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More on David Boies. Note it says many believe he was responsible for Gore losing the election.

Following is from the Wall Street Journal. By the way, many are blaming Boies for costing Gore the Presidency; at one point during the Supreme Court hearings, Justice Souter asked Boies to provide the definitive standard for counting the disputed ballots. Boies, who'd been asking for the court to come up with just such a thing, froze. Seems he hadn't thought of an answer before asking the question. Bad move. Anyway ...

Gore's Lawyer Has Lent Heft to a Feud Of Many Years Between Lawn-Care Firms

By John R. Wilke, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal

PALM BEACH, Fla.

The contested presidential election isn't the only court battle David Boies has fought here. For years, the superstar New York lawyer now working for Vice President Al Gore has waged war on a tiny company called Scott Lewis's Gardening & Trimming Inc.

Mr. Boies's client is Amy Habie, the wealthy owner of a Palm Beach lawn-care business involved in a tangled and venomous feud with a rival. And in this case, the 59-year-old lawyer who led the U.S. government to victory over Microsoft Corp. and won huge judgments against financier Michael Milken, a global vitamin cartel and art auction houses has been defeated by four gardeners.

On the surface, it looks like a simple quarrel over contractual obligations between Ms. Habie and Scott Lewis. But Mr. Boies and his legal team took the case to a new level, alleging racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, fraud and federal antitrust violations.

The tangled plot has included the gardeners, who mostly represented themselves in court, and a Guatemalan textile tycoon who was wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for kidnapping his and Ms. Habie's children, along with cameo appearances by an errant watermelon vine and a shrinking Dumpster.

Mr. Boies won't comment on the fight between the 39-year-old Ms. Habie and her lawn-care rival. Throughout the proceedings, however, he has argued in court and elsewhere that the dispute is a "sideshow" to a larger conspiracy by Jose "Joey" Habie to destroy his former wife.

Mr. Boies entered the story in 1992, when an old law-school friend who was acting as Ms. Habie's divorce lawyer asked him for help. It had been a poisonous divorce.

At one point, Mr. Habie sent fliers to Ms. Habie's neighbors in her wealthy Boca Raton neighborhood, attempting to sully her name with lurid accusations. Fines of as much as $5 million a week were levied against the former husband for failing to comply with court orders related to the divorce. By September 1996, Mr. Habie had been fined a total of $800 million, Palm Beach County Court records show.

Mr. Boies, then with the prominent New York firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, says that when he started work on the case, Mr. Habie had instigated several lawsuits filed against Ms. Habie and was wanted by the FBI for kidnapping the couple's two-year-old twins, Daniel and Alexandra, and flying them in his private jet to Latin America.

In one of those suits, a Guatemalan woman blamed Ms. Habie for the death of her husband from insecticide-laced drinking water. The suit, filed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleged that an airplane owned by a leasing company registered under Ms. Habie's name dumped insecticide on her village in 1991, poisoning her family. The suit was eventually dismissed, as were 10 others, says Mr. Boies, who worked on many of them.

"This man was using U.S. courts as a weapon against her," he says. Enter Mr. Lewis. In 1996, Ms. Habie bought his company, Scott Lewis's Gardening & Trimming, for $800,000, later renaming it Nical of Palm Beach.

She says she hoped to make a new life for herself after the devastating loss of her children. Mr. Lewis, who had decided to sell the business shortly after his father's death, stayed on as a consultant. He soon complained to Ms. Habie that he wasn't receiving the payments he was owed under the sale agreement, and that the business was being mismanaged.

"This was my baby, a business I spent my life building up, and it was going down the drain," he says.

He resigned, as did his wife, Carol, who had been helping keep the books. The couple turned around and started another landscaping business in Palm Beach, along with a few former employees of the company now owned by Ms. Habie. Again, it was called Scott Lewis's Gardening & Trimming.

Later that year, in a lawsuit Mr. Boies filed on behalf of Ms. Habie in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, Mr. Boies alleged that in starting his new business, Mr. Lewis violated a noncompete clause in the sale contract with Ms. Habie, among other breaches of contract.

During the proceedings, Mr. Boies, famous for his relentless cross-examinations, found himself grilling Mr. Lewis about a watermelon vine that he said had sprouted in the lawn of one of Ms. Habie's customers. Mr. Lewis, questioned on the stand for hours by Mr. Boies, testified that he saved the fruit of the vine in his refrigerator to provide the court evidence of his competitor's shoddy lawncare.

The judge, in a verdict issued even before the defense presented its case, ruled in favor of the defendants. Unbowed, Mr. Boies in February 1997 filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Miami, alleging a litany of serious crimes against Mr. Lewis and three of his gardeners, including Sherman Act antitrust violations, racketeering, conspiracy, fraud and extortion. The suit alleged that Mr. Lewis masterminded a criminal racketeering enterprise to harass Ms. Habie and harm her business.

Mr. Lewis, the suit alleged, had sought to extort concessions from Ms. Habie by threatening to "work" with her fugitive ex-husband "in his war against his former wife." To that end, the plaintiffs argued, Mr. Lewis tampered with computer files, threatened Ms. Habie, pilfered funds and poached customers and employees.

The suit detailed alleged confrontations between the two companies' workers and called Mr. Lewis's alleged efforts to cut off service from a lawn mower repair shop and other suppliers an illegal "group boycott" under antitrust law. The suit also charged that defendant Luis Rojo, eventually fired by Ms. Habie, had brandished a hoe at a co-worker in a threatening manner -- an incident included among the alleged criminal acts needed to prove a pattern of racketeering.

In what one defendant's deposition termed "the Dumpster war," the federal lawsuit also alleged that, with the aim of damaging Ms. Habie's business, Mr. Lewis and his co-conspirators "from time to time unilaterally padlocked the Dumpster" that the two companies shared. The defendants also replaced an eight-cubic-yard Dumpster with a two-cubic-yard one "that would not accept lawn and plant clippings," the suit said.

Mr. Lewis, his wife and their employees "repeatedly used the U.S. mails and interstate wires in furtherance of their wrongful conduct and scheme," it said. Mr. Lewis and the other defendants denied the allegations. "I was called by Joey Habie and I've never denied that," Mr. Lewis says now, "but there's not an iota of proof that I worked with him because I never did."

Mr. Lewis, lean, tall and tightly wound, is a 43-year-old former schoolteacher who lives on Possum Pass, on the western edge of West Palm Beach -- miles from the multimillion-dollar Palm Beach estates he tends for a living. He and the other three defendants often represented themselves in court against Mr. Boies or his associates.

They filed awkward first-person briefs denying Ms. Habie's charges and made serious accusations against Ms. Habie's employees, noting that one of her managers had been convicted of bribery, drug smuggling and money laundering. They also disclosed that Mr. Boies, who from the start has been working pro bono for Ms. Habie, had taken a small equity stake in his client's company.

Mr. Boies says that any business ties to his client were simply investments for his family trust. Later that year, Mr. Boies became one the few partners in the history of Cravath, Swaine & Moore ever to quit the firm.

Also that year, Mr. Lewis's wife, Carol, alleged in a complaint to the Federal Election Commission that Mr. Boies violated campaign-finance law in 1995 and 1996 by asking Ms. Habie and some of her employees, including Mrs. Lewis herself, to give money to the House campaign of Jane Harman, a California Democrat, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Mrs. Lewis and others were then illegally reimbursed a total of $11,000 by Ms. Habie, the FEC found. Mr. Boies was cleared of any wrongdoing, but Mrs. Habie was fined $50,000 for campaign-law violations. Mrs. Lewis paid a fine of $750, reduced because she reported the incident.

In Ms. Habie's lawsuit, the defendants then entered a motion for summary judgment. On July 9, 1998, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Graham found that there may be evidence that Mr. Lewis threatened to "work" with Mr. Habie against Amy Habie and "that a jury could reasonably infer that Mr. Lewis committed the predicate act of extortion" because of the alleged threats.

But in the end, the extortion charge didn't hold up, and was dismissed with the rest of the suit. All that the plaintiffs have presented, he said, "even when considered in a light most favorable to them, are sporadic and isolated acts that do not constitute a pattern of racketeering."

He also threw out the Sherman Act claims, saying that no evidence was offered of Mr. Lewis's market power as required by antitrust law. Citing alleged errors by the lower court, Mr. Boies appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta -- the same court that has heard part of the Florida election case.

The appeal failed, too. "Bill Gates should have hired me as his lawyer," says Gary Scudiero, one of the gardeners who has represented himself against Mr. Boies. In a rambling 47-page brief he filed last year during appeal, Mr. Scudiero asked: "Who would believe one of the most powerful attorneys in the country would choose to persecute three laborers with the same federal antitrust complaint and at the same time that he is going against the richest corporate giant in the United States?"

Mr. Lewis says that the dispute between the two lawn-care companies was a basic breach-of-contract matter that Mr. Boies and his associates blew all out of proportion. Mr. Lewis figures that through the various phases of the dispute, he has faced a total of 26 lawyers before a dozen state and federal judges. Mr. Lewis and Ms. Habie started working out a settlement two years ago under which each side agreed not to interfere with the other's business and the noncompete agreements would end. But it took another year to finalize, as the federal appeal proceeded.

Today, Mr. Lewis and Ms. Habie continue to spar in Palm Beach County Circuit court over compliance. Mr. Lewis, representing himself with some help from a local lawyer, has so far won sanctions and judgments of more than $178,000 against Ms. Habie's company for violations of the settlement. But he says he hasn't seen any of the money because of appeals.

Those appeals are linked to Circuit Court Judge Kathleen Kroll, who in July lost patience with the endless legal maneuvering, saying in court: "This case has been in litigation for years. ... It's been in the appellate court for years and, in this court's opinion, epitomizes how the courts can be abused."

Several months later, Mr. Boies and colleagues alleged that the judge had been promised a campaign contribution by the lawyer assisting Mr. Lewis. The judge denied the charge, but recused herself from the case, and Ms. Habie's lawyers appealed her orders. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.

In recent months, Mr. Boies has largely removed himself from the imbroglio with Mr. Lewis, handing over the reins to another lawyer, who also is working pro bono. Among the remaining protagonists, fatigue is setting in. "We want peace," Ms. Habie says. "I mean, it's a pity it's gone this far. This isn't Pepsi and Coke; these are small landscaping businesses in the town of Palm Beach -- there's enough work for everyone." Adds Scott Lewis, her opponent: "I pray every day for this to end."

His legal records now fill a dozen boxes stacked in a garage alongside lawn mowers and leaf-blowers. Mr. Scudiero says that defending himself has cost him his home, his job and his marriage. "My dream of owning my own sprinkler business has been destroyed," he says. And Mr. Rojo, the 27-year-old laborer from Cuba who was alleged to have been part of the Lewis conspiracy, says, "Nobody knows who's to blame, or what it's about any more."

But the story doesn't end there.

Mr. Boies has continued his eight-year effort to reunite the Habie children with their mother. On the night of Sept. 25, shortly before Mr. Boies was scheduled to appear in a federal appeals court in San Francisco on behalf of Internet music distributor Napster Inc., he was in a federal jail cell in Florida, negotiating the final wording of a joint custody agreement with Mr. Habie. The fugitive had been arrested by FBI agents hours earlier, after his white Lear jet had touched down from Guatemala at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, his first known attempt to re-enter the U.S. since 1992.

It was the climax of a series of events that began in May, when Mr. Boies flew to Guatemala to meet Mr. Habie. There, the fugitive agreed to give his ex-wife joint custody of the twins and to provide child support -- a $1.5 million trust fund, plus $1.5 million for legal expenses. And once in the Florida jail, he put up another $1.5 million as a performance bond to ensure that terms of the deal are carried out. In return, Mr. Boies persuaded a federal judge to free Mr. Habie and to drop all other pending charges and fines.

Mr. Habie declined to comment after the hearing and flew to Guatemala; his lawyer in Washington, D.C., didn't return a call seeking comment. "All I've wanted for eight years is to get my kids back, and David Boies did that for me," Ms. Habie says. "Through all of the other lawsuits and everything else, he never lost sight of the goal."

P.S.: FREEP TALKING - Boies also made Amy Habie the CFO of his New York Law Firm. (I don't know if she still is). Boies likes entanglements - similar to what Rush finds himself in at this time. Any chance Boies is trying to bring Rush down since Boies failed to win one for Al Gore?