by Wayne Gross

In 1910, two orphans in Dublin, Ireland, married and later had six children, the youngest of whom, Eileen Campbell, would come to America. There was no money for the youngest child to consider college, but Eileen married Charles Hueston and started a new life in the land of opportunity. Because of her humble beginnings, Eileen decided that, no matter what, the eldest of her five boys,  John, would attend an Ivy League school. Eileen was delighted when John was accepted and enrolled at Dartmouth College. But when John later received an acceptance letter from Harvard Law School, Eileen thought that her mission in life had finally been completed. In her opinion, Harvard had the best law school in the country and obviously her son should accept such a privileged invitation. She felt so strongly that, during a call with John in which he began to explain why he was choosing to enroll at Yale instead of Harvard, she hung up the phone. Tough bunch those Huestons.

From an early age, John demonstrated that like his mother, he had an indomitable will and a particular focus on working for change in his community. As a high school student, John, nervous though determined, stood up before the Newport-Mesa school board to demand restoration of the Latin program at Corona del Mar High School. Foreshadowing his remarkable ability as a lawyer to move decision makers, John convinced the board to restore the program. At Dartmouth, John organized a conference about apartheid in South Africa. Students acting independently of Hueston erected, with permission from the college, a mockup complex of shanties on the college green to demonstrate opposition to apartheid. Students opposed to the apartheid protest wrecked the shanties. When college administrators ignored the vandalism, John and other student leaders organized an overnight sit-in at the college administration office to demand a meeting with the college president. The president agreed to meet with Hueston and his fellow demonstrators. Not surprisingly, Hueston prevailed upon the president to discipline the students who had wrecked the shanties and later helped convince Dartmouth to divest its holdings in South Africa.

In addition to demonstrating courage and a firm sense of justice as a young man and college student, Hueston, as a law student and young lawyer, demonstrated that he would use his considerable legal talents in the same manner. In law school, for example, Hueston’s academic record enabled him to work for any law firm in the country during the summer breaks. Sacrificing much-needed money for his family of three at the time, Hueston instead chose to extern at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, sensing that, by observing firsthand how federal prosecutors try cases, he would more quickly be able to make a greater impact as a young lawyer. After law school, Hueston, instead of immediately joining a large law firm, clerked in Montgomery, Alabama, for U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank M. Johnson, whose decisions in cases involving Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had helped advance the cause of civil rights. That experience, coupled with his earlier experience at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, solidified for John that his legal career would focus on high-impact trial work that made a difference.

After completing his clerkship and working as an associate for a large law firm, Hueston received his chance to become a trial lawyer with an offer from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The year was 1994 and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Orange County, at the time of John’s arrival, had fewer than ten prosecutors and, unlike their Los Angeles counterparts, were typically relegated to handling small, garden-variety cases. Large, complex cases venued in Orange County were often handled by the much larger LA Office, which would send its prosecutors to Orange County to prosecute such cases.

John, still a newly-minted prosecutor based in Orange County, decided that it was time for a change. After cutting his teeth on garden-variety cases like bank robberies, John decided to specialize in public corruption and corporate fraud matters. Over the following six years, John’s success in prosecuting a CFO of an international company, officers and private contractors in an international Army contracting kickback scheme, and public officials in cases spanning county and municipal governments in Orange and Los Angeles counties earned him a string of three awards presented to him by various U.S. Attorneys General, an unrivaled accomplishment in the Central District of California. And for the first time, Los Angeles-based investigators were coming to Orange County for the prosecution of some of their most important cases.

John’s trial work and initiative did not go unnoticed by management in Los Angeles. In 2000, he was chosen to serve as Chief of the Orange County Office. As an executive, John approached his job with the same vigor and fierce determination as he had his trial work. While continuing to handle trials, he doubled the number of prosecutions, quadrupled the number of complex white collar investigations, and oversaw a three-year trial run during which the Orange County office lost no cases. The increased number of cases proved too many for assignment in Orange County to the existing three overworked federal judges. The overflowing cases proved to be a key statistic that Hueston, as then president of the Federal Bar Association’s Orange County chapter, to assist others in the Orange County community build support for the eventual successful effort to increase the number of judges in Orange County from three to five.

By 2003, Hueston’s extraordinary transformation of the Orange County U.S. Attorney’s Office had been completed. He had also established himself as a formidable and decorated trial lawyer who could handle large, complex, high-profile trials. With these credentials, Hueston, not surprisingly, was wooed by several law firms that vigorously pursued him with lucrative partnership offers. Making John even more vulnerable to such offers was the fact that he had four children with his college sweetheart and wife, Mae. While John and Mae had learned to live within a tight budget (which included John purchasing suits at garage sales), government service would not allow them to send four children to college. Accordingly, the couple decided, by 2003, that John would soon leave government service for private practice. Fate, however, has a way of stepping in when you least expect it. The end of 2001 saw the implosion of Enron, the then largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, prompting DOJ to create the Enron Task Force in 2002. DOJ staffed the task force with the best and brightest from U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country. Based on his extraordinary achievements, John was nominated by Los Angeles and later selected by Washington to serve as a lead trial counsel in the most important case prosecuted by the task force: the case against Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling.

It would be interesting to have been a fly on the wall during the discussion between John and Mae when he broached the topic of not only turning down partnership offers but also performing extended government service in Houston, where the Task Force was based. Having known the couple for many years, my guess is that Mae’s initial reaction was probably similar to Eileen Hueston’s reaction to John’s decision to turn down Harvard. Whatever the initial discussion, Mae pledged to handle alone children as young as two and four years of age while John proceeded to do for the Enron Task Force what he had done for the Orange County U.S. Attorney’s Office.

When John arrived in Houston, most within DOJ assumed it had gathered sufficient evidence to indict Skilling on a difficult but triable case. The Lay case, however, which had been built prior to John’s arrival as a possible insider trading prosecution, was deemed at a virtual dead end, due primarily to the apparent difficulties in proving Lay’s motive for selling Enron stock in late 2001. What DOJ didn’t know was that it had just enhanced its Enron arsenal with a nuclear weapon. I and others who had directly worked with John knew that if sufficient evidence existed, John would overcome any obstacle to find a way not only to charge Lay, but also to win the case. The only difference, from our perspective, was that John was now doing what he did better than anyone else on the national stage in the largest fraud case in the history of the country.

To say that John’s opening statement, widely reported in the press and now used as a pedagogical device by criminal law professors in law schools, was a source of pride for Orange County federal law enforcement is a significant understatement. Those of us who had been around for several years remembered the scorn with which the Los Angeles law enforcement community had previously treated us. To have an Orange County prosecutor make such an impact on behalf of DOJ on the national stage reflected how far all of us had come. And of course John’s contributions in obtaining the convictions of Lay and Skilling did not stop with the opening statement. In fact, the highlight of the trial was John’s devastating cross-examination of the former CEO who had once dined with presidents. At the conclusion of the case, when guilty verdicts on all counts against both defendants were returned, the press struggled to make sense of how DOJ could have achieved such an absolute victory. A reporter from the LA Times contacted me and inquired of how John was different from other trial lawyers I had encountered. My response, which became the title of the story, was: “He doesn’t just win, he destroys.” To this day, that still seems to be the best way to sum up what John does in trial.

It was inevitable that John would one day leave government service for new challenges and that day came in 2006, when John joined Irell & Manella as a partner. And of course John, since joining Irell, has approached private practice in the same manner that he has lived his entire life. In less than four years, John has become a leader at the firm, presently serving as co-Chair of the Corporate Crisis and Government Investigations Group and as a member of the firm’s Executive Committee. John’s recent successes in his diverse practice include securing a $50 million judgment on behalf of his client T-Mobile and obtaining a permanent injunction and winning a trial for UCLA in civil actions against organizations and individuals threatening violence against professors.

But John has drawn effectively on his rich prosecution experience, working as an effective problem solver for companies and institutions in crisis; to wit, termination of criminal investigations of UCI and key doctors relating to its Liver Transplant Unit, a quick resolution without fines and penalties for a Fortune 100 company confronting a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act problem, successfully navigating Kaiser Permanente through regulatory probes arising from the Octomom case, and securing as a key member of the Irell team an SEC settlement for former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo that is viewed by the defense bar as a stunning victory.

At the same time, John has recouped millions of dollars in remediation settlements to date in his pro bono representation of the Navajo Nation in uranium mining contamination matters, a representation that has been recounted in part in former Los Angeles Times writer Judy Pasternak’s recent book, Yellow Dirt. He has been named as an AmLaw Top 50 young litigator, a California Attorney of the Year, and repeatedly cited as one of California’s Top 100 most influential lawyers.

In sum, as the Orange County Bar continues to grapple with one of the worst legal market recessions in generations, we can all be quite thankful that our incoming president is more than up to the challenge. Just ask the former Newport-Mesa school board members who long ago decided to restore a Latin program because of the fiery determination of a 16-year-old Corona del Mar High School student with tough Irish roots

Wayne Gross is a litigation shareholder at Greenberg Traurig LLP, where he focuses on trial practice, complex civil litigation, and white collar criminal defense.  He previously served as Chief of the Orange County U.S. Attorney’s Office and prosecuted cases of national and international significance, including the UCI Fertility case. His email is grossw@gtlaw.com.