As a law student, Bob Bennett took a job at a moving company to help pay the bills. His older co-workers, full of resentment at the college boy in their midst, picked on him relentlessly. One day he had enough and, as he recalled in his 2008 book, “In The Ring,” “foolishly stood up to” Joe, the biggest of the bunch, “a real animal.”
When Joe “charged like a raging bull,” Bennett said he grabbed a two-by-four board and smacked Joe across the face with it.
Joe “fell to the ground, blood pouring from his nose and mouth,” Bennett recounted. “He gave me a toothless smile and said, ‘Kid, you’re OK.’ ”
For the past five decades, Bennett has given bloody noses to plenty of opponents in high-profile cases.
Now he finds himself back on the front pages after the D.C. Council turned to him to investigate new corruption allegations against Marion Barry.
The former mayor, who has wiggled out of trouble numerous times during his career, may have met his match.
Bennett has prosecuted killers, con men and senators. He’s defended defense contractors, a congressman and a sitting U.S. president. For nearly three decades, not a single client he defended at trial was sent to prison.
He has been on a first-name basis with some of the men and women who are synonymous with Washington power — mentor and former Roosevelt fixer Tommy “The Cork” Corcoran, Harvard classmate Mary Elizabeth Hanford (better known now as former Sen. and senatorial wife Liddy Dole), Johnson Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski and President Bill Clinton.
He’s the first to acknowledge that the work has required plenty of two-by-fours.
“It’s a very rough business,” he told The Washington Examiner in an interview. “It’s a business where your friends stab you in the chest. You’re dealing with people’s lives and their families.”
Yet ask people who’ve worked for him, with him or even against him, and the voices swell to a chorus: The kid’s OK.
“Anything Bob Bennett tells you, you can take to the bank,” said fellow superlawyer Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney. “He’s a good friend. I have enormous trust and confidence in him.”
Colleagues, friends and clients say Bennett has a rare combination of Ivy League intellect and Brooklyn street smarts.
“He’s a big-time lawyer, but he remembers where he came from,” said Boston police Detective Ken Conley, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and then cleared on appeal after Bennett took his case. “He’s defended the president of the United States, and he’s just a guy’s guy.”
Bennett seems to practice law as if he were still in Bedford-Stuyvesant or Flatbush, trying to be what natives call “a stand-up guy.”
“Juries just eat him up,” said prominent defense lawyer Lawrence Barcella, who was Bennett’s protege in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “They look at him and say, ‘He’s one of us.’ And it’s not just juries.”
Bennett’s earliest memories involve taking lists of names of kids who had picked on his younger brother, Bill — future education secretary and drug czar — and prowling Brooklyn, doing “my brotherly duty of evening the score.”
“No one was going to hit my little brother,” Bob Bennett wrote in “In the Ring.” “That was a privilege I reserved for myself.”
He’s still at it.
“I hate bullies,” Bennett told The Examiner. “That applied when my brother was a kid, and that applies now.”
The Bennett family had a surplus of money but a deficit of happiness. As his mother’s second marriage unraveled, Bennett said he slept with a baseball bat under his bed, in case he needed to defend his mother from his abusive, often drunken stepfather.
When he was 12, Bennett’s father remarried. He asked little Bobby to be his best man. The problem was that the Bennett boys were being raised Catholic, and a parish priest warned young Bobby that participating in a Protestant ceremony could cause a scandal.
“While this seems absurd today, I was tormented,” Bennett wrote.
He decided to stand up for his dad.
“I was much relieved that the newspaper blip referring to the wedding did not include a caption along the following lines, ‘Bobby Bennett, 12, brings disgrace to his church by attending Protestant service,’ ” Bennett wrote. Still, young Bennett wanted to be on the right side of the Lord and, after the wedding, he raced to confession. Even at that young age, though, he had a gift for working his judges. He confessed to a Father Kiernan, “who was known as a soft touch.”
When the good father told Bennett “that he did not think God would be too terribly troubled about a 12-year-old boy serving as best man in his father’s wedding. … Father Kiernan became my confessor of choice,” Bennett wrote in his book.
Bennett’s stepgrandfather had been a doctor and so had two of Bennett’s uncles. His family expected him to carry on the tradition. But studying pre-med at Georgetown bored him to tears. Bennett was exhilarated, though, when — on a whim — he stopped into federal court one afternoon just to see what was happening. He kept coming back.
“One day I realized I was hanging around the federal court watching trials, and a light went on,” he said. “I wasn’t hanging around the hospital.”
He changed his major.
After working his way through the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Bennett went into private practice. In the early 1970s, white-collar defense work wasn’t prominent or lucrative. Then a handful of men were arrested for breaking into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate hotel. The scandal prompted federal prosecutors to pay more attention to public corruption and corporate malfeasance, creating a wealth of opportunities for lawyers like Bennett.
Through all of his cases, he never lost “that twinkle,” Barcella said. “He loves the game.”
Bennett agrees.
“I couldn’t be happier. I love going to work every day,” he said. “I’m going to die with my boots on.”
And probably with a two-by-four near at hand.
