As if you thought the Stanford story couldn’t get any more bizarre, Bloomberg is running an article today on the alleged-Ponzi operator’s elephant-hide wearing, hard-ridin’, Cessna-flyin’, bull-scrotum-owning Texan lawyer: Dick DeGuerin. Really.

From the newswire:

May 8 (Bloomberg) — In a newspaper photo on his law office wall in Houston, Dick DeGuerin stands with Robert Durst, a New York real estate heir who admitted shooting a man and using a paring knife and a hacksaw to cut up the body.

A jury in nearby Galveston voted for acquittal after DeGuerin followed his favorite trial strategy: “Embrace the ugly baby,” he said. “You don’t shrink from the problems in the case, but find a way to turn them to your advantage.”

Now the 68-year-old lawyer is representing fellow Texan R. Allen Stanford, accused of orchestrating an $8 billion Ponzi scheme. The case was brought by “storm troopers” at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission who “cremated” his client’s business, DeGuerin said in an interview.

“He’s out of the ‘ride ‘em hard and show no mercy’ school of defense,” said William P. Allison, a criminal law professor at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin. “It’s a reputation he’s worked hard to earn, and what people pay for.”

DeGuerin’s former clients include former Senate majority leader Tom DeLay and Waco cult-leader David Koresh.

Defense like this doesn’t come cheap, of course — something which could be a problem for Sir Allen Stanford considering his assets have been frozen. From the story:
So far, DeGuerin has yet to be paid for his work for Stanford, the lawyer said. U.S. District Judge David Godbey in Dallas is considering Stanford’s bid to unfreeze at least $10 million in assets, locked up when the SEC sued, to pay his legal bills, which the Stanford Group Co. chief executive officer said in a court filing may exceed $20 million.

The SEC and Stanford Group investors told Godbey on May 4 that they oppose giving the financier access to the money.

“I’m not doing this for free,” DeGuerin said as he leaned back in a cane-seated desk chair, exposing well-worn boots made of elephant hide during the interview in his office in Houston’s Republic Building. “This case is a huge undertaking that no lawyer in his right mind would take on. It’s going to be a hard job, but not an impossible one.”

Oh, and on the cowboy stuff:

A colleague gave DeGuerin a gift afterward that the lawyer keeps in his office: a bull scrotum with the inscription, “Taken from the Earle of Travis. Only the container was tanned; the contents proved too small to preserve.”

The memento is in keeping with DeGuerin’s image, which he cultivates in court by wearing custom-made boots and a dusty- white hat with business cards tucked inside the crown.

“I like to play cowboy,” DeGuerin. On his 150-acre ranch northwest of Houston, he keeps about 50 Longhorn cattle, mostly as “pasture art,” he said.

He and his wife, Janie, an artist, have three other homes – - a house near Rice University in Houston, a restored adobe in Texas’s Big Bend country and a condo in Crested Butte, Colorado — and he pilots his single-propeller Cessna 206 between them.

Only in Texas, eh?

Related link:
“The trick is not to act like a lawyer” – Texas Monthly

This entry was posted by Tracy Alloway on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 13:30 and is filed under Capital markets, People. Tagged with Dick DeGeurin, lawyer, Stanford, Texas. Edit this entry.