Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (72 page)

During her deposition, under oath, she denied any knowledge of a call-girl ring or prostitution activities at the DNC; she also testified that she did not know Phillip Bailley, notwithstanding his claims to the contrary; and she stated that she had never had pictures of Maureen in her desk at the DNC, as Bailley claimed, nor had she arranged dates for men at the DNC with prostitutes, as Liddy claimed Bailley had informed him she had done. After the deposition, our attorney John Garrick visited with Maxie. (John appreciates and knows good literature, including Southern literature, which was Maxie’s interest.) He asked her why she had done nothing about Liddy’s false charges, and she explained that she had wanted to avoid anything that might distract her from completing her doctorate and dissertation, so she had worked to ignore Liddy—although that had been difficult because his claims that she procured women for men visiting the DNC and that she was affiliated somehow with a prostitution operation troubled her deeply. At our request, John Garrick told her that if she decided to take action, we would be pleased to assist her in any way we might.

By spring 1997, Maxie felt she had to do something. She hired an experienced defamation attorney based in Washington, DC, David Branson, who contacted me (through David Dorsen) to ask if our offer of assistance was still open. It was, indeed, so I arranged to meet Branson while he was in California for another case, so that I could assist him in gathering basic information and documents about the case. (We encouraged David Dorsen to assist Branson in any way he could, and it worked out nicely for all, for soon Dorsen joined Branson’s law firm.) When we visited and chatted, Branson indicated that Maxie had had her fill of Liddy. Maxie’s mother had heard Liddy on the radio talking about her daughter arranging for dates with prostitutes while she worked at the DNC, and claiming that she had pictures of prostitutes for men to look at in an envelope in her desk. It upset her mother. And it disturbed Maxie’s friends as well. She was going to file her defamation suit, and she did so, in Maryland, where Liddy had a home, on April 1, 1997. (Because there is a one-year statute of limitations on filing such lawsuits, much of what Liddy had said could not be sued upon. Dorsen and Branson, however, had located a few examples of Liddy trashing Maxie just as he had Maureen, including a lecture Liddy delivered that Dorsen himself attended and recorded.)

By the time Maxie filed her lawsuit, the senior-status judge who had been assigned our case, Harold H. Greene, had become impatient with the massive filings by the defendants. Colodny had filed one motion that actually required a dolly to move it, at 4,200 pages. St. Martin’s, as well, had filed enormous motions. It was all part of their scorched-earth effort, which was backfiring.
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Rather than burying us, we were making the lawsuit painfully expensive for the insurance carriers pay the bills of the defendants. Within a few months of filing our lawsuit, we became a well-tuned machine, able not only to respond instantly to the endless motions and actions filed by the defendants, but also to keep the initiative in the lawsuit. We never departed from our game plan of slowly tightening the noose on St. Martin’s top management, while gathering information about how this bogus account had been assembled. Colodny had taped everyone, and the tapes made quite clear that all the key players knew this was faux history, because they knew that Bailley was not believable.

Meanwhile, Liddy had filed a lawsuit against me. His complaint read like something he and his son (an attorney) had drafted on the kitchen table after too many beers. Based on the (false) charges in
Silent Coup
, Liddy claimed that if he had known that I had allegedly ordered the break-in on June 17, 1972, then he would not have participated, nor would he have remained silent. Because I had allegedly concealed my activities for the past (then) twenty years, he contended that I had defrauded and injured him. The lawsuit was absurd. Unfortunately, when Judge Greene dismissed the suit for, among other reasons, Liddy’s “unclean hands,” he did not publish his memorandum dismissing the case. I suspect Liddy’s frivolous action cost St. Martin’s insurance company, which was covering Liddy’s legal fees, quite a bit.

Colodny, and his then-attorney, pursued one of the most noxious and specious of all the defendants counter measures: They took the unheard-of step of suing our attorney, John Garrick. When Colodny and St. Martin’s had filed various motions to block us from obtaining Colodny’s illicitly-recorded conversations, Colodny’s attorney began attaching news articles from a columnist/reporter for
The Tampa Tribune
, Ray Locker. The articles were meant to bolster the motions, which was pure bootstrapping, because Colodny was feeding information to Locker that he repeated like a parrot. For this reason, John Garrick sent a strong letter to Locker—not for publication, but rather to call him on what he was doing. Locker, however, had the letter printed in the “commentary section” of the newspaper. In the letter, Garrick took issue with Locker’s statements (in several columns) that
Colodny’s
unlawful tape recordings “provide[d] the heart of
Colodny’s
defense,” and that Garrick (and his law partners) were trying to suppress these tapes. Of course, that claim—which Garrick called “absolute hogwash”—
got what was occurring precisely backward. As Garrick stated, “To the contrary, we are confident that full disclosure of all the tape recordings made by
Colodny
will expose
Colodny’s
book
Silent Coup
as a fraud.” Based on this statement, Colodny sued Garrick and his law firm for defamation. The case ended up in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division, before Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich, who eventually granted Garrick and the firm summary judgment, ruling that Colodny was a public figure in connection with
Silent Coup
, and that, as a matter of law, there was no evidence that Garrick acted with actual malice. The judge also pointed out that a jury might well agree with Garrick that the book was a fraud, and noted that Garrick was expressing “pure opinion,” which would not support a claim of defamation. This frivolous litigation no doubt cost Colodny’s insurance carriers quite a bit, too.

St. Martin’s scorched-earth strategy was making a lot of lawyers wealthy, costing the insurance carrier dearly, and not advancing the defendants’ situation in any way whatsoever. Thus, it is no wonder that St. Martin’s wanted to talk settlement. By then, in 1998, we understood exactly how Colodny had invented his new history, based on Phillip Bailley’s sick fantasies, and we were therefore ready to discuss settlement. Because we reached a confidential settlement, unfortunately, we are precluded from discussing it, except to say we were satisfied by the terms of the agreement that was reached.

Like St. Martin’s, Gettlin was ready to settle, but Colodny and Liddy wanted to fight on. Colodny’s insurance company was not prepared to risk more, however, so they simply paid Colodny (he claims he was paid $400,000) to allow them to settle with us, ending our action against him. Accordingly, we agreed to dismiss St. Martin’s, Colodny, Gettlin, and Bailley “with prejudice,” meaning the litigation was over for them, and began to prepare for our trial with Liddy.

Liddy had no reason to settle, since he was in a fight with Maxie Wells, and he had gotten lucky;
Wells v. Liddy
was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz, who had been appointed to the bench in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan. Judge Motz consistently ruled for Liddy. First, he granted Liddy’s motion for summary judgment, declaring that Wells was an “involuntary public figure”—the rarest of rarities in the defamation law, so rare that only about two of them have been found since the beginning of time. According to Motz, the very fact that Maxie’s telephone had been bugged by Liddy’s wireman, McCord, made her an object of interest, and that fact—together with the one that Bailley had spent years spreading false stories about her—combined to make her a public figure. As a public figure, Maxie had to prove Liddy had acted with actual malice. Judge Motz then ruled that, as a matter of law, she could not prove actual malice, and he therefore dismissed her lawsuit against Liddy, just over a year after it had been filed.

Fortunately, there is nothing that David Dorsen loves more than an argument before an appellate court. By this time, David was deeply involved in the Wells case, so he prepared the brief appealing Judge Motz’s ruling, and argued it before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In July 1999, the Fourth Circuit reversed Judge Motz, and sent the case back for trial. The appellate court held that Maxie was not an involuntary public figure, and that, as a private figure, all she had to do was show the jury that Liddy had acted negligently (rather than knowingly, or with reckless disregard regarding the truth or falsity of his statements). Liddy’s lawyers then requested that Judge Motz send the Wells case to the District of Columbia to combine it with our lawsuit, which he did. But the situation had changed. On January 29, 2000, Judge Harold Greene passed away; now our case was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan. Judge Sullivan saw the ploy of Liddy’s counsel to combine the cases for what they were, and on February 24, 2000, he sent the Wells case back to Judge Motz. We also took some delight in the fact that Liddy no longer had St. Martin’s insurance company paying his attorneys’ fees. Now, he was facing two trials where each could easily cost $1 million in attorneys’ fees.

In addition, we had developed a strategy that would limit our trial and give us a ruling that Liddy’s statements regarding myself and Maureen were false: We filed a motion seeking partial summary judgment that would gut Liddy’s case. It is unusual for plaintiffs to seek summary judgment, particularly in defamation lawsuits, but the situation was unusual. Liddy asserted only two defenses as we headed to trial: that the statements he made were true and that he had not made those statements with actual malice (that is, knowing they were false or with reckless disregard as to whether they were true or false). Our motion sought to remove one of Liddy’s defenses by showing the court, before trial, that Liddy had no admissible evidence to demonstrate that the statements Liddy had made regarding Maureen were true. After nine years of discovery, and millions of dollars of investigations and depositions by the defendants, the undisputed evidence showed that Maureen had never been associated with prostitution, not withstanding Liddy’s false claims to the contrary.

After years of digging, Liddy had but one source for his claims that my wife had been involved in prostitution: Phillip Mackin Bailley. For good reason, Liddy had not listed Bailley in his pre-trial statement setting forth the witnesses he would call. Liddy could not rely on Bailley, whose psychiatrist had explained did not know how to separate truth from fantasy regarding the false information he had provided. Thus, Liddy had no evidence to prove what Maureen denied, and her denial was corroborated by many witnesses who knew her at the time Liddy claimed she had been involved in these activities. Liddy had no admissible evidence that her photograph—or for that matter any photographs—had been in Maxie Wells’ desk and Maxie herself had denied ever seeing or possessing such photos. Liddy did not have even a scintilla of evidence that Maureen had ever told me about a call-girl operation at the DNC, because it had never happened. Nor did Liddy have any admissible evidence that a woman Maureen had once known, Erika Rikan, had used the alias Cathy Dieter, as the madam of a call-girl ring. To the contrary, Colodny had discovered before publishing
Silent Coup
that Rikan was not Dieter, but since Rikan was dead, Colodny had proceeded to make the claim anyway. In short, Liddy had no probative evidence whatsoever to prove the truth of his claims, while we had solid proof to show the statements were false.

In addition, just as Liddy’s lies about Maureen were unsupported by viable evidence, he similarly lacked evidence for his claim that I had ordered the Watergate break-ins and committed perjury. Liddy had claimed that he himself had not known that Jeb Magruder and Howard Hunt had been acting at my direction. In fact, neither had Magruder or Hunt known this and both denied it under oath. Indeed, Hunt, according to Liddy the key player on my behalf, had actually told Colodny that the target of the break-ins had
not
been the offices and telephone of Spencer Oliver and Maxie Wells; Hunt said that that had been “McCord’s mistake…nobody was interested in Oliver, for God’s sake.” Liddy had absolutely no evidence to support his claim that Hunt was the “only person” aware of my role and my setting the real target, a fact both Hunt and I denied under oath. Magruder also denied under oath that I provided him false orders, for he testified that he never discussed the break-ins with me. Finally, not only is there no evidence that either my wife or I had any knowledge of a call-girl operation at the DNC, there is clear evidence that everyone who made this claim relied on Phillip Bailley. Not a single person who worked at the DNC was aware of such an operation.

As for Liddy’s claim that I committed perjury that sent an innocent John Mitchell and John Ehrlichman to prison, again, Liddy had no evidence to support his charge. First, Liddy had no evidence that Mitchell and Ehrlichman were innocent. In fact, both had been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice, and perjury. When reviewing their convictions, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found the evidence “overwhelming” to support the jury’s verdict, noting that Mitchell had been convicted not merely on my testimony, but also on that of Magruder, Fred LaRue, and Herb Kalmbach, not to mention on the basis of White House tapes that contained statements by Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman that “implicated Mitchell in the crimes of which he was convicted.” Similarly, Ehrlichman was convicted of perjury based on his statements before the grand jury and the Senate, and openly admitted his perjury during the deposition in our lawsuit, which undercut Liddy’s claim.