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Taking Enron to Task
From left, Kathryn H. Ruemmler, John C. Hueston and Sean M. Berkowitz are part of the Enron Task Force taking the firm's former leaders to trial.
(By Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)
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The Yale Law School graduate served as a clerk for federal Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., whose landmark rulings on integration in the South made him a hero to civil rights pioneers. The Alabama judge advised Hueston to join the U.S. Attorney's office as quickly as possible. Hueston readily complied, working his way up to command a unit of 25 government lawyers.
"He gave one of the best closing arguments I've ever seen," Cormac J. Carney, a federal judge in Santa Ana, Calif., said of Hueston's remarks in a sophisticated computer counterfeiting case. "He was very good about 'those stubborn facts.' "
For the last few years, each of the lawyers has regularly left behind home and family to commute to Houston and Washington. The wear and tear of travel has prompted turnover within the unit over the years. Berkowitz and Ruemmler took the reins at the task force this summer after the unit's disappointment in the Andersen and broadband cases.
The final member of the government trial team is Cliff Stricklin, a former Texas state judge who once served on a Dallas city council ethics panel with White House counsel and failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. The son of a Baptist minister, Stricklin, 41, is the only Texas native on the government's team. He has 26 federal jury trials as a prosecutor under his belt and 130 more trials during his time as a judge. "I've pretty much seen just about everything," said Stricklin, including a case in which parents had kept their emaciated daughter in a closet for nearly five years.
Stricklin will focus on jury selection and pacing at the upcoming Enron trial. The other three prosecutors will divide up the remaining duties, sharing opening statements and closing arguments as well as key witnesses.
The Enron trial is by no means a certain victory for prosecutors. The task force, composed of about a dozen lawyers and another 12 federal agents, will be outgunned in both manpower and financial resources. Skilling has paid his lawyers more than $20 million out of his pocket and $17 million more from insurance proceeds. Lay has shelled out millions of dollars more.
Defense lawyers already have tried to keep the government team busy reacting, filing motion after motion to distract their opponents in the weeks before the trial.
"Unlike so many cases brought by the government, this is not a sure thing," said Warren Lupel, Berkowitz's uncle, who also is a prominent Chicago lawyer. "It's a bit of a gamble."
