The New Yorker, November 1, 1999 P. 70
A REPORTER AT LARGE about flamboyant Florida trial attorney Willie Gary, 52, vs. the Loewen funeral company... Tells about the civil trial, which began Sep. 12, 1995, in Jackson, Mississippi... Gary wears three-thousand-dollar suits and has cases pending in forty-two states... Describes his self-made career, and how he rose from poverty... Describes how, rejected for a football scholarship on the last day of training camp at Bethune-Cookman, a small black college in Daytona... Describes how he then succeeded in obtaining a football scholarship to Shaw University in Raleigh, by showing up as the school year commenced, and convincing the coach to give him an opportunity... Before the start of his second year of college he married Gloria Royal... Tells about a landscaping business he started in college to support himself... He was accepted at North Carolina Central University law school in Durham... After law school, he returned to Florida and passed the bar exam on his first attempt. He talked his way into a job with the Office of the Public Defender in Stuart, and in his first week, was given responsibility (mainly by the defendant) for a first-degree murder death-penalty case... The defendant was found guilty, but he eventually received a retrial and a life sentence... After the trial was over, no money was available to keep Gary on in the public defender's office, so he opened his own law office... Tells how he settled a case against an insurance company for $225,000 in his second year, a verdict which made his reputation... By 1996, Willie Gary had accumulated nearly sixty settlements or verdicts of a million dollars or more... His great indulgence is lavish spending, and in this he can match the excess of any corporate mandarin. The interior of his Gulfstream jet, for example, is outfitted with 18k. gold fixtures... Tells about the rise of Ray Loewen to the head of a large chain of Canadian and American funeral homes... Tells about the case brought against Loewen by a Biloxi businessman named Jeremiah O'Keefe, a contractual dispute, which Gary eventually agreed to lead... Tells how Gary's initial request to settle the case was for $125 million... Describes Gary's lengthy cross-examination of Ray Loewen... Tells how the jury awarded O'Keefe a total of $500 million, an amount which would bankrupt Loewen's company... Eventually a deal was negotiated between the two parties... Lowen's company went bankrupt eventually and O'Keefe eventually purchased Loewen assets in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, using money obtained in his lawsuit against Loewen...