Bankruptcy Judge Is Running a Tight Ship : Courts: Former Navy man John E. Ryan is in the spotlight as he handles the complex legal issues of O.C.’s fiscal recovery.

For years, John Edward Ryan began each work day by reciting a bit of verse.

“This is the beginning of a new day. God has given me this day to use as I will. I can waste it . . . or use it for good,” the federal judge with a Boston Irishman’s accent would remind the crop of lawyers funneling through his courtroom for mundane motions on bankruptcy cases. “But what I do today is important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.”

Fitting words for a fighter pilot who skipped a shot at the Navy’s elite Blue Angels in order to re-up for another Vietnam combat tour. An apt adage for a middle-aged man who treats every game of lunchtime hoops like it’s the Olympics. It’s not surprising that when Ryan calls a 10-minute recess during a hearing, it lasts exactly 600 seconds.

Now Ryan, 54, presides over the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, the fate of Orange County hanging on his decisions.

This week brings Ryan’s biggest moment yet, when Tuesday he’ll consider a plan to pay out the $5.7 billion that remains in the investment pool, effectively ending a complex chapter in the massive case.

Already, he has handed down several delicate decisions in this landmark case.

It was Ryan who restored government workers’ seniority rights in the face of widespread layoffs, and stopped the county from unilaterally firing disabled people during a hepatitis A scare. It was Ryan who doled out emergency funds from the county’s collapsed investment pool, choosing which schools and cities really required the cash. He was the one who decided to put lawsuits against the county on indefinite hold, to let the county spend money once set aside for bond payments, to make the county continue hearing taxpayer appeals about property assessments.

Concerned about the appearance of impropriety, Ryan declined to be interviewed for this story.

Conversations with a score of relatives, friends and colleagues depict a fierce competitor and evenhanded jurist who is known to belly laugh over a few beers on his own time.

“I can’t think of a more responsible person I’d like to have on such a serious case,” said Gene Sullivan, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the armed forces and an old buddy of Ryan’s from Georgetown Law School.

“I know he’s going to do the right thing, and he’s going to do the smart thing, and he’s going to do the tough thing.”

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Raised in an Irish-Catholic home where Sundays were spent in church and dinner every night was a full-family affair, Ryan came of age in the Kennedy era, though his parents were longtime Republicans. He was the eldest of four boys, a natural leader who leaned early toward the path set by his father, a Harvard-educated attorney.

They grew up in Beverly, a commuter suburb about a 30-minute drive north of Boston. The Ryan boys were all smart, but none fared as well in school as John. They were all athletes, but John--captain of the varsity football team and a three-sport letterman--was the star there as well.

“He was my best friend and my most ferocious competitor, and certainly he was an inspiration to me,” said Alan Ryan, just one year behind John in school and now a businessman in Augusta, Maine. “He was a tremendous role model. I was always called Johnny Ryan’s brother, and it never bothered me because I was always very proud.”

The football team he led his senior year was undefeated, coming from behind to beat rival Salem High during homecoming. Seeded last in a basketball tournament played at Boston Garden, home of his beloved Celtics, Ryan’s team was forced to play the No. 1 squad--and John himself scored the winning jump shot with five seconds left.

The Beverly High yearbook for the Class of ’59 notes his nickname, “Jumpin’ John,” and chronicles the jam-packed life of an ambitious teen: Student Council treasurer, homeroom president, graduation usher, literary magazine staff member--even Slide Rule Club and Fire Extinguisher Squad.

“I can remember my father saying to me that John was the type of person who, in whatever he undertook to do, he would learn and study as much as he could about it,” said Paul Ryan, now a Boston attorney like his dad, who died in 1983 after a long bout with cancer. “In whatever challenge was presented to him, or he was asked to undertake, he took it upon himself to do it positively, to put his mind and his capabilities to it.”

At home, he learned the art of argument. Dinner conversations about politics and current events often stretched past midnight; friends of the Ryan clan gathered round the table to join in.

“He learned that he could take a position and reason it through very well,” Alan Ryan said. “And if he didn’t, he had somebody on the other side that could show him where the reasoning might not be right.”

Love of country sent John Ryan to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he failed to make it as a midshipman on the gridiron, but excelled as a college student and officer.

Like those who knew him earlier and later in life, Academy classmates remember Ryan’s dogged competitiveness on the racquetball court or softball field, his precise organization and a smiling willingness to try anything once.

On leaves, he and his roommates would hitch rides aboard military jets--one summer to Europe, where they bought motorcycles and cruised around without helmets, the next to Hawaii.

“We’d stay up late and try to solve the problems of the world--I guess we didn’t do too good a job, there are still some left,” mused his Academy roommate, Philip Dean, now an emergency room physician in Eugene, Ore. “He was always up for adventures. We’d get a little crazy--but relative to today, probably pretty mild.”

Ryan talks little to friends and colleagues from the six years he spent in the Navy, most of it fighting Communists in Southeast Asia, but it shows in the tight ship that is his courtroom.

With the call sign “Irish,” Ryan flew F-4 fighters over North Vietnam. He retired in 1969 a lieutenant commander, with an Air Medal, Navy Commendation Medal and Vietnam Service Medal adorning his uniform.

Later, he would tell friends, even-toned, what happens when the alarm goes off announcing that surface-to-air missiles have been launched against your craft. He has an old home movie shot from the back of his plane showing a Russian bomber flying some 50 yards away and Ryan, the pilot, never flinches when the bomber’s guns shift to face his windshield.

At Georgetown Law School, with his leather pilot’s jacket, he stood out among the students as more mature and more worldly, more confident and yet more humble at the same time.

“His maturity in judgment showed through on the first day of class,” said Patrick Raher, a Washington lawyer who was in Ryan’s class. “When a professor first asked a question, most people would stand up and put their hands on the desk and leave these huge sweaty palm marks. John would stand up and cross his arms and look right at the professor. And whether he was right or wrong, the professor never said anything back.”

He was renowned among classmates for careful preparation before class--but also for throwing wild parties each spring in which he filled his bathtub with as much vodka and orange juice as he could afford, friends recall.

He finished in the top 5% of his class and was articles editor on the Law Review.

Before graduation, he proposed to a blond-haired, blue-eyed airline stewardess named Terri who lived in his apartment complex, sure enough of the answer that he invited Raher and his wife to hide in the kitchen of his efficiency apartment while he popped the question.

“He never, ever thinks he’s going to lose,” said Raher, with a laugh. “He said, ‘Will you marry me?’ There was a dead silence. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s going to say no.’ And then she screamed and yelled and said, ‘Of course I will!’ We jumped out and then we proceeded to drink a pint of Canadian Scotch.”

More than two decades later, John and Terri Ryan live in a $200,000 house in Escondido with their three athletic daughters, who are now almost grown themselves.

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On Thursday, the 9:30 a.m. law and motion calendar in Ryan’s courtroom began at 9:30 a.m. Exactly. It’s been that way throughout Ryan’s nearly nine years on the bankruptcy bench--except for the brief period when a clock in Ryan’s chambers was five minutes fast, and he therefore entered the courtroom five minutes early each day, catching the attorneys off guard.

It is not good to be caught off-guard by this judge.

He recently kicked a pair of lawyers out for chatting in the back row of his silent chamber. Once, he stopped an attorney mid-sentence to admonish him to straighten his tie. He nabbed another’s chewing gum, and sent him running like a scolded schoolboy.

“You’re in there, you’ve got to respect the system,” said William Malcolm, Ryan’s first law clerk, who now practices bankruptcy law in Orange County. “When he comments on something and he’s not happy about it, I think everybody knows it. You can see it in his eyes.”

On Thursday, by 9:39 a.m., Ryan had dismissed three cases, granted three unopposed motions--offering a hearty “Congratulations!” at the first attorney who walked away a winner--and launched a hearing about who would pay how much in legal bills.

Fees are a big issue with Ryan.

He loathes attorneys who fritter away their clients’ money with frivolous motions and redundant speeches. That is why he issues tentative rulings on all minor motions, why he lets lawyers “appear” in court via telephone, why he runs his calendar with the precision of a Swiss watch, why he refuses to approve bills for filings that lead down endless paths.

He is swift to discipline attorneys for wasting the court’s time--and even harsher if he catches them bending the truth to make their points.

“If you say something, you better know it’s true,” said bankruptcy attorney Robert P. Goe.

“If you don’t give him the straight poop he gets very angry,” added another lawyer involved in the county’s bankruptcy, insisting that his name not be mentioned because he must appear before the judge on Tuesday. “He just doesn’t suffer fools. He just really gets mean if you cross him.”

Yet, Ryan, who wore a green shirt under his robe on March 17, also retains a sense of humor.

At the annual follies of the Orange County Bankruptcy Forum, Ryan cut it up one year in karaoke; the next year he beat the other local judges at a fake sumo wrestling gag.

“Away from the bench he’s a bit of a card,” said attorney Len Shulman. “On the bench you’re looking at an extremely serious scholar. And then, outside, he’s just like a regular guy, down to earth.”

For years, Ryan was a full-time judge, part-time girls’ soccer coach. On vacations, he usually goes camping with his family. When he takes a lunch break, he often uses it to play racquetball with his law clerks.

Former clerks are invited to his home for a barbecue each summer. Inevitably, they play basketball and volleyball until sundown.

Because of his family’s involvement in the Escondido community, Ryan refused to move to Orange County when President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the bankruptcy court in October, 1986, halting his career as a corporate and securities attorney.

So he rides the train 90 minutes back and forth to work each day, hopping on an Orange County Transportation Authority bus for the final leg of his journey to the Civic Center. He arrives on the sixth floor of the federal building each day at 8:20 a.m. and departs at 5:20 p.m., but a stuffed litigation bag and laptop computer join him for the commute, tacking three hours onto his workday.

He is known as decisive--but reluctant to buck precedent. He typically rules from the bench, quickly. But when he finds novel areas of law, he never hesitates to commit his ideas to paper, becoming one of the court’s most prolific judges.

Since 1991, Ryan has published 25 legal opinions, according to a court database. His colleagues at the courthouse in Santa Ana have published 14, six and four. In the Orange County case alone, Ryan has already written three opinions.

With more than 25,000 pages of documents filed so far, the county bankruptcy is by far the largest and most closely watched of Ryan’s career.

Some speculate that its prominence could catapult him to an appointment on the U.S. District Court, a rare jump from the bankruptcy bench. Those close to him insist Ryan is not gunning for that leap--but would not mind making it.

“He is a warrior. He has the heart of a warrior,” said Sullivan, the law school friend who is a federal judge on the opposite coast.

“Him being a combat fighter pilot, there’s nothing that scares him. A big case like this would not scare because it would never approach what he’s been through,” Sullivan said. “In life, you draw back upon your experiences. After you face death, some of the little things in life don’t frighten you as much.”