Down & Dirty (36 page)

In Broward, Lee and Carroll look outside at the craziness, the protesters and lawyers coagulating, the gnashing of teeth.
Deutsch is holding a press conference, talking about how he was illegally forced from the meeting. A
Sun-Sentinel
reporter will later tell Lee that Democratic honcho Mitch Caesar and some others are outside talking up the notion of recruiting
a well-financed opponent for Lee in his next judicial election.

“How do we get out of here?” Lee asks Carroll. The back door goes out only to the roof, where there’s barbed wire. He and
Carroll laugh about the image of them scaling the building to avoid the crowds.

In a way, it’s just annoying, Lee thinks. He has no doubt in mind that if the current skirmish he’s been drawn into were reversed,
those exact same parties would be making—with the exact same vigor and vehemence—the exact opposite arguments. Democrats would
be saying that the Republicans were inventing votes; Republicans would be arguing that county canvassing boards have the discretion
to do whatever they see fit. It’s all kind of tiresome, he thinks.

Monday night, The Flag takes a bunch of the Tallahassee operation out for dinner at The Governor’s Club.

It’s been a long day. Broward voted against having a hand recount, Clay Roberts issued his opinion against the legality of
the very notion… it’s clear to all that the Republicans are very well coordinated.

They sit in a nice upstairs dining room—leatherbound books, white-coated waiters, a long table. Daley and Christopher sit
across from one another in the center of the table, and they’re flanked by Berger, Klain, Douglass, Sandler, Christopher attorney
Mark Steinberg, Berger’s law partner John Newton, spokesman Hattaway, Daley aides Graham Streett and David Lane. Much of the
discussion at dinner is about Bob Butterworth. About how he’s done nothing for them. Daley, in particular, expresses some
frustration. Butterworth is the only Democratic state official, really—the governor, house, senate, division of elections
director, secretary of state, even the goddamn (purportedly Democratic) secretary of agriculture is in the Bush camp. And
yet he’s done nothing for their cause, he’s AWOL. Silly Butterworth; unlike Harris and Jeb, he actually is trying to behave
impartially.

Christopher mentions having met him, how he found him not all that impressive, rather underwhelming. As Daley goes on about
Butterworth, he gets increasingly agitated. Just talking about it is pissing him off. He tells Streett to get Butterworth
on the phone for him. Streett gets up, walks to the corner of the room, punches up his cell phone.

When he’s got Butterworth on the line, Streett brings the phone to Daley. Daley snags it and leaves the room, whereupon he
proceeds to rip Butterworth a new asshole. It’s day six and Harris has already shown the world how aggressive she’s going
to be for Bush, and where have you been?! Daley asks. We have no friends in this state, he says. Everything we’ve
gotten so far we’ve gotten on our own, while Bush has the whole thing wired. He tells Butterworth about the opinion that Roberts
handed down earlier today on the illegality of hand recounts. Palm Beach asked for an opinion from you, and you didn’t even
give them one, he says.

The next morning, Butterworth—despite a 1993 opinion he issued that “any questions arising under the Florida Election Code
should be addressed to the Division of Elections and the Department of State”—issues an opinion that differs from Harris’s.

“No vote is to be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter as determined by the
county canvassing board,” he writes. He was compelled to offer his opinion since Clay Roberts’s take on it all “is so clearly
at variance with the existing Florida statutes and case law.”

It’s the first and last time the Gorebies find any use for the man they’ll come to think of as Butterworthless.

P
ost-Elián, there aren’t a lot of Cuban-American Republicans who have framed letters from Janet Reno on their office walls.
Roberto “Bobby” Martinez—the former U.S. attorney whom Kendall Coffey replaced—may be the only one. He tries to be a voice
of caution, calm, the rule of law.

Martinez is a friend of Jeb’s, has been since prep school at Phillips Andover. He served as his general counsel during Jeb’s
transition to governor. Now he’s serving as one of the lead attorneys—along with former state representative Miguel De Grandy—in
front of the Miami-Dade canvassing board.

Armed with a book on election law—Martinez hasn’t been involved in a recount for more than a decade, when he argued against
Coffey in a state legislative race—he went into the building and checked it all out. Everything seemed in order. Judge Lawrence
King, Jr., the chairman of the canvassing board, even gave Martinez a tour of the counting room. To Martinez, King seemed
very proud of his staff and the process, telling him how professional it was, how careful the workers were not to touch the
individual ballots, as repeated handling could degrade the cards.

In all the squabbles about recounts, Martinez knows his mission: to preserve the status quo. Martinez hasn’t been told to
stop any further counting, to engage in delay tactics, to stall—he doesn’t have to be told.

Thus, he was delighted when the board chose to wait until today to hold its hearing on hand counting the 1 percent sample.
Bush field director Ken Mehlman was especially happy. Though of the three southern Florida counties, Gore’s margin of victory
in Miami-Dade was slimmest—roughly 53 percent to 47 percent—Mehlman’s concern is that there are a lot of
undervotes—10,750. The Bushies don’t want those ballots counted by hand.

Over the weekend, Martinez and De Grandy got organized. Political consultant Al Lorenzo was hired to tell them just which
precincts were what and why and whether their rates of undervote were normal. Martinez suspected that the Gorebies were going
to challenge absentee ballots, so he contacted a private investigator, Hugh Cochran, a former G-man Martinez knew when he
was U.S. attorney. You never know when a bit of information about something—or someone—might be useful.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday morning, Martinez remains concerned about the potential legal might of his Democratic rivals. In
fact, he’s more concerned than ever, because he hears that last night, David Boies flew in to Tallahassee to join the Gore
team.

David Boies flew in last night because on Monday, Ron Klain asked former solicitor general Walter Dellinger, “Who is the best
lawyer in the country that we don’t have working on this case?” and Dellinger gave two names: Boies and Joel Klein, both of
whom worked on the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Klein was unreachable, Boies not so.

Not that he wasn’t busy. As America’s hottest lawyer, Boies was in Manhattan meeting with executives from Philip Morris in
the conference room of the Lexington Avenue office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner when Dellinger called. Before he could be
given the message, Boies—who is known to say, “Would you rather sleep or win?”—had already zipped over to the office of another
client, Manhattan developer Sheldon Solow, for whom he won an $11.5 million judgment in 1999. At Solow’s office, he got Dellinger’s
message, which was marked “Important.”

Boies called Dellinger, a friend from Yale Law School days and on various legal stuff. What’s up? he asked.

As you’re probably aware, there’s this recount issue going on down in Florida, Dellinger said. He conference-called Klain
in, and Klain gave the basic 411, asked if Boies could come down to help out for a few days.

“When do you want me there?” Boies asked. “As fast as possible,” Klain said, as they might be going to the Florida Supreme
Court the next day.

Boies called his son, Jonathan, a lawyer at his firm, and had him prepare a packet of information gleaned from Lexis-Nexis
and the Internet. He had a charter plane arranged to take him from Teterborough Airport, across the river in New Jersey, to
Florida and proceeded to take two more meetings
— with clients from Calvin Klein and from Napster—before heading to the airport, where Jonathan’s research was waiting for
him. He arrived in Tallahassee around midnight, cabbed it to the Governor’s Inn, met Klain, walked over to Mitchell Berger’s
offices. The only one on the team he knew was Warren Christopher, since they’d both done some work for IBM in the 1970s, as
well as the fact that they were both alumni of the University of Redlands.

Tuesday night I catch my first glimpse of Boies when I stumble in to the Governor’s Inn, where The Flag is staying and where
my glorious office assistant had managed to secure me a room. It’s late, and he’s doing a TV interview. Such is Boies. The
camera loves him, and it is not an unrequited love. Boies is an intriguing figure, brilliant, nice, rumpled, pock-marked,
mussed, with cheap suits and Rockport shoes and a $29.95 Casio watch oddly wrapped around the outside of his shirt.

He has represented radio talk-show host Don Imus, comedian Garry Shandling, and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. In 1997,
he left big-time law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore to start his own firm, and in 1999,
National Law Journal
named him “Lawyer of the Year,” and the reporter who wrote the story—calling him “the Michael Jordan of the courtroom”—is
now following him around working on his biography. Largely this is due to his last case. Just as Ted Olson is Bill Clinton’s
legal nemesis, Boies is Bill Gates’s.

And to hear his best friend, James Fox Miller, tell it, he always knew that Boies was headed in this direction. Miller’s a
past president of the Florida bar, and he’s more than willing to tell me all about his buddy. As able as Boies is, Miller’s
hyperbole strains credibility. But he’s only slightly less hypey than the rest of the media is being with news of Boies’s
arrival.

Boies has been Miller’s best friend since four days into Northwestern Law School in 1962, he tells me. Bearing in mind that
Boies has been married three times, Miller says that he “probably know[s] him better than anybody in the world.” “He’s the
best legal mind I know,” Miller tells me. “He can simplify complex legal and factual issues better than anyone I know. He
can grasp the basics and the nuances of law to which he has never been exposed. He’s the quickest study of any mind I have
ever seen anywhere.”As if his legend needed any more mythology, Boies also is dyslexic—the reason that his brain has worked
so hard on overdrive to overcompensate in other areas, like his photographic memory. But no one considers his dyslexia to
be anything but interesting color in his profiles. Certainly not Miller. “When Vice President Gore hired David Boies, he maximized
his chances of success,”Miller says.

But what of the fact that Boies isn’t an expert on election law, certainly not on Florida election law? No problem, Miller
says. When Boies was hired by CBS to defend the network against libel charges by Gen. William West-moreland, Boies had never
done a libel case before. But by the end of it, he was the no. 1 libel lawyer in the country, Miller replies. When Klein at
the Justice Department brought Boies in to help them fell Gates and Microsoft, “he’d never even turned on a computer,” Miller
says.