Unaclíent
Lawyers from around the nation are trying to
hawk their services directly to Unabomber suspect Theodore
Kaczynski.
—USA Today
DEAR MR. KACZYNSKI,
I won’t pussyfoot around: I’m the best there is, and you, my friend, are knee-deep in kimchi. Here’s how we handle it: The FBI had dozens of agents staked out around your cabin for weeks. We put each and every one of them on the stand and ask him if in the last twenty years he ever used the word “weirdo.” Let them deny it! We’ll put their fifth-grade teachers on the stand, then nail them for perjury and move to dismiss.
I would have come up there personally, except that urgent business on behalf of a very fine client is detaining me here. But my jet is fueled and ready.
Sincerely,
F. Lee Bailey
Tallahassee, Fla.
P.S. It turns out my jet won’t be available after all. Do they have commercial flights into Helena?
Greetings! Perhaps I can be of some assistance. Most important, we need to get this case moved out of Buffalo Dung, Montana, to Berkeley where we’ll get a jury of peers who won’t sit up all night drinking beers. Those people up there look as if they’d all been swimming in the same gene pool too long and someone forgot to add chlorine. Also, my Rolls-Royce would not take kindly to driving over cattle guards. As for those so-called bombs in your cabin, we’ll tell the jury “if they did not detonate, you must exonerate.”
Sincerely,
Johnnie Cochran
Los Angeles, Calif.
DEAR MR. KACZYNSKI,
I practice law here in Wyoming and I have experience with men such as yourself, who want only to live in harmony among the elk and bear and antelope, but who wake up one morning to find that Big Brother has descended from the Big Sky.
My client Randy Weaver went through a similar infringement of his rights in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Before I took over his case, he was looking at spending the rest of his life in a federal dungeon, cursing the darkness.
Now he is a free man,
And FBI Director Freeh
Fears to arrest the Freemen.
I wrote that. I also do some painting.
I’m not saying it will be easy. Westerners don’t make easy promises. What they do is spit on their hands and go to work. The FBI has found material in your cabin that might lead a jury to suspect you weren’t just tinkering with new recipes for jackrabbit: specifically, bombs, trigger devices, saltpeter, sulfur, and ammonium nitrate, and also what appears to be the original draft of that manifesto they printed in the newspapers and this here piece of paper they found with the words “hit list” written above “airline industry,” “computer industry,” and “geneticists.”
As we say in these parts, “If you got a rope around your neck, it’s no time to goose the horse.” We’ll want to be very deliberate about this and pick our own hunting ground.
Sincerely,
Gerry Spence
Jackson, Wyo.
DEAR MR. KACZYNSKI,
I’m in the middle of the tour for my book on the O. J. Simpson case, Reasonable Doubts—it’s really excellent. Have you read it? It’s getting great reviews. I don’t want to sound defeatist, but in my opinion you’re going to need the best appeals lawyer in the country. And, since I’m already halfway through the manuscript for the book about your appeal, you might as well hire me, right?
Let me set you at ease. First, I would take you on without charge. The deal for the book and movie about your case, which I’ve already signed, will cover my costs.
Second, I am not the kind of lawyer who asks his client improper questions, like “Did you try to decapitate your wife?” or “Did you pump your wife so full of insulin in the eighties that she’s still asleep in the nineties?” That’s not my role. My role is to uphold the Bill of Rights by establishing that a bailiff picked his nose during the voir dire and tainted the entire proceeding. Call me.
Sincerely,
Alan Dershowitz
Cambridge, Mass.
P.S. If you have any casting ideas for who should play you—Eastwood? Van Damme?—let me know right away. They want to move on this quickly.
—The New Yorker, 1996