Midland Reporter-Telegram
Tuesday, April 30, 1991
Former DA awarded largest libel judgment can wait for money
By Barry Shlachter
N.Y. Times News Service
Waco-There’s the piano, the flower-patterned furniture and the painting of Texas bluebonnets. But what sets the living room of former McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell apart from his neighbors' are 25 cardboard boxes of files scattered about and scores of folders spread on a long table. Then there’s the copy machine on the piano stool.
The room was Feazell’s command bunker during the six weeks when he took on Dallas’ WFAA/Channel 8 and its former investigative reporter, Charles Duncan in a successful libel action that might make judicial history.
“I’ve always wanted new towels,” said Feazell’s second wife, Berni, a tall, red-haired woman. Berni Feazell can crack a joke as well as a stand-up comic, but this day she insists that’s actually what she’d buy first with the $58 million judgment, the biggest in U.S. history. “You know, the matching kind-bath towels the same color as the washrag.”
As for himself, Vic Feazell said, he’d take what’s left after paying his lawyer and move his family to Tulsa, Okla. or Austin, Texas-“somewhere near an airport”-and be more selective in the work he’d handle, perhaps civil-rights cases, national civil-rights cases.
The award, decided by a jury April 19, must be approved by the judge, who can reduce or even set aside the verdict. If he doesn’t, it may face as many as three appeal by the 180-lawyer Dallas firm, Locke Purnell Rain Harrell, that represented the Belo Broadcasting Corp. TV station.
Somewhere along the line, there could be an out-of-court settlement for somewhat less than $58 million. Feazell says he’s willing to talk turkey. He’s also prepared to be patient (“I’ve got the staying power to wait five years”), knowing that the award will be earning 10-percent compound interest.
Neither Feazell nor his Tulsa-based lawyer, Gary Richardson, had any libel case experience, Feazell said, “This little ragtag team took on Locke Purnell. A real-life David-Goliath story.”
There is no mistaking that Victor Fred Feazell-a Louisiana preacher’s son and onetime Baptist preacher himself who became a police trainee, a lawyer, a populist politician and then a private attorney again - is on a roll.
In 1986, he won re-election as district attorney despite a federal racketeering indictment accusing him of tacking bribes for dismissal or leniency on drunken-driving cases. Playing on a now-familiar David vs. Goliath theme, he handed out bumper stickers picturing the kind of handcuffs he wore when arrested – only those on the stickers were depicted being snapped in half.
He was acquitted of all charges in a highly publicized 1987 Austin trial.
Feazell said he stayed on as district attorney for 18 months only at his wife’s insistence, then became a corporate lawyer until he decided to return to private practice.
Perhaps it was the threatening gray skies or the $12,000 due on his credit cards, but a week after the libel case ended, Waco’s most colorful resident was pensive, almost dour in demeanor.
Feazell – who might soon join the ranks of newly made millionaires along with Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes winners and Cowboys defensive tackle Russell Maryland – showed a world-weariness that belied not only his good fortune and his 39 years but also the public flamboyance for which he was once known.
Or maybe he was just wary of out-of-town reporters.
The domed McLennan County Courthouse is clearly visible from Feazell’s ninth-floor law office. Binoculars, placed on a windowsill, enable him to spot opposing attorneys so he’ll know when to show up in court, he explained.
Next to the window is a picture of an old country church – gold on black glass – and a bookshelf containing a biography of Huey Long, the Louisiana populist-demagogue. Feazell lists Long as one of his heroes, along with Moses, David, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
In person, he exudes open-faced candor, though possibly the sort of familiar, practiced sincerity honed by those of his pulpit-and –prosecutorial background.
This morning, he is the consummate Texas criminal lawyer starched white shirt, red paisley tie, the suit pin-striped and double-breasted, his boots western and covered by ostrich skin. The look is completed by a Texas-shaped golden nugget ring.
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