FERGUSON, Mo. – In the days following a Department of Justice report accusing Ferguson’s police and municipal court of widespread abuses, the city made a series of conciliatory moves. Three employees involved in racist emails were forced out. The city manager stepped down. So did the police chief and municipal judge.
Less than a month later, on March 27, a City Council that’s been grappling with declining revenues voted unanimously in a closed meeting to hire one of the nation’s most distinguished and highest-price trial lawyers to navigate what could be a prolonged and expensive reform process.
His name is Dan K. Webb.
And the city of Ferguson is paying him $1,335 an hour.
Over the past 40 years, Webb has been both prosecutor and defense attorney in some of the country’s high-profile cases. His work in the in U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago resulted in the convictions of public officials and police officers. He prosecuted former National Security Adviser John Poindexter during the Iran-Contra scandal.
Webb’s private clients have included tobacco giant Philip Morris, Microsoft and the New York Stock Exchange. He also has defended some of Illinois’ more notable politicians, including former Gov. George Ryan, as well as one of the nation’s most notorious sheriff’s departments.
Last week, Webb, 69, was in Vienna representing Ukranian business mogul Dmitry V. Firtash in an extradition hearing. The U.S. charged Firtash with bribing officials in India for titanium mining licenses.
Jeff Small, a city spokesman, said city officials would not comment beyond the one-paragraph statement released last month announcing Webb’s hiring.
“He’s an outstanding trial attorney, but this is not a trial,” said Sam Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, an expert on the Justice Department’s negotiations. “It looks like they don’t know what they are doing, and they’re gearing up for a fight.”
Webb disagreed, calling that interpretation of his hiring “naive.”
“Yes, I try a lot of cases, but that’s not why I was hired,” he said. “The city wanted somebody who could try the case if necessary if they had to. But they don’t want to do that, and it’s clear to me that the Department of Justice doesn’t want to do that . I have resolved a lot of cases in my time.”
Webb’s fee will be in addition to expenses and the fees for any lawyers or paralegals in his firm who may work on the case, according to an engagement letter between the city and Webb’s firm Winston &Strawn.
Webb’s hourly rate is nearly double the highest billing rate in Missouri in 2014, which, according to Missouri Lawyers Weekly, was $700 an hour.
The city fought to keep the engagement letter secret. For two weeks, it refused to release a copy of the letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, arguing that it was privileged communication that could reveal the city’s litigation strategy. After the Post-Dispatch argued that it was illegal to keep the document secret under the state’s open records law, the city council voted in a closed meeting Thursday night to release it. Still, the city did not turn over the letter until just before 5 p.m. Friday.
Webb will play a key role in working with the Justice Department, which spent seven months investigating Ferguson’s police department and municipal court after the death of Michael Brown. The department concluded that the police shooting of Brown was justified, but said the city had tolerated a culture of police brutality while pressuring the police chief and court officials to increase traffic enforcement and fees without regard to public safety.
Now it’s up to the two sides to negotiate an agreement for reforming the police department and municipal court. Then, if the process plays out as it has elsewhere, the city will pay for a federal monitor to ensure that Ferguson keeps its promises.
In other places, the process has taken years and has cost police departments across the country millions.
Ferguson is already reeling from financial setbacks, and has already had to dip into its reserves.
Webb grew up in Bushnell, Ill., a community of roughly 3,000 people 170 miles north of St. Louis. His father worked as a grocer and mail carrier. Webb, who now lives in the Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge, said about half the city were Cubs fans, while the other half rooted for the Cardinals.
“I was a St. Louis Cardinals fan,” he said. “I still am to this day.”
After watching Webb in a high school debate, a guidance counselor gave Webb biographies of two celebrated trial lawyers: Clarence Darrow and Earl Rogers.
“He read those two books and decided to be a lawyer,” said Charles Kocoras, a federal judge who wrote the book about Webb, “May It Please the Court.”
Webb graduated from Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 1970s and went to work as federal prosecutor under James R. Thompson, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago. Within a few years, he was thrust into the spotlight when he prosecuted Cook County’s longtime clerk in a bribery scandal and 24 police officers, including a police captain, for shaking down bar owners.
He left the U.S. Attorney’s office in 1976 to set up a law firm. After Thompson was elected governor, Webb was tapped to head up the state’s Department of Law Enforcement. But he missed the courtroom and soon returned to private practice.
During President Ronald Reagan’s first term, he was recruited to serve as U.S. Attorney in Chicago. In that role, he oversaw one of the FBI’s most significant undercover investigations ever: “Operation Greylord,” that resulted in the indictments of 17 judges, 48 lawyers, eight police officers, 10 deputy sheriffs, eight court officials and one state legislator, nearly all of whom were convicted.
A few years later, the late Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-Contra affair chose Webb to try the Poindexter case. In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of conspiring to mislead Congress, obstructing congressional inquiries and making false statements. The conviction was later overturned on appeal.
Through the years, Webb represented large corporate clients. A 2004 profile in The New York Times said Webb “epitomizes the rise of a new breed of superlawyers.”
‘If God decided to make a trial lawyer, he would have made Dan,” Kocoras said. “He makes quick judgments that are unerringly accurate.”
It was Webb’s involvement in Maricopa County, Ariz., which is the subject of a Justice Department investigation, that attracted the attention of Ferguson, Webb said. DOJ alleged that the Sheriff’s Office and Sheriff Joseph Arpaio engaged in discriminatory and otherwise unconstitutional law enforcement actions against Latinos.
In 2012, the DOJ filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against Maricopa County, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and Arpaio. In a press release, the DOJ wrote: “negotiations were unsuccessful, primarily because the county and Arpaio refused to agree to any independent oversight by a monitor.”
“They have been the most belligerent” of the communities in negotiations with DOJ, said Walker, the professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
Before Webb was hired, city officials met with the consulting firm Greenwood &Streicher, LLC, which the city of Albuquerque hired last year to negotiate its consent decree. Partners Scott Greenwood and Tom Streicher are former adversaries. Greenwood was an attorney for the ACLU and Streicher was the police chief in Cincinnati during a consent decree process. The hourly fee for Greenwood and Streicher is $350, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
None of the council members who voted to hire Webb returned phone calls from the Post-Dispatch.
The costs may become an issue in Ferguson, where city officials are already worrying about bankruptcy.
Brian Fletcher, a council member who was elected in April, after Webb was hired, said Ferguson has lost sales tax revenue from businesses destroyed in the riots last year, collected less in court fines and fees, paid officers more in overtime and had higher-than-normal legal bills.
He said that the city is facing a $2 million to $3 million deficit for the fiscal year that ends on June 30, and will likely face a similar deficit next year.
That’s without the cost of a implementing any reforms or paying Webb’s legal bill.
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