Run, Brother, Run by David Berg

Author:David Berg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

10

Two months before Harrelson’s murder trial, Harriet spotted Foreman on a street corner in downtown Houston. With his massive height, outsized head, and sweaty hair that hung pasted to his forehead, he was an unmistakable presence. “Mr. Foreman,” Harriet said, walking right up to him, “I’m Alan Berg’s widow. Please don’t tear my husband up.”

Foreman removed his fedora, leaned down, and replied,

“Nature has already done that, Mrs. Berg. I never would.”

But I had been in practice long enough to hold a different view of our hometown hero: I told Harriet that he was lying. Foreman had a two-step formula for winning that he repeated in every case: the first, common among defense lawyers, was to put the victim on trial, argue that lots of people had a motive to kill him, and besides, the son of a bitch had it coming. The difference with Foreman was that he made most of it up—turned trials into a viciously inhumane assault on the dead man’s character. Four years earlier, he’d pulled this off spectacularly in State of Florida v. Candace Mossler and Melvin Lane Powers. Powers was Candace’s lover (and nephew) and the two of them had been accused of conspiring to murder Candace’s husband, Jacques Mossler, a wealthy financier. In his opening statement, Foreman called Jacques a “sexual deviate” with no shortage of people who wanted to kill him:

If each one of the 39 knife wounds had been inflicted by a different person, there still would be many times that number of people left with real or imaginary justification.

Both defendants were acquitted. (Later, when Candace sued Percy for the return of hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate and jewelry she’d given him as collateral, Foreman testified that he was entitled to every penny and more because “both of them were guilty.” Percy won that trial, too.)

Foreman’s second step was not just backup: it was bulletproof. In case character assassination alone might fail, he reached into his stable of “reserve witnesses,” as he called them: former clients and others who repaid his favors by swearing to have been with his defendant at the time of the crime. It wasn’t just opposing prosecutors who knew that Foreman operated this way: his colleagues and even attentive laymen understood that he would do anything, no matter how dishonest, to win a trial.

Perhaps the only person in all of Texas capable of underestimating the ruthlessness of Percy Foreman was Ogden Bass, the thirty-five-year-old, first-term district attorney of Brazoria County, whose job it was to prosecute Harrelson for Alan’s murder. By now, Sandra Sue Attaway had agreed to testify against her former lover, in exchange for having her own case dismissed. Bass, having been in office just a little more than two years and lacking serious jury trial experience, assured my father that Sandra Sue’s testimony would make quick work of Harrelson, Foreman or no—and said it often enough that Dad panicked. “He doesn’t seem to know the facts and he never asks me anything about Alan,” Dad told me one day.

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