Читать книгу Betrayal In Blood - Michael Benson - Страница 15

CHAPTER 8

A Working Lawyer

During October 1989, when Tabatha Bassett was thirteen years old, Kevin Bryant passed the bar exam at the age of thirty-one and was licensed to practice law in New York State. A few months later, after a short search, Kevin Bryant landed a job.

It wasn’t the best job. Low pay. High turnover. Okay for a guy fresh out of school. He accepted a position as a staff attorney at a local branch of Hyatt Legal Services, once a regionally well-known chain of law offices.

Hyatt, the chain, was called “the McDonald’s of the legal profession” by Barron’s magazine. The chain of law offices was cofounded in 1977 by Joel Z. Hyatt, who had earned his J.D. only the year before at Yale Law School. Hyatt, the man, was named by The American Lawyer as one of the ten most influential attorneys during the 1980s for his pioneering efforts in making the legal system work on behalf of middle-income families. Briefly involved in politics, in 1994, Hyatt was Ohio’s Democratic nominee for the Senate. Today, Hyatt is the CEO of a start-up cable network that he established with former vice president Al Gore. According to the newsletter of Stanford Graduate School, where Joel Hyatt was a teacher, Hyatt Legal Services “helped revolutionize the legal services delivery system by making legal care affordable and accessible to middle- and lower-income families.” The founder flourished, the law offices not so much. They were less than glamorous, but that was where Kevin landed a job. Everybody was inexperienced, or otherwise troubled. In a sense it was like working at McDonald’s. When anyone seemed too sharp and had been there for too long, coworkers wondered why they hadn’t moved on.

In 1986, KRON-TV in San Francisco reported: “Since 1977, Hyatt Legal Services has grown into the largest law firm in the U.S., serving mainly middle-class clients out of storefront offices. While Hyatt’s growth has been spectacular, former Hyatt lawyers have claimed that the incentive to take on new clients causes heavy workloads and high staff turnover, and charged that in the Bay Area, Hyatt hired two attorneys under suspension by the bar. Although the firm’s system works well for some clients, it may be inappropriate for more complicated cases, such as contested divorces.” So, the impression was that Hyatt generated a lot of business, and if it did make a lot of money, it did so through volume. They also were not too picky about the lawyers they hired, it seemed.

In June 1993, Kevin Bryant became a partner in the Hyatt’s office in Greece, New York. His supervisor there was a man named William R. Shero (pseudonym). A swinging bachelor with a steady income, Kevin bought himself a Mazda Miata. After a couple years on the job there, Kevin bought the house on Pennicott Circle in Penfield. The house was in a perfect location. It was only about a mile from where he had grown up, and where his mom and dad still lived. It was a big house; so to help pay the mortgage, according to neighbors, Kevin frequently invited people to come live with him.

When his supervisor separated from his wife and was in the process of getting a divorce, Kevin invited Shero to take one of the bedrooms. As a result, they became housemates for a while.