F. Lee Bailey, the once-prominent and flamboyant defense attorney, has died at the age of 87. I didn’t know him, but I did know his brother Bill.
Bill was immensely proud of his brother. Can you imagine attending Harvard Law School while your older brother was defending the confessed Boston Strangler and winning a reversal in the conviction of Sam Sheppard, the doctor whose case inspired “The Fugitive” movie and TV series?
I got to know Bill Bailey in the 1990s. He had been a trial lawyer—even worked for his brother’s law firm–but by then he was associated with an insurance trade group.
He was the prototype extrovert, always eager to see you, instantly ready with a question about a family member whose name and situation he would remember. And not afraid to mention his brother, who by then had gained even more national attention be defending the likes of Patty Hearst and O.J. Simpson.
Bill and his brother would sometimes make a buck by staging a debate before an audience. Lee would draw the crowd. Bill would make them laugh. The subject? The legal profession.
“I attack the lawyers,” Bill told a reporter, describing the flow of the debates. “They are more interested in their own pocketbook than they are the client’s welfare. They dream up theories that support their cases. They abuse the system…and they abuse people by using the legal process to wear people down and pay damages they shouldn’t pay. And then Lee will rear back and accuse the insurance industry of sitting on its moneybags and not paying claims and allowing fraud and abuses of the system to go on.”
Bill was a Marine who served in Vietnam. He died of prostate cancer nearly 12 years ago at the age of 69, not long enough to see his brother’s career fade away into bankruptcy.
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