Dogged lawyer vies for Indians
The Denver Post
By: Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
March 18, 2002
WASHINGTON – There are moments when Dennis Gingold seems hardly a legal threat to anyone. After all, the curly haired former Denver lawyer has had only one case in the past six years. His tiny office, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, is awash in a sea of 3-foot-high stacks of unsorted paper.
And there’s the 6-foot, wooden cigar-store Indian outside the door, hardly the appropriate symbol for a man who has been battling for American Indians since 1996.
“It’s not politically correct,” Gingold quickly acknowledges. Then he adds: “I’m not politically correct.”
As dozens of federal lawyers can ruefully attest, however, the 52-year-old Gingold – a New Jersey native who punches with all the subtlety of Mike Tyson and talks like television detective Andy Sipowicz – is not someone to cross.
While Gingold has had only one lawsuit, he has won every major decision in the case. Today he is on the verge of forcing the Interior Department to give up one of its prized, historic functions: serving as the government’s trustee for the nation’s Indians.
In the process, Gingold seems likely to win a contempt-of-court citation against the Bush administration’s top Indian-affairs aide and Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the former Colorado attorney general who came to the capital with an unblemished record.
The charge: failing to care for the Indians and billions in trust funds that the government has been handling for them since 1887. “There are billions of dollars at stake here – monies not properly handled by the U.S. government,” says Gingold, his voice rising in anger. It’s even more than the $10 billion figure he has used in the past, Gingold says, probably more than anyone will ever know because the government’s lax record-keeping.
The government, Gingold’s critics would counter, has known that for decades. But until Gingold came along, no one had devised a legal theory to make the government come clean with 350,000 individual accounts being held for some of the nation’s poorest citizens.
To do that, Gingold – whom one government lawyer calls “The Terrorist” for his no-holds-barred courtroom style – fashioned a lawsuit that many initially called questionable. Then, to the amazement of some in the government, Gingold refused to budge over efforts to settle the case out of court.
In the process, Gingold has defeated numerous officials and lawyers who have challenged him. In 1999 he won contempt citations against three Clinton administration officials – two of whom were Cabinet officers. He since has initiated similar proceedings against 39 other current and former officials and forced the Justice Department to send in a replacement team of lawyers after he questioned the ethics of the first team.
Zealous. Combative. Confrontational. Gingold, who agreed to be interviewed but not photographed, concedes he is all three. Indians, he argued, need someone with a strong will to defend them from a government that has lied and misled them since 1887, when Uncle Sam set up the first trust accounts, believing Indians could not manage their own money. “Confrontation is the only weapon we have,” Gingold said. And anyone who has watched Gingold in Courtroom 21, where the case has played out, will attest that Gingold is constantly on the offensive. Indeed, he became so passionate during one hearing that U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth cautioned him: “We can’t right all wrongs here.” “He’s not going to give you much room for abusing the rights of plaintiffs,” said Keith Harper, a senior lawyer with the Colorado-based Native American Fights Fund, which has worked on the case with Gingold. “He’s held their feet to the fire.”
Government lawyers, burned by Gingold’s assaults on their ethics, declined to discuss his style.
Gingold, a 1974 graduate of Seton Hall Law School, makes no excuses, saying it’s the government that should apologize. Lawyers who have known him for years say Gingold places a high value on ethics. But Gingold also says he was misled by government lawyers in their many months of working to settle the case out of court.
“He’ll be there ’til the glaciers all melt,” says Thad Holt, an Alabama lawyer who has worked with Gingold. “The stalling tactics are never going work with Dennis.”
Besides, Gingold says, government lawyers were never serious about settling the case.
His explanation for the government’s decision to fight the case is backed in part by the testimony of a Treasury official, who said government officials long have viewed the trust funds as a “government slush fund” that could be used to lower the national debt.
That’s why, Gingold says, the government has never come close to settling the case despite the $614 million taxpayers have spent since 1996 trying to reform the system. But the government’s legal defense has been off the mark since the lawsuit was filed, largely because the government rejected Gingold’s insistence that it had a bank-like trust responsibility to the Indians.
Throughout the case, federal lawyers maintained that the trust relationship was subject to various arcane laws, such as the administrative procedures act. No, Gingold insisted, it is a trust relationship, like those any commercial bank faces, and it is subject to the same rules that apply to any trust.
Gingold said that when he outlined his legal strategy for the case to lead plaintiff, Elouise Cobell, a member of Montana’s Blackfeet Tribe, some were aghast.
It would be a trust case, he said, not a claim against the government that might end up in the Court of Claims, a special court here that considers complaints against the government over contracts.
To the amazement of federal lawyers, both Lamberth and then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia bought Gingold’s argument. Since then, the Justice Department has fought a defensive battle with Gingold. Gingold had met Cobell in the late 1970s when he was in Denver, first as regional counsel for the Comptroller of the Currency’s Denver office. She was an executive of the Montana’s Blackfeet National Bank, the nation’s first Indian-owned bank.
“I think that the stars are aligned for this case,” Cobell said. “He opened doors that no one had ever opened before. It is going to make for total opportunity for Indian people.”
As for Gingold, there are battles ahead and he isn’t pulling punches. Asked what he would advise the judge to do with Norton, he said: “I’d tell the judge to ask the secretary to bring her toothbrush.”
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