Civil Rights Lawyer Charged : Courts: A. Thomas Hunt, a pioneering attorney who forced L.A. police and fire agencies to hire more minorities, is accused of cheating clients and practicing law without a license.

Trailblazing civil rights attorney A. Thomas Hunt, who forced institutions as varied as the Los Angeles Police Department and Chippendale’s nightclub to diversify their work forces, has been charged with six felony counts of cheating clients and practicing law without a license.

Hunt stands accused of stealing money from the very people whose causes he once championed--a pregnant woman denied promotions, a black man excluded from job skills training and a veteran teacher alleging age discrimination.

In a separate civil case, a Superior Court judge Tuesday sentenced Hunt to five days in jail for failing to notify clients that he relinquished his license to practice law in November, 1993, and for neglecting to return their fees within 20 days of resigning from the State Bar.

Head slightly bowed, Hunt, 52, followed sheriff’s deputies out of a Santa Monica courtroom to be taken to County Jail. Several former clients--who had clucked, hissed and even shouted insults during the hearing--clapped with glee as he was led away.

“Maybe he was a good attorney (at one point), but he was a rip-off artist as far as I was concerned,” said racetrack employee Steven Smith, who said Hunt took his money to prepare a class-action lawsuit, then kept it even after the case collapsed. “I just think it’s pathetic.”

Once praised for giving up contingency fees so his clients could keep every penny awarded them at trial, Hunt has recently drawn sharp criticism from the State Bar for allegedly failing to return fees paid to him in cases he swiftly abandoned.

“He calls himself the champion of the disadvantaged . . . (and) his resume reads like a tribute to Perry Mason, but something happened along the way,” said Howard Bennett, who claims that Hunt took $6,000 from him and bungled an age discrimination case against the Culver City school system.

Hunt’s attorney, Mark Werksman, said his client will plead not guilty to all six criminal charges at his arraignment May 10.

But Werksman could not respond to specific allegations against Hunt, saying he had been on the case for just one week and was still trying to determine “what (Hunt’s) obligations were, and why some obligations were and were not met.”

Reached at his Culver City home, Hunt declined to comment on the charges against him. But in a 1992 document filed with the State Bar in an attempt to win reinstatement of his license, he blamed some of his behavior on alcoholism.

If convicted on all counts, Hunt could be sentenced to six years in state prison.

Hunt’s slide has stunned his colleagues, who regarded him as one of the most aggressive and principled attorneys to fight discrimination in the two decades after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

Admiringly, they recall Hunt’s work with the nonprofit Center for Law in the Public Interest in the 1970s.

In one celebrated case, Hunt won agreement from the Los Angeles County Fire Department to hire more African Americans and Latinos until the work force’s ethnic makeup mirrored the city’s population. He won a similar deal with the Los Angeles Police Department--after a lawsuit that took seven years and made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This was his life,” said Marc Coleman, a Long Beach attorney who worked with Hunt on job discrimination cases in the early 1980s. “He was solely interested in getting jobs for women and minorities.”

Civil rights attorney Laurence B. Labovitz said: “For Southern California purposes, he was truly the pioneer. It’s not like it was him and someone else. It was just him.”

Hunt’s arrest, Labovitz said, “broke a lot of hearts.”

And not just in the legal community.

Hunt’s alleged misconduct shocked clients who counted on his stellar reputation to win them better jobs, higher pay or more opportunity in industries dominated by white males.

“We all felt really abandoned and overwhelmed by his dishonesty,” said Michael Johnson, a dockworker who put up $1,000 for Hunt to start work on a class-action lawsuit alleging racist hiring practices. “He had this past history of fighting for discrimination cases, and we felt really disappointed in him.”

In hiring Hunt, Johnson knew that the Beverly Hills attorney had engineered landmark settlements with port employers in the 1970s and 1980s--agreements that opened several trades to women and minorities for the first time. He did not know, however, that the State Bar had just suspended Hunt’s legal license for the second time in two years.

“Our focus was on getting Mr. Hunt out of the profession,” said David Carr, deputy trial counsel for the State Bar. “We had more than enough (evidence) to justify his disbarment.”

Hunt resigned from the Bar with disciplinary charges pending against him Nov. 9, 1993--two weeks after accepting Johnson’s case.

Werksman, his attorney, said Hunt had “experienced some troubled times in his practice. . . . We’re trying to determine what the fallout from those troubled times will be.”

Former clients who have pelted the Bar with complaints about Hunt have very clear ideas about what the fallout should be.

Many have been reimbursed by the Bar’s Client Security Fund, which compensates victims of dishonest lawyers. But the refund checks hardly quelled their anger.

“The damage he had done, as far as my job--there was no way he could pay that back,” said a dockworker who claims that her employer has harassed and ridiculed her since her attempt at filing a class-action sex discrimination suit collapsed. “I’ve been through hell.”

Like other alleged victims, this woman said she hopes that Hunt--who can apply for reinstatement to the Bar in 3 1/2 years--will be permanently banned from practicing law. And she wants to warn other potential victims not to be taken in by glittering resumes.

So does Carson resident Connie Chaney, who hired Hunt to represent a group of black longshoremen demanding training for higher-paying jobs.

Chaney said she was impressed not only by Hunt’s resume, but also by how he could spew “verbatim dates, times, facts and figures off the top of his head.” If he was suffering alcohol-related blackouts, Chaney said, she never suspected a thing.

“The man had a road map and he was right on the mark with what he was doing--busting open the door on discrimination against women and violations of labor law practices,” she said.

Chaney added that after taking more than $16,000 from the longshoremen, Hunt wrote one letter on their behalf and disappeared. He never returned phone calls, she said, and was impossible to contact.

“I was misrepresented, misled and highway-robbed,” Chaney said. “He stole our money.”