Out Sick for the Enron Trial, and Rethinking It
May 19, 2006
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
HOUSTON, May 18 — It started with what felt like a heart attack.
Just minutes after he had cross-examined Enron's former chief financial officer two months ago, Michael W. Ramsey, the lead lawyer for Kenneth L. Lay, turned to one of Mr. Lay's daughters. "I think I just had a heart attack," he half-jokingly told the daughter, Elizabeth Vittor, looking her in the eye across the defense table.
Mr. Ramsey said he thought the discomfort would subside in an hour. It did not.
Within days Mr. Ramsey was forced into surgery to clear an arterial blockage. For the 66-year-old, who describes himself as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking legal warhorse, it was the beginning of the most challenging personal odyssey of his career and an event that may turn out to play a crucial role in the outcome of Mr. Lay's case.
After further heart complications, Mr. Ramsey missed more than a month of the 56-day trial, including the testimony of Mr. Lay, the former Enron chief executive who had paid Mr. Ramsey $2 million to lead the legal team in his criminal trial.
Despite his belated but powerful return to action on Tuesday, Mr. Ramsey's illness raises questions that probably will never be answered.
Would he have controlled an indignant Mr. Lay on the stand better than George McCall Secrest Jr., the lawyer who ended up questioning Mr. Lay? Should Mr. Lay have sought to delay the trial when his most experienced criminal lawyer was unable to participate?
"This is the major what-if in this case," said Joel M. Androphy, a criminal defense lawyer in Houston. "You can't just replace Ramsey's years of experience in not only defending people but in communicating with jurors."
Mr. Ramsey acknowledged that several lawyers advised him to push Mr. Lay to seek a delay. "Ramsey is the glue that held that defense together," said his good friend, Dick DeGuerin, another prominent Houston defense lawyer. "It was a mistake not to at least ask the judge for a continuance or a mistrial."
Mr. Lay, for his part, said he was "not second-guessing anything." He conceded that his own strained finances contributed to the decision to carry on with the case.
"They were important," Mr. Lay said Wednesday. "But the right decision was to move ahead and to get it done."
Without Mr. Ramsey, Mr. Lay's defense team appeared to drift into disarray. Mr. Ramsey, after all, had been defending the Enron founder since well before he was indicted in 2004. He had been a principal architect of the defense strategy, which he laid out in his opening statement — that Mr. Lay was a victim of government overreaching by prosecutors bent on punishing the top officers for Enron's collapse.
The company was forced into bankruptcy, Mr. Ramsey contended, by a virtual conspiracy of short-sellers and news articles that caused a "classic run on the bank."
Mr. Ramsey's absence mattered in other ways. He had led his team's selection of the jurors with an eye to how they would react to him, not the other lawyers.
"When you take me out of the equation, whoever takes my place may not have that same communication," he said.
And in the end, Mr. Ramsey was not able to help his client when a prosecutor, on cross-examination, confronted Mr. Lay with the provocative statements that Mr. Ramsey had made to reporters outside the courtroom: that short-sellers were "vultures" and Enron's former treasurer, Ben F. Glisan Jr., was a "trained monkey."
Last week, on the last day of testimony, an unsteady, shuffling Mr. Ramsey returned to court against his doctors' advice, after more than a month of surgical procedures and fitful time spent mostly in a hospital bed. Even when he was at the hospital, he said he obsessively followed the trial through daily transcripts, media reports and daily calls to the other defense lawyers.
"Ken Lay is a good friend of mine, somebody I admire," Mr. Ramsey said. "I wanted very much to assist him. I really felt quite helpless in that situation, and helpless is not a condition I like to feel."
Weeks before, after the doctors first made the diagnosis, Mr. Lay had confidently forecast his lawyer's return. "I expect him to return in time to pull out the victory," Mr. Lay told reporters.
And return he did. On Tuesday, Mr. Ramsey anchored a four-lawyer lineup for Mr. Lay, arguing for 12 spirited minutes.
In his characteristic style, part Southern preacher and part angry grandfather, he raised his voice in indignation as he urged the jury to find the courage to reach an "unpopular" verdict of not guilty.
"Reasonable minds disagree on every point at issue in this case," he said in a near-shout. "Every one of them!"
And in a flourish that evoked Patrick Henry's famous revolutionary line, "Give me liberty or give me death!" he added, "When the spear of government starts to touch living flesh, we're proud of our liberty."
Mr. Ramsey lamented the next day that he needed about 50 minutes to really stir the jurors' emotions. But he said he might not have had the stamina — or the credibility with jurors after such a long absence — to argue that long.
Mr. Ramsey's original diagnosis of a blockage in one coronary artery seemed manageable, thanks to advanced treatments that rely on a less-invasive procedure from which patients often return to regular activities in just a few days.
After surgery on Friday, March 24, Mr. Ramsey returned to court the next Monday. But the symptoms soon returned. Further tests revealed a 95 percent blockage in a different artery, which could have led to a stroke, and Mr. Ramsey said he probably was not getting "enough blood to the brain."
His sudden health problems were particularly frustrating because, he said, he had undergone a complete physical and stress test just weeks before the trial began and been given a clean bill of health. He says he eschews drink when a case is on trial. His smoking habit has been harder to tame. "I have smoked three packs of Winstons a day for 50 years," he said.
On Wednesday, about an hour after the Enron case went to the jury, Mr. Ramsey dug into a tenderloin steak at a restaurant near the "war room” loft he rents downtown to focus on big cases. The doctors, he explained, said that if he would quit smoking they would not fuss at him about what he eats.
In interviews this week, some lawyers raised questions about whether Tuesday's closing argument would be the last hurrah in Mr. Ramsey's 40-year career, one spent exclusively as a criminal defense attorney.
"He has a fabulous talent before a jury," said Jamie Wareham, the global chairman of litigation for Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. "But would he be the right choice in a lawyer, given his health issues, for an extended trial? He might not be anymore."
Raised in the blue-collar town of Channelview, Tex., outside Houston, Mr. Ramsey rose to prominence defending accused murderers and police officers accused of civil rights violations. After working under the renowned trial lawyer Richard Haynes, who is known as Racehorse, Mr. Ramsey cemented his national reputation in 2003 by helping win the acquittal of a New York real estate heir, Robert A. Durst, after Mr. Durst shot and killed a neighbor, dismembered him and tossed the body parts into Galveston Bay.
While he said he was not considering retirement, Mr. Ramsey said he did plan to slow down. He said he was "seriously thinking about trying a case overseas," possibly at a tribunal in The Hague. "They try cases in a much more civilized fashion over there," he said.
But the timing of his illness — in the midst of what he called the "biggest business case since Teapot Dome" — continues to haunt him. "I will always regret I got sick in the midst of this particular trial," he said. "That is something I will live with the rest of my life."
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