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Joe Registrato
"I Always Thought Becoming
a Lawyer Woud Be a Real Interesting Thing To Do"
(Originally published in Pinellas County Review,
January 1995)
By Bob
Andelman
Walking away from one career for another is
never easy. It's especially challenging if you've reached certain
heights in your first profession. Your expectations may be more
than a little difficult to attain.
Just ask Michael Jordan.
Or, if you don't have MJ's cellular phone
number, ask Tampa attorney Joe Registrato.
For more than 10 years, Registrato was city
editor at the Tampa Tribune, responsible for virtually all the
news that fit. Regional, state and national editors reported
to him, giving him standing far above the usual interpretation
of "city editor." He was the paper's Lou Grant, aggressive
and hard-hitting, the kind of editor who inspired reporter loyalty
because no one wanted a scoop as badly as he.
Registrato's tenure was also remarkable because
of who his counterpart across the bay was in those days: His
wife. Janice Martin was the St. Petersburg Times' metro editor,
making them the area's pre-eminent power couple. (They weren't
by any means the only bi-media couples in the bay area, of course.
Denise & John Costa, Tim & Bridget Nickens and Bill Shelton
& Gretchen Letterman all drew one paycheck from the Trib,
one from the Times.)
Registrato and Martin met at the Trib when
he was a young reporter and she worked in the library. For a
time they reported side-by-side, until he became her boss as
assistant city editor. Then, even as he was moving up to city
editor, she relocated to the Times and became metro editor.
"We were head-to-head for a while,"
Registrato recalled. "There were times it got testy, but
I thought we did a good job of keeping it separate" from
their family life.
The high-powered marriage had its share of
problems - the couple separated at one point - but Registrato
said their problems were not from the rocket-fueled competition
between their respective papers.
"That was all going along swimmingly,"
Registrato said. "We thought it was cool."
Enter Doyle Harville, the so-called "Dragon
of the Newsroom." Harville was sent to Tampa in 1987 with
the task of getting the Tribune ready for blood-curdling, head-to-head,
take-no-prisoners competition with the Times. All the old unspoken,
gentlemanly agreements about staying out of each other's wallets
were rend obsolete. And while he made plans to raid the Times'
wallets, he also took great pains to stop his troops from sleeping
with the enemy.
"Mr. Harville came along and changed
a lot of things," Registrato said.
Before long, virtually every department manager
Harville inherited was packing their bags, including Registrato.
He was one of those who had seen the writing on the wall and
had already applied and been accepted to Stetson University College
of Law.
His interest in the law had been piqued by
an investigation reporters Richard Bockman (now an editor at
the Times) and Kalwary did that caught then-Judges Arden Merkle
and Richard Leon in a bribery deal and subsequently led to their
removal from office. "It was the best piece of work I was
associated with at the Tribune," Registrato said. The reporters
and their editors, Registrato and Matt Taylor, won the American
Bar Association's 1984 Silver Gavel Award, the highest recognition
the ABA gives to newspapers.
"I had covered my share of cops and courts
as a reporter. I always thought becoming a lawyer would be a
real interesting thing to do," Registrato said.
Leaving the paper in 1986 at the age of 40
and becoming a student again after so many years was complicated.
Registrato's children were still in day care at the time. Martin,
whose hours kept her at the Times until late, got them off in
the morning while he headed for 8 a.m. classes. Registrato's
family responsibilities began at 5 p.m. when he picked the kids
up from day care, fed, bathed and entertained them. After Martin
arrived, he'd hit the books until bedtime.
"Up until my last semester, I never missed
a class," he said proudly. "Ten people dropped out
of first semester. It scared the bejesus out of me. I was so
goddamned scared that I'd miss something and flunk." Instead,
he finished in the middle of the class of '89, made law review
and even spent a semester on the dean's list.
Martin supported her husband financially when
he went to law school. It's a good thing she kept her job, because
after graduation "there were no big job offers in the mail,"
Registrato said. "It was very difficult for a 44-year-old
guy to get a job."
Hillsborough State Attorney Bill James finally
hired him as a beginning attorney in the misdemeanor division.
"I knew Bill from the early '70s," Registrato said.
"I will forever be grateful to him for that."
A year later, when Registrato hung out his
shingle as sole practitioner, it was his turn to produce because
Martin resigned from the Times and devoted herself to raising
their children. She also started a home-based public relations
agency.
The differences between being on the payroll
at Ma Trib and having to make payroll - his and a secretary's
- in private practice are not lost on Registrato. "Business
is up and down," he said. "You never know what's going
to happen." In December, for example, a pipe burst in the
concrete slab supporting his home, flooding the house, buckling
the floors and forcing the family out for weeks.
"I said to my daughter, 'We used to take
the floor for granted. We can't even take the FLOOR for granted',"
he said, shaking his head.
There's plenty of water in Registrato's law
office, too - in his 55-gallon saltwater aquarium. Some attorneys
have these in their lobbies to amuse waiting clients; Registrato's
is the central feature of his office. His boss in the Hillsborough
State Attorney's Office, Dan Sleet, had one in his office and
Registrato noticed immediately the way he gravitated toward it
in moments of high stress.
"It keeps me calm," he said. "And
my clients like it. Sometimes they come in with kids . . . I
believe it has a calming effect."
That's valuable when your practiced is oriented
to family law.
"Family law is what you really need to
do if you're going to start a practice," Registrato said.
"There's not that much property or corporate law for sole
practitioners."
Registrato has devoted a good deal of time
recently to defending his friend, Hillsborough Public Defender
Julie Holt, against the St. Petersburg Times. Registrato met
Holt while he was in the State Attorney's Office and she was
a defense attorney. When he went into private practice, she sent
him business. He worked in her campaign for public defender,
lobbying the Tribune's editorial board to endorse her (it did)
and he even bought out her share of the office building where
his office is. (His office was once her office.)
Lately, he has made a personal campaign of
defending Holt against the Times.
"I have been fairly aggressive in this,"
he said. "The Times began an investigation of her six months
ago. I have really been on their ass about this. The latest thing
is their attorney (George Rahdert, Rahdert & Anderson) has
asked me not to communicate with their newsroom and to only communicate
with him."
Rahdert confirmed he's been in contact with
Registrato. He just doesn't understand Registrato's standing
in the issue. "I'm trying to clarify what Joe is doing talking
to my clients. Complaining about a story that hasn't yet been
written is an unusual exercise for a former managing editor,"
he said. "And the people complaining are saying much more
vituperative things about our reporters than we would say in
print about a person being investigated. I just wish (Registrato)
would step out from behind the curtains and identify what hat
he's wearing."
"I look at Joe as a good friend of mine,"
Holt said. "He has a great passion for the practice of law."
But she demurred from describing Registrato as her legal representative.
"If Joe does things based on what he knows, he does it in
his own stead. Have I engaged him for formal purposes? The answer
is no."
Meanwhile, Rahdert did confirm a Times investigation
of Holt has been in the works.
"Anybody who holds public office can
expect the public to be interested in them and Ms. Holt is no
exception," Rahdert said. "She's a public figure and
we're going to consider anything that's newsworthy. It's an ongoing
project. I guess the thing that concerns them is there have been
some interviews. But it's not like 60 Minutes is here with their
cameras."
Maybe not, but the Holt experience, combined
with his legal training, has changed the way former newspaper
editor Registrato views the media.
"One of the real weaknesses in the media
is this tendency to want to label everything," he said.
"You hear this all the time: Is he a liberal or a conservative?
They have to have a label. It's an easy way for reporters to
make decisions. In law school, you learn to make fairly fine
decisions. You can't say, 'This is a black issue.' "
In the newsroom, he said, stories were assigned
along lines of color, politics or religion. "Let's let a
black reporter do these black stories. They understand them."
He made decisions that way, something he now regrets. "This
business of labeling is going to be the death of us," Registrato
said. "The thinking is, 'The system is rotten.' Well, that
isn't helping anything."
This reappraisal of the press and its function
has Registrato pursuing a new special interest: defending private
and public persons hounded by the media.
"I think there's a vacuum there,"
he said. "Maybe they're being investigated, or they have
a special problem that the newspaper is getting on them about.
I don't know anybody who's doing that. It's not a traditional
area."
BAY AREA LAWYER PROFILE
Name: Joseph J. Registrato
Position: Sole practitioner
Birthplace/date: Queens, NY; May 7, 1946
Marital Status: Married
Children: Laura, 13; Ellen, 11
Pre-Law: U.S. Marine Corps, 1965-69, including a tour
of Vietnam 68-69: "I was anti-anti-Vietnam. But I lost sight
of the fact the government could be wrong. It took me 20 years
to realize I was wrong"; Joined Tampa Tribune in 1971 as
a reporter; left in January 1987 as night assistant managing
editor; B.A. in Mass Communications, University of South Florida,
'73; Stetson University College of Law, J.D. '89
First Law Job: Assistant State Attorney, Hillsborough
State Attorney's Office
Why I Became a Lawyer: "I took the LSATs in the '70s
and I couldn't find a way to go to law school. It was something
I'd always reported on. I got an opportunity to do it and I did."
Biggest Victory: "Not guilty from a general court
martial on a rape that would have been a life sentence for my
client. His military public defender and I represented him. I
felt that was a major accomplishment. The system had to be stretched
to its limits in that case."
Biggest Disappointment: "I have some people who have
been hurt, and because of the economics involved, they can't
get help. I can't do it. The judicial system is a money-driven
system. People who don't have any money don't get any justice.
That's a disappointment to me."
Lawyer Most Admired: "Abraham Lincoln. He was able
to keep the country together by threats and coercion. He was
known as a liberal guy, but he suspended habeus corpus! He wasn't
liberal at all."
Favorite Law-related Book: Contrary to Popular Opinion
by Alan Dershowitz
Favorite Non-law Book: A World Lit Only By Fire
by William Manchester
end
©2000,
All rights reserved. No portion may be reproduced without the
express written permission of the author.
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