Dark and Bloody Ground (3 page)

The most important of these was the governor at that time, A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the most popular figure in modern Kentucky history. First elected in 1935, Happy Chandler was appointed commissioner of baseball after World War II and by 1956 was into his second term as governor. In that year Lester managed to land frequent assignments as the official chauffeur of the governor and Mrs. Chandler.

As commissioner, Chandler left mixed impressions. He helped to integrate the sport by assisting Branch Rickey in bringing Jackie Robinson up to the Brooklyn Dodgers; but in the eighties Chandler compromised that distinction by uttering the word “nigger” at a meeting of the University of Kentucky Board of Regents, a slip that prompted demands for his resignation from the board. In 1947 he suspended Leo Durocher for the season for allegedly having consorted with gamblers; but many people, including Leo the Lip, believed that Durocher’s crucial mistake was in complaining to reporters about the commissioner’s hypocrisy in not suspending a Yankee owner for entertaining the same gamblers, Memphis Engle-berg and Connie Immerman, in a private box at a ball game in Havana. “Baseball typifies the great American dream,” Chandler wrote in his preface to the
Encyclopedia of Baseball
(1949), “where a boy may rise from direct poverty to become a national hero. No pull—no inside track is necessary. The only requirements are the development of a skill and the willingness to work hard in the development of that skill.” In anointing Lester Burns as a protégé, however, Chandler must have believed that some pull and the inside track would do the boy no harm. In Lester, Governor Chandler spotted a fellow with political instincts, down-home charm, and shrewdness not unlike his own. The two developed a father-and-son closeness.

Lester was by then a handsome stripling, as he might have
phrased it, just under six feet tall, his physique toughened by work in the mines and lifting those Pepsi crates. High cheekbones, a tanned, coppery complexion, and a regal carriage exuding confidence suggested a Shawnee chief, maybe Tecumseh himself somewhere in the background ennobling the tough Scottish strains. His hair was sandy; his eyes gleamed turquoise.

“Momma and I just about raised him,” Governor Chandler recalled twenty-five years later in speaking to a reporter who was preparing a front-page feature story on Lester. “He just had that Clay County determination about him. Under other circumstances, he might have had an average life. But he had that spark.”

One October afternoon Lester drove Mrs. Chandler to the Keeneland races, a journey of more than an hour, plenty of time for him to spin a few mountain yarns. He also gave her a tip on the big race.

“Lester, honey,” Momma said on the return trip, “do you want to be a trooper all your life?”

“No, Momma,” Lester said, “I have always dreamed of becoming a lawyer.”

“Then why don’t you do it?”.

“I can’t afford it. I’ve got a wife and a baby daughter, and besides, I can’t choose my hours. They don’t have classes at night, and half the time I’m working days.”

“Lester, honey, didn’t you finish first in your class at the Police Academy?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“Well, Lester, I want you to call your supervisor first thing Monday morning, you hear? You tell him the governor told you to call. From now on, you’re working nights, and you can attend law school during the day.”

“I don’t think the supervisor will agree to that,” Lester said. “Everybody has to work different shifts.”

“Honey, the head of the State Police works for my husband. If he doesn’t like it, Happy will fire him.”

Lester enrolled at the University of Kentucky School of Law that week, his books and tuition taken care of by a special scholarship granted by the governor’s office. He gave out very few tickets during the next few years. Usually he parked his cruiser on some lonely road to study. Another trooper gave him a book rack with a light attached
that hooked onto the steering wheel. When he received his degree, other graduates urged him to sign up for special courses to cram for the bar examination.

“Why would I need to do that?” Lester asked. “I’ve been going without sleep for three years. If I don’t know the law by now, I must be some kind of an idiot.”

Lester passed the bar on his first try in September 1959, argued his first case the same day, and won. He borrowed five hundred dollars to move his family—Asonia had given birth to a second daughter by then—back to Manchester, the Clay County seat, where he knew he had enough contacts and understood the people well enough to give himself a running start. He opened a twenty-dollar-a-month office and began immediately to establish the theatrical style that would mark his career.

The nearest Cadillac dealer was over in Corbin. Lester walked into the showroom wearing a new suit he had just purchased on credit, pointed to a white 1959 Coupe de Ville, and announced that he did not have a dime to his name but was the best lawyer in Kentucky and would never miss a payment. When the salesman laughed at him, Lester demanded to see the owner and drove off in the Cadillac with no money down. In his first four months of practice, he made twenty-five thousand dollars and paid off the car.

Lester knew he had brains and was willing to work harder than anyone else; he also knew that that was not enough. To be the kind of success he was determined to be, he knew he had to appear it and act it, and he understood which symbols meant success to mountain folk. There was the Cadillac, that was a prerequisite, and there had to be clothes to match and the panache to wear them as if he belonged in them—the mountain boy who had made it and with whom everyone could identify, or nearly everyone. Lester was so meticulous and imaginative about his clothes that if he had been born a Parisian, he might have outstyled Christian Dior. He often wore a touch of bright blue, in a tie or a silk handkerchief billowing from his breast pocket, to call attention to his eyes. To complement the white Caddy with its red leather upholstery he chose several pastel suits, added diamond rings, and made sure his shoes never showed a speck of dust. When he descended on a dingy mining town he looked as if he had flown in from a holiday in Florida
or maybe Las Vegas, tan, sparkling, rich, exuding bravado.

“I can’t understand these small-town lawyers with their Sears Roebuck suits and
shop rags
for ties,” Lester said. “You know what a
shop rag
is? That’s what a grease monkey uses to change your oil. All those lawyers wear them. No wonder they’re broke.”

When Lester began handing out business cards with his name engraved in gold on a black background, the state bar association came after him. Lawyers in those days were forbidden to advertise. He was not advertising, Lester insisted. His only advertisement was himself. The cards displayed only his name, not a word about his being an attorney-at-law. Surely the Constitution protected the right of every American citizen to print his name on a little-bitty card! The association backed off.

In court, Lester adjusted his wardrobe to fit the circumstances, gearing sartorial selections to appeal to the jury. He often visited a territory two or three days beforehand incognito, wearing bib overalls if necessary to mingle for coffee or a few beers with the locals, to gauge the temper of a place. He found out what color suit the prosecutor was wearing on any given day and, dressing in his motor home, chose something that contrasted with his adversary. When jurors began showing up wearing Lester’s colors, he knew he had the case won. Nosing around before one trial in 1983, he learned that the whole town had gone mad for a certain brand of imported Taiwanese clothing that a local merchant had on sale under the Frenchified label “Etienne Augére.” He bought two suits and a leather jacket and began carrying a briefcase bearing that label, which he left open for the jury to see.

“I Augered ‘em to death,” Lester crowed, pronouncing the name as if it were something used to bore holes. It took the jury twenty minutes to reach a verdict of acquittal.

The premise of his courtroom tactics was that anyone who believed that twelve randomly selected human beings were capable of reaching a unanimous decision on the basis of a cool disinterested weighing of the evidence was an idiot. You had to play psychological games, you had to distract and entertain a jury to persuade them and make them grateful to you for giving them something better than anything on TV. And you had to be able to anticipate their gut reactions. Supposing, for instance, that one of your key defense witnesses had something ghastly in his background that, if unskillfully elicited,
would undermine his credibility. The key was to bring that skeleton out of the closet right off the bat, so that by the time the jury was ready to deliberate, they had forgotten about it or at least had relegated it to the backs of their minds. Thus he might begin examining a witness by saying, “Mr. Smith, it’s true that several years ago you had the misfortune of getting into an argument with your cousin and shooting him, isn’t it? And you were convicted of manslaughter and spent time in prison satisfying your debt to society, isn’t that also true?” That out of the way, Lester could get down to business. If he left damaging information to be brought out by the prosecutor, a mere distraction could turn into a bombshell.

Everyone conceded Lester’s cleverness, even brilliance; no one doubted his knowledge of the law or the thoroughness with which he usually prepared a case. It was his theatrics that offended other members of the bar and some judges. There were those who called him a buffoon. John Y. Brown, Sr., once advised a certain client to plead guilty and accept a sentence of ten years in prison. The client consulted Lester, who asked how much John Y. was charging him. The man said fifteen hundred dollars, and Lester said that that was about fourteen-ninety-nine too much. What did he need a lawyer for? He could go to prison on his own. The man went back to John Y. Brown and fired him, saying he was hiring Lester Burns.

“But—Lester Burns has no
finesse!”
John Y. protested.

“You tell John Y.,” Lester retorted when he heard this, “that Lester Burns has finessed everything he ever started.”

When Lester purchased the first of his twenty-foot-long motor homes displaying his name across the front and sides, the bar association again took exception. Lester told them that if they didn’t care for this one, he had another bus that lit up in neon with the slogan, “If You Cough, Call Us!” The facetious reference was to his advocacy of black lung disease cases on behalf of miners. He would roll into the coalfields with an entourage of assistants and gofers—some of them former clients paying off debts to him by working for nothing—and open up for business on the spot, doing minor legal work for free and taking black lung cases on a contingency basis. He was a pioneer in this litigation, which did more than anything else to build his reputation and income.

When the government tightened the rules on black lung suits, making it difficult for Lester to turn a wheeze into money, “I could
feel the darkness closing in,” he remembers in one of his favorite asides. Quick to adjust, he began to specialize in criminal defense, which occupied about seventy-five percent of his practice, with personal injury and medical malpractice taking up most of the rest. By one means or another, he continued to enhance his reputation as the champion of the little man—or woman. First it had been the injured miner against the corporation; now it was the accused against an oppressive system of justice and a vindictive prosecutor, or, if Lester was himself prosecuting, the victim’s family crying out for retribution. Lester was careful, whatever the economic temptations, never to represent the obviously rich and powerful unless he could somehow cast them in the role of the oppressed. And he continued to do some work for free or for next to nothing. He took on for one dollar, for instance, any case in which a state trooper was charged with any sort of crime—out of warm memories of his days on the force, he said, and because troopers were shamefully underpaid public servants who daily risked their lives for the common good. Whatever his motives, this public-spirited generosity did no harm in terms of publicity and may even, some cynics claimed, possibly have caused troopers called to testify in criminal cases to modify, to soften, perhaps to shape their testimony in Lester’s behalf without, of course, ever stepping over the perilous line of perjury.

As Lester became more and more identified with criminal cases, his flamboyance—the word reporters associated with him more than any other—increased, his sense of drama growing bolder. He had the instincts of a P. T. Barnum or a Mike Todd, that if the public likes what you are giving them, give them more of it.

ATTORNEY LESTER BURNS TURNS THE COURTROOM INTO A STAGE
read a front-page headline in the
Lexington Herald-Leader,
under a three-column photograph of Lester standing grinning beside his bus, dressed in a Western-cut suit, rings flashing, an enormous gold-on-silver belt buckle gleaming. He had discovered that, although Kentucky was hardly the Wild West, Western clothing, including handmade ostrich-, snake-, and turtleskin boots, always played well.

“I would have no quarrel with the word flamboyant,” he said.

“I’ve been known to get down on the floor and I’ve been known to wrap myself in the American flag.” He meant all of this literally.

“But if working to the fullest extent of my abilities for my clients, if wearing expensive clothes and expensive diamonds and giving
myself fully to every case I take is being flamboyant, then I plead guilty to being flamboyant.”

His theatrics included high-powered firearms. Explaining his need for bodyguards, automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns, Lester claimed that “the cases I have are not ones that enhance popularity,” a judgment with which most Eastern Kentuckians would have disagreed. “It’s sad, but I have to go heavily armed. When the crooks and killers of this country know you’re packing a gun they won’t be so quick to go out there and shoot people down in the streets.” Here he walked a tightrope, because he was defending crooks and killers at the same time that he presented himself as their enemy. The people saw no contradiction: it was a variation on the mountain philosophy.