Lawyer Has No Objections to His Job

In court, he’s been called everything from Mr. Garrison to Mr. Galapagos. It’s Ger-a-gos. Mark John Geragos. The G is hard, the accent is on the first syllable and the rest rhymes with asparagus.

Remember the name. He is the Los Angeles legal community’s next hot thing.

Geragos is coming off big back-to-back victories for Susan McDougal, winning acquittals in Santa Monica and Little Rock, Ark., for Whitewater’s lone holdout. The cases have landed him in the national spotlight and made him a television talk show fixture.

In November, McDougal was cleared of embezzlement in a case brought by the Los Angeles County district attorney. On Monday, a federal jury in Little Rock acquitted her of obstructing the Whitewater investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Jurors deadlocked on two counts of criminal contempt--charges nearly everyone assumed were slam-dunk wins for the independent counsel’s prosecutors. It is not yet certain whether prosecutors will seek to retry the case.

“They don’t have the guts,” Geragos said. These days, he can’t help gloating a little about driving “a stake through the heart of Ken Starr.”

The day after the verdict, Geragos was back in Los Angeles and back at work. As the kudos poured in, he met with clamoring clients who had had to stand in line during the 20 weeks he spent in court with McDougal at her two trials.

Among the lawyers offering congratulations was David E. Kendall, President Clinton’s attorney. He praised Geragos’ courtroom strategy and technique in Little Rock.

“He did a good job and I’m sure glad of it,” Kendall said. “It was a bravura performance. Mark is obviously not only brave, but he’s very resourceful.”

Kendall, as much as anyone, knows the headaches involved in fighting independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office. “They are unlike other prosecutors’ offices,” he said. “They intimidate a lot of lawyers.”

With his confident swagger and smooth courtroom delivery, Geragos projects the image of someone who doesn’t get intimidated. He seemed to be having a ball in Little Rock. He’s so personable that his opponents usually wind up liking him.

Asked what they thought of his client, McDougal, associate independent counsels Mark Barrett and Julie Myers were circumspect. But Barrett sheepishly volunteered, “We like Mark,” as Myers vigorously nodded in agreement.

“He’s an old-fashioned mensch,” said his longtime friend and mentor, the noted criminal attorney Harland W. Braun. “In a way, he’s not L.A. He has a strong Armenian family and strong community ties. He’s an old-fashioned good person.”

Last weekend, the California Criminal Courts Bar Assn. honored Geragos as its trial lawyer of the year. McDougal attended the ceremony.

“I’m just so grateful to him,” she said of the 41-year-old Geragos, who donated his time and the resources of his small family law firm to represent her.

He handles a lot of pro bono cases, many of them as a favor to Archbishop Vatche Hovsepian of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America. Geragos’ father and law partner, Paul, has represented the church since he left the district attorney’s office and founded the firm in 1969.

“He’s never sent me a bill,” Hovsepian said.

The archbishop, who has known the younger Geragos for most of the lawyer’s life, said he always has been bold but compassionate. As a young man, Geragos considered becoming a priest, but, he said, “the archbishop talked me out of it.”

Hovsepian said Geragos has found his true role in life, where “he’s been doing a lot of priestly work.”

After graduating from Loyola Law School in 1983, Geragos turned down a job in the district attorney’s office and went to work for his father. He started small, taking court appointments, and worked his way up through the criminal justice system. (His brother, Matthew, handles civil cases.)

Before the McDougal cases, Geragos was best known for keeping City Hall lobbyist Art Snyder out of jail. The attorney crafted a plea bargain that allowed an appeal, and Snyder’s convictions were overturned.

Geragos’ client list is growing daily, and he promises more courtroom soap operas.

His next courtroom battle is likely to be on behalf of a woman accused of having sex with a minor--Michele Holden, wife of Pasadena Mayor Chris Holden. Geragos also represents charter reform Commissioner Marcos Castaneda, who is accused of patronizing a prostitute.

Part of Geragos’ success lies in his ability to tell a client’s story in a sympathetic way while turning the tables on the accusers. He reaches jurors with zingers such as “How dumb do they take us for?” “Don’t you just want to gag?” and “I’m sorry, your Honor, I’ll try to have no sense of humor today.”

Geragos always has been a talker--and a workhorse. His first loquacious turn occurred when he was 5 or 6 and appeared with a classmate on Art Linkletter’s variety show. The segment was called “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” and Geragos, according to his father’s recollection, told viewers that the classmate was his girlfriend.

By the time he was 12, Geragos had five newspaper routes. As a teenager he and his friends ran a catering service. During law school, he promoted rock concerts and managed a nightclub in Pasadena. Even now, Geragos considers putting in a 14-hour workday to be slacking. He has been known to go into the office for a few hours on Christmas Day.

“I’m addicted,” he said. “I love it. I don’t think I’d ever burn out. I have the opposite fear, that if I don’t have something to do, I’ll drive myself crazy.”

He tries to look at his cases from the client’s point of view.

“I don’t judge them. By the time they come to me, they’re already in a jam,” he said. “They want somebody to judge them, they’ve got a priest or a rabbi. Most people who come in to me have beaten themselves up so badly already, the last thing they need is for me to go and beat them up some more.”

Braun says Geragos is fast on his feet, a quick study who isn’t afraid to push the envelope to achieve a good result for a client. “He doesn’t worry about humiliating himself,” he said. “He can wing it.”

It was Braun whom Geragos consulted the night before his closing argument in Little Rock, when it appeared that the judge had cut the heart out of his defense. Braun pointed out language in the jury instructions that gave Geragos an opening. The jurors still could acquit if they found that McDougal was driven by innocent motives or mistaken reasons when she clammed up in front of the Whitewater grand jury.

“The judge left the door open, and Mark drove a freight train right through it,” Kendall said.

Geragos entered the McDougal case midstream, when she was languishing at the Sybil Brand Institute, Los Angeles’ now-closed county jail for women. His father suggested that they take her case pro bono. If she was willing to stand up to Starr, he said, somebody should be willing to stand up for her.

“I always thought Susan was the perfect client for our practice because she was willing to stand up, go to trial and take the consequences,” Paul Geragos said.

At their first meeting at Sybil Brand, Mark Geragos was outraged that McDougal wore shackles while clients he represented in murder cases did not. After seven months, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, he convinced authorities to transfer her to a less harsh federal lockup. Then, at a hearing in Arkansas a year ago, she was freed.

The 15-week embezzlement trial last fall, at which McDougal was acquitted of stealing from her former employers, conductor Zubin Mehta and his wife, Nancy, was like walking into a twilight zone. By the trial’s end, few of the people who packed the courtroom could follow the prosecution’s evidence.

At the five-week Little Rock proceedings, Geragos put the independent counsel’s tactics on trial, bringing in a parade of witnesses who testified that they had been tricked or harassed or pressured.

During both trials, Geragos, a vegetarian, ran five miles a day and then worked out at the gym. This was a point of mystery to McDougal’s brother, Bill Henley, a meat-and-potatoes native Arkansan.

“All he eats is fruit. All he drinks is water,” Henley observed. “How can a man think on that?”

“Better to go in hungry,” Geragos said.