Lawyers Gone Bad

by Philip Slayton

  The search warrant question answered, Codina was then charged with defrauding the Ontario Legal Aid Plan of about $20,000 in 1991 and 1992, billing for about 270 hours of work she never performed. Her trial was not until late 1997. She was found guilty on two counts. The judge described her behaviour at the trial as “arrogant and aggressive.” In January 1998, he sentenced her to six months in jail. The judge said that “she presented herself as a legal Joan of Arc but the evidence I heard does not support this.” He called her “devious, very aggressive and dishonest.” Finally, in 2002, because of this conviction, Codina was disbarred in Ontario.11 In Canada, at least, Codina’s legal career was over.

  Meanwhile there was serious trouble for Codina in another part of what Harry Kopyto had called her “international immigration law empire.” In 1996, she had opened a law office in New York City, with a staff of sixteen (four of them lawyers), in the elegant Helmsley Building on Park Avenue. Several of her clients at that office, who had paid fees in advance, claimed that they had not received promised legal services, and reported her to the New York bar. When it was discovered that she was not qualified to practise law in New York State, the bar complained to the New York Attorney General’s office. On March 20, 1998, the Attorney General executed a search warrant and seized files from Codina’s office. (It was two months after her conviction in Toronto, and Codina believes that the New York prosecution was initiated by the Canadian authorities, annoyed that she had slipped from their grasp, under a reciprocal agreement between the two jurisdictions.) In May 2000, following a ten-day trial in Manhattan, she was convicted of fraud, larceny, and practising as a lawyer in New York State without being admitted to the bar. The judge described her as “a cold calculating repeat offender who refuses to acknowledge and take responsibility for her criminal behaviour, and, thus, presents no hope of rehabilitation.” Codina called her conviction “politically motivated.”12 Sentencing took place in July. A triumphant July 24, 2000, press release issued by Eliot Spitzer, now the New York Attorney General, announced:

  Angie Codina, who fraudulently portrayed herself as an immigration lawyer and victimized hundreds of people seeking to become United States citizens, was sentenced to a term of 9 1⁄3 to 28 years in prison and ordered to pay $108,840 in restitution by Manhattan State Supreme Court Judge Laura Visatacion-Lewis.…

  Testimony at the trial indicated Codina defrauded as many as 1,000 victims. Witnesses testified they each lost from $7,000 to $178,000 and that Codina stole more than $260,000 in legal fees from the 17 victims named in the charges against her. One victim who was scheduled to testify was unable to do so because he was stranded in the Czech Republic as a result of an exclusion procedure for which he had originally sought Codina’s legal assistance.

  But the legendary Spitzer, like others before him, had underestimated Codina. She appealed, and in September 2002 the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court quashed her conviction and ordered a new trial.13 The 1998 search warrant had been improperly issued. The evidence obtained pursuant to the warrant was inadmissible. The new trial took place in April 2003, and Codina was convicted again, but given a lesser sentence. When last heard of, she was prisoner number 66854, in “E Pod” of the Monmouth County Correctional Center, Freedhold, New Jersey.

  On September 10, 1985, Codina and Kopyto published an article in The Globe and Mail about prison.14 It began:

  Imagine a city of 12,000 people ruled by a faceless bureaucracy that determines to whom they speak, what they eat, what they read and where they work. There is no privacy, not even for bodily functions. There is no right to vote, to decide what to buy or what to wear. Sex is forbidden. Any form of disobedience can result in disassociation in primitive isolation cells without ventilation, where every breath comes with difficulty. Despite such repression, a cycle of anger and frustration leading to violence burst out periodically.

  This is the city where Codina herself lived fifteen years later. She told a journalist that her capacity for “intellectual abstraction” allowed her to make the transition from lawyer to prison gardener and hospital porter.15

  HARRY KOPYTO was born in a displaced persons camp in Ulm, Germany, on December 13, 1946. He says that more than a hundred of his relatives died in the Holocaust. He came to Toronto with his parents in 1952, living in the College and Spadina area (where his office is today). His mother, Frieda, went to work in a factory. His father, Israel, worked as a tailor. Harry graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in 1970.

  Kopyto first attracted public attention in December 1980, in what the Toronto Sun called the “Chanukah Caper.” He was representing a man charged with trafficking in narcotics. Kopyto asked that the jury trial be adjourned because it fell on the same day as the Jewish holiday of Chanukah. The judge granted the adjournment. On the day in question, a gowned Kopyto was spotted in another court room. Crown counsel in the trafficking trial told Kopyto he intended to tell the judge that Kopyto had misled the Court. Kopyto reacted angrily; he later testified that he felt a Christian was attempting to interfere with his rights as a Jew. He had requested an adjournment, said Kopyto, because if the trial went ahead on the scheduled day, he would be unable to celebrate Chanukah with his family in the traditional way the evening before, since trial preparation would have to be done. The judge ordered that Kopyto appear later in the week to explain what happened. Kopyto didn’t show up, sending his secretary instead. Now it was the judge who was angry. He found Kopyto guilty of two charges of contempt. Responding to emotional evidence given by Kopyto at the contempt hearing, the judge said, “What this case has absolutely nothing to do with … is Mr. Kopyto’s right to live his life as a Jew; it has nothing to do with his having been born in a displaced persons’ camp; it has nothing to do with Nazi persecution.”

  But, on appeal, Kopyto’s convictions in the Chanukah Caper were set aside.16 Justice Brooke for the Ontario Court of Appeal said that, although Kopyto’s conduct was unreasonable and unprofessional, there was doubt that he intended to mislead the judge, and that subsequently the judge was wrong to treat as inappropriately qualified an apology that Kopyto gave the court. The Ontario Attorney General promptly appealed the acquittal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Kopyto responded by saying that “the universal feeling in the legal community is that they’re out to get me.” The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.

  By March 1982, Harry Kopyto was considered interesting enough to be featured in a front-page story in The Globe and Mail:17

  “Harry Kopyto,” Harry Kopyto says, “does not sue persons unless they are very wealthy and establishment people. I sue major corporations and I sue the government. I sue the police.”

  … He has no friends in the legal profession, whose membership he describes as “selfimportant, egotistical, egomaniacal in some cases, materialistic.… They think they’re God’s gift to the world, they have overblown evaluations of themselves, they are more concerned with how much money they can make than with serving their clients.”

  … “The people I represent,” he says, “wouldn’t be represented by anyone else. I’m the last person they come to. I am the dead end. After me there is nothing. Oblivion. I am the last hope.”

  One of Harry Kopyto’s closest friends was Ross Dowson (Dowson died in 2002). An avowed follower of Leon Trotsky, Dowson was a full-time Canadian political agitator for a succession of organizations, particularly the Revolutionary Workers Party, the League for Socialist Action, and the Socialist League. In his obituary, The Globe and Mail noted that Dowson “managed to make a significant mark on the Canadian political scene from the sidelines, in part by being a thorn in establishment’s [sic] side.”18 In the seventies, allegations were made that the RCMP had improperly investigated the activities of the League for Socialist Action and of Dowson.19 Kopyto, Dowson’s lawyer as well as his friend and a political sympathizer, got busy. In 1982, after the failure both of an action against the RCMP for defamation and of an attempt to have criminal ch
arges brought against RCMP members, Kopyto, as a final effort, commenced civil proceedings in small claims court. In 1985, Judge Zuker dismissed the claim, in part on the grounds that the action was not brought within the statutorily prescribed limitation period.

  When Zuker dismissed Dowson’s claim, Kopyto gave an angry interview to Kirk Makin of The Globe and Mail. Makin’s story, published on December 18, 1985,20 quoted Kopyto at length: “This decision is a mockery of justice.… It stinks to high hell. We’re wondering what is the point of appealing and continuing this charade of the courts in this country which are warped in favor of protecting the police. The courts and the RCMP are sticking so close together you’d think they were put together with Krazy Glue.” (Kopyto later admitted that these were not impromptu remarks; in particular, he says that he had carefully prepared the Krazy Glue comment the night before.) Ian Scott, the Attorney General of Ontario, was not amused. On February 7, 1986, Kopyto was charged with “scandalizing the court.” In another interview, after he was charged, Kopyto told Makin, “This may be the biggest freedom of speech case of the decade.… I think I’m being persecuted for my views.… It’s incredible that a person should face jail for expressing an opinion.… I give voice to the secret world of the dispossessed and the oppressed.… Most lawyers are fixers and manipulators of the system.”21

  By April, Makin was reporting that “the fight to acquit Harry Kopyto has grown to include lawyers of all political stripes, fringe-party activists and supporters from the arts and media.”22 At an April fundraising party at his house, Kopyto read a poem titled “Ode to Krazy Glue.” (Harry fancies himself a poet. “When I was in Spain one time,” he told me, “I wrote a poem about how a lobster feels when it is put in the cooking pot.”) In September, Robert Priest and his band, The Great Big Face, gave a benefit concert for Kopyto at Lee’s Palace, a nightclub on Bloor Street West in Toronto.

  The trial, with Harry facing the obscure and archaic charge of scandalizing the court, began on Monday, September 22. On Tuesday, Drew Fagan in The Globe and Mail was reporting that “the trial of outspoken lawyer Harry Kopyto for contempt of court appears destined to provide a wide-ranging examination of the criminal justice system.”23 On Wednesday, Kopyto, giving evidence on the freedom of conscience section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, told the court that the principle that guided him in practising law was “to give body and flesh to the deep thirst I have for equality.” He told the now familiar tale about losing most of his relatives in the Holocaust, and being born in a displaced persons camp. On Friday, while Angie Codina as one of his defence lawyers was questioning Attorney General Ian Scott, Kopyto rushed out of the prisoner’s box and demanded to question Scott himself. Justice Montgomery refused, and the trial was adjourned until Monday, amid chaos.

  On Wednesday of the next week, Justice Montgomery refused to allow the defence to call evidence attempting to prove that the courts were biased, on the grounds that it would be contrary to the public good. “I can’t allow this proceeding to turn into a circus,” he said, perhaps a bit too late. The trial concluded on Friday, October 3, with an impassioned address by defence lawyer Charles Roach, who compared Kopyto to Socrates.

  On Friday, October 17, judgment was given. Kopyto was found guilty of scandalizing the court. On November 6, he was sentenced. Justice Montgomery ordered him to apologize for his remarks, and said that until such an apology was made Kopyto could not appear before the courts. Supporters of Kopyto in the courtroom responded with catcalls. Leaving the courthouse with his elevenyear-old son, Marc, and nine-year-old daughter, Erica, Kopyto said he would not apologize and would appeal. A lead editorial in the November 7 edition of The Globe and Mail commented that “any sentence for this law is too harsh, because the law itself should not exist.… The public interest will be far better served by respected lawyers and others challenging Mr. Kopyto’s assertions than by using the weight of the law to silence him.… Once the state gets into the business of punishing people for their opinions, where does it stop?”24 On November 27, 1987, the Ontario Court of Appeal, although highly critical of Kopyto’s behaviour, overturned his conviction on the charge of scandalizing the court, with a majority of the judges holding that the offence was contrary to the guarantee of freedom of expression found in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.25

  The Law Society of Upper Canada still wanted to discipline Kopyto. “They were out to discredit the radical lawyer movement,” he later told me. “The pursuit of me was part of an attack on activist lawyers in general. And there was an institutional antipathy towards me personally.” A variety of disciplinary proceedings against him continued.26 At first, the law society’s principal charge was based on the statements about Kopyto’s unprofessional behaviour made in the Court of Appeal judgments that acquitted him of scandalizing the court. Then, in January 1989, allegations of a different sort were made. It was said that Kopyto had deliberately submitted inflated bills to the Ontario Legal Aid Plan. It was alleged that, among other things, he had billed the plan for more than twenty-four hours’ work on a single day, and for over a thousand phone calls made on behalf of a single client.

  In an agreed statement of facts, Kopyto unexpectedly admitted that he had overbilled Legal Aid, saying that overcharging was a result of poor bookkeeping, guessing, and estimating, by an extraordinarily overworked lawyer who turned no one away and was working forty-five hundred hours a year. Why did he suddenly give in? “My political supporters dropped away,” he told me. “They felt I had betrayed them. Suddenly it wasn’t about justice, fighting for the little guy, it was about stealing money. I became isolated. And I had to admit that I’d been sloppy. But not crooked!” The disciplinary committee promptly found him guilty of professional misconduct and recommended to the law society that he be disbarred. In a front-page story on July 25, The Globe and Mail reported Kopyto’s reaction: “I only admitted to doing what hundreds and hundreds of lawyers do.”27 On September 17, there was a rally for Kopyto outside Queen’s Park. About sixty people showed up. Frances Kelly described the scene the next day in the Toronto Star:28

  Harry Kopyto loving Harry Kopyto. The downtrodden loving Harry Kopyto. The blind, the disabled, the abused, the dispossessed and the poor loving Harry Kopyto.

  … “We’re on the edge, but we haven’t gone over it yet,” Kopyto shouted to applause and cheers of “God love ya, Harry,” and “Victory to Harry Kopyto” from the crowd.

  “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings,” he shouted.

  On November 8, the law society accepted the disciplinary committee’s recommendation and disbarred Kopyto for fraud. An outraged Kopyto said he was betrayed: “There was clear agreement I had been negligent, not fraudulent. There were no facts that said I was fraudulent.”29 His daughter Erica sat weeping beside him as the decision was announced. “The fight has just begun,” he said. “Now, they’ve got me real angry.” The Globe and Mail reported that “Kopyto trudged off, hugging his daughter and hefting a briefcase covered with a sticker saying, Boycott South Africa, Not Nicaragua.”30 Later Kopyto said that eighty inmates in Toronto’s Don Jail were going to skip their lunch in solidarity with him. On November 14, Kirk Makin reported in The Globe and Mail:31

  In a telephone linkup at the prison, Mr. Kopyto and The Globe and Mail [sic], inmate Patrick McCarman led a series of group cheers for the embattled lawyer.

  “Okay, guys. How do you feel about Harry?” Mr. McCarman hollered down the cell-block.

  “Yayyyy,” chorused the inhabitants.

  “Wait a second,” Mr. Kopyto interrupted feverishly. “Where is my damned tape machine?”

  “I may not be all that popular with the law society,” Mr. Kopyto said afterwards, “but if I was in the Don Jail I would be king. They may even be starting a club for me soon.”

  Kopyto’s disbarment took effect on November 19, 1989.32 The rules of professional conduct do not allow a lawyer to share premises with a disbarred lawyer. Codina’s disbarment was yet to come. On
the instructions of the law society, a wall was built in the office they shared, separating Harry and Angie.

  HARRY’S INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP with Angie is long since over; she is far away, in prison. Now Harry lives with Geraldine Bowman, who teaches mathematics at Seneca College in Toronto. He met her forty years ago, when they were both students at York University. But, Harry reports, he often speaks to Angie on the telephone.

  He works as a legal agent in Toronto. He doesn’t seem to be engaged in great civil liberties issues anymore. He doesn’t seem to be fighting injustice and oppression. On April 22, 2005, the National Post reported, “A Dalmatian that was turned over to the Toronto Humane Society while his owner was on an extended trip to Greece was yesterday ordered back into the care of the man who says he lovingly shared his pizza and doughnuts with the dog.”33 Kopyto represented the dog’s owner at a Small Claims Court hearing. In June 2005, he was again in Small Claims Court, this time representing a tenyear-old suing the Applewood Hockey Association, who was kicked off his house league team because of conflict between his father and coaching staff.34 Harry would passionately deny a description of what he now does as trivial. “I’m fighting injustice every day,” he told me. “I’m doing what I always did.”

  One September afternoon, I visited Harry at his office in downtown Toronto, on the second floor of a nondescript building on College Street just off Spadina Avenue, in the neighbourhood where his family lived when they moved to Toronto in 1952. The sign on the door said “Resnick Services” (“my holding company,” Harry later explained, “named after my ex-wife.”) The office, small and scruffy, looked like the office of a struggling member of the bar. There were law books piled on bookshelves, and the room was furnished with the battered red leather chairs that, for some reason, lawyers favour. Harry came out to greet me. He looked old (he was born in 1946). His grey hair was braided in a pigtail. He wore a black T-shirt, shorts, socks, and sandals. We sat down in his cluttered office. I asked him about the political philosophy that has informed his life. He started talking, rapidly and passionately. “My creed,” he said, “is deconstructionism. Ruthless criticism of everything. My job is to destroy injustice. I use law as a political weapon. I use it to educate. The legal profession deals in law. I deal in justice.”