967 on the program Good Company, where he chatted up celebrities, he was himself a household name. His 1971 book, The Defense Never Rests: The Art of Cross-Examination, became a best-seller. Several legal, nonfiction, and fiction books followed.

Fame for Bailey was a double-edged sword, bringing both attention and criticism. Often sought out by the news media for his opinions, he used their interviews as soapboxes from which to call for legal reforms. He argued that criminal defense attorneys needed several additional years of training; held that fewer frivolous lawsuits would tie up the courts if the U.S. legal system were to imitate the more rigorous British one; and, on the lecture circuit, even suggested that crime could be prevented by making it illegal for people to carry more than $500 at a time. He also simply liked the limelight: as the equally famous attorney Melvin M. Belli recalled, he and Bailey once stood at a bar betting each other $5 over who would be recognized first. Not all of Bailey's pronouncements met with praise; his outspokenness was sometimes seen as grandstanding. Ironically, for the attorney who had won Sheppard, he was criticized by the Massachusetts Bar Association for saying too much outside of court, and in 1971, the Supreme Court of New Jersey barred him from practicing law there for a year for similar reasons.

In 1974, Bailey faced his Waterloo when he unsuccessfully defended the publishing heiress Patricia Hearst. Hearst had stunned U.S. citizens when, after being kidnapped, she was photographed carrying an automatic weapon in a San Francisco bank heist. On trial for robbery, she claimed to have been brainwashed by her abductors, a terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). In orchestrating her defense, Bailey was widely criticized for the risky strategy of putting her on the witness stand, where she took the Fifth Amendment forty-two times to avoid answering questions. Years after her conviction, Hearst herself blamed Bailey, arguing in a 1980 appeal that the attorney had been less interested in her defense than in writing a book about the case. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "Bailey's potential conflict of interest is virtually admitted," and granted Hearst a new hearing (U.S. v. Hearst, 638 F. 2d 1190 [9th Cir. 1980]). See also Hearst, Patty.

After the Hearst trial, Bailey disappeared from public view for a time. Nevertheless, his reputation as "flamboyant" and a "legend" persisted and he continued to win cases. In 1982, he attracted national attention again when he beat a drunk driving charge with legal representation from his friend, Robert L. Shapiro. Bailey complained that the police had picked on him because he was famous. Soon he was campaigning publicly against what he saw as police harassment, warning, "The cops have decided to set some fierce public examples of their new hard line, probably to scare drivers into going easy on the booze." He promptly wrote a legal self-help book titled How to Protect Yourself against Cops in California and Other Strange Places, purporting to be a guide to avoiding unfair drunk driving convictions.

In 1994, the trial of Simpson returned Bailey to the spotlight when he and Shapiro were hired for the defense team. However, before the trial even began, the old friends engaged in a public feud. Shapiro accused Bailey of trying to destroy his credibility by leaking information to the press, comparing Bailey to a snake and demanding his removal from the case. In reply, Bailey criticized his colleague's "public outburst." According to Newsweek, Simpson admonished the two bickering attorneys, reminding them that his life was at stake. The spat died down, and, in March 1995, Bailey cross-examined a key prosecution witness, police detective Mark Fuhrman.

Surrounded by high expectations, the cross-examination was widely portrayed as a comeback attempt for the sixty-two-year-old Bailey. He rose to the occasion with high expectations of his own, promising to "dismantle" Fuhrman. The defense had branded the detective a racist and alleged that he had planted a key piece of evidence at Simpson's estate: a bloody glove. Bailey's difficult job was to prove that Fuhrman had planted evidence and had once used the pejorative nigger; Fuhrman never conceded either point, despite several days of grilling on the stand. Prosecutor Marcia Clark attacked Bailey on several points, arguing that he had misrepresented what a Marine sergeant would testify to as to Fuhrman's language in the Marines, and that he was manufacturing evidence with his conjecture that Fuhrman had sneaked the bloody glove to the crime scene in a plastic bag in his sock.

After Bailey's questioning of Fuhrman, several prominent legal analysts argued that he had flopped. He defended his performance, in Time Magazine, using a comparison that recalled the earliest praises of his career: "I'm not Perry Mason; nobody is. Other lawyers whom I respect told me that given what I had to work with, it was good. Norman Mailer called me and said it was flawless. So I feel good."

In March 1996 Bailey himself became the subject of criminal prosecution after he and the United States government had a disagreement over who was entitled to millions of dollars of stock formerly held by Claude Duboc, a drug dealer and client of Bailey. The government demanded forfeiture of the stock, but Bailey said a plea bargain he had negotiated with the government on behalf of Duboc allowed Bailey to keep it. When Bailey refused to surrender 2.3 million dollars to the federal district court in Tallahassee, Florida, he was sentenced to six months in jail for contempt.

For the English astronomer, see Francis Baily.

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Francis Lee Bailey Jr., commonly referred to as F. Lee Bailey, (born June 10, 1933) is an American criminal defense lawyer who served as the lawyer in the Sam Sheppard re-trial. He was also the supervisory attorney over attorney Mark J. Kadish in the court martial of Captain Ernest Medina for the My Lai Massacre, among other high profile trials, and was one of the lawyers for the defense in the O. J. Simpson trial. He has also had a number of visible defeats, legal controversies, and personal trouble with the law, and was disbarred for misconduct while defending his client Claude DuBoc.^[1] In spite of his difficulties, he still has a reputation for being a highly successful defense attorney, and is the Chairman and CEO of IMPAC, Integrated Control Systems, Inc., a Florida corporation.^[2]

Contents 1 Education and military service 2 Notable cases 2.1 Sam Sheppard 2.2 "Boston Strangler" 2.3 Dr. Carl A. Coppolino 2.4 Ernest Medina 2.5 Patty Hearst 2.6 O.J. Simpson 2.7 William & Chantal McCorkle 3 "Paul is Dead" 4 Controversies 4.1 1994 DuBoc case 5 Publications 6 Notes 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Education and military service

Bailey was born in Waltham, Massachusetts. He went to Cardigan Mountain School and then Kimball Union Academy, graduating in the class of 1950. Bailey studied at Harvard College, but dropped out of Harvard[1] to join the United States Marine Corps in 1952, and received his aviator wings in 1954. He served as a jet fighter pilot and a legal officer. He was discharged in 1956. Bailey received his LL.B. from Boston University, where he was first in the graduating class of 1960.^{[citation needed]}

Notable cases

Sam Sheppard

In 1954, Dr. Sam Sheppard was found guilty in the murder of his wife Marilyn. The case was believed to be the inspiration for the Fugitive television series (1963–1967) and the 1993 movie. Bailey, at the time a resident of Rocky River, Ohio, was hired by Sheppard's brother Stephen to help in his brother's appeal. In 1966, Bailey successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Sheppard had been denied due process, winning a re-trial. A not-guilty verdict followed. This case established Bailey's reputation as a skilled defense attorney and was the first of many high-profile cases.^{[citation needed]}

"Boston Strangler"

While defendant Albert DeSalvo was in jail for the "Green Man" sexual assaults, he confessed his guilt in the "Boston Strangler" murders to Bailey. DeSalvo was found guilty of the assaults but was never tried for the stranglings.^[3]

Dr. Carl A. Coppolino

Dr. Coppolino was accused of murdering his wife, Dr. Carmela Coppolino (August 28, 1965), and Lt. Col. William Farber (July 30, 1963). The prosecution claimed that Coppolino injected his victims with a curare-like substance called succinylcholine chloride, which at the time was undetectable due to limited forensic technology. Bailey, who had just won Sam Sheppard an acquittal in November 1966, successfully defended Coppolino in the New Jersey case over the death of Lt. Col. William Farber in December 1966. However, Coppolino was convicted of murdering his wife in Florida. He was paroled after serving 12 years of his sentence.^{[citation needed]}

Ernest Medina

Bailey successfully defended U.S. Army Captain Ernest Medina in his 1971 court-martial for responsibility in the My Lai incident during the Vietnam War.

Patty Hearst

The case of Patty Hearst, a newspaper heiress who had been involved in bank robberies after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), was one of Bailey's defeats. Patty Hearst describes his closing argument in her autobiography as "disjointed" and that she suspected he had been drinking. During his closing argument, Bailey spilled a glass of water on his pants.^[4]

O.J. Simpson

Bailey joined the O. J. Simpson defense team just before the preliminary hearing. Bailey held numerous press conferences to discuss the progress of the case. In a press conference prior to his cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman, Bailey said, "any lawyer in his right mind who would not be looking forward to cross-examining Mark Fuhrman is an idiot." His famous cross-examination of Fuhrman is considered by many to be the key to Simpson's acquittal. In front of a jury composed predominantly of people of color, Bailey got the detective to claim he never used the word "nigger" to describe blacks at any time during the previous 10 years, a claim the defense team easily found evidence to refute. Ultimately, the statement that Bailey drew from the detective forced Fuhrman to plead the fifth in his next courtroom appearance, thereby undermining his credibility with the jury and the otherwise devastating evidence he allegedly found. Bailey also attracted minor attention for keeping a silver flask on the defense table, which fellow defense attorney Robert Kardashian claimed contained only coffee.^[5]

William & Chantal McCorkle

Chantal McCorkle (born 1968, Slough, England) is a British citizen. Along with William, her American husband, she was tried and convicted in 1998 in Florida for her part in a financial fraud. The McCorkles sold kits purporting to show buyers how to get rich by buying property in foreclosures and government auctions. They advertised on infomercials; among the grounds for their conviction was their representation in the infomercials that they owned luxury automobiles and airplanes (actually rented for the commercials), and their use of purported testimonials from satisfied customers, who were actually paid actors.^[6]

She, represented by Mark Horwitz, and her husband, represented by Bailey, were each originally sentenced to over 24 years in federal prison under mandatory sentencing laws. After two appeals, the McCorkles' sentences were reduced in 2006 to 18 years.^[7]

"Paul is Dead"

In 1969, during the "Paul is Dead" urban legend's popularity, Bailey participated in a television show where he received "testimony" from believers in the myth.^[8]

Controversies

Bailey's visible public profile has come both as a result of the cases he has taken and for his own personal actions. In 2001 he was disbarred in the state of Florida, with reciprocal disbarment in Massachusetts in 2002. The Florida disbarment was the result of his handling of stock in the DuBoc marijuana case. Bailey was found guilty of 7 counts of attorney misconduct by the Florida Supreme Court. Bailey had transferred a large portion of DuBoc's assets into his own accounts, using the interest gained on those assets to pay for personal expenses. In March 2005, Bailey filed to regain his law license in Massachusetts. The book Florida Pulp Nonfiction details the peculiar facts of the DuBoc case along with extended interviews with Bailey that include his own defense.

1994 DuBoc case

In 1994, while the O.J. Simpson case was being tried, Bailey and Robert Shapiro represented Claude DuBoc, an accused marijuana dealer. In a plea bargain agreement with the U.S. Attorney, DuBoc agreed to turn over his assets to the U.S. government. His assets included a large block of stock in BioChem, worth approximately $6 million at the time of the plea deal. When the government sought to collect the stock, it had increased in value to $20 million. Bailey claimed he was entitled to the appreciation in payment of his legal fees and refused to turn over the stock to the government. In 2000, he was sent to prison for contempt. After 44 days at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee, Bailey agreed to relinquish his claim to the stock and was freed.^[2][3]

Publications

Non-fiction

• The Defense Never Rests, co-author with Harvey Aronson. Stein & Day, 1971. ISBN 0-8128-1441-X.
• For the Defense. Atheneum, 1975. ISBN 0-689-10667-X.
• Cleared for the Approach: In Defense of Flying, co-author with John Greenya. Prentice Hall, 1977. ISBN 0-13-136663-7.
• How to Protect Yourself Against Cops in California and Other Strange Places. Stein & Day, 1982. ISBN 0-8128-2891-7.

Fiction

• Secrets (1977).

Magazine

• Gallery, publisher (1972).^[9]

Notes

1. ^ "SJC-08764: In the matter of F. Lee Bailey", "Suffolk, December 2, 2002 - April 11, 2003," mass.gov, accessed October 7, 2007.
2. ^ "F. Lee Bailey, Chairman and CEO IMPAC Control Systems, Inc."
3. ^ Junger, Sebastian; "A Death In Belmont"; W.W. Norton & Co. Inc, 2006.
4. ^ Hearst, Patricia Campbell & Moscow, Alvin, Patty Hearst: Her Own Story, Corgi/Avon, 1988 (p. 442-443) ISBN 0552134902, previously published as Every Secret Thing (1982)
5. ^ Donna Foote, "Here Comes the Jury", Newsweek, October 21, 1996.
6. ^ Allie Johnson, "Chantal's Angels", The Pitch, November 9, 2000.
7. ^ "Judge cuts couple's jail term", The Orlando Sentinel, March 25, 2006.
8. ^ R. Gary Patterson, The Walrus Was Paul: The Great Beatle Death Clues (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998) 16-17. ISBN 978-0684850627 (13).
9. ^ "Playboy and Plagiarism", Time October 16, 1972, accessed October 7, 2007: In October 1972, Bailey became "the showcase publisher of Gallery", a new magazine, based on Playboy and Penthouse magazines, but later dropped out as publisher.

See also

United States Marine Corps portal

References

• Bardsley, Marilyn. "The Boston Strangler - Albert DeSalvo or not?", Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods, Court TV. Accessed December 28, 2005.
• "Biography for F. Lee Bailey, defense attorney for Ernest Medina", University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. accessed December 28, 2005.
• "F. Lee Bailey, Chairman and CEO of IMPAC Control Systems, Inc.", Law Stars Hall of Fame. Accessed December 28, 2005.
• McGunagle, Fred. "The Murder of Marilyn Sheppard", Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods, Court TV. Accessed December 28, 2005.
• Ramsland, Katherine. Chapter 4: The Controversial Trial, in "Hearst, Soliah and the S.L.A.", Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods, Court TV. Accessed December 28, 2005
• "Once-stellar F. Lee Bailey now broke, beleaguered", July 30, 2000.
• ^ Florida disbarment ruling appeal, April 6, 2002.
• ^ Massachusetts reciprocal disbarment, 2002. Accessed December 28, 2005.
• ^ "O.J. Simpson Trial: F. Lee Bailey", University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Accessed December 28, 2005.
• "F. Lee Bailey mounts a comeback: Celebrated trial attorney bids to regain law license", Associated Press, March 10, 2005.
• ^ Respondent's Brief, Case No. SC96767, The Florida Bar v. F. Lee Bailey. Accessed December 28, 2005.
• F. Lee Bailey profile. Accessed December 28, 2005.
• Appellate opinion affirming disbarment, June 9, 2006.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: F. Lee Bailey

• "F. Lee Bailey, Chairman and CEO IMPAC Control Systems, Inc." – Corporate biography hosted by IMPAC, Integrated Control Systems, Inc., Florida; "Copyright 2002, Integrated Control Systems, Inc., A Florida Corporation." Accessed October 7, 2007.

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