Sunday Morning Hot Tea - No. 28

Escaping the Moving Sidewalk and Lawyer of the Bodysnatcher

Welcome to Sunday Morning Hot Tea where I write about a little something up top then answer a legal question for you down below. This week, what am I if I change jobs? Also, if you represent a person the media calls a “ghoul,” is it chill to go on TV and talk about it? 

In this edition:

• Topic of the Week – The Moving Sidewalk is Ending

• Legal Question – Lawyer to the Bodysnatcher

As Seen on TV

Today I found myself in a place I often am – the Starbucks drive through. While we waited for my drink, the barista in the window and I made small talk.

“Did you do anything fun today?” she asked.

“I just woke up from a nap because I went to a kid’s birthday party earlier.”

“Yikes,” she said. “Anything else fun planned for today? Just going back to sleep?”

“I’ve got some work to do, actually,” I said, referring to the research notes I needed to type up for the next Patreon minisode on the #FreeBritney updates.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a comedian,” I said. It felt weird and impostery coming out of my mouth. Should I have said podcaster? Writer? Lawyer? What even am I now?

Last week on our crossover episode with the podcast And That’s Why We Drink, I announced that I had given notice at my day job to focus full time on Sinisterhood. My last day at legal aid will be July 9. I will still have my law license, and I plan to do pro bono work with whoever will let me, but it’s going to feel different not lawyering every day. While it feels weird, at the same time, it feels inevitable.

On the first grade page in my school memory book, it asked me to check a box next to a profession under the heading What I want to be when I grow up. I checked the boxes for both TV Star and Lawyer. I also hand-wrote the words “house wife” because I had my eye on the real prize.

When I graduated from law school and passed the bar at age 29, I eagerly posted an adorably cropped photo of the checked box beside lawyer and said something like, “Childhood dream come true.”

The problem with that photo is that it omitted an integral part of the photo – the checked box beside “TV Star.” Now, over five years into my law practice, I realize those were not two boxes to be considered separately but were instead a conjunction to be read together. The whole housewife thing was really prophetic, like somehow I knew I would also do those things while working from home. THE DREAM!

My ideals of law practice and being a lawyer were shaped by the only lawyers I intimately knew as a child: those on TV. We talked last week of the family friend who represented the ephemeral ideal of a lawyer, with her pants suits and Lexus.

The TV lawyers I admired never really mentioned their cars. They lived in places like Boston and New York City where they got around in cabs and on subways. I loved all the characters on Boston-based Ally McBeal. I particularly loved the man they called Biscuit, John Cage, the eccentric partner obsessed with clean toilet bowls who screamed out uncontrollably. 

Despite it being wildly inappropriate for kid to watch, I became obsessed with Ally McBeal. I liked seeing her and other female lawyers. They also had a gender-neutral bathroom, which seemed normal and unremarkable to me. Though, looking back, it was regarded as incredibly progressive and outrageous for the late 1990s.

The best person on the show was the Biscuit, played by Peter MacNichol. He had a remote control switch on a bathroom stall that would automatically flush the toilet before he got there, thereby avoiding remnants as he “liked a fresh bowl.” Who doesn’t? If that’s what being a lawyer was like, sign me up! I wanted a remote control to handle the unsavory parts of my life.

At the time, I thought that show was the coolest thing on television. Weird people like Santa Claus came to the firm for help. And Ally, like myself, was plagued with intricate mental fantasies in which she seemed to relish. All the characters hung out together at a bar with a cool jazz pianist. They wore sexy skirt suits. They sang karaoke. Most of all, Ally got to fall in love with Robert Downey, Jr., a major childhood crush of mine which, again, for a kid was not super appropriate.

No matter their wacky situations, they were all problem solvers. And as a kid who created a lot of problems, I looked with admiration on these people who seemed to solve them so easily.

Jackie Chiles was the next TV lawyer I loved. All of his plots and plans seemed destined to end in riches but for the meddling idiocy of Kramer. Ever the terrible client, Kramer would either take a deal too early (always wait to hear what comes after “coffee for life” when considering an offer) or who would put the balm on (nobody told him to put the balm on!) I had no clue Jackie was a parody of Johnnie Cochran or that the cases were parodies of real-life big-ticket litigation that was happening at the time. I just thought he was a clever foil for Kramer.

Before there was Ally McBeal or Jackie Chiles, Judge Harry Stone was the first fictional lawyer I wanted to be like. Not only was he a judge, he was a magician and made jokes to the people in his court room. When arguments arose, Harry solved them with a sleight of hand or a laugh. The people in his court room loved him and all left happy, except for some of the ones who were taken into custody. 

I also saw non-fictional lawyers on TV. My dad worked nights, so during the OJ Simpson trial, he would be glued to the TV, commenting on the performance of the lawyers. To me, a nine-year-old kid, it was another set of lawyers on TV for me to admire and study. My dad wasn’t in the legal business. He worked as an independent contractor for the Dallas Morning News, mass-delivering newspapers across the DFW metroplex. He filled red metal racks with thick newspapers seven days a week, with no time off, no weekends or holidays.

Things like the OJ trial and crime in general were good because they sold papers. Daddy would buy the papers from the printer for about 10 cents each, then sell them in the stores for 50 cents to a $1.50 on weekends. The more papers that sold meant more quarters for him to collect and bring home to my mother to count out and deposit in the bank.

I was unabashedly a daddy’s girl growing up. He thought anything I did was the absolute greatest and praised me for my accomplishments. He also praised the skills of some of the lawyers at the OJ trial and criticized others. My impressionable little mind put all the pieces together: Lawyers like Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden are good and smart. Lawyers like Ally McBeal and Harry Stone are funny and smart. Dad respects lawyers. I must be a lawyer. Also, bonus, Ally McBeal gets with Robert Downey, Jr. Done and done.

But the other part of me, the deepest part of me, wanted to be a comedian and a writer. Just as I thought Jackie Chiles was great on Seinfeld, I envied that Jerry himself was a comedian. He seemed to do nothing during the days except hang out with his rag tag group of friends then kill it on The Tonight Show. Well, except when his Charles Grodin BBQ sauce was destroyed.

I also deeply loved and obsessively watched The Dick Van Dyke Show. It aired originally from 1961 to 1966, but the re-runs came on via syndication. My mom recorded them each day for my dad to watch later in the evening. He would sleep during the early morning hours, until about 11am, right when the re-runs would air.

She’d pop a cassette in the VCR and record them, giving me a chance to watch an episode not once, but twice when my dad would want to turn it back on after dinner. It followed Rob Petrie, a professional full-time television comedy writer. He got to write jokes for money! He worked alongside a woman named Sally Rogers. She was a girl like me who also got to write jokes for money!

With the purchase of our first home computer, I learned that all the weird fantasies I had in my head could be translated onto the page. I could write them out just like Rob and Buddy and Sally.

I wrote my first novel at 11 years old. I like saying it that way because it sounds fancy and pretentious. What I actually wrote was a very long and convoluted piece of Backstreet Boys fan fiction. All the main characters were either Backstreet Boys or my fifth-grade classmates. We lived together in an enormous house in Florida because obviously when you earn multiple millions of dollars in a world-famous boy band, you pool all of your money together for one single house like some sort of sad Tampa reality show.

Inspired, I am sure, by the hours of All My Children I had absorbed during the summers, the story included dramatic twists and turns. Two of my classmates were Nick Carter fans, so a love triangle formed where he was forced to choose between them. Yes, in reality we couldn’t drive a car, hadn’t learned algebra and hadn’t yet gotten our periods, but on paper, all bets were off.

I, of course, was paired up with Howie D., the self-described Latin lover of the group. But to juice up dramatic tension, I had to throw a wrench in. I decided that the best thing for the plot would be an illness. People in soap operas were always hovering over the hospital beds of loved ones, lamenting that they should have proposed sooner or said “I love you” earlier. 

So I did a little poking around on Alta Vista and gave my fictional self Mosquito-Borne Encephalitis. It seemed serious enough to put me in a coma, but not terminal enough to kill me. I was, after all, the star of this great work of art. I wasted all the ink in my parents’ inkjet printer to “publish” my manuscript, which I then bound in a three-ring binder. Much to my horror, both my mother and sister found the finished work and reviews were not great.

I didn’t write as much after that, just made up stories in my head. Then in seventh grade, I met Mrs. Shurtleff, my English teacher. She hosted a creative writing club that met mornings before the first bell rang. Anything was fair game for us to write – fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose. Once per semester she hosted a reading event where we could share our pieces aloud.

In my internet scouring for further information on my favorite Backstreet Boy, Howie D., I came across some unsettling information. My betrothed, the man who sat by my beside and mourned me as I suffered from my bout with encephalitis, was “said to be dating a woman named Minda.” I was crushed and felt completely powerless. How could I compete with this woman, given that I was only 13 years old and lived thousands of miles away?

I sought my revenge the only way I knew how – on the page. Driven by an urge to kill, I did just that. To be fair, I had also read American Psycho for class earlier that year, so I had violence on the brain.

Side Note: That book is FILTHY! I went back as an adult and tried reading it. It was overwhelmingly obscene. I felt like a complete prude, but I had to put it down. It made me sick, and my job is actually studying and talking about crimes. When I read it in seventh grade, I felt like I was generally unphased by the subject matter. Judging by the violence in my Minda story, that was not entirely true. I was very phrased!

It came time to read our stories out loud for our friends, our parents, and the faculty. I had printed my piece out, adding the title in red dripping font that looked like blood. My story centered around a man named Howard (excellent cover, McKinney) and his wife, Minda. Very early in the story, Minda is killed in a bus accident. By that I mean, I graphically described her being run over by a bus. I read this. Out loud. In front of everyone. And honestly? It got some laughs.

Without knowing what I was doing, I employed the rule of three – I had three different spouses get hit by the same bus. No one in the audience asked why there was not an investigation into the rash of bus crashes on this particular route or the negligence of the city’s bus operators. I guess they were just being gentle since I was only in seventh grade.

I ended up reconnecting with Mrs. Shurtleff as an adult, and we’ve struck up a friendship. We go out for breakfast or lunch once a month, and she’s truly a guiding light in my life. I asked her why she didn’t report me to the counselor for writing about violent death-by-bus. She said because we write about things as a way to process our feelings.

I wasn’t really plotting to kill a woman via municipal transportation. Rather, I was angry and felt powerless and writing it out was the only way for me to regain control. Super cool of her to (1) not judge me at the time, and (2) agree to meet with me knowing my little demented mind wrote that all those years ago.

Now feeling as I have - a bit powerless and out of control - I think is why I have been writing so much. Some days working in a “profession” like the law can feel like you’re on a moving sidewalk at the airport. You could get off in the middle. It wouldn’t be easy. You would have to heave your legs over the glass partition. Maybe you’ll stumble, lose your luggage, make a scene. It’s not easy, but it’s also not impossible.

The alternative is staying on, being hurtled to the destination that you may have changed your mind about.

I think it’s fair to hop off the sidewalk if you feel like it. Just because we wanted to step on back when we were in first grade or in our teens or twenties or even thirties, doesn’t mean we should trudge dutifully toward that end. It’s ok to change your mind and head where you want to go instead.

After graduating law school and passing the bar, I started looking around for ways to maybe get off. When my mom asked what she and my dad should get me for a law school graduation gift, I told her I wanted a gift certificate to take comedy classes.

“How about a briefcase?” she asked.

It’s not easy to shift gears at any point in our lives. It can feel a bit like admitting we were wrong. Because I am humble I can say – I absolutely was not wrong. I am glad I went to law school. I have had the privilege of helping a lot of people in the past five and a half years. I hope to still help plenty more through all the pro bono opportunities Dallas has to offer. I’ll still be a lawyer. I just won’t be mostly a lawyer. Being a lawyer has made me a better podcaster, writer, and thinker in general. I’d never tell somebody to go to law school to get into comedy, but it sure worked for me.

We live in a label-driven society. If I am not a (insert profession here), then what am I? You still are you. Even if you’re doing a thing that feels like everyone expects you to do, it’s never too late to change. Only you know what you want to do. Somewhere quiet deep inside you, you can see yourself doing it, whatever “it” is. And if you open your eyes and find that you’re not doing it, then by all means, try and chart a path towards it.

Charting that path will not be easy, but the alternative - not moving toward what you truly want - is death. Waiting for each of us at the end of any moving sidewalk is the great city bus ready to take us all to the same place. It is better that we don’t hurtle toward it kicking and screaming and miserable but instead move gladly on the path made for each of us. After all, the moving sidewalk is ending.

QUESTIONS FROM YOU - Can your lawyer give an interview about you?

This week’s question is from Amanda M. on Instagram. Amanda asks:

I just watched a documentary called Bodysnatchers of New York. I wondered about the defense lawyer in the documentary. In it, he recounts conversations he had with his client. Can he do that? Doesn’t that violate attorney-client privilege? The client is not dead, and he is participating in the documentary.

Great question, Amanda! First of all, this documentary is pretty pretty wild. For those interested, it covers the 2005 case of Biomedical Tissue Services which was shut down by the FDA for illegally harvesting body parts from individuals who did not consent to be harvested.

One of the people interviewed on the documentary is Mario Gallucci, lawyer for Dr. Michael Mastromarino, the mastermind of the parts-harvesting scheme. Mastromarino eventually pled guilty to body stealing, forgery, grand larceny, and enterprise corruption for harvesting over 1,600 bodies over the course of five years.

In the documentary, Gallucci speaks freely about the case, reminiscing on how he reacted when Mastromarino first approached him with the subpoena from the Kings County, New York district attorney’s office.

Throughout the documentary, Mastromarino laments what has happened and emphasizes how badly the media got his story wrong. He cries because “I really am a good person,” and says how upset he is about the version of the story that his kids heard in the news.

This footage is juxtaposed with footage of victims’ family members describing what Mastromarino did to their family member’s bodies, including selling bones and replacing them with PVC pipe. I SAID IT WAS WILD!

Can Gallucci participate in the documentary? Doesn’t that violate attorney-client privilege?

Let’s first address what the “attorney-client privilege” is exactly. It is a rule of evidence that keeps lawyers from testifying about their clients. Since Gallucci was giving an interview on the documentary, the attorney-client privilege would not apply. What would apply, however, is Gallucci’s ethical obligation not to reveal confidential client information.

The New York Professional Rules of Conduct dictate in Rule 1.6 that “A lawyer shall not knowingly reveal confidential information, as defined in this Rule, or use such information to the disadvantage of a client or for the advantage of the lawyer or a third person.”

The rule provides for a few exceptions:

1. If the client was informed and consented,

2. The disclosure is in the best interest of the client and is reasonable under the circumstances or customary in the profession, or

3. A few other exceptions including to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm or to prevent the client from committing a crime.

Gallucci may have been able to participate in the documentary because Mastromarino gave his consent to have Gallucci talk on camera. Based on the poor-pitiful-me act that Mastromarino put on for the camera, he probably participated in the documentary in an effort to clear his name. Perhaps he thought letting his lawyer speak on camera would also help his crusade to repair his reputation. A swing and a miss, sir.

It could also be that nothing that Gallucci said counted as “confidential information.” One carve-out to the definition of “confidential information” is “information that is generally known in the local community or in the trade, field or profession to which the information relates.”

In his interviews, Gallucci explained that he and his colleagues were told by Mastromarino that what he was doing was perfectly legal. He also describes how Mastromarino turned himself in and what evidence the prosecutors used as the “smoking gun” that caused Mastromarino to plead guilty.

Those things would be “generally known” given how public this case was and how widely reported it had been in the media. If information is generally known, then it is not confidential and the lawyer may freely disclose it, according to the New York State Bar Association’s ethics opinions.

Gallucci also explains the severity of an “enterprise corruption charge” aka state-level racketeering. He outlines the process of DNA testing conducted in the case that sealed Mastromarino’s fate. Both of these pieces of information would fall into the other carve-out of what is not “confidential information” – that is “a lawyer’s legal knowledge or legal research.”

Although we lawyers have a duty of confidentiality to our clients, that only extends to certain information that falls under the definition of “confidential information.” If Gallucci kept his comments to publicly known details and general legal knowledge, he wouldn’t be violating his duty to Mastromarino.

Then again, Mastromarino may have given Gallucci the green-light to participate in an effort to help this real-life Dr. Frankenstein clean up his reputation. If you watch even 5 minutes of the 45-minute documentary, you’ll see that didn’t quite work.

Thanks for asking, Amanda!

Got a question? Submit it here. They can be legal what-if questions, questions on current events, or questions about the legality of actions in TV shows or movies you’ve seen. I never ever want to answer your personal legal questions, so don't send those. Love you, but I don’t do that.

Until next week, that’s the tea, and once I’m dead, do whatever you want with my body.

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