Math Problem
You might need to use all your fingers to add this one up. Here we go. How is it possible that the Boston Globe, when it wrote this glowing Aug. 13 profile of Crockefeller lawyer Stephen Hrones, “Lone Defender“ …
A week after he began defending one of the most vilified criminal suspects in the country, Stephen B. Hrones sat in his cluttered law office on the Boston waterfront yesterday and characterized himself as Clark Rockefeller’s lone voice of support.
“The press is crucifying him,” he said, raising his voice in a room decorated with newspaper and magazine clippings about his cases. “He has no one to stand up for him at all. He has no friends now. No one wants to get involved. Someone has to stand up for him.”
… managed to entirely overlook Hrones’ highly unusual problems with state bar authorities? Boston Herald, Clark Rockefeller’s lawyer faces own legal woes:
Stephen Hrones, the impassioned attorney who has made international headlines defending bogus Back Bay blue blood Clark Rockefeller, has been in hot water with state bar investigators , the anti-discrimination commission and several dissatisfied clients, a Herald review shows.
The 66-year-old Hrones:
• is accused by the Office of Bar Counsel of allowing a former paralegal - “a conman,” he calls him - to illegally pass himself off as a lawyer while splitting fees with Hrones;
• was barred from appearing before the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination for one year for making misrepresentations and neglecting clients;
• has been named as a defendant in four legal malpractice lawsuits since 2004.
Though he insists he was duped by former paralegal Lionel Porter, Hrones told the Office of Bar Counsel he is willing to stop practicing law for three months, if he commits “further disciplinary violations,” according to his 37-page pleading obtained by the Herald.
Porter is accused of passing himself off as Hrones’ co-counsel. Hrones admits authorizing Porter to solicit new clients on his behalf, and sharing their fees.
Hrones told the Herald “at no time at all” was he aware Porter was pretending to be a lawyer.
“I’m the first to admit, I didn’t properly supervise this guy,” Hrones said yesterday of Porter, whom he fired last year. “I was careless, but I don’t think I did anything wrong. I was doing this guy a favor. No good deed goes unpunished.”
But the Office of Bar Counsel is pressing to suspend Hrones’ license for two years, saying in its 67-page “recommendation for discipline” that he “lacks full insight into the nature, effect and implications of his ethical wrongdoings.”
Hrones told the Bar Counsel “Porter was a clever crook and a conman” who “could sell ice to Eskimos.”
If you’ve been following this summer’s potboiler, you’ll know that Bavarian fabulist Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who passed himself off as a scion of the Rockefeller clan while a person of interest in two 1985 California disappearances/murders, is one heck of an ice salesman himself, having used his false identity to live large, at large, for decades.
Anyway, back to our math problem. 1 + 1 usually equals 2, but we may have an exception here. I’m certainly not going to suggest that, despite the Boston Globe’s periodic ethical and factual difficulties, it is possible to draw a straight line between the gratification offered to “Lone Defender” Hrones on Aug. 13, and the news that surfaced a couple of days later that the Globe had scored an exclusive print interview with Crockefeller, on softball terms, due to take place today. Boston Herald, Aug. 16:
Gerhartstreiter’s lawyer, Stephen Hrones, has arranged for NBC and The Boston Globe to interview the erstwhile Rockefeller at the Nashua Street Jail, but the network and the newspaper agreed to limit their questioning to only the subjects of his daughter and ex-wife. Hrones said he agreed to the unorthodox jailhouse interview next week in order to counter negative publicity spread by prosecutors and the FBI.
It would be astonishing if the august NYT-owned Boston Globe purposefully ignored Hrones’ remarkable legal woes in order to curry favor while cutting an exclusive deal to interview his internationally notorious client. The only reasonable explanation is a happily coincidental incompetence that worked to the Globe’s and Hrones’ mutual advantage. Because you can’t buy advertising like this, from the Globe’s Aug. 13 Hrones profile:
His successes included a 2004 ruling that erased the conviction of Angel S. Toro, who was sentenced to life in prison for killing a Howard Johnson’s clerk in Dorchester during a 1981 holdup. Toro is still serving a sentence of three years to life for an unrelated murder conviction in Florida.
“I had about 14 attorneys since he was arrested, and without a doubt, he was the most effective,” said Toro’s wife, Debra, of Melrose.
Robert A. George, another defense lawyer, said that “when the world seems to be crashing down all around a defendant, there is not a better person to be fighting for your life.”
Topics: Boston, lawyers, media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:06 am on Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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