Arrested Lawyer Quick to Charge Back
Discrimination, Coercion Claimed

By Ruben Castaneda
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 28, 2008

Defense attorneys typically advise clients charged with criminal offenses to keep quiet. College Park lawyer Walter L. Blair, who is representing himself after being accused of money laundering and witness tampering, is taking a somewhat different approach.

On Nov. 10, four days after he was arrested, Blair filed a civil lawsuit alleging that Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein and others targeted him for investigation because he is black and of Jamaican descent. The suit accuses federal law enforcement officials of coercing government witnesses, unlawfully seizing documents from Blair's office and conspiring to violate his civil rights.

The lawsuit, which offers no evidence in support of those claims, asks a judge to throw out the criminal charges against Blair and prohibit prosecutors from indicting him again. It also seeks $200 million in damages.

"This is so compelling, Ray Charles could see it," Blair said in an interview. "What they are doing to me is an outrage. Somebody needs to defend the dream. If I need to stand alone, so be it."

Rosenstein dismissed the lawsuit as "frivolous" and noted that a 23-member federal grand jury indicted Blair after weighing evidence. "We don't pay attention to race or ethnicity," he said. "Anybody who committed these offenses would be indicted."

Blair, 57, a Brookeville resident, has gained public attention over the years as an aggressive advocate for plaintiffs suing local police, sometimes partnering with the late noted lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. Court records make clear that Blair has also been an occasional plaintiff himself, suing a judge who presided over a case he tried, a doctor he retained as an expert witness and a prosecutor he alleged had violated his civil rights.

Also named as defendants in his latest lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, are Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael R. Pauzé, IRS agent Daniel R. Johnson and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.

Asked what evidence supports his claim of discrimination, Blair pointed to the first sentence in the indictment: "The defendant, WALTER LLOYD BLAIR, was a native of Jamaica, and between at least 2002 and 2005, a resident of Silver Spring and Brookeville, Maryland."

"It's obvious," he said. "Why do that except to tell the grand jury that Blair is a black man?"

The indictment accuses Blair of laundering at least $70,000 that once belonged to a Jamaican drug dealer in Richmond. Before he was killed, the dealer gave a safe containing the money to a distant relative who lived in Germantown, the indictment alleges.

In 2003, the indictment says, the relative contacted Blair after the drug dealer went missing and his girlfriend was found shot to death; the dealer and his girlfriend's son were later also found fatally shot. Blair told the relative to bring the money to him at his office in College Park, the indictment says.

As part of a scheme Blair hatched to conceal the origins of the money, more than $40,000 was used to buy real estate, the indictment alleges. Blair also used $30,000 to pay himself and two other lawyers for representing associates of the slain drug dealer, it says.

According to the indictment, Blair later told the Germantown resident to lie to an FBI agent who was asking questions about the drug money. Blair also failed to report the funds on his tax returns, the indictment alleges.

Blair contends that the financial transactions were legal. He said he recently learned from his tax preparer that he overpaid the government for the years in question and is entitled to a refund of about $47,000.

Blair, a father of six, and his wife divorced in 1993, according to Montgomery County court records. They engaged in a years-long legal battle in which she alleged that he was behind in child-support payments, at one point by more than $14,000. Blair sought to have his payments reduced, saying in one document filed with the court, "I do not have any money."

For a time during that battle, he sought to become the primary caretaker of their two children, submitting to the court pictures of the children and him snorkeling in Jamaica and visiting the Mall.

In the mid-1980s, when he practiced in West Virginia, Blair was charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly tampering with a witness. He was found guilty, but a judge threw out the convictions, and he was acquitted at a second trial. Blair unsuccessfully sued the prosecutor in that case.

About the same time, Blair filed a lawsuit accusing a West Virginia judge of making racially incendiary remarks about Blair. Specifically, the judge told a fellow jurist in 1983 that Blair should "go back there in Africa and swing from the trees with the rest of his relatives," according to a deposition provided by Blair. The lawsuit was settled under terms that are not public, Blair said.

Blair also took on authorities in lawsuits he filed on behalf of his clients.

In 1999, Blair, Cochran and Baltimore lawyer Billy Murphy sued Montgomery after a county police detective accidentally shot a 44-year-old man to death. The county settled the suit by agreeing to pay $2 million to the family of the man, Junious W. Roberts Jr.

In 2003, Prince George's County paid $200,000 to settle a civil lawsuit against county police Cpl. Brian C. Catlett, who fatally shot college student Gary A. Hopkins Jr. four years earlier. In that case, Blair brought in Cochran, who gained worldwide fame defending O.J. Simpson in his double-murder trial. The county settled before the case went to trial.

Blair said he met Cochran at a 1998 book-signing event for Cochran in the District.

A law professor said civil actions like the one Blair filed this month against Rosenstein are unusual and rarely succeed.

"Unless you have a smoking gun -- say, Rod Rosenstein was heard to say, 'I'm going to prosecute someone because he's Jamaican,' -- it's very difficult," said Byron L. Warnken, a law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

"There is no lawyer in the United States who would take [Blair's] civil case on a contingency basis," he added, "except for the publicity value."

Staff writer Dan Morse and researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.