Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit

by Robert F. Kennedy

  As part of his ongoing efforts to organize relief projects in war zones, Stephen Skakel managed the launching of a program to provide DNA testing to identify victims at mass burial sites in Croatia and Bosnia. In 2001, six months before Michael’s trial, he attended a conference on clinical and forensic testing in Dubrovnik. Kenney Baden and her husband, Michael, were there assisting in the identification effort. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your brother’s going to be convicted,” Kenney Baden informed Stephen. “It was incredibly obvious to me that Mickey wasn’t doing his job,” she told me recently. But she also understands why the Skakels didn’t fire him. “You get invested in your lawyer, even if they’re doing a terrible job,” she explained. “It’s almost like an abusive wife situation. They cut you off from the rest of the world. You see it as your only option, your lifeline.”

  Sherman was great at one thing: reassuring his client that he had everything under control. Each day during the trial, Michael and his siblings gathered for meals at the Ash Creek Saloon, a few blocks from the Norwalk courthouse. Sherman met every expression of doubt with his Pollyanna refrain: “There is no way in hell that you are ever going to see the inside of a jail cell.”

  Despite the hopes they invested in him and his ever-confident style, it was already starting to dawn on Michael and the Skakel family how many things that Sherman promised would never happen, ended up happening. During their first meeting in early 1999 at the New York Athletic Club, Sherman assured Michael that the State would never issue an arrest warrant. By then, Michael had moved to Hobe Sound, Florida, where he was living with, and caring for, his dying father, who was then in the final throes of dementia. On January 19, 2000, the prosecutors announced Michael’s arrest warrant. A couple of months after that, free on $500,000 bail, Michael sat at lunch with Sherman overlooking the 18th hole in Loblolly. “This will never go to trial,” Sherman insisted. “You’ll never see the inside of the courthouse.” A year later, after the State announced that Michael would stand trial as an adult, he watched Sherman on the Today show couch, assuring Matt Lauer, “I’m not surprised. I’ve always thought, and I’ve always said, this case is going to trial.” Michael was already skeptical about Sherman’s slick, pitchman’s bluster, but he lacked the confidence to fire Sherman even as his doubts about his representation multiplied. Michael recently said to me, “When I buy an airplane ticket, I assume the guys in the cockpit know how to fly the 747.” Michael shrugged and looked glum. “Even when stuff didn’t make sense to me, I just kept hoping he knew what he was doing.”

  A few months before Kenney Baden shared her bleak forecast with Stephen, Sherman was out on the town, partying at Giovanni’s II, a restaurant in Darien, for the annual Stamford Roasters Dinner. Joe Richichi, Sherman’s partner of 25 years, was the roastee. The event got big play in the Greenwich Time. In an unintentionally prescient gag, Sherman, who loves costumes, dressed in a convict’s uniform: horizontal stripes with ball and chain. The roasters’ predictably jabbed Sherman for basking in the spotlight, while Richichi labored at mundane land transactions for Connecticut mobsters. Sherman joked from the dais that he didn’t have to worry about his partner stealing his makeup. His role in the partnership, he said, was to do TV interviews with Katie Couric, while Richichi handled oil tank adjustments at real estate closings.

  If not for the game show scandals of the 1950s, Michael may have been spared the calamity of Sherman’s defense. Sherman grew up in “the slums of Greenwich,” as he termed the middle class section of town in his 2008 memoir, How Can You Defend Those People? A C-average student at Greenwich High, he professed dismay at narrowly losing the vote for class clown. He remained a C student at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, majoring in what he termed “having a good time.” Somehow, Sherman was admitted to the University of Connecticut Law School, where he maintained his lifetime C average. Following a stint as a public defender, he worked as an assistant prosecutor in Connecticut. But practicing law never interested Sherman. Married with two young kids, and yearning for money and fame, Sherman became a professional game show contestant. “I learned that you can get on the shows if you can pass a trivia test and act like a genuine moron during the interviews and mock games,” he wrote. In the mid-1970s, Sherman scored minor winnings on Jackpot, on The $20,000 Pyramid, and on The Joker’s Wild, from which he took home $17,000. Unfortunately for Michael Skakel, the game show scandals prompted an FCC rule providing a lifetime limit of three shows per contestant. Sherman hung out his shingle as a defense lawyer specializing in drunk driving cases. Always a clown, Sherman became infamous for his courtroom gags. He appeared, for example, to defend a man charged with shooting ducks from his yacht, with two rubber duck feet protruding from his briefcase.

  In 1985, he represented Hossein Vaziri, pro wrestling’s Iron Sheik. The Sheik faced a third-degree assault rap following his smackdown of a Fairfield gas station attendant. By way of begging Judge Alvin Rottman for leniency, Sherman traveled to a World Wrestling Federation gig to video himself extracting testimonials from the wrestler’s cronies, including Captain Lou Albano and rocker Cyndi Lauper. Snatching his microphone, the Sheik’s manager, “Classy” Freddie Blassie, bellowed to a grinning Sherman, “Just a minute, you pencil-necked geek! Don’t interrupt me!”

  Sherman boasts of his shameless lust for fame. “I’m a media whore,” he says. According to his memoir, a chance golf game with film director Barry Levinson “resulted in the fulfillment of one of my lifetime goals. (No, not to argue before the Supreme Court.) Barry wrote me into one of his movies! In Man of the Year, starring Robin Williams, Christopher Walken, Laura Linney, and others, I play ‘Talking Head Lawyer.’ In one scene I appear on Laura Linney’s bathroom television set, pontificating about Robin Williams’s election to the presidency. My friends and family have had to suffer through countless obnoxious instances where I’ve let my SAG card fall out of my wallet so people can ask me what it is.”

  Of course, the Skakels were in the dark about this sort of cringeworthy information when they retained Sherman. His 1991 Roger Ligon acquittal had earned Sherman his reputation as a top-notch criminal litigator. Ligon, a 42-year-old African American custodian, shot Willie Dobson, an unarmed 22-year-old, three times during an argument over a Stamford parking space. Following the second shot to his chest, Dobson cried out, “Please don’t kill me.” Ligon fired a third fatal shot to his head. The case looked unwinnable. The many eyewitnesses included the victim’s mother. Sherman pioneered a very risky “not guilty by reason of post-traumatic stress disorder” plea wherein he cited Ligon’s service as a Vietnam combat veteran. By all accounts, Sherman nailed the case, spending a week in the Marine Corps’s Historical Center, poring over combat chronologies to find records of the horrific sights Ligon claimed to have witnessed, and then bird-dogging members of Ligon’s unit for corroboration.

  Sherman fought the case like a good trial attorney. A parade of witnesses testified to the victim’s aggressiveness, to Ligon’s decency, and to the horrors that Ligon witnessed in Vietnam. During a firefight near Que Son, Ligon watched a close friend immolated by napalm. When Ligon grabbed his friend’s arm to pull him to safety, his buddy’s cooked flesh fell from his bone. “He covered all the bases,” Bruce Hudock, the senior assistant State’s Attorney who prosecuted the case, told the New York Times. “He utilized every piece of evidence he could. He had all the tools, and he went to work on me.” Not only did Sherman triumph in the case—Ligon won release—he also triumphed in a new medium. The just-launched Court TV taped and broadcast the trial. Sherman found rebirth as a self-described “TV lawyer.”

  Before long, Sherman was juggling appearances on Today, MSNBC’s America after Hours, CNBC’s Rivera Live, and Court TV. He landed a contract with CBS This Morning as the show’s legal expert. “Mickey the Clown” played every TV gig for laughs: on Fox News’s The Big Story, he wore sunglasses to match guest Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman; on Catherine Crier’s Court TV show, he
appeared in the ghost face mask from Scream. “It’s intoxicating to do this stuff,” he gushed to the New York Times in 1997. Life at such dizzying pinnacles gave him his first brush with Dominick Dunne and the O.J. Simpson trial. Sherman was sprawled on a pool-side lounge chair at the Las Vegas Mirage Hotel next to model Paula Barbieri when she got the call that someone had murdered the ex-wife of her boyfriend, O.J. Simpson. When Dunne called to confirm, Sherman begged him to kill the story, fearing it might dampen demand for him as an impartial talking head during the upcoming trial. Dunne banked the favor.

  Sherman had parlayed his legal victory in the Ligon case into a second TV career. “We make fools of ourselves in return for limo rides and cheap doughnuts in greenrooms,” Sherman told the Greenwich Time. Michael and I were estranged at the time he chose his lawyer. Otherwise, I might have run Sherman’s won/lost record on LexisNexis and learned something that the Skakels didn’t know until it was too late: the Ligon case was one of a tiny handful of murder cases that Sherman ever tried to verdict. He was a rank amateur.

  Rucky had hired Sherman at the recommendation of Margolis, who recommended Sherman as a man comfortable before the cameras and in the courtroom. It was a recommendation Margolis would profoundly regret. The first letter Michael received in prison was an anguished missive from Margolis apologizing for the Sherman recommendation as “the worst decision of my life.”

  Sherman promoted himself as a public-relations expert who could undo the damage to the family’s reputation from nearly a decade of Dunne’s unanswered accusations. But Sherman’s appetite for the limelight turned out to be as voracious as Dunne’s—and he was an ineffective spokesman. Despite some $200,000 that Sherman billed the Skakels for time he spent with the media, both the public’s and the jury’s impression of Michael couldn’t have been more negative. Margolis thought that the lawyer he was recommending was the hard-charging litigator who’d pulled a rabbit out of his hat for Ligon. In fact, they were getting a different guy. Sherman had been dining and drinking on that victory for nearly a decade. He was done with the hard work of litigating. He had found the spotlight, loved the high life, and wanted to be a full-time “TV lawyer.” As the Skakels would gradually learn, Sherman was just a blowhard confidence man with a perma-tan and an electric smile.

  The Skakel case was Sherman’s ticket to stardom. “He kept saying it was going to be his last case,” Colucci says. “He was going to ride off into the sunset and do television.” He wasn’t keeping this a secret. “This could be my last big trial,” Sherman told a reporter at the time, mentioning his two Hollywood films in development. “I’m ready to retire. I think in a couple of years you’ll find me in the Bahamas, surrounded by 20 girls from Scores.” From the moment the Skakels hired him, he was spending more time carousing at New York’s flashy hot spot Elaine’s than bearing down on the law books. “Every time I telephoned him after sundown,” Michael recalls, “I heard a crowd in the background with the cocktail glasses clinking.” Forensic pathologist Michael Baden repeatedly bumped into Sherman in the Fox News greenroom during the run-up to the trial. Both men were frequent guests of Greta Van Susteren. “His devotion was to being on television and I think a lot less on the legal aspect,” Baden says. “I’d never hear anything about the case. All I’d hear about was how many times he’d gone out to dinner with Michael Bolton. He thought he had it wrapped up. He didn’t think he had to do anything.”

  Sherman scheduled his client consultations in Florida, booking a suite at the Breakers in Palm Beach, where oceanfront rooms go for $1,900 a night. He’d often bring his girlfriend, Tara Knight, and his Harley-Davidson, which he shipped down—on Rucky’s tab—and parked on display at the hotel entrance. Sherman scheduled meetings at fancy restaurants, golf courses, and high-profile venues where he could mix recreation with billable hours. “We haven’t found that he spent any significant money on investigating the case,” says Michael’s current attorney Hubie Santos, “but a lot of two-week stays in a suite at the Breakers in Palm Beach.” Sherman rented out Cabana 1 pool-side at the Breakers and trotted Michael Skakel out like a prize ham for the gawkers.

  On October 18, 2001, Sherman was in Vegas on Rucky’s dime, ostensibly to interview Élan alum Annie Goodman. He took the time to address a forum for young lawyers. Michael suspects Sherman scheduled the Goodman meeting to coincide with the Continuing Legal Education (CLE) Conference, which famously doubles as a tax-deductible bacchanalia.

  Less than six months from trial, Sherman was ready to party. “The good news here is that you can put your pens away,” he began. “This is absolutely the entertainment section of this seminar, hopefully. I’ll also bring the narcissist TV lawyer definition to a new high.”

  Sherman was waiting for a critical court ruling on Michael’s petition to be tried as a juvenile. A positive outcome would have meant that, regardless of the verdict, Michael wouldn’t have gone to jail. “I’ll probably lose,” he volunteered from the podium, to shocked guffaws from the junior lawyers in Vegas. (He was right.) Ethical rules strictly forbid reckless public pre-trial banter that might prejudice a pending decision. But Sherman was too giddy to stop.

  “I’m only going to talk about this one case and having fun with it,” he proclaimed. “I mean, too many people just look upon our jobs as absolute drudges in the trench. And for better or worse, I’ve never been someone like that. I certainly have fun with it. I probably have too much fun, which would probably be the primary criticism you have.” Instead of an audio-visual PowerPoint presentation, Sherman showed a reel of his television and newspapers clips and photos of himself lingering near the red carpet in his Dolce & Gabbana tuxedo. He flashed a photo on the screen of himself clowning it up with actors Vince Curatola and Dominic Chianese from January 19, 2000, just hours after Michael’s arrest. “This is really hysterical,” he said, pointing to the picture. “That night, most of you would be in a law library researching. Instead, I went to New York with friends and went out to dinner to have fun. And the guys I was with are two of the guys in The Sopranos, Uncle Junior and John, who is head of the New York mob. That’s the way I research my cases.”

  It’s a pity none of the Skakels heard this speech before the trial began. It was a prescient showcase of the depraved indifference and recklessness that would get my cousin convicted of murder in a case that “couldn’t be lost.” Sherman scored another laugh from the barristers by making light of his professional ineptitude. “Finally we got a reasonable cause hearing,” he said. “Not a probable cause hearing but a reasonable cause hearing. I have no idea what that means. When I do these news conferences outside the courthouse, people would say, ‘Well, juvenile court, what happens here?’ And I go, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never handled a juvenile court case.’ Which didn’t give my client a lot of confidence. My better line is, when I’m asked a question I don’t know the answer to is, ‘I don’t know. You should check with a legal expert on that.’” He showed a clip from the Law & Order episode based on the Moxley case. (“This is the fun stuff … Michael becomes Michael Sarno. Martha Moxley becomes Mary Mosley. I become Barry Nathanson.”)

  He began a section of the talk called “What the Hell Was I Thinking” by returning to the topic of his “narcissism.” If it’s any sort of virtue, Sherman was at least honest in acknowledging that the Moxley murder trial, for him, was always about something much larger than Michael Skakel or justice; it was about Mickey Sherman. “You have to understand the case isn’t about you,” he cautioned. “It’s about your client and the defense.” But the publicity attending the Moxley trial had propelled him, he said, “into a fugue state and I totally forgot about that.”

  By the time Sherman hit Vegas, Margolis and the Skakels were already chastising him, in Julie’s words, “[t]o shut his fucking mouth and stop putting himself in the news.” But, he told the lawyers, glitzy fashion editor Tina Brown (a career Kennedy maligner) had made his vow of silence to the Skakels impossible to keep. “I kept getting a call from Tina Br
own, the publisher of Talk magazine,” he said. Tina, continued Sherman, “wanted to do a piece on me handling this case. And I said, ‘That’s kind of a gossipy publication. It’s a murder trial. I don’t want to piss anybody off. …’ So she started inviting me to all the A-list parties in New York … [and] she says, ‘I’ll do the interview anywhere you want.’ I go, ‘Anywhere?’ She says, ‘Yeah.’ Okay. The Academy Awards and all the cool parties and this is what happens. This is horrible. Horrible!”

  But most galling, Sherman shared a few capsulized reviews on the literature of the case, written, he admitted, by friends he knew from his life as a cable TV gas bag or, as he described it in Vegas, “one of those schmucks every night on one of the shows talking about whatever bullshit case is going on, whether it’s O.J. or Menendez or whatever.” He asked of the crowd, “Has anyone ever read any of Dominick Dunne’s books? He hates defense lawyers. He thinks that everyone’s guilty. He’s had some tough baggage himself. But he’s a wonderful guy, true judge of character.” He described the book that caused Michael to be arrested for a murder he didn’t commit as “Mark Fuhrman’s brilliant book, Murder in Greenwich.” Fuhrman, too, was a friend. “He comes to our court, these hearings, and African American people go up to him and ask for his autograph,” Sherman said. “Go figure that out. Actually, he and I have become good friends ’cause we do all these TV shows together and we scream at each other and then we go out to dinner. … So I guess in some sense I’m hypocritical. But it’s just amazing to me that the public has accepted him and, as Mrs. Moxley says, he’s a hero” [emphasis mine].