When Mayor Fenty gets in a jam, count on Peter Nickles to be at his side, teeth bared and ready to attack
Even his friends say D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles is like a shark.
“He’s got to keep moving forward,” said longtime friend and law partner Alan Pemberton. “He can’t stop or he’ll die.”
Long regarded as one of the city’s top litigators — in a city full of great litigators — Nickles has been swimming in dangerous waters for the past two years. As one of Adrian Fenty’s oldest friends and most trusted adviser, Nickles seems to be everywhere, all the time, defending the mayor and fighting off his own tormentors.
» City lawyers stand accused of shredding crucial evidence in a civil rights suit. Nickles is fending off calls for an independent investigation — and for his resignation.
» The $300 million special education system is facing a new round of litigation alleging gross incompetence. Nickles is handling the defense himself.
» The child welfare system nearly collapsed last year and is still facing a hostile takeover bid by reform groups who say that Mayor Adrian Fenty and Nickles are in over their heads.
» The much-derided police blockades he threw up in Trinidad have been squashed by a federal appeals court. Nickles has appealed.
“Two years ago, this guy was defending corporations in the equivalent of slip-and-fall cases, and now all of the sudden — with no background, no experience — he’s our top law enforcement lawyer,” said police union chair Kris Baumann, a former lawyer himself who is locked in litigation with Nickles and the city. “He needs to be an honest and fair broker. And that’s not happening.”
The voices raised against Nickles are getting louder as the Fenty administration slouches from crisis to crisis. A recent poll of registered Democrats in Wards 1, 3 and 6 — the gentrified neighborhoods that Fenty desperately needs for political support — found that Nickles was the city’s most disliked public official.
“I disturb the established culture,” he told The Examiner. “I’m not in the job just to be a caretaker. The culture has produced bad results for the citizens of the city.”
Fenty and Nickles have been inseparable for decades. Nickles befriended Fenty’s parents while the future mayor was in his mother’s womb. Nickles is at once the mayor’s mentor, adopted uncle, running buddy and hatchet man. When Fenty needs warm work done, he invariably turns to Nickles.
It was Nickles who stepped in to fire social workers in the wake of the child welfare collapse. It was Nickles who fought against an inquiry into the curious donation of a city fire truck and ambulance to a Caribbean resort town. It was Nickles who fired nearly a dozen lawyers in his office — including a terminally ill cancer patient — in the hopes of building a “young, able” city law firm. It was Nickles who slapped a mentally ill man with a $2.2 million hospital bill after the man, having gouged out his own eyes while under guard by two city orderlies, filed a negligence lawsuit against the city’s mental hospital. It was Nickles who negotiated settlements last year after the federal government twice sued the city for fraud.
Those who know him well say that Nickles’ relentless aggression isn’t a pose: In nature, he’s red in tooth and claw.
“He is really not personally bothered by the fray. In fact, he feeds off it. He always has,” said John Blake, who started his legal career a year behind Nickles and raised his family not far from the Nickles’ home in Great Falls. “That’s what made him such a great pro bono lawyer.”
Nickles is proudest of those volunteer cases. He often begins sentences, “In my 40 years of suing the District…”
It’s easy to get the impression that he spent his pre-government career in some kind of sweltering people’s law office. In fact, he had a palatial office at Covington & Burling, one of D.C.’s most illustrious firms. He charged clients such as Asarco mining and Kerr-McGee chemicals more than $600 an hour to handle lawsuits and troublesome tax laws.
In his private practice, just like his public one, Nickles had three modes: attack, attack and attack.
“It’s hard to forget Peter,” said Ray Givens, who went up against Nickles about a decade ago when he represented an Idaho Indian tribe suing Asacro over toxic waste in a tribal lake. “Nickles is a very good lawyer — very tough, and not afraid for a minute to [tick] off people, if he thinks that’s what he’s got to do.”
Givens recalled that at one point in his litigation against Asarco, he appealed a separate piece of tribal litigation to the Supreme Court and the court agreed to hear the case — “granted certiorari,” in legalese. Having already lost at the Supreme Court on an earlier, procedural question in the case, Givens was worried the justices were taking the case so they could swat him down again.
“So Nickles walks up and he says, ‘Saw the court granted cert,'” Givens recalled. “He said, ‘Well, they didn’t grant cert to affirm.'”
As it turned out, the Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the tribe.
“About a week later, I get a letter from Nickles: ‘Dear Ray, You were right. I was wrong. Congratulations, Peter Nickles,'” Givens said. “To me that kind of sums him up. He’s a harsh guy: He’ll get in your face, give you [trouble], but he is straight up.”
Councilman Phil Mendelson, D-at large, was one of Nickles’ earliest critics and, since news of the evidence shredding scandal broke, has joined calls for the AG’s head.
“This job requires an understanding that public sector law is very, very different,” Mendelson said. “It requires an understanding that the adversary is not an enemy, but a person or entity that the government serves — a D.C. public school student, a working police officer.”
Nickles says he’s not worried about people throwing harpoons at him.
“When I see wrong, I still feel a tremendous amount of rage. I have enough talent and energy to translate that it into meaningful reform,” he said.
Does he have any regrets?
“I guess I regret being too soft on the [city] council,” he said. “If there’s any mistake, it’s not being as vigorous and as aggressive as I could have been.”
