Visiting day at the Lompoc federal prison satellite camp, just up the coast from Santa Barbara, a midsummer Saturday so oppressive you can see the heat rising in jellied waves off the surrounding farmlands. The parking lot is full, a smattering of Mercedes and Lexuses giving evidence that many of the criminals housed here are of the nonviolent, white-collar variety. In the shade of a eucalyptus grove, children dart about as inmates and their visitors enjoy a few hours of relaxed intimacy under the watchful eyes of the guards. In the near distance loom the forbidding walls of the penitentiary proper, a constant reminder that these minimum-security prisoners have a pretty sweet deal, all things considered.
I’m here to see one of the camp’s most prominent cons, the famed Bay Area criminal defense attorney J. Tony Serra. Eight weeks into a 10-month sentence on an income tax conviction, Serra has thus far discouraged his family and numerous friends from making the long drive south, so other than one of his sons, Chime, who dropped by unexpectedly a few weeks ago, I am only his second visitor.
As he leads the way to a table under the trees, Serra tugs on the baggy waistband of his prison-issue green trousers. “Down 20 pounds already,” he grins proudly, his gold tooth flashing in the sun. “Not bad, huh? Or do I look too gaunt? When I get out, everyone will think these people have been starving me down here.”
Not likely. The truth is Tony Serra looks terrific, his brimming bonhomie diminished not a whit by the regimented demands of incarceration. After 70-plus years (he won’t say exactly), his powerful ex-jock body is noticeably stooped, and he moves slowly due to two hip replacement surgeries; but despite being one of the oldest inmates here, he exudes enough animal energy to power this whole complex. Before he came in he was constantly reassuring people that a prison stretch would be a breeze for him, and he clearly seems to be taking confinement in stride.
He tells me he’s settled into a comfortable, if dull, routine that provides regular exercise and allows him time to read, write, and reflect. He goes to bed early, sleeps well in spite of the nonstop cacophony in his 150-bed open dormitory, and rises refreshed. It’s quite a contrast to his driven existence on the outside as a workaholic radical defense lawyer who specializes in high-profile murder trials. His prison job, which takes about four hours a day and pays him $19.20 a month, is watering the grounds. It’s perfect, he says, because it allows him to roam all over the camp, moving sprinklers and hosing down the lawns and shrubbery.
“After I was here a couple of weeks, one of the staff guys offered me a job as a clerk, but I turned him down,” he says, leaning close to keep our conversation private. “It was kind of delicate because he thought he was doing me a favor, but I didn’t want to be someone’s flunky, and I wanted to be outside. Doing the watering, I’m on my own as long as I get the job done. Which means, you know, I get to space out a little. I dig just watching the way the sunlight refracts through the sprinkler spray.”
This brings up another major lifestyle change that prison has wrought: the enforced cessation of Serra’s prodigious marijuana consumption. By his own admission he’s smoked dope on a daily basis since the ’60s, and I wonder if stopping so suddenly has caused him any problems. “Nah, cold turkey, boom, no big thing,” he chuckles. “I mean, I had no choice, but it’s cool. My feeling is that pot adds a couple of colors to the spectrum, enhances things, you know. But the flowers are still beautiful to me, and the best thing is I don’t get the munchies now, which is helping me lose the weight. I’ve been offered a hit off a joint a couple of times, but I just tell them, No thanks, man, I’m a short-timer, I don’t want to fuck up.”
This isn’t Serra’s first stretch at Lompoc: he served four months here in 1974 on another tax evasion charge. In 1986 he was put on probation for not filing a tax return. Even he can’t disagree that he had some sort of official chastisement coming—let’s face it, the court record is just the tip of the iceberg; the guy’s been openly blowing off the IRS for the better part of 40 years. “I don’t cheat,” Serra told me blithely before he went in, “I just don’t pay.” Oh, the feds managed to snag a pittance now and then, like the $100,000 consultant’s fee he was to have received from a 1989 movie made about one of his headline cases, but that was a drop in the bucket of what he owed. (The film was True Believer, starring James Woods and Robert Downey Jr., and for the record, Serra considers it a Hollywood abomination.)
His tax resistance started as a protest against the Vietnam War, but over the years it devolved into what he describes as his “financial dysfunction.” If this sounds disingenuous coming from a man who’s been called the greatest lawyer of his generation, bear in mind that in his eighth decade Tony Serra is more broke than he was when he began practicing law. He’s never had a bank account or a personal credit card, and he gets the clothes he wears, even his courtroom suits, from thrift stores. In his longtime hometown of Bolinas, he is renowned not so much for his courtroom exploits as for his constant tinkering on the motley caravan of beaters he’s driven over the years.
“It’s truly a subject matter for psychiatry, but I’ve just always had this weird relationship with money,” Serra says. “It started with my mother, who identified with the proletariat and didn’t buy into the consumer society. Then I had a revelation about money on an LSD trip, and in my postacid clarity I took an informal vow of poverty: to never buy anything new, to never acquire anything that capitalism preaches, like stocks, and to not even have money in the bank. And I’ve fulfilled it. My net worth is minus.”
An adjunct to the vow was a resolve not to capitalize on his profession. He takes just enough out of his fees to sustain a spartan existence and uses most of what is left over to fund indigent clients. “I’ve sunk as much as $30,000 of my own money into some of my death penalty cases,” he says. “But, you know, it was usually a fee I made off some dope smuggler, and for those guys it was just Monopoly money, so I used it that way.”
Serra undertakes a large number of cases on a pro bono basis and has been known to refuse even court-appointed fees. He is regularly voted by his peers a place among the top trial lawyers in the country, and he’s been given numerous honors, including runner-up for American Lawyer magazine’s Best Lawyer in America award, UC Berkeley/Boalt Hall’s Alumnus of the Year award, and the ACLU Benjamin Dreyfus Civil Liberties Award. Additionally, Serra is exceptionally generous with his time, traveling great distances to address various groups and forums on the law, also usually gratis.
At his sentencing in July of 2005, the cream of the Bay Area defense bar, including such luminaries as John Keker (who prosecuted Oliver North during the Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair and, more recently, represented Silicon Valley IPO king Frank Quattrone in federal court), pleaded with the presiding federal magistrate to allow Serra to serve his time in home detention instead of prison. Jeff Adachi, head of the San Francisco public defender’s office, even proposed that Serra be sentenced to work in Adachi’s office, training young lawyers to do public service.
Before pronouncing sentence, Judge Joseph Spero praised Serra for “devoting his life to the cause of justice” and conceded that his tax problems had not been motivated by greed. Nonetheless, the judge said, there must be real punishment for someone who had run afoul of the IRS three times.
But it’s unlikely even the most draconian sentence would soften Tony Serra’s fierce antiestablishment stance. So single-minded is he about the cause of justice that he has walled off from his life virtually everything extraneous to it. Other than his loved ones, a few friends, classical literature, and the quirky little hamlet of Bolinas, his part-time home for more than 30 years, Serra will tell you that he has no real loves or interests. He says he often feels that he lives in a narrow tunnel, and he regrets all the experiences he’s missed out on. On the other hand, he’s never found anything that provides the adrenaline rush of a jury trial. It’s his drug, he told me, every bit as addictive as heroin.
The late criminal attorney Michael Metzger used to say that no young defense lawyer’s education was complete without seeing Tony Serra conduct a cross-examination and give a closing argument. No slouch as a courtroom performer himself, Metzger spent 10 years as a prosecutor in the shop of Frank Hogan, New York’s famous mob-busting district attorney, so you have to think he was a pretty shrewd judge of forensic talent.
Jeff Adachi will tell you that he routinely encourages his young lawyers to experience Serra in courtroom action. “He’s a dying breed, one of a handful left that can truly be called a people’s lawyer,” says Adachi. “He not only does meticulous preparation and has a tremendous command of detail, he has that rare ability to grab a jury and bring them into his reality. When they look at him, they don’t see a slick defense lawyer trying to argue a technicality; they see a smart, down-to-earth guy with all this integrity.”
I spent a fair amount of time around Serra in the months before he went to prison. I observed him in court, had long talks with him in his office after hours, and spent time with him socially among family, friends, and colleagues at a handful of functions, including a wedding reception for one of his daughters. Having followed his legal (and illegal) exploits in the local media for years, I’d formed a hazy mental picture of what he must be like. My image of some glib shyster, all bombast and swagger, went up, you’ll pardon the pun, in smoke during our first meeting in his San Francisco office, on Broadway in a space previously occupied by Finocchio’s, the famous drag nightclub.
Following a sign that read “HONEST LAWYER ONE FLIGHT UP,” I ascended the stairs to enter a large unkempt room crowded with overflowing desks that looked as if it might double as a museum of the counterculture. A painted dragon snaked across the ceiling on an air duct, tie-dye banners hung from the walls, Hindu and Buddhist posters were spotted about, and dusty artifacts, including some impressive Fijian carved figures, were stuffed into every available space. A side room was devoted to mementos of Serra’s turbulent career: yellowing newspaper accounts of trials, gifts from grateful clients, various amulets and talismans (he is a fervent believer in magic), a jailhouse letter from Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, requesting counsel, and dozens of pieces of artwork depicting the weathered, Mount Rushmore–like visage of the man himself.
We settled onto a sagging couch, and, unlit joint in hand, Serra started in. He’d already put in a full day in court, but as soon as I punched the button on my recorder, it was as if I’d switched him on, too. He answered my questions with prolific animation, reeling off stories and reminiscences in an argot composed equally of hipster street slang and high literary idiom. His candor was startling, and in this and subsequent conversations I found myself reminding him that we were talking on the record, asking if he really wanted to say this or that for public consumption. His answer, always, was, “What do I have to hide?”
Well, yeah, good question. In light of the fact that he’s convinced his latest tax prosecution was initiated at the highest levels of the Justice Department, you’d think the guy might deign to be just a touch circumspect, but no, he resolutely puts it all out there. My sense is that he operates on the theory that the more you expose of yourself, the less you have to fear. In his raffish milieu it’s served him well. At the same time, I couldn’t escape the feeling that there is a Tony Serra nobody gets to, an introspective loner carrying a heavy load of Weltschmerz. Although he is consistently upbeat—“I have delusions of well-being,” he told me on several occasions—he confided that the only time he feels entirely at ease is in court or traipsing around in nature.
Even so, he is an extrovert to his bones, and I found him to be quite companionable, the kind of guy you might want to accompany on, say, an aimless road trip. Granted, you’d have to have a taste for long, baroque monologues. Pot-fueled or not, conversations with him tend to be pretty one-sided. It’s my experience, though, that there are two types of egomaniacs in the world, the wearisome and the fascinating, and, as many a jury would agree, Serra has no peer as a raconteur. Even though you suspect he’s told a story a hundred times, polishing and shaping as he goes, you can’t help but marvel at the consummate performance he gives with each rendition.
After nearly three hours he showed no signs of flagging, but he announced that he had to get back to work. Although he had done all the heavy lifting, my head was spinning from exhaustion. As I headed downstairs to Enrico’s for a drink, it occurred to me that he never did get around to firing up that joint.
Born and raised in blue-collar circumstances in the outer Sunset, Serra is the eldest of three talented, if wildly disparate, brothers. His middle sibling is Richard Serra, the internationally acclaimed sculptor whose monumental works are installed in venues all over the world, including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. (His first public work in San Francisco, a 160-ton steel sculpture titled Ballast, was installed a few months ago at the new UCSF campus at Mission Bay.) The youngest brother, Rudy, also a noted artist, has taught at Rutgers and Bennington. Tony Serra has virtually no contact with either.
“We’re the Brothers Karamazov, definitely fratricidal,” he told me with a laugh. “We have the Achilles tendon of vanity, all three of us. I’m the oldest, but with Richard and me the roles are reversed; he’s always been like the judgmental grandfather, profoundly disapproving. At all levels I admire him, except the interpersonal. On the other hand, he’s been very good to my kids. I’m the poor lawyer and he’s the rich artist, and he’s sent all five of my kids through college. But even they aren’t all that close to him.”
Serra remembers his father, an uneducated Majorcan candy maker, as quiet and unassuming, while his mother, a volatile Russian Jew, was a screamer. She was also a bohemian aesthete who taught her sons to value beauty and nature over possessions. (In the ’60s, Serra recalls, she cultivated marijuana in their backyard.) Somehow the union worked, up to a point. “He stabilized her, she stimulated him, at least until she did a Virginia Woolf one day and walked straight into the ocean right out there at the end of Taraval, where we used to go
as a family.”
It was this inexplicable tragedy in the late 1970s, along with his father’s death a few years later, Serra says, that precipitated the schism between Serra and his brothers. After tending to his father through a long hospital stay, he found himself emotionally unable to attend his funeral, and this, he believes, exacerbated longstanding sibling tensions. “That was the germ of it, and we went our separate ways,” says Serra. “It was caused a lot by my inability to confront the deaths of my parents, probably out of guilt. They lived for us, and, you know, I went dancing down the trail. When they died, neither Richard nor I had come into the recognition we would later have, so they never got to see that, and it’s always made me feel bad.”
Remembered as a legendary all-around high school athlete in San Francisco, Serra went to Stanford, where he majored in philosophy while holding down a succession of factory jobs. He also found time to box and to play baseball and football, winning, and then quickly losing, an athletic scholarship. “I spent too much time in the library reading poetry,” Serra says. “Then the hippie thing came along and I hitched onto it. I discovered drugs, which turned out to be both my strength and my weakness.”
After graduation he set off to travel the world, landing eventually in Tangiers. The idea was to emulate Rimbaud and be a disgraced poet living in squalid glamour in the Casbah. He fell in with a circle of expat junkies, and although he was doing no opiates himself, he was also doing no writing. It didn’t take long to realize that his nihilistic existence was leading nowhere. “I was pumping with this pristine energy, but nothing was happening,” he recalls. “Finally I said, Oh, fuck it, I’ll be a lawyer.”
He entered Boalt Hall at an extraordinarily portentous time. The Free Speech movement exploded at Cal a few years later, followed by the floating hippie carnival across the bridge in the Haight-Ashbury. Protest, drugs, music, Eastern mysticism, sex—it was all jumbled up in a chaotic ball of do-your-own-thing, and nobody did it harder than Tony Serra. “It was such a wonderful renaissance of art and politics, thought and action,” he says. “I was this crazy dancer at the Straight Theatre, swirling with the maddest of them, and at the same time hanging out with the Black Panthers and the Free Speech people. In Berkeley you had to be verbally facile; in the Haight you just had to smile.”
Law degree in hand, he decided to be, of all things, a prosecutor, joining the Alameda County District Attorney’s office. He lasted 11 months. “It was the wrong thing to do, and I regret it,” he says. “But I wanted trial experience, and it was a means to an end.”
Disgusted with himself, he took off in a camper to South America with a lady friend, traveling all the way down the west coast and back up the east. He came back with a woolly monkey on his shoulder and dropped in at the Hall of Justice to announce, “This is my partner.” When he began criminal defense work, his first cases were drug busts, his clients often members of communes where he resided. He soon became allied with an idealistic group of young lawyers who were fighting for the counterculture revolution in the courts.
“We broke into town together in the late ’60s and have been on parallel paths ever since,” says Michael Stepanian, one of San Francisco’s top drug lawyers. “I started the Haight-Ashbury Legal Organization, and we were providing free legal services for the hippie kids during the Summer of Love; Bill Graham was paying for it. The bottom line is that Tony Serra was the closest thing I know to a saint then, and he still is now. He takes the most rough-and-tumble cases you can imagine and tries them better than anybody in America. He’s been crawling up the rectum of snitches and rats for his entire career, working his way through the warmest part of the body until he gets to the heart, and then he destroys the beast.”
Jeff Adachi first crossed paths with Serra in 1982 when, as a college student at Berkeley, he volunteered for the defense committee of a Korean immigrant named Chol Soo Lee. Lee was facing the death penalty after being convicted of a Chinatown contract murder—this is the case True Believer is based on—but many in the Asian community were convinced he was innocent, and the case became a cause célèbre. Leonard Weinglass, co-counsel to William Kunstler during the infamous Chicago Seven trial in 1969–70, had been Lee’s lawyer during earlier proceedings but was unavailable for the retrial. Stuart Hanlon, a prominent local criminal defense attorney, insisted the defense had to bring in Tony Serra.
“So here comes this imposing figure right out of the American Revolution,” Adachi recalls. “He had that long hair tied back in a ponytail and these patched clothes, and people didn’t know what to think. We were all these young kids who’d spent six years working on this seemingly hopeless case, and we got to watch Tony give this amazing performance. His closing argument was incredible, the most moving thing any of us had ever witnessed, and he got an acquittal. To this day, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
In one of his first high-profile political cases, Serra had in 1977 successfully defended an enigmatic revolutionary named Jacques Rogier, the public spokesman for a shadowy underground group called the New World Liberation Front, which had a penchant for blowing up PG&E substations. Two years later, Serra represented Huey Newton, the controversial cofounder of the Black Panthers, who had been charged with murdering a prostitute in Oakland.
It was this trial, conducted in a white-hot political climate, that vaulted Serra into the national spotlight. It didn’t help the defense’s cause that Newton had jumped bail and escaped to Cuba, where he stayed for several years before returning to face the music. The trial was a media fever dream, with police helicopters buzzing overhead and the gallery chanting in churchlike cadences while Serra gave his closing argument. When he managed to deadlock the jury and gain his client his freedom, Serra was more or less appointed by acclamation as house lawyer for the Bay Area’s radical left.
Over the next decades he solidified his credentials with a string of court victories. In 1981, on retrial, he won an acquittal for Russell Little, the Symbionese Liberation Army member who had been convicted of murdering Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster in 1973. In 1990 Serra mounted probably the first successful “cultural defense”—based on the white man’s systematic extermination of Native Americans—to exonerate Hooty Croy, a Shasta-Karuk who was on death row after being convicted of murdering a policeman. In 1997, proving self-defense by mapping out the scene of the crime in excruciating detail, he gained an acquittal for Bear Lincoln, a Round Valley Native American charged with killing a sheriff’s deputy in a running shoot-out.
More recently, in 2002 he helped win a $4.4 million judgment against the FBI and the Oakland police in a civil rights suit stemming from the investigation of the Oakland car-bombing of Earth First stalwarts Darryl Cherney and the late Judi Bari. (True to form, Serra refused to accept his court-ordered fee.) And in 2005 he won a unanimous judgment in federal court against the Humboldt County law officers who forced pepper spray into the eyes of environmental protestors in 1997. Again, he declined to share in a substantial fee.
Along the way, of course, he took his lumps. In the sensational 1993 trial of Ellie Nesler, the woman who shot her son’s alleged molester in a gold-country courtroom, Serra failed to get an acquittal when he went with a risky insanity defense. After an impassioned plea to the jury, he managed to get Nesler’s charge reduced to manslaughter, for which she was sentenced to 10 years.
Another benchmark case that had a troublesome outcome was the 2001 trial of Sara Jane Olson. Olson, aka Kathleen Soliah, was an SLA member who disappeared from the Bay Area in 1975, about a year after the core of the notorious group was killed during the police fire-bombing of their hideout in Los Angeles. After living quietly as a middle-class housewife in Minnesota for nearly 25 years, Olson was arrested in 1999 on a longstanding indictment for attempted murder. (She was accused of planting pipe bombs, which failed to detonate, beneath two police cars in L.A.) Her trial, which attracted intense media scrutiny, was depicted as the dying gasp of ’60s radicalism.
At first Olson proclaimed her innocence, but while she was awaiting trial, the events of 9/11 fatally altered the political landscape. Patty Hearst, the San Francisco newspaper heiress who’d been kidnapped by the SLA in 1974, had already agreed to testify against her. Represented by a defense team led by L.A. attorney Shawn Chapman, who had assisted in O. J. Simpson’s defense, Olson brought in Serra just before her trial began. Under a deal with the prosecution, she pleaded guilty in return for a reduced sentence, but when she publicly recanted her plea, all hell broke loose. Chapman portrayed Serra as a heavy-handed bully who had browbeat Olson into copping a plea, and when Serra failed to appear at a hearing to testify to his role in the deal, the alternative press crucified him as a fraud and a bungler.
Serra insists he never had control of the case, and that it was Olson’s “committee” that persuaded her to accept the plea bargain. “[They] believed that because of some ‘hard’ circumstantial evidence, plus Patty Hearst, plus 9/11, we would probably lose, and she would do life,” Serra wrote to me from prison. “She never wanted to [take the plea agreement], but she acceded equivocally to the opinion of her advisers. I had come in to try the case to jury; after that collapsed, it was all bad karma for me.” And for Olson, too, who is currently serving a seven-year term in the women’s prison at Chowchilla.
Not all Serra’s clients come from the far left. He’s defended members of the Hell’s Angels, the Aryan Brotherhood, Nuestra Familia, various Asian gangs, and organized crime. (He was once offered a permanent retainer by one of the big mob families, he says, but politely turned it down.) One of his more sensational recent cases was last year’s trial in the East Bay for the killing of transgender teenager Gwen Araujo in Hayward in 2002. While Serra generally shies away from sex-oriented crimes, he took on this client, he says, because he was convinced the young man was not involved in Araujo’s murder, only in helping dispose of her body. Serra got two hung juries, but when the prosecution declared it would try the case a third time, he persuaded his client to plead out in exchange for a six-year sentence.
“It was tough convincing my guy and his family, but if he’d been convicted, he was looking at 20 years,” Serra says. “That’s the way the law is these days. Somebody like me only gets the unwinnable cases, because anytime a prosecutor thinks he can’t win, he’ll deal. If your dude is looking at 20 and they offer you 5, you grab it.”
You have to wonder what motivates someone to so eagerly stand up for these often violent, aberrant types, especially when you consider that the majority of them are no doubt guilty as hell. Sure, everyone has a right to counsel, but beyond that Serra freely admits that he has always identified with hard-core outlaws, viewing them as nonconformist kindred spirits who live in contempt of bourgeois convention. “Society wants to separate itself from such people, but it’s my belief that no living thing should be put into a steel cage,” he says. “I’m not talking about pathology; there’s always 10 percent that must be separated, but not the remaining 90. If someone steals a car, I say give him a car! She cheated on welfare to feed her babies? Then feed her babies!”
That’ll never happen, and Serra knows it. But it’s a reflection of perhaps his most radical conviction: that every trial, no matter what the crime, is politically based—a primal clash of ideologies fought with rhetoric, guile, and emotion. With the scales of justice always weighted in favor of the “haves,” he sees himself as a warrior for the dispossessed, his task to thrust an
“ugly semantic fist” in the face of power and privilege.
“To litigate properly in an adversarial system, one must postulate an enemy,” he says. “Narcs are my enemies, informants are my enemies, overzealous, brutal police officers are my enemies. Prosecutors especially are my enemies because so many of them are sick and twisted people who abuse their positions. Mostly they become cynical and contemptuous over time, but the worst are the ‘true believers,’ because they feel they’re entitled to go to any lengths to put somebody away.”
When he goes to trial, he gears himself for battle by meditating on the code of a knight: “I win, or I die.” One of his important influences was Vincent Hallinan, former San Francisco D.A. Terence Hallinan’s formidable father, who was famous for his pugnacious demeanor. Hallinan Sr. was also a far-left renegade who did time for tax evasion, so you can see the connection. “A fucking bulldog, man, really tough,” Serra says admiringly. “For Vincent, everything was political, too. He taught me that you never talk to a D.A., you just look at him like you’re gonna eat him. When I was just getting started, I saw him take a big hulking lawyer by the scruff and slam him against a wall. I said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna like the law.’ ”
It would be reasonable to assume that someone as abrasive as Tony Serra has made his share of enemies over the years: prosecutors, informers, witnesses he has berated on the stand, and so on. He surely has plenty of detractors out there, but it was a hard task finding anyone connected with the law to say something derogatory about him. Judges praise him for his professionalism, federal agents respect him for his toughness, district attorneys admire his courtroom skills. On the other hand, he’s worked over so many cops in trials over the years that it’s hardly surprising he has few friends in the police ranks.
“Tony was once quoted as saying he’d defend anybody who killed a cop, and that didn’t particularly endear him to law enforcement people,” says Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s just another classic liberal, whacked-out San Francisco defense attorney. I’m always fascinated by these guys, how when
99 percent of their clients are guilty, they can rationalize defending them. I don’t even think he’s a great lawyer anymore; his skills have diminished over the years.”
Still, even Delagnes gives Serra grudging props. “I was in narcotics for 15 years and was cross-examined by him on several occasions, and I have to say, he’s no cheap-shot artist. I kind of respect guys that believe their own bullshit, and Tony, God bless him, believes his.”
Serra insists that his words were taken out of context. “I meant it in the sense that the trial of a cop killer is the most pointedly political of all, pitting the extremes of society in head-to-head conflict,” he says. “And I went on to say that I wouldn’t defend just any nut who was into offing cops but would do it only if it was a self-defense case or it was a frame, such as in the case of Hooty Croy and Bear Lincoln, or if somebody had been really brutalized by the cops.”
Not surprisingly, Serra is antiauthority on the personal level, too. Feeling the state has no place in anybody’s relationship, he doesn’t believe in marriage; his companion of many years now is a school official named Vicki Day, whose son, Eric, a lawyer, he considers his stepson. (When he’s not in his North Beach pied-à-terre, Serra’s at the place he shares with Day in Sonoma County.) His first long relationship was with Mary Edna Dinneen, who bore his five children (three sons, including twins, and two daughters). Their names are Shelter, Ivory, Chime, Wonder, and Lilac: Serra says he and Mary Edna felt there were enough Johns and Janes in the world. All were born at home; Serra cut the umbilical cords himself and buried the placentas under a rose bush in the front yard. He and Mary Edna seriously considered not registering the kids’ births but decided in the end that it would cause too much hassle with the bureaucracies.
“I remember one time, years ago, being at a party out on the mesa in Bolinas,” says Terence Hallinan. “I asked somebody where Tony was, and they said he was home delivering a baby. And then about two hours later he and his wife show up at the party! I said, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe this!’ ”
Serra says he regrets not spending more time with his kids while they were growing up. I met all five at his daughter Lilac’s wedding party, and they struck me as attractive and well-grounded young people. Nor did they seem to harbor any ill will toward their father. The twins, Shelter and Ivory, 34, are based in New York, a painter and a photographer, respectively. Chime, 32, lives in L.A. doing production design work after managing a nonprofit theater in New York. Wonder, 29, is in the film industry and working on a movie in London. Lilac, 26, is a jewelry designer.
“My dad may feel guilt about not being home so many nights and weekends when we were growing up, but when we did see him he always made it such a great experience that it made up for it,” says Chime. “He took us to museums or the aquarium or the movies or fishing, and it was always a wonderful adventure. He would do things like barter a bottle of wine with the motel guy in Petaluma so we could swim in the pool on a hot day. And he was always encouraging us to go ‘over the hill.’ In Bolinas you have to go over the hill to get anywhere, but he meant it metaphorically as much as literally. He was always pushing us to get out and see the world.”
Late last year, as he was trying to clean up his caseload in preparation for entering prison, Serra found himself ensconced for parts of several weeks at the Marin County Civic Center, trying a case in which the defendant was the son of an old friend. At issue were a couple of misdemeanor battery charges—not something he’d normally bother with, but, as he told me, he’d been asked to take the thing on as a favor, and he couldn’t refuse. Nor would he accept a fee. His client, a cousin to San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom (his spokesperson says the two have no contact) with a history of minor scrapes, had gotten into an altercation at a posh Marin yacht club. When he illegally parked his souped-up speedboat at the club’s dock, some members challenged him, words were exchanged, punches were thrown, and a citizen’s arrest was made. Amazingly enough, much of the dispute was captured by another member on video.
“Tempest in a teapot, should’ve never come to trial,” Serra told me dismissively as the trial began. “The problem is, I’m probably gonna have to put my guy on the stand, and he won’t make a very sympathetic witness. He’s the closest thing I’ve had to an establishment client in a long time. His only saving grace is that he’s kind of a black sheep, and that the guys on the other side are even more obnoxious than he is.”
If, as Serra has said, every trial is a symbolic manifestation of the class struggle, this one seemed ineluctably to be a clash of privilege versus privilege. Still, the incident being trivial and the stakes minor (the defendant faced little more than a fine) in no way mitigated the ferocity of his defense. Day after day Serra prowled the courtroom like a hungry bear, slashing away at witnesses with jibes and sarcasm, insinuating dark motives and devious means, incessantly hammering at the idea of a longstanding nautical schism between the elite sailing yachties and the power-boat plebeians.
“What I’ve got to do is paint my guy as the interloper, the scapegoat, the oppressed,” he said during a recess, regaling the small crowd that invariably gathered around him. “He comes into this exclusive domain of sailing yachts with his loud, offensive boat, and the sailing guys aren’t having it; they want him out of there at all costs. And more than that, they want to punish him.”
But what about the video? someone asked. Everything’s there in black and white. How do you get around that? “Hah!” said Serra. “I can’t believe the prosecution put on that video, because mostly what it shows is them roughing up my client. Look, I know this jury, I’m not gonna get an acquittal, but I think I can hang ’em, and my guy’ll walk.”
In the end he did put his client on the stand, and it was almost as disastrous as he’d predicted. The guy slouched insolently in his chair, his tie pulled down and his shirt untucked beneath his jacket. He made feeble attempts at humor and became so rambling and confused at one point that Serra sharply rebuked him. “All right, here’s the deal,” he said, cutting off his client midsentence. “I ask the questions, you answer them, but only the ones I ask. Are we clear on that?” It got a good laugh around the room.
Nevertheless, by careful digging Serra was able to elicit the helpless outrage the guy had experienced when he was unable to convince the yacht club people that, as a member of an affiliate club, he felt he had every right to be on their premises.
Closing arguments began late on the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving. The amiable young prosecutor gave a crisp, dry, fact-driven spiel and was finished in 15 minutes. Then Serra took the floor. He began with a long-winded fable about a Japanese law student, so rife with digressions the jurors were sneaking peeks at their watches. But then he caught a groove. Leaning close to the jury, he confided that he knew exactly what they were thinking, that this entire proceeding had been absurd and unnecessary. “A judicial farce and a prodigious waste of time!” he thundered, waving his glasses disdainfully toward the prosecutor. “Three grown men, each with personality defects, acting like fools. But does it properly rise to the province of this court?”
Then he backed off, throttling down his ire in order to instruct the jury on the ascending levels of reasonable doubt, a benevolent professor coddling his star students with inside information. As he described the bizarre flow of events that had led to his client’s arrest, his anger again began to mount. By the time he came to one of the most crucial moments of testimony, involving a
nonfunctioning key to his client’s boat, he had worked himself into a righteous lather. “They switched the key!” Serra bellowed in disbelief. “A sick, sadistic, ugly act!”
There had been no direct evidence to prove that anyone had done such a thing, but you could feel the intensity of his conviction pouring over the jury like molten lava. He howled against the infamy of a yacht club conspiracy against his client. His face contorted with fury, he painted the picture of the nefarious plot, designed to humiliate the guy in front of his girlfriend. Bobbing and weaving, spit flying from his mouth, he lurched around the courtroom with his hands clenched around his own neck to illustrate how the wicked sailing types had brutalized his hapless client.
Finally he stopped and swept his gaze slowly past each juror. “Now let me return to the issue of reasonable doubt,” he said quietly. “Ladies and gentlemen, I say to you that it is our most precious gift. It separates us from the chaos of the totalitarian state.” He delineated the five circles of guilt, pointing out the progressive difficulty of proving each. “Now you have to walk this last mile alone,” he gravely told the jurors. “You have to stick by your guns. You have to uphold the fabulous sanctity of the jury system. And then you will have done your job.”
As Serra took his seat, I could have sworn I saw one woman on the jury surreptitiously applauding. Wow, I thought, if this guy’s skills have diminished, I wish I could’ve seen him in his prime.
When court convened the following week, the foreman announced that the jury was deadlocked. Serra packed up his files and prepared to drive to Hayward, where another trial was getting under way. This one promised to be a little closer to his style. “A three-snitch homicide,” he said with a grin. “It’ll be a bitch.”
As Serra and I talked on there in the prison camp yard, the sun had moved to a point where it was blasting us from almost directly overhead. Noticing the sweat on my shirt, he suggested we move our picnic table into the shade. The table was heavy and awkward to move, and as we struggled with it, a gnarly-looking young inmate with tattoos and a mohawk came bounding over from where he was sitting with his girlfriend. “Lemme give you guys a hand,” he said, smiling sweetly, and he grabbed one end of the table and helped us maneuver it under a tree. After we got it relocated, he tossed Serra a discreet little salute and sauntered back to his lady.
“They know you here, Tony,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, I’m one of the gray panthers. You get some respect just for being an elder of the tribe.”
On the drive home I thought about that moment. Those young guys in prison must see Serra, with his long white hair and deep aboriginal features, as some kind of cool shaman. I hoped so, at least. He seemed to have things pretty wired, and that would definitely make life easier for him. I realized I had been so mesmerized by his percipient accounts of prison life that I’d completely forgotten to ask about his plans when he gets out. Would he slip gracefully into retirement, maybe write a memoir? And, perhaps equally important as far as his future was concerned, would he finally bend and pay his taxes, get the feds off his back once and for all?
As soon as I got home, I wrote and posed these questions. This was his reply: “Prison certainly will not effect any change when I get out. I will still do free cases. I will be involved in as many ‘political’ cases as I can. My stay here has only increased my fervor for activism.
“The compromise—the only one I am aware of—is that part of my sentence requires me to pay back taxes of $100,000 at $1,500 per month…and [do] my best to pay subsequent IRS years. I will do this because I only have about 10 years left of jury trials—and I don’t want to be in prison for the so-called twilight years of my legal career (and miss it!).
“My era is just coming—not over. Fear of terrorism has destroyed much liberty in this country. Radical lawyers are gravely needed to combat the governmental creep into totalitarianism. I see another ’60s coming. I expect to resume practice the day I’m out. I have a double-murder trial in Martinez set for my first month of freedom. I tell people that my mind paces like a tiger in prison, and when I am released that I will attack.”
What did I expect?