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Jeff Cosnow
"Mtu Wa Watu"
(Originally published in Pinellas County Review,
December 1994)
By Bob
Andelman
Some people are destined to be self-employed.
It just took Palm Harbor divorce attorney Jeff Cosnow a little
longer than most to figure out he was one of them.
That became apparent in every story Cosnow
told about his days before becoming an attorney. Every one of
those tales ended the same way: " . . . until I got fired."
Cosnow, 51, didn't attend law school until
he was nearly 40, but rest assured it didn't take four decades
for his life to get interesting. For instance, how many people
do you know who received Ford & Rockefeller Foundation grants
to earn a Masters degree at the University of East Africa's Makerere
University College in Kampala, Uganda? Or who were thrown out
of a West Virginia hospital for teaching the "black arts"
- hypnotism?
Meet Jeffrey Evan Cosnow: lawyer, college
professor, witch doctor.
"Did Jeff tell you his nickname? Mtu
Wa Watu," revealed Cosnow's long-time friend and fellow
attorney, Rich Catalano. "It means, in Swahili, 'Man of
the People.' Sometimes I address letters to him as 'Jeffrey E.
Cosnow, Mtu Wa Watu.'"
Watu's . . . er, Cosnow's eye contact
never breaks. His verbal delivery is rat-a-tat-tat and he punctuates
virtually ever sentence with either "Okay? Okay?"
or "YouknowhatImean?" Knowing he is a trained
hypnotist makes interviewing him a challenge. Did he just snap
his fingers and say bark like a dog?
"This guy is a madman," Catalano
said. "He's got the most ridiculous past of anybody I've
ever met in my life. He's been everywhere, done everything. He
is the most bizarre character I ever met and I grew up
in the Bronx."
He may be a madman, but he gets things done.
"I'm not saying he has great bedside manner or great courtroom
decorum, but he's a great attorney," Catalano said. "The
man will not be wrong about a point of law. If you tell him the
law is 'A' and he believes it's 'B', he will spend 20 hours to
prove himself right. When it comes to his job, he's the most
zealous advocate I've ever seen. I have the utmost faith in his
ability."
He better; Catalano just turned over his entire
family law practice to Cosnow. At least he'll no longer have
to refuse clients who want him to take on his friend in court,
a task Catalano always refused.
"My only advice to potential clients
going up against Jeff is to head for the hills," Catalano
said. "He's like a pit bull. He'll bite you and won't let
go. You'll have to shoot him before he'll let go."
"Cosnow? I could talk for days
about that character," said Carita "Candy" Wells,
a Tampa attorney and - like Catalano - member of Cosnow's study
group at Stetson Law. Wells called her friend "Cosnow. On
Everything," for his ability to talk extemporaneously about
any topic.
"Jeff has got to be one of the most intelligent
people I have ever met," Wells said. "A lot of people
don't understand him. He'll start arguing on a topic that nobody
understands. What you find is you've missed two or three intermediate
reasoning steps. He can change gears and argue the other side
as quick as a snap of the fingers. People think he's kooky but
he's just off the scale as an intellect."
Kooky, eclectic, a screaming, unreconstructed
liberal - and proud of it, thank you very much.
"I'm a '60s character," Cosnow proclaimed.
"In the '60s, our great naiveté was that we believed
in the reformability of things."
Cosnow, studying in 1969 for a Ph.D. in anthropology
at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was beaten
by the police for joining a Vietnam War protest which blocked
Highway 101. A year later he was across the country, serving
as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of
Maryland, when he again lined up against the war to block a road,
this time Highway 1. In 1971, anticipating a police action on
the college campus, he scheduled a portion of his honors anthropology
class to coincide with the cops' arrival. One day, as if on cue,
he turned to the class and said, "Hear the dogs barking?"
After six years of teaching, Cosnow never
found time to finish his doctoral dissertation, "so I got
fired."
From there he relocated to West Virginia and
became director of the Parkersburg Salvation Army. One day, he
gave a talk to the United Churchwomen of Parkersburg, a room
"packed with blue-haired women."
Cosnow was concise, to the point.
"You must decide whether you want to
follow what Jesus said or whether you want your carpets cleaned,"
he told them. Then he sat down. There was no applause, not a
word was spoken.
The Salvation Army fired Cosnow after two
years on the job because "I called Mrs. Captain a thief
and Mr. Captain didn't like it."
But Cosnow wasn't out of work long. "I'm
very good at job interviews," he explained. "I'm just
not good at keeping jobs." He moved to Linn, West Virginia,
and became director of mental health services there despite a
distinct lack of experience or knowledge of the field.
"How?" he said, laughing. "The
lady liked me. Second, like I said, I'm very good at interviews.
Third, it's the Third World, okay?"
The hospital allowed its administrators one
out-of-state seminar trip each year. That's when Cosnow started
learning hypnotism, ostensibly for pain, weight and smoking control
in his patients. In a county of 8,000 people, it didn't take
long for the mental health services director's profile in the
community to rise, what between the hypnotism and advising women
to leave their alcoholic husbands.
"My therapy style was cognitive reality,"
he recalled.
His biggest errors in judgment, however, were
more basic. When his secretary, the daughter of the high school
athletic director, wanted a few hours off to go to the beauty
parlor, he insisted she take the whole day because a few hours
would be too disruptive. Daddy didn't like that. And he made
the mistake of buying alcoholic beverages from the ABC store
in town instead of in the next town over like the rest of the
hypocrites did.
"I got fired from there, and sued,"
Cosnow said. "But the hospital's lawyer said, 'With your
personality, you should be a lawyer.' "
Figuring he'd at least pass the entrance interview,
Cosnow moved to Florida in 1982 and began studying law at Stetson.
As a going-on-40 college student, Cosnow took
great pains to keep his age a secret. When the top of his head
was invaded by grey hairs, he snipped them out, causing his barber
to suggest he was going bald.
Only Catalano knew Cosnow's real age. And
he let the rabbit out of his pal's hat on Cosnow's 40th birthday,
arranging for a Playboy Bunny to appear during tax class to wish
Cosnow a happy birthday.
"That broke my cover," Cosnow said
morosely.
"He was really conscious of his age because
this was like his third profession," Wells said. When the
Playboy Bunny entered the classroom, she recalled, "We laughed
our heads off!"
"You have to understand," Catalano
says, "Stetson is a Baptist school, a very reserved and
refined law school, with this Playboy Bunny coming in to see
this Jewish guy. It raised some eyebrows."
While Cosnow worried about not looking his
age, his friends worried about the way he looked in general.
"He'd dress like all of us, only much
more sloppy," Wells said. "He wore shorts all the time.
We'd say, 'Jeff, you could put your shirt in your pants, y'know?'
"
After graduation in 1985 (he just paid off
his last student loan), Cosnow immediately put out a shingle
and began working for himself in Palm Harbor. His practice is
primarily family law, divorce and post-divorce. And while it's
been a while since he's tangled with HRS, his experiences representing
families against the mega-agency left a very sour taste. He sees
its institutional goal as a twisted nightmare, to destroy families
rather than keep them together.
"I've heard them tell a woman that if
she hired an attorney, they'd keep her child out of the family
longer," he claimed. "They're very anti-lawyer. They
are highly defensive; they are highly anti-family. How many parents
can explain every bruise on a two-year-old? Parents fear HRS
and HRS loves it. They have no mission, I think, except to bring
harm and unhappiness to families. It's my belief that HRS is
the example of the unreformable government entity."
His antipathy for HRS bleeds into Cosnow's
general frustration with family law when it comes to a father's
rights in divorce and custody cases, a significant portion of
his practice.
"There is a presumption in the law now
that men are molesters," he said. "Not a day doesn't
go by that the St. Petersburg Times does not have something
on male molesters."
As a result, Cosnow generally discourages
his male clients from seeking full custody except in extreme
cases and particularly if they just want to piss off their ex-wives.
"I say it's the hardest, most miserable thing you can ask
for," he said. "I highly discourage it because they're
going to lose, okay?" And he advises those awarded visitation
rights to use great caution, getting as specific as telling them
to frequently change a child's diapers or underwear to avoid
suspicious-looking rashes.
"When a male client (seeking custody)
calls me and says, 'Jeff, it isn't fair!' I say, 'It's Palm Harbor,
Florida. It's 1940. It's getting dark. You're accused of shoplifting.
You're black. Don't talk to me about what's fair and what's unfair.
Talk to me about what we can do.'
"There is a (great) amount of gender
bias in the court system. It is, to my belief, anti-male. In
the 18th and 19th centuries, men 'owned' their wife and children.
There's been an evolution of thinking that women 'own' their
children. I don't believe anyone has the right to own anybody.
I believe there has been a reversion to the 19th century belief
that women are infants. What do you do with infants? You protect
them. I think it is wrong for women. I think it is an injustice
for women.
"The law says that men and women are
to be treated equally in custody battles, okay? Ask any lawyer
if they are treated equally, okay? I'm not sure they are. This
will probably get me a Bar investigation," he continued.
"But that's okay. We're still in America."
Cosnow accepts what he called "light
criminal" defense, but he's very selective. "I do criminal
if they're not going to prison," he clarified.
He also does personal injury, but doesn't
advertise.
"I don't do silly personal injury,"
he explained. "Clients have fired me because I talked turkey
to them. One woman told me, 'This case is worth $300,000!' I
said we'd be lucky to get $80,000. She fired me. But if I say,
'This is a big money case,' I mean it."
BAY LAWYER FILE
Name: Jeffrey Evan Cosnow
Title: Attorney
Birthplace/date:
Chicago, IL; Sept 8, 1943
Marital Status:
Divorced
Pre-Law: Father,
Robert, was an 8th grade teacher and director of adult education
for Chicago public schools; mother, Phyllis, was a housewife;
Cosnow received a B.A. from Northwestern University, 1965; Masters
from University of East Africa, 1968; J.D. from Stetson University
College of Law, 1985
Biggest Victory:
"Early in my career, a judge had to apologize to the other
side because he ruled in my favor. Justice was on their side,
but the technicality was on my side. Winning in that way means
you have manipulated the system in such a way as to win on the
side of law as it exists."
Biggest Disappointment: "That what is written is not necessarily what
is abided by by the judges."
Lawyer Most Admired:
William Eleazer. "He was the coach of the trial team at
Stetson. We were very different people. He had been a career
Marine. I had a mustache down to here. He said, 'Is there a special
reason you have that mustache down to there?' He got me cut it.
His judgment in that mattered. I respected it. I remember a student
once asked him, could he be called by his first name? He said,
'Sure, Colonel or Professor.' "
Favorite Law-related Book: How to Win Your Case Through Discovery
Favorite Non-law book: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
end
©2000,
All rights reserved. No portion may be reproduced without the
express written permission of the author.
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