Mouthpiece A Life in -- and Sometimes Just Outside -- the Law

by Hayes, Edward; Lehman, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780767916547
• ISBN10: 0767916549
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-05
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

From prosecuting (and defending) murderers in the Bronx to handling the public and private problems of Manhattan's elite, Mouthpiece recounts the colorful adventures of New York City's ultimate legal operator. "In the pages before us, the Counselor tells a saga's worth of tales of the city. As the saying goes, he's got a million of them." Tom Wolfe, from his Introduction Edward Hayes is that unusual combination: the likable lawyer, one who could have stepped off the stages of Guys and Dolls or Chicago. Mouthpiece is his storyan irreverent, entertaining, and revealing look at the practice of law in modern times and a social and political anatomy of New York City. It recounts Hayes's childhood in the tough Irish sections of Queens and his eventual escape to the University of Virginia and then to Columbia Law School. Not at all white-shoe-firm material, Hayes headed to the hair-raising, crime-ridden South Bronx of the midseventiesfirst as a homicide prosecutor and then as a defense attorney seeking to free the same sort of people he formerly had put in jail. Tom Wolfe immortalized this setting in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Ed Hayes was his guide, and he served as the model for the scrappy defense lawyer Tommy Killian. Eventually, Hayes moved his practice to Manhattan, using his neighborhood white boy instincts and connections and the rough-and-tumble techniques learned in the Bronx on behalf of the rich and powerful and famous. From a high-stakes legal shootout over the Andy Warhol estate to working to secure financial justice for the families of the World Trade Center victims, Hayes has been behind the scenes of how New York City really operates. For the tens of millions fascinated by New York's unique blend of glitter and grime, of idealism and corruption, of avarice and ambition, Mouthpiece provides the ultimate close-up of high-stakes Gotham gamesmanship.

Author Biography

Edward Hayes now practices law in Manhattan for a wide variety of influential and/or notorious clients. He co-anchors Both Sides for Court TV and broadcasts once a week on WABC Talk Radio. He is an inductee into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame.
Susan Lehman, a former criminal defense lawyer, was senior editor at Riverhead Books, Talk magazine, and Salon.com. She has written about the law, crime and other topics for the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and other publications.
Tom Wolfe is the famed author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff, and, most recently, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Excerpts

CHAPTER 1


I learned as a child not to expect to be loved for myself.

My father was a very good teacher.

I don't have a single good memory of him, not one, but he taught me a lot of useful lessons. A merchant marine during World War II, my father had gone on missions to Murmansk and Malta on a tanker and he told me how, during those voyages, American destroyers rammed German subs and the subs torpedoed the tankers and, in the end, the water was full of sailors who had been blown to bits or were on fire. They fought to the death. I remember thinking,That's the way life is: somebody goes home and somebody does not, you try to avoid the latter, but that's how life is.

I learned this early on, and also that people are weak and can't control themselves and you have to protect yourself from that.

All in all, pretty useful things to learn, especially if you live in New York. New York, this City of Ambition is brutal, unrelenting, dense, neurotic, always alive, and, if you're willing to take a chance and pay the price, you can get what you want here, or at least close enough. The whole city is full of guys who can take beatings, guys who got beaten somewhere else but crossed the ocean to get here and take another one and who will get up tomorrow to do the same thing.


I was born Edward Walter Hayes on November 3, 1947, at Physicians Hospital in Jackson Heights, Queens. It was a difficult breech birth and the doctor, who was Jewish, had to reach in and ease me out, which saved my life and was my first good experience with Jews. But my breathing was strange and Dr. Goldberg didn't think I would live long. So Father Cunningham, the priest who had married my parents a year before, was dispatched to baptize me right away.

My mother does not know where my father was at the time, but he wasn't there, for either the birth or the baptism. My mom says he was probably out in the waiting room, fainting or drinking.

I made little squeaking sounds,--"Ehhhh"--and couldn't cry for four months after they got me home from the hospital. My mom worried about this and about some trouble she thought I seemed to have eating, but she says my father was not too concerned. About this, my father's response seems to have been just right: after a while the squeaking stopped; I have never had trouble eatingorcrying since; and the years we lived in the four-story red brick house on Eighty-sixth Street were the best of my childhood.

The house cost four thousand dollars. My aunt Nonie bought it courtesy of Bill Fitzgibbon, who worked at Grant's department store and had nice cufflinks and silk shirts and may have been the first Irish affirmative action hire in the history of New York and who for years courted Aunt Nonie until finally she agreed to marry him. Fitzgibbon promptly became a hopeless drunk and died an awful death a year later, but he left Aunt Nonie with the four thousand dollars she needed to buy the brick town house on Eighty-sixth Street.

In Jackson Heights, there are tales (true, partly true, or not at all true) that are told and retold so many times they eventually take shape as actual, incontrovertible fact. They're calledIrish facts. Aunt Nonie was orphaned ten years earlier when her father, Francis McCade, a tombstone cutter, died of consumption; Nonie was dispatched to a wealthy family, the head of which was a fashionable dressmaker who taught Aunt Nonie her craft. Is it an Irish fact that Nonie first caught Bill Fitzgibbon's eye as she bent her pretty head over a sewing machine? No idea, but I know that Fitzgibbon supplied Aunt Nonie with her one chance at love and that she took it; it didn't turn out well, but the story introduced an idea central to the rest of my life: everyone, even an orphaned seamstress, gets at least one shot at something and you're a fool not to take your chance when you get it; it might not work out, but there could

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Excerpted from Mouthpiece: A Life in -- and Sometimes Just Outside -- the Law by Edward Hayes, Susan Lehman
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