Editor’s note: In 2004, The National Law Journal published a profile of Reid Weingarten, a top white-collar crime defense attorney. In reporting the story, Marcia Coyle, the NLJ’s Washington bureau chief, interviewed one of his best friends, Eric Holder, who may be U.S. Attorney general in the administration of President-Elect Barrack Obama. This interview is being published for the first time today.
WASHINGTON — While working together in the new Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice, they became best friends — the man who may be the next attorney general and the man who today is one of the nation’s top white-collar crime defense lawyers.
It was his first job out of law school in 1976, recalled Eric Holder, a partner at Washington’s Covington & Burling, during an NLJ interview about his friend, Reid Weingarten, a partner at Washington’s Steptoe & Johnson LLP, and it was Weingarten’s second job.
Holder, reportedly President-elect Barack Obama’s top choice as the next attorney general, said the Public Integrity Section was formed right after Watergate, when the department decided it needed a specialized division to handle official corruption cases.
He and Weingarten became “fast friends,” he recalled, probably because of their similar backgrounds.
“He was northern New Jersey and I was New York City, and we both had a passion for New York sports, especially for football — the Giants — and we had similar world views. We were Democrats,” he remembered.
While at the Public Integrity Section, Holder handled prosecutions and appeals involving such defendants as the Florida state treasurer; the ambassador to the Dominican Republi — which he worked on with Weingarten; a local judge in Philadelphia; an assistant U.S. attorney in New York City; agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and a “capo” in an organized crime family in Pennsylvania.
But the two men also had a shared mission outside of the office. They wanted to reach out to the most troubled youth in their home territory, and so they went to the Oak Hill, the District of Columbia’s long-term, secure facility for youth who have been adjudicated delinquent, to tutor and mentor.
“The thought was to try to reach these kids even though they were involved in the criminal justice system at an early age and not in a small way,” he recalled in the interview.
“Too many of those kids were beyond hope. We felt if we could reach six or seven, we could really change their lives. We thought if we could occupy these kids 24 hours a day, with mentors and education, our kids were going to go to college so they could compete in the 21st century.”
Saying that he and Holder are “very close,” Weingarten too recalled, “We both were pissed about what society did to children. If you went to Oak Hill with me and spent one hour, you’d look at one-third of the kids there and see they’re so screwed up and so angry and their eyes are twisted or their eyes are so dead, and you’d say with all the money in the world and all the therapy in the world, they could never be saved.
“And then one-third are so slow, some are retarded or their brains aren’t working, and you would say, `Not much promise there.’ Then one-third are bright-eyed and clever. They’re usually the drug couriers, or just savable. So it’s that one-third I was always after.”
The two men worked at Oak Hill in their spare time until Holder was tapped by President Reagan in 1988 to become an associate judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, where he subsequently served for five years, presiding over civil and criminal trials. “I had to disassociate myself from our work at Oak Hill,” Holder explained.
Weingarten continued, and helped to form the See Forever Foundation which, in 2007, took over management of the school at Oak Hill. The school subsequently became the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, and more than 80% of its graduates go on to college.
Holder went from the bench to high-level positions in the Justice Department and then to Covington’s litigation department. Weingarten left Justice and built a career defending corporate officers, such as WorldCom’s Bernard ebbers, and Tyco general counsel Mark Belnick.
But the two friends still share a dream.
“I have different ideas about what I want to do in life,” said Weingarten. “Either See Forever or my next organization is going to be a criminal justice strike-force. I see a half-dozen issues out there, at a minimum, where a good landmark case, a jury verdict or a good court of appeals decision would do wonders: providing juveniles with adequate
representation; seeing to it that you can’t willy-nilly throw a kid into an adult population; imposing some obligation on a community to provide services for a juvenile after he is released. There are a bunch of issues out there that need landmark decisions and I’d like to provide that. I just need to catch my breath and do it.”
And, Holder said in 2004, “We often thought at some point it would be cool to get an office with some associates and really just take important cause cases. We still think about it. When we retire, when we’re not too old, in our late 50s and early 60s, after our kids are out of college, just open an office and attack the issues — juvenile justice, free speech, cases where government is overreaching.
“We’re kids of the ’60s.”
