Attorney Willie Gary successfully battles corporate giants

Willie E. Gary weaved his way through the crowded courtroom, offering hugs and handshakes to anyone in arm’s reach and pumping his fist in the air.Gary and his legal staff had just won a $50 million breach-of-contract verdict for the family of baseball great Roger Maris against Anheuser-Busch. The world’s largest brewer had become yet another corporate giant felled by Gary’s trial skills.

Willie Gary, center, the lead plantiff attorney, leads his lawyers and the Maris family in a prayer outside of the Alachua County Courthouse in Gainesville, Fla., after a verdict of $50 million was awarded to Maris Distributing Co. in a civil suit against Anheuser-Busch. Rudy Maris, third from the right, brother of baseball legend Roger Maris, joins the prayer circle.

During his quarter century of practicing law, Gary has earned the nickname “Giant Killer.” The corporate giants he’s challenged in courthouses nationwide make an impressive list: Walt Disney. Coca Cola. Microsoft. Bridgestone/Firestone.“This verdict is saying to the big corporations, no matter how powerful you are, how much money you have, or what your resources are, you’ve got to do the right thing,” Gary said following the Anheuser-Busch decision earlier this month.Yet years of legal victories have made Gary, self-proclaimed champion of the little guy, as rich as many of the corporate executives whom he often belittles on the witness stand for their trappings of wealth.Gary won’t say how much he’s worth, but Forbes magazine puts it at $12.1 million. He lives in a 50-room mansion in Stuart, owns Rolls Royces and limousines, and is whisked around the country in a Gulfstream jet named Wings of Justice.With a folksy approach, Gary, 54, often delights in emphasizing the class difference between the jurors to whom he is making his arguments and the executives he grills on the witness stand. He has mocked witnesses for having Harvard educations, yachts and corporate jets.“I know what tough times are about,” Gary told jurors during last year’s Disney trial in Orlando in which two businessmen won a $240 million judgment against the company for stealing their idea for a sports complex.But the tough times are a distant memory for Gary, who worked in his youth as a migrant worker in the South. He has shirt sleeves that are embroidered “Gary,” wears immaculately tailored suits, was recently featured on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” had a celebrity golf tournament named for him and has hosted President Clinton in his home.He also wears a diamond-encrusted Rolex watch, though never in court.“I don’t want the jury to think that my client doesn’t need the money,” he said.

When he talks before juries, he sometimes resembles a preacher on the pulpit. He waves his arms and his voice swells. Gary tends to be more emotional than analytical during his arguments, and he often picks cases pitting an everyday David against a corporate Goliath.“I think he connects on an intuitive level. He connects with ideas of right and wrong, not just legal arguments,” said Orlando attorney John Stemberger, who worked with Gary on the Disney case.But some jurors said they find Gary’s emotional approach offputting.“Mr. Gary seemed to be tugging at your heartstrings more, trying to get your emotions involved,” said Alva George Blake, a juror in the Anheuser-Busch trial. “To me, it was distracting. It’s almost as though he were trying to disguise the facts with emotions.”Gary’s populist rhetoric also has upset opposing attorneys.In the Disney case, it was part of the basis for the company’s appeal. Disney attorneys said Gary’s “us-against-them” arguments were inflammatory and tainted the jurors.His firm employs 130 people and handles about 7,000 cases a year, most of which are settled. Gary is currently handling racial discrimination lawsuits against Coca Cola, Exxon Mobil and Microsoft. In June, he sued Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. for $1 billion on behalf of the adult children of a Florida couple killed in a rollover accident.Gary isn’t always on the side of the little guy. He successfully defended Big Sugar against charges it underpaid migrant workers.Gary said he grew up “dirt poor, with 13 of us living in a house the size of a two-car garage.”He was born the sixth of 11 children to migrant farmworking parents, who traveled through the South according to the picking season. In his youth, he often picked crops beside another young migrant, Gloria Royal, who became his wife and with whom he has four sons.Football was his ticket to an education. He was offered a chance to play linebacker for Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach but was cut from the team. On the advice of his high school coach, he took a bus to Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. where the football coach told him to go back to Indiantown because he had no room for him. With persistence, he eventually made the team and got to stay in school.He has since given $10 million to Shaw University.Gary graduated law school from North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C. and later set up a storefront law practice. His practice grew steadily and so do did his fortunes.A Mississippi case in the mid-90s proved to be the turning point.Gary won a $500 million breach of contract judgment against the Canadian funeral company, the Loewen Group, for his client, a Mississippi funeral home owner. He later settled the case for about $175 million.“I was just a country lawyer,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to win.”