Commentary : Defense Counsel ‘Stars’ at Drug Trial

Bits and pieces from the notebook of a reporter who spent 14 days covering a drug trial that brought some colorful theater to American jurisprudence: The United States vs. Philadelphia caterer, baseball groupie Curtis Strong.

Curtis Strong had the title role and baseball top billing, but the star of the proceedings that played daily to a packed house on the eighth floor of Pittsburgh’s Federal Courthouse and a television audience of 60 million Americans was flamboyant defense counsel Adam Renfroe.

Dressed in elegant, hand-tailored silk suits, monogrammed shirts and shoes made of exotic animal skins, Renfroe was a one-man theatrical troupe, changing character faster than he could yell “objection.”

With a flash of an ingratiating smile, the hostile interrogator became the stand-up comedian who, in turn, simply straightened his posture and became the urbane man-about-town.

By modulating his baritone voice into tenor range and accelerating his speech patterns, Renfroe easily became street-wise and talked turkey with the black ballplayers.

When he added rhythm to his high-pitched speeches spectators had to work hard to refrain from clapping their hands or shouting “alleluia!”

In his hell-fire-and-brimstone summation to the jury he apologized his enthusiasm.

“It was no act, ladies and gentlemen,” Renfroe said of his fiery speeches and his sometimes sarcastic remarks to witnesses.

Rather, Renfroe told the jury, his misspoken words were slips of the tongue resulting from his pent-up emotions.

Renfroe might have had in mind remarks such as those he addressed to San Francisco outfielder Jeff Leonard.

“Are you still numb in the head, Mr. Leonard?” Renfroe retorted after Leonard, a rehabilitated former user, said that rubbing the cocaine on one’s gums created a numbing effect in the mouth and the head.

Renfroe was particularly tough on Cincinnati Reds star Dave Parker, referring in his cross-examination of the former Pirate and in his closing argument to his “$25,000 watch,” “$2,000 alligator shoes” and “diamonds and gold” on his hands.

What the jury did not know was that the sartorially splendid counsel took off his own heavy gold jewelry each morning and deposited it in his left suit pocket shortly before the panel was brought into the courtroom.

At that point, he also usually discarded an unlawyerly wad of chewing gum.