New York Lawyer
November 27, 2007

I was not entirely surprised to receive a call from Sol at my office. I was just surprised where he was calling me from. A homeless shelter was not what I expected. But with Sol, anything was possible, maybe even probable.

“Why are you in a homeless shelter?”, I asked, knowing full well that the story would be both entertaining and sad at the same time. Sol had a way of getting to me more than most of my clients.



“My son threw me out! I got into this big fight with him and his wife because they were opening my mail and it cost me a lot of business opportunities. That’s why I’m calling you. I want you to sue them for me. We can make tons of money. They cost me a deal with Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs and another deal that I have to tell you about in person”.

Now, of course, I knew that neither of those esteemed pillars of the financial community were going to be doing business with Sol anytime soon and, since Sol was pushing 80, not in his lifetime. Sol had only nine months previously been released from a federal penitentiary in Pensacola, Florida for selling real estate over the telephone in a rather fraudulent manner: he didn’t own it. He and his third wife, Lila, had been targeted by the Florida Bureau of Land Fraud as well as the U.S. Post Office. Lila rolled over on Sol and he got 87 months; she got three months. He tended to blame all his troubles on loving too much and too deeply, but his real problem was that he disliked honest labor.



Sol had been a lawyer at one time and lost his law license thirty-five years ago after his first offense of backdating real estate documents. The details of his second offense elude me now, but it had something to do with insurance fraud. The word was that if you had Sol’s telephone number and a paid-up fire insurance policy, he would make your money problems go up in smoke.

Now, I am not a criminal lawyer and I did not have any involvement in any of Sol’s criminal problems. I’m just a commercial trial lawyer that had had the good fortune to handle some of Sol’s civil matters over time, always on a contingency basis. The good thing about the contingency system was that it aligned the interests of the client and the lawyer: no one gets paid unless they both get paid. The bad thing about the system was that, as a lawyer, you were only as good as your client’s story. If it fell apart, your pay day went with it. All in all, Sol had been honest with me and we both had done pretty well. But of course, he had been away for more than seven years and we had only recently renewed our acquaintance. This telephone conversation did not seem likely to lead anywhere, at least from a business standpoint.

So I said: “Sol, how do you know they have been opening your mail?” And he told me. And from there we were off to the races, quite literally.

Back in the day, Sol had been a devotee of the racetrack. When he was practicing law, he regularly numbered among his clients big time trainers and jockeys who had an ever so slight larcenous bent. Sol, who spent considerable time at the New York and Miami tracks, would often place bets for his clients so that their activities would not draw attention from the betting public. As you can imagine, nothing would cause a horse’s odds to be reduced faster than the sight of his trainer betting on him and nothing would cause a license to be revoked faster than a jockey betting against his own horse. Sol, therefore, was a necessary cog in the wheel of commerce. And, of course, his end came in the form of inside information that was denied less well connected gamblers.

In 1983, Sol had made a grievous error that caused him to be banned from every racetrack in the country and probably started him on his life of crime. He was caught with a battery that one of his jockey friends had thrown on the track after a winning race. A battery is not really a battery as most people know it, although it needs one to work. In racetrack parlance, a battery is an electronic prod that stimulates a horse to run faster than he normally would. It is dangerous to the horse and it is extremely illegal. For a jockey (or any other racetracker) to be found with a battery is the end of a career and a felony, to boot. For Sol, it just meant a ban from his favorite pastime.

All of this is simply to explain what Sol was so worked up about, as I was later to find out when I picked him up at the homeless shelter, looking about as bad one would expect a 79 year old ex-con without a home would look. Anyway, I took him to a bar restaurant, bought him a burger and a beer and this is what he told me.

Apparently, just before he was released from prison, Sol was told about a betting coup that was being planned for May or June of the following year at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. The guy that told him about it was a convicted forger (treasury notes and bearer bonds) whom Sol had helped out with a couple of unsuccessful habeas petitions while in the joint. While Sol knew that the horse would be a two year old of obscure pedigree running against much higher priced animals, the all important details about the scam (such as the name of the horse and the day of the race)were still unknown by the participants at the time. Bruce promised Sol that he would send him a letter that had the details. That information was in the letter his daughter-in-law had tossed in the garbage just before she dumped him in the shelter. As one might expect, Sol was in a less than charitable frame of mind with regard to his family.

After I paid the check (naturally), the conversation turned to solving the problem; how to recover the lost information? But my first priority was somewhat different: what were my ethical responsibilities in this situation. I had always governed my lawyerly conduct so that I satisfied the first rule of the bar: if your client goes to jail, make sure that you don’t go with him. Now, in this case, despite my previous use of the pejorative word “scam”, the ethics remained murky. It did not seem that anything illegal was being undertaken here exactly. As far as I understood it, no one was planning to shoot a horse full of drugs or ask a jockey to stiff one of the competitors or anything else that might result in a violation of the law. On the contrary, the only edge for Sol and his informant was that they knew that a two year old colt that appeared to be no faster than a three legged donkey was actually the second coming of Secretariat, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. That kind of inside information was hardly illegal or unique and, in fact, was the coin of the realm of owners and trainers throughout the racing world. But then again, how is it that Sol’s cellmate came to know of it? If he used illegal means to obtain it, where did that leave Sol and me, for that matter. After careful consideration, I decided to ignore the problem. Even lawyers have bills to pay.

So how do we track down the cellmate? No last name, not even a prison number. All that Sol knew was that he was a black man of about 50, from Lafayette, Louisiana who answered to the name Cicero, which might or might not be his real name. We didn’t know where he lived, whether he had a job or any of his hobbies or friends or any other helpful information. Nevertheless, it turned out to be surprisingly easy.

Googling Cicero got the expected responses: Cicero, the Roman emperor, the Chamber of Commerce for Cicero, Illinois, twelve pizza places and a website for Cajun poets. That site led to a couple of not-bad poems about old Louisiana by a guy named Ralph Edwards, otherwise known as Cicero. It also gave the name and address of the woman who created the website and was available to provide any other information that we wanted to know about any of its contributors.

By this time, Sol was exhausted and since he had no place to go, he was off to the spare bedroom of my apartment for a serious nap. The chase was now up to me, so I called Bobbie Murdock who was the proprietor or the webmaster or whatever you call it of the website. She wasn’t in and I left my number. In the meantime, I tried to figure out how to solve this puzzle if I couldn’t track down Cicero, or just as bad, he decided not to be cooperative. After all, telling one of your pals in prison about something is not the same as telling him anything once you get out. The easy camaraderie of institutional living often turns to disinterest or even hostility once the commonality of life experience is altered. Thus, we had no way to know what his attitude would be now.

But figuring what to do was almost impossible. It was now late November; the race might not be run for another six months or even more. At this point, all we knew was that somewhere in the world a real good two year old colt of undistinguished pedigree was in training to pull off a huge score for some insiders and I had a toothpick ready to stick in their goldmine. But fate was kind to me, as it turned out. The answer was right in the newspaper.

The Daily Racing Form is not the New York Times but it is the bible of the racing world since it contains past performances of the horses at a number of different racetracks. I read it only sporadically because it costs so much money ($5.50) and is usually of interest only when you want to bet on horses. On this day, a relatively balmy day in mid January, it more than paid for itself. In the classified section, the following ad leapt out at me