Tribune-Herald
June 10, 1987
Attorney testifies his law firm paid money to Feazell
By Tommy Witherspoon
Tribune-Herald staff writer
AUSTIN – McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell exchanged a portion of legal fees for favorable treatment of clients, a Waco attorney testified Tuesday.
Dick Kettler testified Feazell told Don Hall, Kettler’s law partner, that he wanted a third of their profits in exchange for preferential handling of their clients’ cases. Feazell, Hall, and Kettler shared law offices before Feazell was elected district attorney in 1983.
Feazell, 36, is on trial for a 10-count indictment for racketeering and mail fraud.
Kettler, 42, said he and Hall often would bypass an assistant prosecutor assigned to a case to speak directly to Feazell when they “needed some help” getting a case dismissed or reduced.
“Generally speaking, if we had a case we needed some help on, we had a pretty good idea we could get Mr. Feazell to handle the case for us if we asked him to,” Kettler said.
He and Hall dealt with Feazell’s assistants most of the time, but Kettler said he spoke to Feazell “on cases where I thought I had a better chance of making a higher fee on.”
Kettler said he and Feazell had a good rapport. He said Feazell dismissed three cases in which he intervened on behalf of Waco attorney Dick Clark, who testified in the trial last week, and split the fees with Clark.
On one driving while intoxicated case, Kettler said, Feazell asked him how much he was charging to represent the client. Kettler told him about $2,000.
“Mr. Feazell told me I was not charging these people enough money. His general statement was that what I was getting done for these defendants was worth more than I was charging,” Kettler said.
“About that time, Mr. Feazell told me that his campaign debt was about $70,000, and some lawyers needed to come around and make some campaign contributions if they wanted done what was right on their cases,” Kettler said.
Kettler’s relationship with Feazell began to sour when they found themselves on opposite sides in the Lake Waco triple murder case, he said. Kettler had been appointed in March 1984 to represent Anthony Melendez on three capital murder counts, and Kettler said he was “doing some things in the capital case” that Feazell did not like.
That appointment also coincided with Kettler’s representing Henry Mendez, a probation officer charged with DWI. Kettler said he approached Feazell to dismiss Mendez’s case in court one day when Feazell was preparing to try a murder case.
“He said, ‘you can forget about me doing anything for you in the Mendez case,’” Kettler said of Feazell.
After he told Hall of his strained relations with Feazell, Kettler said, Hall spoke with Feazell in May 1984 in an effort to mend the rift.
Kettler said Hall returned and told him Feazell “wants a piece of the action.” Feazell instructed Hall, not Kettler, to handle the firm’s negotiations of cases with Feazell.
“I understood what he meant,” Kettler told Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Frels. “He wanted part of the money. Mr. Hall said that generally, that was what it was going to take to do business” with the district attorney’s office.
Kettler said the arrangement with Feazell to split fees ended in April 1985 when Kettler learned that Feazell was the target of a federal investigation.
“I told Don Hall then that it was over. I wasn’t going to do it anymore,” Kettler more.
He decided to cooperate in the government investigation of Feazell in July 1986, Kettler said. He appeared three times before an Austin federal grand jury in 1986.
Kettler’s testimony is in exchange for immunity or partial immunity from prosecution for reported tax violations. The details of his arrangement had not been made official late Tuesday, and Kettler declined to discuss it after court recessed.
Clark was granted complete immunity from prosecution for his testimony, and Waco attorneys Ken Crow and Ron Moody have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor tax evasion charges. Hall, who has made similar arrangements, also will testify against Feazell, prosecutors have said.
Earlier, Clark testified he paid Feazell $4,000, and Moody said he and Crow paid Feazell $9,100 in unreported cash campaign contributions.
Kettler said he decided to cooperate because it “was the right thing to do. I had struggled with this for a long time, and I knew there was no other way and the right thing to do was cooperate.”
Kettler, whose voice trembled and who blinked back tears during this portion of his testimony, said his attorney advised him he probably would be prosecuted on tax violation charges even if he cooperated.
He said he taped a conversation between himself and Feazell on Sept. 12, 1986, in his office with a small tape recorder provided by the FBI. Late Tuesday, government officials passed out transcripts of that recorded conversation and wireless headphones to jury members, but the sound system malfunctioned.
U.S. District Judge James Nowlin recessed jurors for the afternoon and instructed Frels to have the equipment operational by this morning.
Feazell’s attorney, Gary Richardson, probably will cross-examine Kettler today.
In other testimony Tuesday, Deanna Fitzgerald, Feazell’s first assistant, testified about how the district attorney’s office was operated early in Feazell’s tenure. Attorneys often bypassed assistants in an attempt to speak directly to Feazell about their cases, Fitzgerald said.
She told Feazell he was being too “soft-hearted” by listening to the attorneys “cry, whine and moan” about their innocent clients. Not long after that, Feazell instructed her to steer attorneys away from him, but said Kettler, Crow and Hall still often would seek Feazell’s attention about a case.
Back
