Opel lawyer turns court into theater

People who have met criminal-defense attorney Pete Mazzone tend to remember him — just like they remember their first kiss. Or their last hangover.

"Oh, you bet," said Tom Giebel, a juror in a murder trial that Mazzone worked on two years ago. "You bet I remember.

"Loudmouthed city slicker from New York is what I first thought," he added. "A little short guy from New York."

Actually, it's Jersey City, N.J. As for the rest, Mazzone himself probably wouldn't argue — though if he did, it would be loudly, with his thick Jersey accent, gesturing wildly with his arms.

Still, none of that is what struck Giebel most about Mazzone. "He was very, very good," he recalled. "Very convincing, very aggressive. As the trial went on, he seemed to get better and better."

At the end of it, 11 of 12 jurors were persuaded by Mazzone and his co-counsel, Caroline Mann — more than enough to get a mistrial, which for defense lawyers is often the next best thing to a not-guilty verdict. Their client ended up pleading guilty to manslaughter to avoid another trial, which meant a much lighter sentence than a murder conviction would carry.

Mazzone is now preparing for his seventh murder trial, the one he calls the biggest challenge of his career. He is defending Barbara Opel, a 39-year-old from Everett who could one day become the first woman to be executed in Washington state.

"In that whole scenario, she's been singled out," Mazzone says, sitting outside a Starbucks across the street from his downtown Everett office. He's talking about the Opel case, waving a Marlboro Light, his voice rising to an indignant half-shout that is frequently his speaking mode. "The light has been shone on her only because of circumstances that were totally out of her control."

Mazzone, 42, won't elaborate on what he means, saying he'll save it for the February trial.

The circumstances of the case thus far are these: Jerry Heimann, 64, was beaten and stabbed in his Everett home in April 2001. Five teenagers — at the time ages 13 to 17 — have either pleaded guilty or been found guilty of his murder, including Opel's 15-year-old daughter, Heather.

Prosecutors say Opel — who was a live-in caregiver for Heimann's elderly mother — bribed the teens to kill Heimann because she didn't like him and wanted his money, thinking he had about $40,000.

She was charged with aggravated first-degree murder, which carries two possible penalties: life without possibility of parole or execution. Prosecutors announced this summer that they would seek the death penalty if she were convicted.

After Mazzone and his law partner, Brian Phillips, were appointed to be Opel's attorneys, they decided Phillips would handle trying to persuade the jury in her trial to give her a life sentence if she's convicted.

Mazzone's job will be trying to convince jurors that Opel is not guilty.

People are always asking criminal-defense lawyers how they can do it — how they can put on the black hats every day and crusade on behalf of defendants accused of being killers, rapists, child molesters and thieves.

Empathy with clients

Mazzone is quite comfortable in the hat. Growing up poor in a tough Jersey City neighborhood made him realize, he said, that some people are born less lucky than others.

"Some aren't lucky enough to get out of there," said Mazzone, who moved to the U.S. from his native Italy at age 9. "So if you do, you understand why people commit most crimes."

He got hauled to jail a couple of times as a kid — once for stripping a stolen car with some friends, another time for trying to steal cases of coffee off a boxcar. A neighborhood cop beat him up once after he got caught stealing from a grocery.

"The people around here that grew up in Medina ... they don't know what it's like," he said. "I know what it's like because I've lived it."

He can send himself into fits of indignation just talking about the raw deals he thinks clients have gotten, or the cops and ex-wives and jailhouse snitches who he thinks have wronged them.

In the courtroom, he goes after those people with gusto, asking even the most banal questions as if they are about to reveal something particularly damning and reacting to even the most mundane answers in similar fashion.

In a recent trial, in juvenile court, he got so worked up grilling the prosecutor's star witness, a 17-year-old girl, that he didn't seem to realize how hard he was bringing his hand down on the shoulder of his 14-year-old client, causing the boy to jerk each time.

"He's good at waving his arms, raising the volume of his voice, acting indignant and making the jury believe that whatever was just said was the most ridiculous thing he's ever heard," said Mark Roe, head of the violent-crimes unit for the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney's Office.

Some jurors buy it; some don't. "My impression was that he represented the worst of what lawyers could be," said one juror in a murder trial Mazzone did last year. "It was like he thought he could make a devil into a saint."

Frenetically theatrical

Mazzone wears Joseph Abboud suits tailor-fitted to his 5-foot-4 frame. He is swarthy, quick to smile and has a jaunty gait a little reminiscent of George Jefferson from the 1980s sitcom. He is missing two fingers and half his palm on his right hand from when he picked up a tear-gas bomb that exploded when he was 13.

He moves around a courtroom like a matador and a bull rolled into one — flourishing his arms and posing theatrically one moment, rushing around frenetically and nearly bumping into courtroom furniture the next.

Once, trying to demonstrate how someone could have tried to go through a window, Mazzone started jumping on tables. "Most lawyers wouldn't quite do that," Marsha Maltseva, a Superior Court law clerk. "It's not to say watching trials is boring — I don't think it ever is — but it's different with Pete Mazzone."

His path to criminal defense was an unconventional one. Before getting his law degree from Seattle University seven years ago, at age 35, he was an assistant professor of geology at Indiana's DePauw University.

He enrolled in law school intending to study environmental law, figuring it would be a useful complement to his science background. But then he joined moot court and fell in love with doing trials.

After his second year in school, he sought out Karen Halverson — then the misdemeanor supervisor for the Snohomish County Public Defender Association — at a job fair. Her office hired him for a summer internship and later a permanent position.

"Hired him? He wouldn't let me talk to anyone else," says Halverson, now a private defense lawyer and good friend of Mazzone's. "He just leaned over the table and talked to me for an hour and a half."

In his seven years in Snohomish County — five as a public defender, two with Phillips — he's gained a reputation as a talented courtroom lawyer — smart, aggressive, quick-thinking and intuitive, with a good record in trial.

"Pete gets it," said Everett defense lawyer Stephen Garvey, who represented the youngest of Opel's co-defendants. "He just understands what is the core of the case and what he needs to do, whether legally or emotionally or factually."

When a jury is reacting to something, he senses it and responds, Roe said. "Like a shark when there's blood in the water."

He is also seen by some as arrogant, abrasive and difficult.

"He can make personal attacks against witnesses and prosecutors and police," Roe said. "I think he's better than to have to do that."

He can get carried away during trials and push things too far. Twice, judges have held him in contempt for acting inappropriately — something local judges almost never do.

"When you go to law school, you're always being told that what you see on TV is not what you see in the courtroom," said law clerk Maltseva. "Pete is what you see on TV."

The upcoming trial

In the Opel trial, he insists the greatest difficulty won't come from the fact that all of her co-defendants — the teens she allegedly bribed to murder — have all been found guilty or pleaded guilty. Or even the taped confession she allegedly made.

"It's overcoming the mindset (of jurors) because of what they've been fed through the media — you people!" he shouts.

"If there had been no media coverage of this case, I would bet a lot of money that most people would find Barbara Opel not guilty of aggravated murder."

Garvey, the lawyer for the youngest co-defendant, disagrees. "Get a change of venue to Mars and she'll still be convicted." But the perception of Opel as "the embodiment of evil," he says, does present a huge challenge.

One of the teens once testified that after the slaying, Opel also briefly considered killing Heimann's mother, an Alzheimer's patient who uses a wheelchair, but decided instead to abandon her at the house.

Heimann's body was left at the Tulalip Reservation; his mother was found days after the killing eating bits of newspaper, her wheelchair splattered with her son's blood.

And before Opel left the house, prosecutors said, she made her younger two children, then 11 and 7, help clean up the blood. They were later put into foster care.

"That's exactly the kind of thing the jury will hate her for, (and it's) immaterial to whether or not she's guilty of first-degree murder," Garvey said. "She can kill her boyfriend, she can rob a bank, she can deliver drugs but she can't hurt kids. They'll never understand or forgive her for that."

Giving it his all

His previous trial, the juvenile-court case, hinged on the question of whether Mazzone's 14-year-old client had scratched a couple of cars with an ice scraper in the parking lot. The 17-year-old girl says she saw him do it, but she may as well be trying to frame the boy with murder the way Mazzone is going at her.

"C'mon, Stephanie!" Mazzone shouts. He seems to be implying that the real culprit may be one of her friends.

"Your friends aren't liked by a lot of people in that complex, are they?" He is pacing around the courtroom, speaking quickly, pointing and gesturing with his arms. "People know you and the people you hang out with and the kinds of things you do!"

The prosecutor, who questioned Stephanie in a kindly pediatrician tone of voice, rolls his eyes.

At the end of the day, the judge found Mazzone's client guilty.

"But if I go down," Mazzone had said of the case hours earlier, "I'll go down swinging."

Janet Burkitt: 206-515-5689 or jburkitt@seattletimes.com.