I knew a solicitor who was given a house in Spain by a grateful, acquitted, defendant. I also knew a solicitor who had shared a bed with his client’s wife, claiming all hotels in town were full. For his sins, he was given what was described as a ‘good smack’.
I never had such luck as the Marbella house owner and I never put myself in the position of the second solicitor. I have had gifts from happy clients, but generally they have been like those borne by the Greeks.
I once defended an Irish con artist, a man of great charm – his stock-in-trade, after all. If I could get him bail, the client assured me, he could easily find a surety of £100,000. The next week, he asked me to have the terms changed to two of £50,000. After the third week, when the guaranteed four sureties of £25,000 failed to materialise and he thought eight of £12,500 would do the trick, I dug my heels in.
He ended up with a lenient sentence. I received a letter from his mother, thanking me for all I had done for her errant lamb. It concluded with God’s blessings on the enclosed ticket for the Irish Sweepstakes. On close inspection, it was for the previous year’s race. Like son, like mother.
A client once gave me three bottles of whisky after a successful defence. Two days later, I heard, with some alarm, that he had been arrested for breaking into a wine and spirits merchant. Fortunately, he was not picked out in the ID parade.
One client, whose MO was to ask tobacconists to fetch something off the top shelf while he raided the till, brought me a small box of cigars. He assured me he had paid for them. Wrong. I had. Later, my receptionist told me the cashbox had gone AWOL. ‘That nice, elderly man asked me if I could look up a number in the telephone directory,’ she explained.
The saddest gift I heard of was to a recovering alcoholic clerk. He had been on the wagon until a client gave him a bottle of whisky to take back to the office. He had drunk half of it before the bus crossed the Thames.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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