Roofer Turns Attention To Skewering Lawyers : Publications: Revenge fuels a monthly newsletter project aimed at making life hell for attorneys.

In December, 1990, Alfred Adask angrily banged out an open and doggedly ominous letter to the State Bar of Texas.

“I am your enemy,” he said. “I will hurt every member . . . and their families just as you have hurt me and mine. I realize I may not get that opportunity, but God help you if I do.”

Since then, he has struggled night and day to carry out that threat.

Adask, 47, is the founder, publisher and editor of AntiShyster, a gleefully venomous and spasmodically monthly magazine “dedicated to raising hell for lawyers.”

There’s scant evidence the legal community is concerned, although the publication has not gone unnoticed.

“It’s not something we pass around to dignify,” says Marcy Goodfleisch, a spokeswoman for the State Bar. “It hasn’t generated a great deal of attention, negative or otherwise.”

Adask is hardly deterred.

“Call me a wide-eyed optimist . . . but I suspect there’s a 50-50 chance that a social climate may emerge similar to the McCarthy era of the 1950s, except we won’t hunt Communists. We’ll hunt attorneys,” he said.

A volatile, name-calling, scatter-shooting harangue, AntiShyster is more than an outlet for Al Adask’s fury and despair over lawyers, judges, politicians and the legal system. It is his essence.

“I like writing,” said Adask, a roofer by trade. “And this is the job I was meant to do. It is the silver lining in this whole thing. I’m now the man I was meant to be.”

Adask’s wrath, and his desktop publishing venture, stem from a bitter and painful 1983 divorce case.

“It ripped out the middle of my life, destroyed my relationship to my children and ruined a small business simply because I was the only litigant capable of paying both attorney fees,” Adask says.

“The lives of hundreds of thousands of other parents and children are being systematically crippled by a legal system whose principle purposes are to encourage litigation and enrich attorneys.”

With malice aforethought, Adask writes with a song on his lips, revenge in his heart and mayhem on his mind.

“I want you to hurt,” he told lawyers in his December, 1990, debut. “I want you to ache. I want you to suffer, just as I have, as my children have, as hundreds of thousands of your victims have. . . .

“I, too, believe in punitive damages.”

The 24-page publication offers annual subscriptions for $25, although not always in consecutive months. Adask skipped a recent issue because he was busy organizing demonstrations at the American Bar Assn. convention in Dallas.

An earlier issue was scuttled because of “time, money, reality, personal inefficiency, a format change and a contractual dispute.”

AntiShyster is anything but subtle, spitting out data Adask says he has assembled the last eight years.

It is outrageous: “Each attorney does five times more harm to this nation’s people, economy and future welfare than the average drug addict.”

It is incisive: “Injustice doesn’t happen by accident. That’s where the money is. . . . Once you understand there’s no profit in a just court, you’ll understand the driving force behind the injustice of our legal system.”

It is provocative: “I suspect . . . our judicial system wreaks more psychological carnage on American lives than was ever caused by any foreign war.”

It is unassuming: “I don’t pretend AntiShyster is world-class writing--it will often sound more like a howl in the dark than conventional journalism.”

AntiShyster has howled endlessly at a legal and judicial system it describes as the “biggest extortion racket in the Western world.”

It has chronicled accounts of purported abuse in everything from minor divorce cases to multimillion-dollar bank scams, bankruptcy rulings and estate rip-offs.

A recent issue chuckled over a Houston divorce lawyer who sued a client for $20,000, but got hammered by a jury’s $18-million malpractice judgment.

Adask has offered “helpful hints” on impeaching judges, circumventing fat legal fees and obtaining preventive therapy for “post-litigation stress syndrome.”

Last year, AntiShyster dangled a $10,000 bet in front of Texas lawyers, challenging them to produce five attorneys who can successfully argue publicly that they are honorable human beings and proud to be members of the State Bar.

Adask repeated the wager in the March edition, addressing the offer to bar officers by name.

He said he would produce five opponents as a counterpoint.

“I’ve never heard a peep from them,” Adask smiled. “They might find somebody dumb enough to try it, but they’re not going to win it.”

Harriet Miers of Dallas, president-elect of the State Bar, said she and her 55,000 members “can spend our time more productively fulfilling our responsibilities.”

Miers said she scanned a copy of AntiShyster and determined it was “not something I wanted to spend my time reading.”

Before launching his magazine, Adask ran for the Legislature as a Republican, vowing to “reduce the power, privileges and immunities” of Texas lawyers.

“I got my butt kicked,” he says.

Undaunted, he announced in March he would seek the Libertarian Party nomination for the Texas Supreme Court, whose justices must be licensed lawyers. “My non-lawyer candidacy is based on a personal interpretation of some Reconstruction-era laws,” he explained.

Adask is philosophical about his chances, as well as his anti-lawyer effort.

“If I lose, if this blows up in my face, I’m still getting my shot in life,” he says. “A lot of people don’t. If it doesn’t work out, that’s all right.

“At least I got up to the plate.”