Beacon Hill Bigwigs call on Thomas Dwyer    
The Boston Globe - February 15, 1996

WHEN THE LAW COMES CALLING, BEACON HILL BIGWIGS CALL ON THOMAS DWYER - THE ATTORNEY WHO WINS HIS CASES BY NOT GOING TO COURT: THE MASTER FIXER

By Sally Jacobs, Globe Staff

Edition: THIRD
Section: LIVING
Page: 73

It was the ultimate test of spin. Charles Stuart had just leapt to his death after becoming the chief suspect in his wife's murder when, in the bitter winter of 1990, a possible motive abruptly materialized. She was a 23-year-old blonde with a cheerleader's smile and the sculpted calves of a figure skater. The TV crews aimed their klieg lights at her door and settled in to wait

And as they did so, her lawyer, Thomas E. Dwyer Jr., went to work. He issued press releases claiming the woman had no romantic involvement with Stuart, despite her frequent phone calls to him and his apparent purchase of a $250 gold brooch for her. He distributed affidavits from her boyfriend. He sidled up to reporters and took them out for drinks. And by the end of the week the lights had gone out.

"I view that as one of my proudest pieces of work," declares Dwyer, striking his desk in satisfaction. "On Sunday the woman was vilified, being murdered by the press, absolutely murdered. By the end of that week she was out of the paper.

"That," he adds with a thin smile, "is why the case was sent to me."

Thomas Dwyer is not a proper Boston lawyer. Instead of schooner prints, his office features purple carpets and rippling orange walls. He uses PR firms. When the talk grows hot, his deliberate pronunciation lapses into side-of-the-mouth directives laced with "Okaaaaaaaay????" And when it gets really hot, the veil of humility slips a bit and he refers to himself in the third person.

At 50, Dwyer ranks among a tiny cadre of the city's super criminal defense lawyers, and represents some of the state's most powerful political personalities, including House Speaker Charles Flaherty, former public financier Mark Ferber and Essex Sheriff Charles Reardon. Dwyer is so well wired in political and media circles that some say he's become as much a "master fixer" as a lawyer.

It is not just his star-studded client list that has earned Dwyer the tag. Unlike many lawyers, Dwyer does not go to court. The last time he tried a criminal case was seven years ago (he lost, but the jury verdict was overturned on appeal). What, one might wonder, does he do for $425 an hour? Dwyer negotiates plea agreements or gets indictments dropped altogether. Or at least he tries to.

"There's an old martial expression, 'The highest master is he who never has to fight,' " says Thomas Hoopes, cofounder of the Massachusetts Criminal Defense Lawyers' Association. "That's exactly what he does. If you unnerve someone about their ability to win the fight, their ability to win the case, you start to break their confidence."

And Dwyer agrees that his job is not so much to win a case but to keep it from ever happening. "My job is to convince the government that they are wrong, that the facts do not warrant an indictment," Dwyer explains solemnly, seated in his 12th-floor office in the Federal Reserve building. "I mean you'd love to try more cases, but it really doesn't tran! slate into great events for your clients."

Tommy Dwyer is no Johnnie Cochran. He is a man whose greatest achievements have been accomplished largely outside the media spotlight rather than in its frontal glare. He is a middle-aged man of minimal humor, a man in a metallic- green Lincoln Continental whose idea of fun is "golf and fund-raising." He is also a man whose focused perseverance and legal savvy have become the stuff of near legend.

But like many legends, Dwyer's is difficult to prove. Dwyer's most sensitive work often unfolds not just behind closed doors, but in the spare confines of a prosecutor's office, where a potential defendant's fate may well come down to one lawyer's ability to convince another. There is no public record. No list of the people who were not indicted, thanks to Dwyer's efforts.

There is, however, a list of clients whom Dwyer has represented publicly, and it reads like a Who's Who of state politics. There's former Mayor Kevi! n White, former Lt. Gov. Thomas P. O'Neill 3d, former state Sen. Willi am Q. (Biff) MacLean Jr., former Plymouth County District Attorney Thomas Finnerty, District Court Judge Paul P. Heffernan and, of course, Deborah Allen, the friend of Chuck Stuart, to name a few. And there are those who argue that it is precisely the high-profile nature of that list from which Dwyer's reputation has sprung.

"The extraordinary thing about criminal law is you get a reputation in part based on the infamousness of the cases you handle rather than your success in handling them," says one former assistant US attorney who asked not to be identified. "I mean, Tom Dwyer is a good lawyer, but one of the best? I don't know."

What he is is a guy who knows how the system works, and he knows how to work it. His is an art largely of persuasion. Sometimes he argues purely on point of law. Sometimes he hints at the personal. Sometimes he uses both. But the one thing he always brings to a case is a visceral understanding of its context, of the politics and cul! ture from which it springs.

"What differentiates him from other lawyers is the packaging thing," explains Bancroft (Nick) Littlefield, one of Dwyer's closest friends, who worked with him on a legislative panel that investigated corruption in public buildings in the 1970s and is now chief counsel for the US Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. "He knows the prosecutors, the court, the forum, what is the best legal argument, how do you frame it, when do you strike, when do you negotiate, what do you say to the press. It's not just the law, but all the surrounding reality in which the case is developing."

Or as one lawyer who knows Dwyer well and declined to be identified puts it: "Tom Dwyer is the guy who can get you the best deal you can get. A guy who understands the process, a guy who can slow it down if you need it slowed down, or speed it up if he wants it sped up. He's for the ones that work the process. It's nothing more than he's a smart guy, he's b! een around for a long time and he knows a lot of people."

Dwyer is, after all, a Boston boy, the son of a Superior Court judge, one who supped at the table of some of the city's greatest power brokers, who earned his stripes chauffeuring former Gov. Endicott Peabody and prosecuting bit cases and then larger ones in the Suffolk County district attorney's office, who has become such a prominent Democratic fund-raiser that he not only landed a seat at President Clinton's table at a Christmas dinner last year but didn't hesitate to turn down an invitatio n from President Clinton to meet with the pope in Baltimore last fall because "I was too busy with the firm."

Politics is his passion. Among his many efforts, he chaired a lawyers' committee for attorney-general candidate James Shannon in 1990. He backed Republican DA Ralph C. Martin 2d. He supported Suffolk Sheriff Robert Rufo's run for mayor in 1993 even though "I got nothing to do with the sheriff's department. My clients are all too rich to ever spend time in the Charles Street Jail." And on the subject of Bill Clinton he waxes positively florid, calling him "an extraordinary politician, one of the best presidents of the century."

That all of that matters, that generations of relationships are sometimes the only thing that matter in a city where connections are common currency, Dwyer dismisses with a short laugh. "I've never gotten a great result in a case by doing nothing, you know," exclaims Dwyer, who actually grew up in Needham and now lives in West Roxbury. "By saying, 'I'm Tom Dwyer,' and smiling and all of a sudden they say, 'Tommy, great job,' and you're out the door. My results are accomplished by hard work.

"We know what the other side is thinking," he adds. "I know what young prosecutors think. I know what is important to them. I know how many risks they are willing to take."

Despite his disavowal, Dwyer is not above a little name-dropping -- at least as one young prosecutor remembers it.

"It was just 'My dad and I know so-and-so, that judge is an old friend of mine,' " recalls the fo rmer prosecutor, who declined to be identified. "It's a sense of 'I'm very connected. You're dealing in the big leagues, so you better be careful.' I just think he uses all the things he's got at hand and one of the things he's got is being well connected. He's willing to at least try that. It's the political side of him. You know, the message is if you want to screw around, you could get hurt."

Another lawyer closely involved in the case of Mark Ferber, once the state's most successful public financier and now indicted on multiple counts of fraud and accepting gratuities, says that Dwyer tried a similar approach in his unsuccessful effort to avoid indictment. "He said the [US attorney's] office would fall on its face publicly if the case was brought, that it would be terribly important in how the office was perceived," says the lawyer, who refused to be identified. "It's a somewhat aggressive tack. But in other cases he can be a puppy dog. If you're not gonna be scared off, he'll try a fairness approach."

Dwyer, however, says that he's never attempted to intimidate a prosecutor and the implication clearly irritates him. "That's ridiculous, OK?" he says. "People have to have a reason to figure out why things happen. People are unwilling to say you have an extraordinary record of success in stopping cases because you work hard. . . . If I could just make a phone call and stop a case my golf game would be a lot better, OK?"

The record is there.

There's Paul Heffernan, the Somerville judge who became a symbol of judicial imperiousness after he repeatedly scolded a woman who was seeking a protective order five months before she was killed by her husband. Although the Judicial Conduct Commission recommended public censure, the Supreme Judicial Court in 1988 called for a private reprimand publicly revealed, one of its mildest sanctions -- just what Dwyer had proposed.

Then there's former Sen. MacLean. Although the Bea! con Hill power broker's business dealings were once the subject of a U S attorney's office probe, no federal charges were ever brought against Dwyer's client. Instead, MacLean wound up pleading guilty in state court to two misdemeanor conflict-of- interest charges -- an outcome regarded as a coup for Dwyer.

"Tommy is a great lawyer and he did a great job on my case, that's why I used him," says MacLean. "We've become great personal friends."

Now, Dwyer is handling one of the most incendiary cases in the federal government's continuing probe of state-government corruption, the investigation of Speaker Flaherty. After nearly three years of investigating the Cambridge Democrat's relationship with lobbyists and bringing a host of his friends before a grand jury, the US attorney's office is apparently on the brink of negotiating a plea bargain with Dwyer that might allow Flaherty to keep his job. Whatever the outcome, more than a few observers believe that Dwyer's legal maneuvering coupled with his artful use of the media has caused US Attorney Don Stern to blink.

One of Dwyer's strategies, for example, has been to direct his comments almost exclusively to State House reporters rather than courthouse reporters, according to sources, in a subtle effort to downplay the federal investigation. And if, in the end, Flaherty does manage to keep his job, it will be perceived as a huge win for Dwyer.

"Whether Flaherty is indicted or not, you have to say Dwyer has done an excellent job of representing him," says Hoopes. "He has really focused on the weaknesses of the case and given the US attorney something to think about. A lot of people wonder what the big deal is all about, you know, what's going on."

A lot of people will never know. For even in as highly publicized a case as the Flaherty investigation it can be hard to get at just how, or why, decisions are made. Few federal prosecutors are going to acknowledge it if they squandered time and money on a bum case, or if Dwyer just talked them out! of it.

"If the speaker doesn't get indicted, is it because Tom Dwyer is a good lawyer or because the US attorney couldn't get enough evidence to indict or both?" asks Dan Small, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the investigation of former Mayor Kevin White and who is now a defense lawyer. "It is a territory which is the hardest to judge."

Despite Dwyer's reputation as the ultimate insider, he has nonetheless swung open the doors of his own law firm to admit an eclectic mix of 17 lawyers. Many were astonished when Nancy Gertner, a tenacious civil rights advocate and feminist, joined the firm in 1990. Although she left to become a US district judge in 1994, the firm has maintained a blend of former federal prosecutors such as Michael Collora and A. John Pappalardo, along with feminists such as former local NOW president Ellen Zucker.

Another name on the letterhead, until recently, was that of Thomas E. Dwyer Sr., who at age 79 recently retired from his son's firm after nine years. Although Dwyer Sr. worked only three days a week toward the end, his departure has left a visible hole. For it was he, in a way, who cut the path to the firm's front door.

Thomas E. Dwyer Sr. grew up in Mission Hill to become one of Boston's first white-collar criminal defense lawyers as well as one of the first public defenders. By the time he was named a Superior Court judge by Gov. Frank Sargent in 1970, Dwyer Sr. had also become a Democratic activist.

Dwyer Jr., the eldest of six, learned fast. At 16, then a sophomore at Catholic Memorial High School in West Roxbury, Dwyer launched his first campaign -- to have the voting age lowered to 18 -- complete with mailings and speeches. The following year he got a job as a book boy at the Social Law Library at the top of the Suffolk Courthouse. Summers he spent working as a probation officer for the Boston Juvenile Court under the tutelage of none other than Paul P. Heffernan, then a probation officer. And by the time he graduated from Boston College ! and entered Suffolk Law School in 1967, Dwyer had sharpened his politi cal teeth as a member of College Young Democrats and the (Gov.) Peabody Youth Movement.

So radicalized, in fact, had Dwyer become by the time he walked away from the Suffolk graduation ceremonies in 1970 with his diploma in hand, he was the only graduate to sport a red armband. Problem is, he can't quite remember what he was protesting.

"What was the big event that happened that May?" says Dwyer, breaking the lawyer's credo and asking a rare question for which he does not have an answer. "It was whatever that big event was." (Dwyer later called to say he was referring to the US incursion into Cambodia.)

Tom Dwyer does not look like a radical. He looks like the kind of guy who wears a blue and white striped shirt that is perfectly echoed in tiny striped cuff links, the kind of guy who keeps a photograph of himself and President Clinton above a very neat desk, the kind of guy whose surprise 50th-birthday party was held at the Union Club and who works out at Boston Harbor Hotel three times a week before putting in at least a 12-hour day. Ask him what he likes to do and he talks about fund-raising. He does not volunteer his love for things French or his South Harwich vacation home. Nor does he say much about his wife, Barbara, and their daughter, Lauren, a student at Georgetown University, although he is said to be extremely close to both.

He looks, in short, like the kind of guy who figured it out early. And some of the other young lawyers who worked in Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne's office -- where Dwyer headed the region's first white-collar corruption unit from 1972 until 1978 -- thought so too.

"Tom was very much on the inside," recalls Tim O'Neill, who worked in the DA's office with Dwyer and is now in private practice. "His dad was a judge, and he really knew how to work the inside of the office because he knew where the power was and he knew how to use it."

Dwyer also learned about the! media in those early years. And by the time he became deputy chief co unsel to the Ward Commission -- a legislative panel assigned to investigate corruption in public construction -- he had learned how to make it work for him.

Morris Goldings, who represented Gov. Peabody in his appearance before the commission in 1980, recalls how he and Dwyer would discuss the next day's hearing in advance. "We tried to be ready to determine what I guess the word would now be spin," says Goldings, who now represents a defendant closely connected to the Flaherty investigation. "He absolutely recognized that for a person in public life their name is [a] thing of value and if it's ruined that would be an improper use of investigatory power. There were damn few surprises."

When Dwyer moved on to private practice in 1980, he stayed in the headlines. After winning an acquittal of a New York man charged with participating in a prominent national tax fraud case, he was flooded with tax cases. It was not until later in the decade that he began to foc! us on corruption cases.

One of them involved Joe Silvano Jr., a Newton insurance agent. In 1986 Silvano was charged with scheming to use Boston's health insurance program to obtain $2 million in fees with the help of the city budget director. Dwyer argued that the federal mail fraud statute could not be used to convict Silvano as prosecutors had proposed, but the court disagreed and sentenced Silvano to two years. But two years after that the US Supreme Court agreed with Dwyer's reasoning in an unrelated case and Silvano's sentence was shortened.

"He was way out front on that theory at a time when most courts were rejecting it," recalls Bruce Singal, the assistant US attorney who prosecuted the case and is now in private practice.

Dwyer has also taken the lead in efforts to counter the federal government's aggressive probe of government corruption. And few cases illustrate his strategy and skills better than his handling of the Flaherty investigation.  It is a high-stakes business, and for Dwyer the stakes may never be higher than they are now. However the Flaherty case turns out, many will take Dwyer's measure from the outcome. There is the matter of Reardon, indicted on multiple counts of corruption and now on unpaid leave. Dwyer is also preparing to go to court to defend Mark Ferber in a trial that is sure to be closely scrutinized by the media. For a man who has not tried a case in seven years, the pressure is considerable.

For the moment, Dwyer takes some comfort in his newly redesigned office. The airy spread, recently featured in Design Times magazine, is not exactly restful space. The orange walls ripple. A wave motif echoes in wavy metal door handles and in overhead light patterns. Purple rugs collide with red walls and weave beneath patterned furniture.

But there in a central conference room is something else. Visible at the center of the large glass window, shimmering brightly against the black night sky, is the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House. Did Dwyer engineer this view, plan it so that he might look out upon a potential source of clients?

"I never even knew it was there until someone pointed it out," muses Dwyer, gazing at the twinkling skyline. "Isn't that funny?"

And then Tommy Dwyer smiles.

Caption:
1. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO/JOHN BLANDING / Going to trial, says Dwyer, ''really doesn't translate into great events for your clients.''

2. Dwyer, far right, was one of the chairmen of a dinner given in honor of former Suffolk DA Garrett H. Byrne in 1984. From left, former Suffolk assistant DA Kevin Leary, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Msgr. Francis Lally, Byrne, former Mayor Kevin White, developer James F. Sullivan and the late US House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill.

3. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO/JOHN BLANDING / Dwyer shrugs off charges that he intimidates prosecutors, saying, ''If I could just make a phone call and stop a case, my golf game would be a lot better.'PHOTO

Copyright 1996, 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
Record Number: 00046049