Yagman Skis After Suspension : Lawyer Sits One Out After Stepping on Many a Toe

Stephen Yagman, a one-man legal blitzkrieg who has filed more successful police abuse lawsuits than any other lawyer in California--and crushed plenty of powerful toes in the process--was nursing his wounds in one of this Rocky Mountain resort’s best night spots.

Still red-faced from a long day on the slopes, the 43-year-old Westwood attorney poured the last drop out of a $200 bottle of Perrier Jouet, raised a toast and contemplated the bright side of his six-month suspension by the California Supreme Court.

“The best part,” he said, “is I’m here, and they’re there.”

This was on Jan. 30, just four days after the Supreme Court upheld the State Bar’s findings that Yagman had been “hostile, forceful and aggressive” with his own clients, and it ordered him to undergo psychiatric counseling or present a doctor’s statement that he didn’t need it.

In 12 years of scrapping with the Los Angeles legal establishment, Yagman never has allowed himself to take a direct hit--or allowed anyone else the last shot. Now, in a moment of career crisis, the man who has made his reputation defending the down-and-out was attempting to exact his revenge by living well.

He had entered the lobby of the elegant Hotel Jerome in a pair of swim trunks and a towel. “You can interview me in the Jacuzzi,” he offered. He ran up a $650 dinner bill with a few friends, fumed that the feast had made him late for the dance contest, and announced he had “discovered champagne.”

“I’ll probably be able to get in perhaps 60 to 70 days of skiing this year,” Yagman reflected at one point, “which will be more skiing than I’ve ever previously been able to get in in any winter season.”

Yagman seemed almost aggressive in his nonchalance. His long-running feuds with powerful judges, law enforcement officers and politicians have kept him in the public spotlight for years, but this time, it seemed, they had scored a hit. “You know the guy, how strongly he identifies with his role,” a friend said. “Somebody took his role away from him.”

The Bar, after a long series of hearings, found that Yagman had charged an “unconscionable fee” to one client and “willfully failed” to provide a written accounting of $50,000 deposited with him by another client. In the latter case, there was no allegation that Yagman did not intend to return the money, and in fact he did. The Bar found also that Yagman had received a word processor from a client in violation of a court order.

In a year when the State Bar, responding to criticism that it has not done enough to control its own ranks, has increased attorney discipline actions by 43%, Yagman’s longtime critics--mostly police officers and the lawyers who defend them--said Yagman’s conduct was precisely the kind that should be policed.

But Yagman’s supporters said the punishment was unusually harsh for an attorney who, as several State Bar hearing officers pointed out in their report, had battled with his clients, “not for personal gain, but (in) the mistaken belief that his acts were in the clients’ best interests.”

Called Political Retribution

Yagman himself said his suspension was political retribution for his outspokenness against some of the more powerful judges and politicians in the state.

“I think,” he said in an interview here, “that I am perceived as a serious threat to corrupt and abusive government officials, and that the nature and extent of the punishment is simply a reflection of fear by those people in government who are made nervous by me.”

Yagman practices almost exclusively in the federal courts. His specialty is filing civil rights lawsuits against police departments on behalf of clients who believe they have been wrongfully arrested, improperly searched, illegally shot or beaten or otherwise abused at the hands of law enforcement.

Along the way, Yagman has publicly criticized the chief U.S. district judge of Los Angeles, Manuel L. Real (whom he accused of having mental disorders), state Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas (whom he called a racist and an anti-Semite), Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley (whom he described as an Uncle Tom) and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates (whom he has called the personification of the devil).

“Yagman evokes extremely strong emotions in lawyers and judges: they either swear by him or at him,” the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal trade paper, observed recently. “Most of the time, it seems, they swear at him.”

In his small practice, Yagman undoubtedly has filed more lawsuits against Southland police agencies than any other attorney. While he has won many, Yagman will admit he has lost more.

It was Yagman who won an unprecedented $170,000 punitive damage award in December against Gates after the police chief testified in the case of a family whose home had been virtually demolished by an LAPD gang unit and told reporters later that the man whose nose was broken by the officers was “probably lucky that’s all he had broken.”

Remarks Published

“And then his remarks were printed in the papers the next day,” Yagman recalled gleefully of the Gates incident. “I came into court, hung them around his neck and hoisted him up to the ceiling, and the jury left him hanging there.”

Among other notable victories, Yagman won $150,000 for the family of a young Mexican national who hanged himself in the Los Angeles County Jail, a lawsuit that led to better psychiatric evaluation of inmates. And he won from a jury $450,000--later reduced by a judge--for a forklift operator shot in his garage by L.A. County sheriff’s deputies.

More important than damage awards he has won, Yagman said, is the fact that his cases force police officers into court to explain their conduct.

Nonetheless, he has also represented police officers in a number of controversial, highly publicized cases, including the Stanton officer who accidentally shot a 5-year-old boy and the Signal Hill police officers investigated in connection with the jailhouse death of former football player Ron Settles (a case that caused the civil rights attorney difficulties with the American Civil Liberties Union).

In any given month, Yagman will take one or more cases to a jury, a schedule almost unheard of in federal court.

He has been accused of taking on so many cases--maintaining as many as 200 active cases at any one time--that he cannot adequately prepare for them all. After assaulting the other side in a barrage of pretrial motions, Yagman is likely to walk into court in a police shooting case without ever having deposed the officer who did the shooting.

Yagman said he has done so many civil rights cases that he doesn’t need exhaustive preparation every time, and doing less pretrial examination of witnesses--part of what lawyers refer to as the discovery process--can work to his strategic advantage.

Different Approach

“My belief,” he said, “is that less discovery is more conducive to finding the truth. Doing lots of discovery puts them in a position where they can fabricate stories.”

Yagman’s trials careen from the ridiculous to the sublime, from humor to outrage, with breakneck speed. From a complicated forensic analysis of the path of a bullet he is likely to launch into a discussion with the jury of John Locke’s “Second Treatise on Government” for an explication of the origins of human rights.

When he represented sunbathers who were nabbed for nudity in the summer of 1981, Yagman inquired of one of the arresting deputies on the stand whether the defendant was circumcised.

“I don’t remember,” the deputy replied.

“Does he have a navel?” Yagman asked.

“Yes,” said the deputy.

“Is it an ‘innie’ or an ‘outie’?”

Yagman always has been something of a maverick. In the pinstriped world of the Los Angeles federal courthouse, Yagman is a lawyer who goes hunting for hot dogs on lunch breaks, leaves his office early to go to the beach and wears his hair in wild curls (until he sheared it recently in a bet with a Republican politician).

Police in general leave a bad taste in his mouth. Power is suspicious. Money may have been ill-gotten. Politicians can be bought. Even the liberal establishment he regards as “wishy-washy.”

Leon Bornstein, Yagman’s former boss in the New York special prosecutor’s office and a longtime acquaintance, said Yagman “was never taught to toe the line and fear the system. He believes that if he’s right, he should pursue it, and that right will out. Unfortunately, right doesn’t always come out. Wrong often wins, much to everybody’s chagrin.”

Yagman grew up in Brooklyn. He said he first decided to be a lawyer when, at age 8, he read a newspaper article about a white politician refusing to sell his home to a black or a Jewish family.

“I asked my mother whether or not there was anyone who could do something about that,” he recalled.

“She said, ‘Yes, there is,’ and I said, ‘Who?’ And she said, ‘A lawyer,’ and I said, ‘That’s what I’m going to be, a lawyer.’ ”

He said his father, Abe Yagman, a dental technician, had lived with a long-undiagnosed learning disability that made him distant from his children. Yagman had a similar disability himself that prevented him from reading printed material until his early teens. Today, he has nearly perfect recall of everything he has read and can quote at will from Locke, Nietzche and Aristotle.

“My father would frequently make decisions about things, and when I or my sister would inquire the reasons for his decisions, he would simply say things like, ‘Because I am your father.’ And as a child I perceived that as being very arbitrary. . . . It made me have a very healthy dislike for anything that was arbitrary, and I still have that.”

Not until he was in his 30s did Yagman finally become close to his father, and by then, it was nearly too late. Abe Yagman died of cancer a little more than a year ago.

During his father’s last months, Yagman rented the apartment next to his in Venice, moved his parents into it and spent most of the last days of his father’s life with him, shunning social engagements and postponing appointments.

One day, on an impulse, he went back to the apartment and found his father dead. Dismissing the mortician’s employees, he picked up the body and carried it down three flights of stairs to be taken away.

“I loved my father, and I did what was appropriate and consistent with my feelings toward him,” he said in the interview here, wiping away tears.

Telephoned Apology

Such displays of emotion are rare for Yagman, and the next day he telephoned to apologize, blaming it on the champagne.

“I also wanted to tell you this,” he said. “Mahatma Gandhi was disbarred in 1922 at a time when he was a civil rights lawyer. Three or four weeks ago, the Inn of Court of which he was a member in England reinstated him. I just wanted to point that out.”

Yagman described the charges involved in his own suspension as “minor infractions” that occurred nearly eight years ago.

“The discipline imposed is grossly out of proportion, particularly when there are attorneys at large who have committed felonies, and others who have stolen clients’ money are suspended for shorter periods of time, if at all,” he has said.

“Particularly in California, the place of the Japanese internments and the Hollywood blacklistings, those who challenge the system become victims of witch hunts to discredit them.”

The lawyer who represented Yagman in the disciplinary proceedings, Santa Monica criminal defense attorney Brian O’Neill, said he believes the charges were politically motivated.

“He’s just not a member of the club,” O’Neill said.

The most serious charge leveled by the State Bar involved a $1-million default judgment that Yagman had obtained on behalf of a client who had been burned by a camp lantern. When the defendant offered to settle for $65,000 rather than fighting the $1-million judgment in court, the woman, as she would testify later, told Yagman she was tired and wanted to accept.

According to the Bar findings, Yagman, who was to collect 39% of the woman’s award, notified her that he intended to collect his fee based not on a $65,000 settlement, but on the $1-million default judgment.

Yagman, the findings indicate, withdrew the fee demand a short time later, but the State Bar still concluded that his demand had constituted an “unconscionable fee.”

He conceded in testimony before the State Bar that his conduct was “reasonably brutal” and that he should not have written the letter.

“She was terribly scarred and burned, and I just should have let her alone,” he testified.

But Yagman said that he had been frustrated that the company was going to be able to walk away from a $1-million judgment and believed that the woman was being unfairly pressured to settle the case by another attorney who needed the money.

“I’ve never been interested in fees,” he testified. “Civil rights law doesn’t earn us a lot of money at all. I’ve never in my life been motivated by money.”

Nine State Bar referees voted in favor of disciplining Yagman. Five voted against it: one because it was thought that the suggested discipline was insufficient, the others because they thought the punishment to be excessive and, for some of them, because Yagman had acted in what he believed was his clients’ best interest. Some of the dissenters argued that the psychiatric counseling recommendation was punitive and without basis.

But Susan L. Leventhal, a State Bar examiner who urged an even longer suspension, argued in her brief on the case that Yagman had displayed a “disturbing hostility and vindictiveness” toward his own clients. She stated further that he had “repeatedly engaged in conduct pervaded by moral turpitude, bad faith and overreaching.”

Yagman testified before the panel that he solved the problems of conflicts with his clients by undergoing a process known as cognitive therapy to help him “identify” and deal with his own bad moods, and by asking his law partner to handle much of the client contact in the office.

“I generally talk to them a couple days before trial,” he said. “I tend to be aggressive and hostile and forceful, and clients need a different attitude than that.”

Yagman’s supporters are troubled by the Bar’s psychiatric counseling requirement--”a cheap shot,” one called it.

“I don’t think he’s even slightly crazy,” Bornstein said. “I just think he’s very committed, and he’s myopic about it, and he doesn’t realize that he’s rubbing a lot of people the wrong way--people who will take vengeance on him if given the chance to do so.”

Yagman has presented reporters with a sworn statement from a New York psychiatrist that the requirement he receive psychiatric care is “bizarre and wrongheaded.”

“Coerced psychotherapy, like coerced religious conversion, is an invasion of personal and spiritual privacy,” stated Dr. Thomas Szasz, author of a book called “The Myth of Mental Illness.”

Among those testifying on Yagman’s behalf before the State Bar were U.S. District Judge Robert M. Takasugi, U.S. Magistrate Joseph Reichmann, former Municipal Judge Jill Jakes and Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, who called Yagman “the kind of lawyer that we really need here if the system is going to work.”

Yagman, meanwhile, headed out of Aspen last week. He returned to Los Angeles for a few days and then was to fly on to New York. He had made reservations for spring skiing in South America, and refused to discuss further the suspension issue, which he dismissed as “one rock in a long jetty that goes out into the sea.”

Yagman did say, however, that he intended to be back in time for an Aug. 29 trial.

He said the case involves a souvenir vendor whose merchandise was confiscated at a Lakers game by the Inglewood Police Department. It happened that the vendor’s attorney is a friend of Yagman’s.

“They stepped on a land mine,” Yagman said, beaming.