A Most-Wanted Attorney

The government wants his money. The judiciary wants him disbarred. So what's F. Lee Bailey's next move? Sue the bastards!

Comments (0) By Bob Norman Thursday, Sep 28 2000

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Less well-known than Bailey's interrogation of Fuhrman is that the Palm Beach lawyer wasn't paid a dime for his work in the case. Shapiro refused to share with Bailey the $1.2 million Simpson gave him, saying that Bailey was a "volunteer." Bailey, however, was unconcerned; he was flush with cash at the time. Court documents show that, from June 1994 through January 1996, Bailey plowed through $4.6 million of Duboc stock money. He sold a third of it for $2.3 million and spent another $2.3 million from the Swiss line of credit. Of that only $1.1 million went for legitimate expenses related to the Duboc case, according to Judge Paul. Bailey spent most of the rest of it on himself, his businesses, and for a down payment on his Manalapan house, to pay off credit card bills, to buy a life insurance policy, and to fund his aviation business, Palm Beach Roamer.

Bailey insists the value of the remaining 400,000 shares of stock, worth about $20 million at the time, was his to spend. Duboc fired Bailey at the end of 1995. That's when prosecutors discovered the new, higher price of Biochem Pharma. Judge Paul issued a freeze order on all funds associated with the stock, but that didn't stop Bailey from taking another $300,000 or so. (He claimed in court that he didn't know about Paul's order.)

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Some of America's most infamous defendants have relied on Bailey, including (left to right) Patty Hearst, the Boston Strangler, and the accused killer in the trial of the century, O.J. Simpson

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When Bailey learned of the court's ire, he offered to return only $6 million, the stock's value when he received it in Switzerland. "I wanted those profits myself," he says. "I had the balls not to sell it, and it could have wiped me out bigtime. I wanted to pay off my house and my partner's house and pay off the yacht and everything else with that money."

At a court hearing in February 1996, prosecutor McGee declared: "The people of this country have been cheated out of $26 million."

Shapiro testified that he believed Bailey had violated the terms of the deal with the government. Judge Paul agreed and demanded the West Palm Beach lawyer hand over the remaining stock and repay what he had taken. When Bailey declined, Paul ordered him to prison on March 6. Bailey literally knocked down several reporters and photographers as he stormed into the Federal Detention Center in Tallahassee, where he set about calling friends and former clients for loans.

He says he had an easy time in prison, even though there was talk of a race riot because of his ties to Simpson. "I was 44 days in one wing of the jail virtually all by myself," he says. "I had an office. They treated me very well. They did not want me in the general population.... I was a hero to the blacks and anathema to that group of whites."

After six weeks in jail, Bailey finally raised the money, some from the sale of the Spellbound and the rest from friends. By the time the matter was settled, Bailey was forced to repay some $3.5 million that Judge Paul says he never should have taken.

Bailey still says he did nothing wrong.

"F. Lee Bailey is an arrogant son of a bitch," says Howard Neu, a Pembroke Pines lawyer who represented Duboc in a 1997 legal-malpractice lawsuit against Bailey. The case was scuttled when Duboc tried to bribe Judge Paul with $2 million. "Bailey saw dollar signs, and he literally sold Claude Duboc down the river. It was greed, greed, and more greed." William and Chantal McCorkle seemed to have it all -- a thriving real-estate business, a helicopter, a yacht, a mansion, and a tropical island all their own. But that was only infomercial reality. The McCorkles created the illusion to sell get-rich-quick schemes to wannabe millionaires. By the time the feds charged them with fraud in March 1998, prosecutors estimated they had earned as much as $70 million from their schemes.

The couple hired Bailey, who was fresh out of jail, to defend them. Then they diverted $7 million to a bank in the Cayman Islands and allowed the lawyer to take control of the account. He divided it up this way: $2 million went to pay off the McCorkles' debt to the IRS, $3 million was to remain in the bank, and $2 million was put in a legal trust fund.

Problem is, it was actually an illegal fund, prosecutors contend. They say the money earned from fraud clearly should have been forfeited to the government, and they accuse Bailey of intentionally thwarting their attempts to seize it. In fact the Palm Beach lawyer hired a law firm in the islands to protect the money and, by October 21, 1998, the $2 million was gone. About $1 million of it went to Bailey.

On November 4, 1998, the McCorkles were each sentenced to 24 years in prison, but prosecutors still haven't been able to squeeze the $2 million from their counsel. Bailey argues he is broke, in part because his law practice was shut down last year while he tended to calamitous personal troubles. Both his wife, Patricia, and his mother, Grace, succumbed to cancer, losses Bailey says made his court troubles seem insignificant. The attorney says 1999 was the worst year of his life.

The year 2000 hasn't been much better. After hearing the evidence against Bailey in the Duboc case in the Florida Bar hearings, Circuit Judge Cynthia Ellis recommended disbarment. In her July 25 report, Ellis wrote he "is a liar," adding, "Frankly, it is difficult for this referee to conceive of a more egregious set of circumstances than those which Mr. Bailey has brought upon himself." (It could be months before the state supreme court rules on whether or not to follow Ellis' recommendation.)