Circling the Legal Wagons

When FBI agents swarmed onto Lynne F. Stewart’s front stoop in Brooklyn on April 9 with an arrest warrant, she thought they’d come for her partner of 34 years, Ralph Poynter, a longtime political activist. An agent informed her otherwise: “We’re not here for him, we’re here for you.”

Stewart, a 62-year-old lawyer, was handcuffed in front of her neighbors and charged with helping one of her jailed clients--a blind Egyptian cleric convicted of plotting to blow up Manhattan landmarks--pass messages to his militant followers.

As agents took the plump, grandmotherly Stewart away, she shouted to Poynter: “Whatever this is, call the media.”

The arrest put Stewart at the center of a controversy that has jeopardized her career but also brought her to the attention of the tight-knit defense bar. Despite annoyance with her anachronistic lefty ways, many of these lawyers are rallying around her on principle.

They are horrified that this lawyer, any lawyer, is being lumped in a conspiracy with the likes of militant Muslims who live to kill Jews and take down governments; they are convinced that the government is growing increasingly hostile toward them and the people they represent.

And little-known attorney Stewart, a former librarian who wears billowy tent dresses and unstyled gray hair, has come to personify all these concerns and more. She has the nation’s top prosecutor to thank for her newfound fame.

Announcing her indictment, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said the three-year investigation that led to Stewart’s arrest inspired the Justice Department to assert new powers to monitor lawyers and their clients when the attorney general suspects doing so could deter terrorism.

“We simply aren’t going to allow people who are convicted of terrorism to continue ... directing the activity from their prison,” Ashcroft said later that day during an appearance on CBS-TV’s “Late Show With David Letterman,” before he performed “Can’t Buy Me Love” on the piano for Letterman’s cheering audience.

In charging Stewart with conspiring to aid terrorists, lying and breaking an agreement with the Bureau of Prisons, the government says she crossed the line from criminal advocate to criminal.

From a dingy office with a broken toilet, Stewart has spent 27 years representing small-time crooks and leftist radicals in the tradition of such legal bomb-throwers as the late William Kunstler, with whom she tried five cases.

Stewart is reveling in being pitted against the conservative attorney general, and says this case is the culmination of her life’s work.

“I just never thought I’d be the one who could pull blacks, Chinese, environmentalists, American Indians, Arabs ... all these groups together in one case,” she said during an interview in her Lower Manhattan office, referring to her natural allies over the years. “I thought I’d be the lawyer, not the defendant.”

As she was released on $500,000 bail after a few hours, FBI agents searched her office, seizing files, computer disks--even her Rolodex.

Within days, Stewart’s friends--$50-an-hour lawyers with clients accused of 60 rapes or worse--held a fund-raiser over a deli near her office. The mostly young lawyers drank wine from plastic cups, griped about the heat and slipped checks for her defense fund into a cardboard box.

Weeks later, a local law school drew a tonier crowd for a round-table discussion titled “The Attorney-Client Privilege at the Crossroads: The Indictment of Lynne Stewart.” Panelist Michael Tigar, a nationally acclaimed defense lawyer, announced to great applause that he would take on her case.

These lawyers said they suspect Ashcroft of going after Stewart to intimidate them, and that she was picked precisely because she is not the most popular lawyer in town. Many see her as a throwback to 1960s rebelliousness and do not appreciate her habit of embracing her clients’ causes.

“What I am doing here,” said one of her frustrated but loyal backers, “is defending the right of a lawyer to represent a fascist--stupidly.”

Stewart brushes aside criticisms of her and her unpopular client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, preferring to focus on her nemesis, Ashcroft, whose picture hangs above that broken toilet.

“He’s a Midwestern Christian fundamentalist and I really think they view liberal Easterners as having horns and pointed tails and not being folks like he is,” she said. “But he has grossly underestimated me. I’m not some lesbian lefty.”

Certainly, a 24-page indictment put together by the New York U.S. Attorney’s office marks her as the U.S. justice system’s worst nightmare: A lawyer who exploits her protected role to commit a crime against the country.

Stewart and three others are accused of conspiring to keep Abdel Rahman at the helm of his terrorist organization, even though he is serving 65 years behind bars. The indictment said Stewart discussed inconsequential matters using English legalese to distract guards, while Rahman talked about Islamic revolution in Arabic to translator Mohammed Yousry, who also was indicted.

The government began monitoring the conversations early in the sheik’s prison stay after he publicly called on his followers to “avenge” him. (And they did--killing 58 tourists in Egypt in 1997 and stuffing leaflets demanding his release into their torsos.) The Bureau of Prisons placed the sheik in solitary confinement and made Stewart agree not to convey his views to the media.

She admits she violated that pact in May 2000 by telling Reuters the sheik believed his organization should no longer observe a cease-fire on terrorism. She lost visiting privileges briefly, but then signed a new agreement. Prosecutors allege she violated that one too, by acting as a link between the sheik and the outside world.

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Branded a Traitor

“They claim she went too far, but the government went even farther,” said Ellen Yaroshefksy, a law professor who moderated the round-table. “Instead of charging her with violating prison regulations, she was branded a traitor.”

Prosecutors won’t discuss the indictment, but after the round-table, where Stewart was cheered pep-rally style by about 300 lawyers, U.S. Atty. James Comey issued a terse statement: “With a trial pending and few facts disclosed so far, it is grossly premature for anyone to draw conclusions.... The government will present its evidence ... at trial. After that, analysis and round-table discussions will be fully formed.” The trial is due to begin late next year.

In an interview last spring at her office suite, Stewart sounds like the last campus radical. She is surrounded by tattered furniture; newsletters about an upcoming union meeting are in the reception area; four large courtroom drawings of her and Abdel Rahman adorn the walls. A photograph of a clench-fisted revolutionary looms above it all.

“The sheik is a star,” she said, “one of those people you meet in this world journey and you know immediately you are in the presence of someone worldly.”

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed almost 3,000 people just blocks from her office, do not seem to have shaken her views. In America, she said, these men may be called terrorists, but to their people “they are freedom fighters” whose enemies are oppressive Arab regimes and the U.S. for supporting them.

“America likes to say, ‘Do it our way,’ but people have to do it their way,” she said. “We are a country founded in violence and so it is used by others to determine their own future.”

But what if that violence touched her, if her grandchildren had been in the twin towers?

“I’ve always had to answer questions like that,” she said, noting that she had represented Black Panthers and members of the Weather Underground. “Those people were not about going quietly into that good night and [singing] ‘We Shall Overcome’ and getting their heads beaten in. They were about fighting back.”

Stewart is hardly just an affable grandmother in sensible shoes, as she often portrays herself during jury summations.

Raised on Long Island by two Republican schoolteachers, she became a teacher herself after college, and later a librarian in Harlem schools in the 1960s. There, she met Poynter, a black teacher fighting for community control of the schools. In her 20s, Stewart joined his cause and grew increasingly enraged by all the poor children who could not read and who had no hope.

Within a few years, they had left their spouses and were together. Now an investigator for Stewart’s law practice, Poynter, 68, explained: “When you’re politically together, the rest is inevitable.”

Together they have fought capitalism, protested at rallies and raised children--one of theirs, three of his and two of hers--in an East Village apartment with an enviable view of the New York skyline. (They now have seven grandchildren and live in Brooklyn.)

Stewart pursued law when she became fed up with the school system. At age 32, she entered Rutgers Law School in New Jersey and joined anti-war protests. Later she took up criminal defense work because it fit with her politics. She would represent anyone except child abusers and pedophiles.

She teamed with Kunstler to get drug dealer Larry Davis acquitted of trying to kill nine police officers in a 1986 shootout. She defended David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member, and Richard Williams, who was convicted of setting off bombs at military sites and corporate offices in the early 1980s. And she was assigned by judges to defend mobsters, including Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. Although she was never the marquee radical lawyer in New York, she built an impressive list of despised clients over the years.

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A Grandmother’s Style

John Gallagher, a former prosecutor who opposed Stewart in the Williams case, said her style is to convince juries “in a grandmotherly way that she is a nice person representing people who are victims of government overzealousness.”

Unlike Kunstler, the czar of courtroom theatrics, Stewart does not try to distract “a jury from the facts by clashing with judges and prosecutors,” Gallagher added.

Eventually, Stewart distanced herself from Kunstler, telling The Times in a 1994 interview: “He’s a mirror of the times because the ‘60s was an era of hope and change. When that disappears you get involved with things that aren’t as pure. You make excuses and see political righteousness in cases where it’s not quite so.”

Yet that’s how some lawyers viewed her during the sheik’s case in 1995, when he and nine others were tried for engaging in a “war of urban terrorism.” In interviews, Stewart seemed to champion the sheik’s cause as much as represent him.

Gerald Lefcourt, another well-known defender of radicals, said that in the 1960s lawyers often said “all kinds of things in public.”

But “things get really dangerous when the government starts interpreting a lawyer’s words to his client in private,” he added. “In this case the government decided Lynne stepped over a line. She’s just too smart for that.”

At worst, her defenders argue, Stewart might have been “sloppy” during visits and weekly phone meetings with the sheik, or that her anti-government attitude might have colored her professionalism when talking to the sheik’s collaborators. Some suspect she was duped, but she’s not going for that:

“I’m not prepared at this point to say ... things were going on behind my back.”

She is sticking with her co-defendants, speaking of the rights of oppressed Muslims, managing her own public relations and vowing to fight the good fight. And, yes, enjoying every minute of it.

When she left her office at dusk for a retirement party for a local judge, Stewart said that, unlike a lot of New Yorkers, she never worries about another terrorist strike here.

“I’m more worried about some fat white racist cop from Scarsdale stopping my Ralph at a red light and him saying something and the cop shooting him in the head,” she said. “Now that’s what I worry about.”