Lawyer hears last refrain of ‘Ballad of John’s file’

Ah, those carefree days of youth. Dan Marmalefsky remembers them well. Two years out of Yale Law School, he was a 27-year-old lawyer with a girlfriend and a full head of hair. He’d been a UC Berkeley undergrad with an interest in politics and, among other things, John Lennon’s music.

So when he met a UC Irvine history professor who was writing a book about Lennon but having trouble getting FBI files on its 1970s surveillance of the former Beatle, Marmalefsky agreed to join an ACLU lawyer and take the case on a pro bono basis. Knowing the slow pace of the system, he figured it might take a couple years for the case to wend its way through the courts.

That was in 1982.

The case was filed in 1983, and this week, the FBI agreed to turn over the final 10 documents that Marmalefsky had requested way back then on behalf of Jon Wiener, the UCI prof.

Trying to reach Wiener on Wednesday afternoon, I phoned Marmalefsky, having no idea he’d been on the case since Day 1. And I must say he sounded as happy as one could sound who’d been on a case for 23 years.

Marmalefsky, now 51, married the longtime girlfriend and they have two sons. One has graduated from college and the other is attending. As for the hair ... well, 23 years is a long time.

“The short answer is I have no good explanation for why it took so many years for this to be resolved,” he says from his Los Angeles law office. He needed a second or two to recount the number of presidential administrations that had issued executive orders related to the documents’ release.

The Times reported this week that none of the documents released over the years did much more than embarrass the government’s efforts to spy on the musician. The latest batch of 10 had been held up because the U.S. government argued that its disclosure might threaten national security. The reality, Marmalefsky says, is that it made a certain English-speaking island monarchy look bad for its role in helping the FBI investigate one of its celebrated sons.

It’s not that Marmalefsky and the American Civil Liberties Union worked on the case for 23 years straight. He says he put thousands of hours into it, for free, but much of the time the case languished because it wasn’t an urgent priority. Just because motions are filed doesn’t necessarily mean things are in motion.

The case was eventually won at the U.S. Appeals Court level and then turned down for further review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Surely you see comedy in this, I ask Marmalefsky. “I wouldn’t use the word comical,” he says. “What is unbelievable about this is the position that the government took at various stations in the litigation in an effort to conceal from public view the kind of information it was putting in its file about a musician.”

Such as?

Such as the fear that Lennon might be a key figure in hurting Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection or in mobilizing opposition against the Vietnam War. Or that he might be a subversive.

“Every time we got additional documents” over the years, Marmalefsky says, “people would be amazed not so much at what it was, but that the government was fighting to protect it. Whether it was lyrics from a song on the back of an album or an agent saying Yoko Ono was singing off-key or that someone didn’t like a parrot or thought a parrot was annoying.”

That last item apparently was part of some surveillance report, but Marmalefsky couldn’t immediately recall the details.

I’m thinking it’s probably just as well.

Now that it’s all over, I ask Marmalefsky if he’s going to miss it. “I’m going to have to get a second case,” he jokes. The government agreed to pay $204,000 in legal fees for the case, with Marmalefsky’s firm donating its half to the ACLU.

He’s won high-profile cases in which he represented the head of a major aviation firm, and a scientist accused of stealing trade secrets from Harvard, but it’s almost certain he’ll be remembered mostly for the Lennon case. At one point while he was requesting the Lennon files, he was simultaneously representing automaker John DeLorean on another case.

“I was interested because it was John Lennon,” he says of his original involvement. “Because it was about the Watergate era and because it involved a challenge to the legitimacy of FBI conduct during that era.”

So, yes, the years dragged on. But here’s the final historical reference point.

As the case was finally winding down this year, Marmalefsky’s younger son came back from the movies and told his dad he’d seen a trailer about an upcoming film.

It was about John Lennon’s hassles with the U.S. government.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.