© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
Senior Writer for The Texas Lawbook
(Aug. 23) – My cell rang one Saturday morning in 2000. It had a Charleston, SC area code. I knew the number right away.
“He’s gone. They took my boy. I’ve been begging God for mercy, but I just want to die.”
Ron Motley’s agony was nearly unbearable, even over the phone. He moaned and sobbed and I could hear or even feel his broken heart, as it took him several minutes to explain that his son, Mark, had died at the Mayo Clinic from complications related to seizures.
As journalist, we are trained to not get emotionally involved with our sources or our stories. Be objective at all times. But that morning, the rules of journalism made no sense. For the first time in my life, I cried with a source.
Ron Motley died this week. He was 68.
There are a lot of articles on the web today about the amazing legal successes of Ronald L. Motley. He sued and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars from the makers of asbestos. He represented more than 30 states suing the tobacco companies, forcing them to fork over more than $246 billion to states for the medical treatment of sick smokers – about $17 billion of that going to Texas.
This is not one of those articles. As Ron would say, “Those kind of articles are bullshit. Tell me the truth. Tell me what really happened and why this really matters.”
Let me make this clear: Ron Motley was the greatest trial lawyer I have ever seen in person – and I have witnessed some great ones. But he was amazing for one simple reason: It was always personal.
He personally knew people who suffered and died due to asbestos. His mother died in 1984 of emphysema after decades of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day.
Even the phone call to me that morning was obviously personal, but for reasons I will explain shortly.
This idea today that lawyers are not supposed to get personally involved in their case – Ron thought that was total crap. And his clients were glad he did.
I met Ron in 1994 when I wrote my first story about tobacco litigation. For the next five years, we talked by phone at least once a week. We drank screwdrivers with Grey Goose at his mansion on Kiawah Island, as he told me about new legal strategies he was about to employ or progress being made in settlement discussions. We searched through internal tobacco industry documents on his 157-foot yacht, which he named Themis after the Greek titaness. Ron would physically jump up out of his chair to show me an incriminating memo. That was like Christmas for him.
“I hate those lying bastards and I am going to make them pay for killing my mom,” he blurted out one night.
Between 1994 and 1998, I watched Ron in courtrooms from Florida and Connecticut to Texas and Washington State. No one ever had a better grasp of the facts and evidence than Ron Motley.
“Ron was larger than life,” says Houston trial lawyer Harry Potter, who was the Texas deputy attorney general overseeing the tobacco litigation for then Attorney General Dan Morales. “Ron had an extraordinary talent to take a very complex set of facts and make it simple and easy to understand for a judge or jury. He was so instrumental in the success of the tobacco settlement in Texas and across the entire country.
“Ron was not a litigator,” says Potter. “He was a trial lawyer – a great trial lawyer.”
Ron was one of my sources in 1998 and 1999 as I wrote about secret contracts that Morales had signed with his long-time buddy Marc Murr. Those contracts would have provided Murr with more than $500 million in legal fees from the tobacco settlement. In order to get Murr the legal fees, Morales signed a sworn affidavit stating that Murr was his “co-pilot” throughout the litigation.
The problem was that none of the lawyers who were involved in the case knew anything about Murr. His name never appeared on a single document. While most lawyers in the case declined to comment or spoke only on the condition of anonymity, Ron gave me an on-the-record quote that later was cited dozens of times in legal documents and media accounts:
“I don’t know what Morales is talking about because I’ve been in the cockpit the entire time and I’ve never seen or heard from anyone named Marc Murr,” he said.
Murr ended up receiving no money and Attorney General Morales went to federal prison.
Ron and I had a deal: Everything he ever said or did was always on the record. He knew that I was writing a lengthy profile of his role in the Texas tobacco case for The Dallas Morning News, but he never held back.
“Ron is a great lawyer and a great friend, but let’s be honest, he has a lot of personal demons,” Richard Scruggs told me in 1997. Come to find out, Scruggs had a few of his own and is now serving time in federal prison.
The morning my article was published in 1997, he called me at home.
“You make me look like a drunk, a womanizer and you say that I am not the smartest lawyer in the room,” he screamed at me. “I’m going to sue you, you bastard, because I am the smartest lawyer in the room.”
Then, he asked how he could order reprints.
Minutes later, Ron’s long-time assistant Carolyn James called me back.
“You know Ron was just joking,” Carolyn said. “He loved the article. I loved the article. But he is the smartest lawyer in any room.”
No one knows who first spoke the words, “Behind every great man there is a great woman,” (though the first time it ever appeared in print was in 1945 in the Port Arthur News), but Carolyn James should be the face that shows its meaning. Carolyn was Ron’s angel sent by God to protect and take care of him on Earth. And it was not always an easy or pleasant job.
One night, as Ron and I sat alone in the bar at the Four Points Sheraton in Texarkana, which is where the Texas lawsuit against the cigarette makers was litigated, our conversation drifted to family. Ron told me that his son, Mark, had seizures and that he was looking into experimental treatments.
I shared that my then-wife suffered from seizures. Not little seizures but horrible, devastating grand mal seizures that wreaked havoc on her body’s muscular and nervous systems. I told him that there were times when she had suffered three or four of them in a night and that they caused her to suffered massive headaches for days afterwards.
Ron asked me, “What do you do when she’s having them?”
I told him that I hold her as tightly as I can and that I pray over and over and over, begging God for mercy, pleading that the Almighty shift this infliction to me instead. But I told him that such mercy never came.
As I stared at my drink, Ron put his arm around me.
“I believe there is a God and that mercy will one day come for all of us,” he said. “But if he doesn’t, then I’m going to sue him the moment I arrive at the pearly gates.”
Three years later, I arrived at Mark Motley’s funeral in Charleston, SC. Ron and I hugged and we cried. There was no apparent mercy from above that day, though Ron showed extraordinary strength and grace throughout. But in truth, I’m not sure Ron ever recovered.
Ron and I didn’t talk much during the past decade, except when we would both be on CLE panel discussions at a state bar function and then share dinner and drinks afterward. We laughed about good times. We would part with a handshake that always ended in a bear hug.
I truly hope that my friend Ron Motley is resting in peace and that God has finally granted him the mercy that he so greatly deserves. Because if he hasn’t, heaven is about to get its first class action lawsuit.
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