President Bush may have satisfied the religious right with John Roberts. And he’s done nicely by the conservative legal establishment, too. I’m sure, for instance, that C. Boyden Grey went to sleep with a big smile on his face Tuesday evening.

But I’m just not sure Roberts cuts ice with the pundit/talking head community. After all, regardless of political bent, professional yackers and scorekeepers want to see some action — either a right-wing fire-breather who will drive the Democrats insane or a soft-soap-Souter-type who will send the James Dobsons of the world into similarly fist-clenched fits of distraction.

But no dice.

As near as I can tell, this is a really, really fast pitch right on the edge of the strike zone — totally legit and really hard to hit. And, frankly, I can’t think of anything interesting to say about the guy.

So I propose a compromise. I’m not going to write about John Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court. But I will write about another lawyer who’s argued before the Supreme Court, even one who made a small bit of history in doing so. And if that’s not enough, he’s currently representing the president’s consigliere Karl Rove in the ever-expanding investigation into the outing of clandestine CIA agent Valerie Plame. And since Rove no doubt had to OK Roberts before Bush was allowed to appoint him, let’s mark that down as a connection to the news of the day too.

In any case, back to our man Bob Luskin.

His bit of history before the court came in 1995, when he became the first man ever to argue before the court wearing an earring. “A tasteful silver stud in his left ear,” reported The Washington Post at the time.

And that’s not the only way Luskin appears a bit edgier and more interesting than your average luxe D.C. defense attorney. When Legal Times asked him in 1998 why he was shutting down his boutique D.C. defense law firm, he responded: “To paraphrase Hobbes: The life of a boutique is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

I first got interested in Luskin because, unlike most other prestige D.C. defense lawyers I’m familiar with, he seemed to prefer the tactic of making serial contradictory statements on behalf of his client. So I got curious to see whether there were other hints of unorthodox behavior in his background. And when I started looking, I wasn’t disappointed.

The case that really stands out to me was his representation of Stephen A. Saccoccia back in the early 1990s. Saccoccia and his wife, Donna, had been convicted of laundering more than $100 million for various Colombian drug kingpins. Their racket was laundering drug money through companies that traded in precious metals. Stephen was given a 660-year sentence.

After Saccoccia’s conviction in 1993, Luskin took his case up on appeal.

Luskin wasn’t able to get Saccoccia off. But over the course of Saccoccia’s appeal, federal prosecutors became suspicious of where he was getting all the money to hire a pack of such pricey defense attorneys. After all, after his conviction he’d been ordered to hand over the $137 million in drug money he’d made. And the feds wanted to know whether he was using that money instead to pay his lawyers.

On the face of it, this seems a bit unfair since under our system everyone is entitled to good representation and a defense attorney can’t be expected to start investigating his own client to find out where his or her money is coming from.

Well, the prosecutors thought he should have gotten some inkling when Saccoccia started paying Luskin’s attorney’s fees in gold bars.

Yep, you heard that right.

Luskin got paid more than $500,000 of his attorney’s fees in gold bars. And this was from a client whose conviction on numerous counts of laundering drug money with precious metals he was then trying to have overturned.

How would he ever have known that was drug money?

Luskin insisted that he “never [had], and never would, knowingly accept a fee that was the proceeds of illegal activities.”

But when federal prosecutors finally got a chance to depose Luskin and Saccoccia’s other lawyers, they found that their lawyers’ fees had come in all manner of “Goodfellas”-esque forms of payment, “such as gold bars, cash that was dropped off at hotels and trunks of cars, and money transfers from Swiss bank accounts.”

Eventually, in 1998, Luskin came to a settlement with the government in which he agreed to cough up $245,000 of the money he’d gotten from Saccoccia. So I guess that means he got to keep half the bars after all.

Given Karl Rove’s expanding legal predicament and his defense attorney’s creative approach to criminal defense, I’m thinking that Roberts may turn out — all expectations to the contrary — to be a softy when it comes to the rights of criminals. And if not that, perhaps a covert opponent of paper money.

And I’ll be watching the confirmation hearings closely to see if my theories bear out.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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