September 21, 2004

A Foe of Injustice and Champion of Lost Causes

YRON BELDOCK was late. He rushed through the door of his Midtown Manhattan office, looking more frazzled than someone with nearly 50 years of experience as a lawyer has any right to look. At 75, he has a lot to do, what with a Syracuse case involving an arrest he insists was unjust, an appeal of an old Brooklyn murder conviction (a frame-up, he says), and who knows what other injustices may be lurking in the piles of papers littering his spacious office.

"Power is easily misused by those in power," he said by way of explanation. "You either roll over or you fight back."

He was dressed like a lawyer: blue suit, nice purple shirt, matching tie. The effect was softened by a scrunched-up jacket collar, as if he did not have time to notice. It was vintage Beldock. A rumpled champion of lost causes, he has won his share of them with a rare combination of a teddy-bearish manner and take-to-the-barricades language.

He made news most recently by persuading a federal judge this month to overturn a jury verdict in the case of Gidone Busch, a Hasidic man shot to death in a 1999 confrontation with the police. Mr. Busch's family, who sued the city for damages and lost, can get a new trial.

At the trial last year Mr. Beldock was understated and courtly. He fumbled with papers. He would finish questioning a witness only to jump back up with a shrugging explanation that he had forgotten a question. He used all that in service of a harsh attack, asserting that officers had needlessly shot down the troubled man, who was also known as Gary, and then started a cover-up that he said had the tacit approval of the Giuliani administration.

"As soon as Gary Busch was shot, the police and the mayor and the establishment closed ranks," Mr. Beldock recalled. "The establishment went out with an objective, which was to demonize Mr. Busch and sanitize the police."

The jury was not swayed, but, as has often happened in Mr. Beldock's long career, he lived to fight another day. Two weeks ago, Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of United States District Court in Brooklyn accepted his argument that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice.

Waiting nearly a year for that taste of victory was nothing for Mr. Beldock. His most famous case was a 13-year effort that won freedom for the former middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, who is known as Hurricane, after Mr. Carter was found guilty of killing three people in a Paterson, N.J., tavern and imprisoned for nearly 19 years. As the principal lawyer for Mr. Carter, whose case inspired a Bob Dylan song and a Denzel Washington movie, Mr. Beldock became something of a hero to some for stubborn stick-to-itiveness tinged with idealism.

He acknowledged a certain idealism the other day in his office, a jumble that included African sculptures, an unopened gift, a soccer ball and a picture of Clarence Darrow leaning against a wall. But he said that ever since he left a brief stint as an assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn in 1960, his law practice has been animated mostly by a lawyer's commitment to each client's interest.

"I work in the system," he said. "I respect people who work in the system."

It is no coincidence, though, that his name has popped up over the years in several cases that have claimed official misconduct of one sort of another. Early in his career, he made a name by winning the dismissal of attempted rape charges in a Brooklyn case against George Whitmore Jr., who drew wide notice because he was wrongly accused in a concurrent case, the so-called career-girl murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1963.

More recently, Mr. Beldock represented Yusef Salaam, one of the Harlem men convicted of the 1989 rape of the woman known as the Central Park jogger. The convictions of Mr. Salaam and four other defendants were thrown out by a judge last year.

Mr. Beldock, whose paunch and wiry gray hair enhance his look of approachability, said he was the product of an idealistic, World War II-era view of the world. He graduated from Hamilton College and Harvard Law School, with a sojourn at the Sorbonne in the 1950's. "I believed," he said, "what people believed then, that you could make a better world. I still believe it, but it was naïve. The world isn't run by idealism, it's run by power and money."

A FATHER of five, he has been married for 18 years to his second wife, Karen L. Dippold, who is also a lawyer at his firm, Beldock, Levine & Hoffman. His father, George L. Beldock, who died in 1970, was an influential appeals judge in Brooklyn.

After a couple of hours of talking, Mr. Beldock reflected briefly on his success in winning the Busch family a new trial. It was an important case, he said, and it illustrated one of his rules: "If you think you have a just cause, you have to keep trying."

Then, before you could say civil rights, he was lost in musings about another of his cases. The man was innocent, Mr. Beldock said. He could tell from the evidence - and from years of practicing law. "You just get to know the police were doing the wrong thing," he said. "They're doing a sloppy job just to get a conviction."

Myron Beldock's collar was still scrunched up.