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Lazzaro & Paul
"I've Always Found Something
to Love in All My Clients, As Hard As That Seems"
(Originally published in Pinellas County Review,
January 1995)
By Bob
Andelman
Henry Paul, the second attorney on the letterhead
at the Tampa firm of Lazzara & Paul, comes from a baseball
family. His legendary father, Gabe, spent a lifetime running
the front offices of teams such as the St. Louis Cardinals to
the New York Yankees. His brother, Gabe Jr., is a vice president
of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Maybe it was inevitable Henry - who grew up
in Tampa alongside George Steinbrenner's kids - would wind up
in sports, but he took the long way home, attending Florida State
University and Stetson Law, establishing a very different career
than his dad's or brother's.
"When you're exposed to it your whole
life, you think there's a special feel you have for it,"
Paul said. "My father, when I was a little boy, made me
promise not to get into baseball. It was after a particularly
tough doubleheader lose in St. Louis. But I never promised I
wouldn't go into hockey."
Phil Esposito remembers well his first meeting
with Paul. It took place March 26, 1990 at Malio's in Tampa.
Paul was the first person with whom the hockey hall-of-famer
broached the subject of Tampa Bay entering the NHL. The conversation
went something like this:
Esposito: "Do
you think hockey can survive in Tampa Bay?"
Paul: "Yes."
"Then, are you ready?"
"For what?"
"To go for it."
"Sure."
"Then you're my partner."
"I came back one day from court,"
recalled Paul's partner, Bennie Lazzara Jr., "and he's got
Phil Esposito in his office and he says, 'We're going to get
an NHL team.' I though he was crazy."
Crazy and then some. But well-connected and
crazy goes a long way in sports. Paul had a baseball bat in his
law office that was a gift from his friend Tak Kojima, president
and general manager of the Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team.
Kojima was an acquaintance by way of Paul's father and the New
York Yankees; when the Ham Fighters began a relationship with
the Yankees many years ago, Paul helped Kojima with his English.
Esposito was absent-mindedly swinging the
bat in the office one day when he noticed Kojima's name. "Who's
that?" he asked. Before long, Esposito and Paul were on
a flight to Japan, where they persuaded Kojima to invest in the
Lightning. Kojima subsequently brought in additional Japanese
to form the big bucks behind the team.
It was also Paul who helped open a door to
Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was briefly an investor
in the team.
Still, when the Lightning looked like it might
become a reality, Gabe Sr. warned his son: Don't give your day
job.
Bennie Lazzara Jr., Paul's law partner, was
a part of the Lightning effort, too, from being part of the ownership
group's successful presentation to the league to the naming of
the franchise itself.
"The franchise was named at Bennie's
house," Paul said. "He had a party there and there
was a big lightning storm. His mother said, 'Why don't you call
the team the Lightning?' And Phil said, 'I think you're right!'
"
Everything but its name was traumatic for
the Lightning's birth, from solidifying its financing to keeping
the ice at the ThunderDome frozen during exhibition games. Only
some issues were settled when the team finally hit the ice in
the fall of 1992; the biggest, a permanent place to play, wasn't
resolved with certainty until the first pilings of a new arena
were being driven in downtown Tampa this fall.
"It's been a grind," Paul said of
the Lightning's endless problems converting its dream team into
reality. "It was all-consuming for a while." It wasn't
that Paul abandoned his practice; the Lightning was his practice
for two years.
"He handled the stress well," said
Paul's friend Steve Holtzman, senior counsel at Home Shopping
Network. "But for somebody who's a criminal lawyer, that's
not surprising."
"He held up terrific," Esposito
confirmed. "In fact he, more than anyone, kept his cool.
There were times that I was ready to commit hari-kari. Henry
would say, 'Let's try it this way.' He was the rock of the group;
he's become one of my best friends in the world. And he knows
I don't like lawyers."
For his trouble, fees aside, Paul, Esposito,
Mel Lowell and Mark Perrone, a.k.a. the Tampa Bay Hockey Group,
own a 7 percent interest in the Lightning.
Paul's experience with the Lightning leveled
the playing field between him and Lazzara, giving the younger
lawyer a broader and deeper practice that balanced his strengths
against Lazzara's sparkling reputation as the best criminal defense
attorney money can buy.
"It gave me a much greater appreciation
for complex business and finance questions," Paul said.
"I experienced many of the things our clients experience.
The problems the Lightning had are about as difficult as you
can come up with."
"Henry expanded the horizons of the firm,
not just financially, but in sports, and not just in this country
but internationally," Lazzara said. "He changed the
capacity of the firm to work in other areas."
Make no mistake: these are good times for
the firm of Lazzara & Paul. But back around that last bend
in the road came a noxious blast of exhaust fumes, one that left
the partners wheezing and gasping for fresh air.
How else to describe a situation where its
revealed that your partner of eight years has been stealing from
you and his clients? That the situation is so bad he not only
is forced to resign from the Bar but is convicted and sentenced
to five years in prison?
That's the nightmare Bennie Lazzara and Henry
Paul endured in 1994. While their own practices thrived, partner
Bernard Caskey's was discovered diverting funds from escrow accounts
by telling his clients that their personal injury cases settled
for less than they actually did. LIKEWISE, he kept money that
should have gone to the firm by XXXXXXX.
Caskey joined Lazzara in 1982 from U.S. Senator
Richard Stone's office; he became a partner in 1986 and joined
the firm's masthead. He was dropped like a rock within days of
the shocking revelations.
"It was heartbreaking," Lazzara
said. "I'd never suffered anything like that before. It
was like hearing of the death of a family member."
Remarkably, Lazzara and Paul - as a firm and
as individuals - were largely unscathed Caskey's actions. His
clients were all reimbursed (HOW?) and the firm, which Lazzara
described as "thriving," ate its own losses.
Helping eviscerate the impact of losing Caskey
was the return to full duty of Paul. After several years of dealing
with just one client, the Lightning, he began rebuilding a more
general practice in 1994, sharing the load with Lazzara and associate
Eddie Suarez, who came over from the Hillsborough County State
Attorney's office four years ago.
Lazzara never minded Paul's work for the Lightning.
"At least I knew what he was doing," he said,
laughing.
Lazzara & Paul is a full-range litigation
boutique firm, Lazzara said, "from traffic to trafficking."
The University of Florida (B.A., '66; Law '69) graduate's best-known
cases are often those in which has defended public officials
such as former Hillsborough County Commissioner Fred Anderson
or Chief Judge Guy Spicola. He successfully defended Key Bank
against charges the bank's president and other employees had
broken banking laws. That case was noteworthy because the state
intercepted more calls than ever before via wiretaps but the
wiretap evidence was subsequently suppressed at trial.
Lazzara, 50, came up as a Hillsborough County
assistant state attorney in 1969 under Joe Spicola. His specialty
was trying capital cases, an interest which continued when he
went private.
"That's how I started doing a lot of
murder cases; I tried to pattern my practice after what we did
in the State Attorney's office," he explained. "We
were a small group of guys with a small docket of murder and
rape cases we concentrated on. I've always found something to
love in all my clients, hard as that may seem."
In 1974, Lazzara was in a partnership with
Tony Gonzalez. That lasted until 1980, when Lazzara went solo.
Sometimes Lazzara's criminal cases generate
civil litigation, as when his successful defense of former Pasco
County Sheriff John Short on criminal charges led Short to file
a civil lawsuit against the St. Petersburg Times because
of its sensational allegations of misdeeds. Lazzara lost the
civil suit. He's headed for a similar situation with a civil
suit on behalf of Richard Miller, acquitted earlier this year
of killing his wife and her boss in the Brandon Pizza Hut murders.
One of the sensational elements of the case was the testimony
of a blood-slatter expert.
The Pizza Hut case was another in a long career
of cases which put Lazzara in the public eye. "It was strikingly
similar to the O.J. Simpson case - the expert witnesses and the
scientific evidence was very similar," he said. Lazzara
was interviewed by ABC-TV's "Turning Point" and Connie
Chung's CBS-TV show "Eye to Eye" asked him about the
use of jury selection experts.
"I look at the firm as a litigation boutique,"
Lazzara said. "The kind of cases people know are going to
trial seem to end up here. If you look at firms comparable to
us, we spend more time in court than most people. That's not
be choice so much as by fate; the people who come to us don't
want to settle. They want to go to court and fight."
Another Lazzara criminal defense client likely
headed for civil court: Mark Urbanski, son of former Tampa
Tribune general manager Jim Urbanski. That won't be by choice;
the suit will be brought by the Clearwater woman Urbanski and
his friends were accused of raping. The woman is represented
by Barry Cohen.
"What's neat about Bennie is, he's the
kind of guy you can have a good friendship with and a
true adversarial relationship," Cohen said. "We're
on opposite sides of the Mark Urbanski case. But we still go
to lunch. I consider Bennie to be a lawyer of impeccable integrity.
He understands when to play hardball and when to play softball.
"I taught him everything he knows,"
Cohen added. "But he's done more with it than I ever could."
The Lazzara/Paul partnership came by accident,
not design. Paul joined the firm after graduating from Stetson
and planned on a short stay. But Lazzara brought him into court
immediately, taught him the ropes and Paul never again thought
of moving on.
"He's been a tremendous teacher,"
Paul said.
Another graduate of the Lazzara school agreed.
Mike Gillick became a lawyer after 11 years on the Tampa police
force. His first job was as a clerk for Lazzara, eventually becoming
a partner. Working for the revered criminal defense attorney,
Gillick said, "gave me a degree of instant credibility.
Bennie is widely respected and duly so. I learned from Bennie
that you can practice criminal or any kind of law and you can
do it ethically. There's a core of good criminal lawyers in town,
but I think Bennie is head and shoulders above all of them."
Bob Polli, a Stetson classmate of Paul's,
also fondly remembers his days as a Lazzara partner. They still
hang out, most recently taking in the Rolling Stones concert
at Tampa Stadium together.
"Bennie gets inspiration from events
like that," Polli said. "It was not uncommon for him
to rent a bus and take the whole office to a Jimmy Buffett concert."
According to Polli, the work of Buffett, the Stones, Carlos Santana
and Bob Dylan makes life worth living for Lazzara. "He gets
inspiration from them to make it another day."
Not all of the business of Lazzara & Paul
is litigious, criminal or sports-oriented. The firm also provides
Florida legal services to 6,500 clients of a publicly-held Oklahoma
corporation, Pre-Paid Legal Services Inc. These clients - who
contacted the firm via a 1-800 telephone number - are entitled
to free consultations, letters and wills. Two staff associates
work strictly on Pre-Paid cases.
"That's growing," Lazzara said.
"We provide services for the common folk at rates they can
afford; it adds another dimension to the firm. We've found the
bulk of our work is phone consultation and letter writing. Not
much trial. But we're probably going to have to get some more
lawyers."
Lazzara consults and manages the Pre-Paid
business, but rarely handles its actual cases.
On the firm's more traditional, larger cases,
clients may see Lazzara, Paul or Eddie Suarez as their attorney
but they're generally getting the benefit of the entire braintrust
in their defense.
"It's a team approach," Lazzara
explained. "As a boutique firm, we try not to lose."
"To me, that's one of the special things
about the way we operate," Paul said. "There's give
and take, cooperation. We share the problems."
"Our cases are pretty complex,"
Lazzara said. "Sometimes I wish I got some average cases.
But that's not the way it is. Sometimes we call ourselves the
Saints of the Hopeless Case."
Bay Area Law Firm Profile
Firm: Lazzara
& Paul
Founded:
Location: Tampa
Number of partners: 2
Staff: 3 associates; 4 paralegals; 6 administrative assistants;
of counsel: Nathan Eden, Key West
Major clients: Tampa Bay Lightning, Key Bank, E-Systems,
Pre-PaidLegal Services Inc.
Areas of law: Civil litigation and criminal defense
Big lawsuits:
Revenues: Would not reveal
end
©2000,
All rights reserved. No portion may be reproduced without the
express written permission of the author.
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