Mouthpiece: A Life in -- and Sometimes Just Outside -- the Law

by Edward Hayes, Susan Lehman

Edward Hayes is that unusual the likable lawyer, one who could have stepped off the stages of Guys and Dolls or Chicago . Mouthpiece is his story—an irreverent, entertaining, and revealing look at the practice of law in modern times and a social and political anatomy of New York City. It recounts Hayes’s childhood in the tough Irish sections of Queens and his eventual escape to the University of Virginia and then to Columbia Law School. Not at all white-shoe-firm material, Hayes headed to the hair-raising, crime-ridden South Bronx of the midseventies—first as a homicide prosecutor and then as a defense attorney seeking to free the same sort of people he formerly had put in jail.

Tom Wolfe immortalized this setting in The Bonfire of the Vanities . Ed Hayes was his guide, and he served as the model for the scrappy defense lawyer Tommy Killian. Eventually, Hayes moved his practice to Manhattan, using his neighborhood white boy instincts and connections and the rough-and-tumble techniques learned in the Bronx on behalf of the rich and powerful and famous. From a high-stakes legal shootout over the Andy Warhol estate to working to secure financial justice for the families of the World Trade Center victims, Hayes has been behind the scenes of how New York City really operates.

For the tens of millions fascinated by New York’s unique blend of glitter and grime, of idealism and corruption, of avarice and ambition, Mouthpiece provides the ultimate close-up of high-stakes Gotham gamesmanship.

“In the pages before us, the Counselor tells a saga’s worth of tales of the city. As the saying goes, he’s got a million of them.” — Tom Wolfe, from his Introduction

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Ken Oder · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a few months when I was a UVA undergraduate, I worked with Ed Hayes on issues affecting the fraternities there. He was a good leader, charismatic and careful to spread around the credit for accomplishments. He had a distinctive Queens dialect, but he was well-dressed and seemed polished socially. I assumed he came out of an elite northern prep school, like so many of the other UVA students from New York and Pennsylvania. I couldn't have been more wrong.
This memoir lays out the story of where he came from before I met him and what he became afterwards. He was no prep school boy. He was an abused kid who became a street fighter to survive. He grew up in Jackson Heights in NYC's Queens in the home of an alcoholic father who beat him regularly. It scarred him for life (he was never able to reconcile with his father) but it also taught him how to take a beating and get right back up, which became the credo of his life and career.
After UVA, he went to law school, became a homicide prosecutor in the toughest part of the Bronx, then a defense attorney, representing low-level criminals at first, then big-time toughs, and later on, journalists who became life-long friends. He always grabbed the next rung up the ladder, climbing steadily until he became the lawyer the high-profile defendants called when they were in big trouble because he lived up to his promise: "I can get you outa anything."
Along the way, he became best friends with the author, Thomas Wolfe, and famed mob attorney, Bruce Cutler, and he represented Robert De Niro, widows of firemen and policemen from the Twin Towers 9/11 attack, the architect who built the reclamation project there, and the executor of Andy Warhol's estate.
Some of the negative reviews here decry Hayes' perceived arrogance and name-dropping. I don't see it that way. I liked Eddie Hayes when I knew him fifty years ago. He was no egotist. He was a straight-up, plain, blunt, street fighter guy. That's the same guy I see in this memoir. He's just telling what happened and how he felt about it as it went down. Over the course of his exciting life, a lot of people, some very powerful, knocked him down, and in the case of the Andy Warhol estate, they put him on the mat for the count. This is the story of how he kept getting back up no matter how hard he got hit.
It's a fascinating wild ride and a fun read.

[C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. My experience of autobiographies includes Witness (Whittaker Chambers), 大江东去 (司徒华), and the Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), where the author serves as a witness to their times. They tell their story, but only in an effort to get at a greater picture, to capture a little of the experience of their contemporaries in a turmoiled world. These works serve as battle grounds of ideologies.

Yeah, I really don't see the point of an autobiography which only tells one man's story. It's arrogant and deceptive. Even if it is mildly interesting at times. But the name dropping really annoys me.

[Melmoth Morgendorffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The intro by Eddie Hayes's friend Tom Wolfe (who based the defense attorney in Bonfire on Hayes) really sets the stage for this book -- a funny, interesting memoir by a real New York character.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lawyers, a necessary evil? This guy encapsulates and is all encompassing of the malaise afflicting our society. A true villan, wholly proud of it--I presume--from reading this book.

Need to define Narcissistic Personality Disorder? There will be no question after this wretching self portrait.

[Tim]

Good read on someone who made himself and toils among some interesting characters and places in NYC.