Bill Kunstler Leaves His Mark, Outrageously Fighting for the Underdog : Justice: Lawyer for the unloved and unpopular keeps up his frenetic pace at 74. His current clients include defendants in the World Trade Center bombing.

The Jewish Defense Organization is screaming outside his home. Ugly voices leave death threats on his answering machine. Right-wing columnists are bashing him with renewed vigor. His new clients are widely despised.

Yes, life these days is certainly good, says William M. Kunstler, the attorney that America loves to hate, the man whose name is most often modified with “radical lawyer,” the counselor whose clients aspire to become mere pariahs.

“I’m an old follower of Harry Truman’s line: ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen,’ ” Kunstler said in a voice heard countless times in courtrooms and on camera. “That’s what I’ve done for most of my adult life.”

He’s still doing it. Thirty years after defending the Freedom Riders, two decades after standing up for the Chicago 7, Bill Kunstler is busy as ever, rarely leaving his accustomed place in the spotlight.

His headline-making work these days is representing Muslim fundamentalists accused in a pair of terrorist plots, including the World Trade Center bombing. The media glare has been intense; Kunstler has never flinched.

It’s old hat for Wild Bill, who at 74 still wears his sideburns long and his heart on his sleeve. He made his reputation by working for people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Chicago 7. Philip and Daniel Berrigan. The Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Stokely Carmichael. Lenny Bruce.

“Movement cases,” he calls them. His clients were his friends, and they were all fighting for a cause.

“Those were people that you could really say, ‘I love them,’ ” Kunstler said. “Now it’s harder to do that. I’m dealing with people who are much different than me.”

Indeed. His client list recently reads like a Who’s Who in American Crime: accused terrorists Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny and Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali. Mob boss John Gotti. Crack-smoking ex-mayor Marion S. Barry of Washington, D.C. Cop-shooter Larry Davis. Central Park rapist Yusef Salaam.

Movement cases, too, he says. Victims of racism, government oppression or both. And Kunstler does more than simply represent them; he gets them off. Davis was acquitted of the most serious charges from his gunfight with police in the Bronx; El Sayyid A. Nosair was cleared of killing radical Rabbi Meir Kahane, although convicted on a weapons count.

It’s clients like those that earned Kunstler the title of “America’s most hated lawyer” in a Vanity Fair profile. Kunstler doesn’t mind.

“I like the unpopular clients,” the grandfatherly Kunstler said in his Greenwich Village office, his glasses pushed back in his gray mane of hair. “My whole career is unpopular clients. Sometimes they’re popular in one place, like Martin King, but not in another.

“They are the people that get shafted the most, because the law is different for them. If you’re a pariah, the government can do things.”

Few attorneys can mix the leader of the civil rights movement with the head of the Gambino crime family in a single thought, but Kunstler has never been the typical three-piece suit before the bench.

Judge Julius Hoffman, who presided over the Chicago 7 trials in 1969, learned the hard way. Kunstler relentlessly confronted Hoffman, once needling the judge over who had the longer Who’s Who entry. (Kunstler, by three lines.)

At another point, an envelope filled with marijuana was mailed to Kunstler at the courthouse. Kunstler informed Hoffman about the package; Hoffman told Kunstler to get rid of it.

“Your honor, I shall see to it personally that this is burned tonight,” Kunstler replied. Typical Kunstler outrageousness; he once shot heroin with doomed comedian Lenny Bruce, and another time toasted a mob boss with, “Here’s to crime!”

Kunstler sees a single thread running through all his cases: Fighting the government. He abhors the government, its prejudices, its control of people’s lives. It couldn’t be any other way, Kunstler says.

“I feel marvelous about that,” he said. “I think that’s the role I should play. You can’t get up before the Senate, you can’t get up in the Oval Office. But you can get up in the courtroom, and you can reach one branch of government. To me, that’s a great power.”

Check the walls of his office, and you’ll learn a lot. There are pictures of his two teen-age daughters. (He also has two older children from his first marriage.)

On his bookshelves, such law books as “Criminal Sentences” sit alongside “The Life and Times of Cotton Mather,” “The Truth About Kent State” and “The Films of Marlon Brando.”

Brando is an old friend from the American Indian Movement. The actor called Kunstler at 3 a.m. when son Christian was charged with murdering his sister’s boyfriend; the lawyer was in Los Angeles that day.

A picture of Brando and Kunstler adorns another wall, near a photo of Kunstler at Attica prison during the 1971 riots and a note from movie director Oliver Stone thanking Kunstler for his role as Jim Morrison’s lawyer in “The Doors.” Spike Lee has signed a still from “Malcolm X,” where Kunstler played a vengeful judge, with, “Throw the book at ‘em!”

A photo of Kunstler with the Dalai Lama is partially obscured by a filing cabinet. “We kind of hid the Lama,” Kunstler confesses. “He’s a little too right-wing.”

There’s a detective’s badge with the words, “William Moses Kunstler, Honor to a Good Man”--a gift from a city cop who was a client. There’s a framed shot of Kunstler leaving the U.S. Supreme Court after arguing (successfully) in favor of flag burning.

Kunstler wasn’t born to rabble-rousing. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1941. He was awarded the Bronze Star medal in World War II. He received a law degree at Columbia in 1948.

He went into practice with his brother and became a law school teacher, living with his wife and children in the suburbs. He handled divorces, property closings, wills. He was bored.

A 1961 phone call from the American Civil Liberties Union changed all that.

They asked him to handle a Freedom Riders case in Jackson, Miss. Kunstler did--and never looked back. He’s nearly a decade past retirement age now, but his only concession is riding the subway for a senior citizen’s half-fare.

Kunstler’s critics are legion. Fellow attorney Alan Dershowitz, who’s called him a hypocrite over the Muslim clients, is one of the harshest. The Jewish Defense Organization branded Kunstler a “self-hating Jew” because of his work for Nosair in the Kahane case. “I get that a lot,” said Kunstler, who no longer considers himself Jewish.

Other carpers run the gamut from radio shock jock Howard Stern to syndicated columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

“When world socialism and the peace movement disappeared, Kunstler’s new clients were simple bearers of disorder and destruction,” Tyrrell wrote. “So much for Kunstler’s idealism.”

Another Kunstler client, Kevin McKiever, was found mentally unfit to stand trial for murdering ex-Rockette Alexis Welsh in June, 1991. Her brother-in-law, Todd Welsh, claimed Kunstler took the case to keep his name in the papers.

Kunstler disagrees.

“It isn’t so much seeking out publicity; people seek me out,” he said. “But the point is, I’m not hardly one adverse to media attention. I think it’s healthy as a lawyer.

“But there’s a fine line that you pass, that I guess all of us are in danger of at some time, of where you’re only doing things for the media. . . . In the beginning, I think I came close. But I think I’ve learned to be quite realistic about the publicity.”

Kunstler estimates his annual salary at $100,000, little of it generated by his law practice. (His Muslim clients are getting a free ride.) Books, lectures and personal appearances are his livelihood; the criminal bar and poetry remain his passions.

Poetry?

Kunstler wrote “Our Pleasant Vices,” a book of poems, in 1941. More recently, he penned “Judge Duffy’s Gag Rule” after a federal judge barred both sides in the World Trade Center bombing case from speaking to the media.

He’s also at work on an autobiography. Working title: “Loose Cannon,” although the publisher likes “My Life as a Rebel at the Bar.”