FROM Northern Virginia | June/July-2006

Alexandria

With his specialties ranging from serious traffic misdemeanors to tax evasion, Fred Sinclair gets a lot of calls from people who went looking for trouble—and found a great lawyer.

But what if trouble comes looking for you? Suddenly it’s not a criminal defender you need. It’s something slightly different. Say you’ve been robbed but you’re accused of a crime and facing trial. Or you checked into a hotel room but now you owe $100,000 downstairs in the casino.

Or maybe you’ve never been issued a passport or owned a business, but you’re wanted in Georgia (the one next to Armenia) because that hotel on the Caspian Sea that you bought with your partner in Turkmenistan just went bust. You owe laris and manats. That’s short for big bucks.

It’s civil defense meets white collar crime with a twist. “I represent the legal source income people.” he says.

Sinclair teamed up with high-powered criminal defender Jonathan Shapiro on a cutting-edge identity fraud case that’s scheduled for trial in June. Sinclair and Shapiro will argue that the accused were victims of perpetrators caught because they were buying things with stolen credit cards in Arlington county. “I’m still learning all this stuff,” but here’s what Sinclair can tell you right now about the sophisticated scams that have found their way to Northern Virginia.

“They go into gym locker rooms. They take out your card, scan your number, your information, and put it back in your purse. You don’t even know that it’s been stolen. Or they pull a card that doesn’t look like it’s used very often.” It can be months before you even realize it’s gone.

“With the appropriate equipment they can remag cards and change the numbers stored on the magnetic strip. That’s why cashiers are checking the name against the bar code. They don’t match up.” In New Jersey and Nevada, Sinclair’s working on cases where stolen credit cards are paired with stolen numbers to get cash advances at casinos. Stolen numbers can be bought on Internet sites. “In Eastern Europe thousands and thousands of credit card numbers are for sale right now.”

“An Arlington detective told me that your personal and credit information is often stored on the strip on the back of that credit-card style hotel room key.” Sinclair’s advice: “Turn it back in or just cut it up.”

Sinclair says he couldn’t defend the clueless if he didn’t understand the criminal mind. Same goes for defending the criminally bewildered (who are among Sinclair’s clients in tax cases where he’s well-known for settling disputes with the IRS). Sinclair is good at determining if clients were trying to avoid paying taxes, versus trying to evadepaying.

Sinclair got to know his share of shady characters a couple years out of law school at Georgetown.

“I was working with a small firm, but that was no fun. So I got a job as a state prosecutor in Arlington, and that was where I got motivated.”

He liked “thinking on your feet, working with detectives. Obviously gaining a different perspective on society.”

After two years he served as an Assistant U.S. District Attorney where, “I did a lot of bank robberies. Narcotics first got me interested in tax fraud. The IRS was one of the best agencies to work with because of how thorough the CID agents were.” Sinclair went back to school for a masters in tax. “But I never put it to use in private practice.”

Instead he stuck with criminal defense. Many of his clients are accused of skim operations, false deductions, off-shore tax frauds, tax schemes.

“I used to prosecute criminal tax cases. The IRS’s theory is, reduce the case to the utmost simplicity so that the frauds are evident. The government wants to tell the jury: ‘If you believe this happened, there was no legitimate purpose for it,’ so convict the defendant.”

Fair enough, but Sinclair asks: “is there really an attempt to evade taxes? If that’s not crystal clear, a criminal defender gets his or her experts on and confuses the jury. Complexities in the tax law are heaven for somebody like me,” he says affably.

In some cases, he’s happy to say, Sinclair defends people who don’t deliberately lie. They earn money and fail to report it. Or tax preparers come up with bogus deductions. What’s his advice when the IRS comes knocking? First of all, put on a bathrobe. “IRS Special Agents tend to turn up at six a.m. and confront you with documents. They’re not there for a social visit. Say nothing. Call a lawyer.”

Some of Sinclair’s notorious clients have been accused of heinous crimes, like Iyman Faris, the Ohio truckdriver who pled guilty in 2003 to plotting with al Qaeda to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge and launch a simultaneous attack in Washington. A twist in the case came recently following reports that Faris was spied upon illegally by the NSA.

Faris has employed tactics similar to Zacarias Moussaoui, filing motions that denigrate Sinclair just as Moussaoui has denigrated his lawyer Ed MacMahon (see profile on page 83).

“People always ask me how I can defend people accused of crimes like terrorism, espionage and possession of child pornography. I’m not a moral arbiter. My job is to provide a competent and zealous defense.”

“We’re the buffer between the government and the individual. Our job is to evaluate the weight of the evidence and stand behind our client if the government can’t prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The stakes are higher now than ever, Sinclair says. Legislatures and Congress are enacting statues that impose mandatory minimum sentences with no parole.

“In state courts, you’re subject to jury verdicts.” The down side of going to trial in federal court can be Draconian because of federal sentencing guidelines where, “if convicted, 85% of the time is to be served. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled them (FSGs) to be unconstitutional. Congress is taking away sentencing from the court and giving it to the executive. In many cases putting it in the hands of a young prosecutor. These are powers I never had when I was a U.S. attorney. It’s a lot of power.”

With those kinds of stakes, Sinclair’s work is intense.

“Lou Koutoulakos once told me, ‘any time you try a case in the courtroom, you leave a little piece of yourself in the courtroom.’ How many cases are overturned on appeal? Very, very few. Ten percent or less.”

Sinclair foresees a constitutional law battle over FSGs. “The balance of power could be upset.” He predicts debates will center around due process or cruel and unusual punishment as well as the separation of powers issues.

Why take on the stress and rigors of criminal trials? Sinclair’s a married father of teenage sons.

He’s definitely not a big firm like Williams and Connolly, where “you can probably match the U.S. government tit for tat. In my small practice, you have limited resources to bring to bear against a giant.

You have to be innovative to counter that. You do it because it’s a challenge, and it’s getting more and more challenging now.” The oarsman tries to counter the stress of his practice with exercise. “Every case is different. It’s not repetitive routine or mundane. It invigorates you.”

The Advocate | January 31-2006
The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks
by Diana Souhami

Diana Souhami’s lesbian biographies just keep getting better. Another American couple of glamorous Left Bank artists enters the Pantheon in Wild Girls, a read so light, fast and fun that you forget it’s nonfiction with footnotes. And the best part is, you can check your Ph.D. at the door and just enjoy the ride: Wild Girls is the “Moulin Rouge” of belles lettres.

This time the award-winning British biographer trains her monocle on Natalie Barney’s famous 1920s Paris salon that showcased artistic innovators for 40 years. Never taking her focus off Natalie and her tempestuous 55-year relationship with Romaine Brooks, Souhami leads us deep into the gaslit world of our queer great aunts and our great-great gay grandmothers, late Victorian rebels who became the first Moderns and posed for portraits painted by Romaine. You could call them driven and profligate, you could call them celebrity success stories and forgotten talents, addicts anorexics and suicides, nymphomaniacs and eccentrics, power dykes and trophy wives—but you could never call them boring.

Later, in the mid 1950s when this generation of wild girls was beginning to die off, Truman Capote called Romaine’s abandoned studio “the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes” and said they formed an international daisy chain of lasting influence on modern culture.

Cincinnati-born Natalie was more than just a legendary seducer with an insatiable appetite for sex with beautiful women. Souhami portrays her as one of the first lifestyle mavens, a Martha Stewart prototype for living life as an art in itself. And although she was incurably attracted to addicts and nut cases, Natalie appears to have had the healing touch. Thank God for the one or two nurturers in Natalie’s life (besides Berthe her loyal cook). There’s the monumental Gertrude Stein who took Natalie on cozy late night dog walks (but wouldn’t sleep with her). And there’s the secure aristocrat Lily de Gramont (who would). Seen through Natalie’s eyes, Souhami gives us more to love about the Proustian Lily. She knew how to hold onto Natalie with a light rein, liked civilized travel and could not abide a domestic entanglement.

By contrast, the remote, severe and gloomy Romaine never really overcame a horrific childhood of abuse by her tormented, mentally-ill relatives. “My dead mother stands between me and life,” she said of her rich and crazy mother, Ella Waterman Goddard. For the rest of her life Romaine was haunted by disturbing memories of Ella, who believed she was paranormal, and of Romaine’s dangerously mentally-ill brother St. Mar—yes, his mother named him St. Mar—whose life ended in suicide. The sole inheritance of a family fortune in metals & mining was not enough to make Romaine feel safe in any one of her multiple houses and studios in France, Italy and on the island of Capri. As a child in Philadelphia, Romaine was once palmed off on the Goddard family’s impoverished Irish laundress Mrs. Hickey as punishment for bad behavior. Ella went abroad soon thereafter on impulse without leaving money or instructions to Mrs. Hickey for Romaine’s care. Months went by. Romaine became a street urchin. Adoption arrangements by a neighbor in Mrs. Hickey’s tenement had already been undertaken before a family member returned to claim Romaine.

She sketched to get a grip on reality. In adulthood she developed into a disciplined ascetic and a successful celebrity painter. Natalie, ever a glittery surface person herself, was attracted to Romaine’s reedy body and her murky depths. As the tragic-comic, bittersweet tale of the mutually unfaithful yet deeply committed love affair unfolds between these two headstrong heiresses—the “irredeemably blonde” social butterfly Natalie and Romaine, the loner and workaholic who refused to set up house with Natalie—Souhami’s eye for detail brings the story up-close and personal. The lovers’ struggle to remain together while nurturing separate identities and managing a complex web of relationships isn’t too far from the main plot line of “The L Word.”

There are small mistakes. Did Natalie and Romaine live together in Fascist Italy for six months during World War II, like it says in the preface, or was it six years? (It was six years.) Sometimes we’re tantalized by villains in the piece who pull strings from above but never come down to earth, like the shadowy power player and lesbian Symbolist poet Baroness van Zuylen, possibly one of the world’s richest (and most jealous) women at the time, being the granddaughter of James de Rothschild who died in 1868 worth more than Bill Gates at his zenith. Or we’re introduced to new “discoveries” like Natalie’s neighbor in Paris on the Rue Jacob, the long-forgotten American expat writer and bisexual society decorator Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux whose papers have only recently been cataloged at the Smithsonian—then we’re disappointed when Souhami (like Natalie) has to drop the side plot.

How on earth did Natalie manage her days with two wives (Lily and Romaine) and countless other women going in and out of her bed? Details, Diana, details! We long for A Day in the Life, but Souhami has to keep the story moving. And why does everybody have a retinue of servants paid for by unearned income from inherited wealth? Souhami only occasionally touches on harsh realities of the opportunity gap between her wealthy leading ladies and their entourage who must work to pay the bills.

But stick to the big picture. This story does keep moving, and it’s a miracle that Souhami can keep it all straight with at least a dozen main characters whose lives all intertwine. She sifts through unpublished manuscripts and more than 500 letters between the lovers for perfect character sketches of Natalie, Romaine and their cast of thousands. Even if you’ve come across this material before, Souhami makes it sound fresh. When the teenage Natalie seduces a woman twice her age aboard a steamship, Souhami sums up drily: “their love lasted from Trondheim to Paris.” Souhami can even make outtakes from secondary sources look like new scenes. Who can forget Oscar Wilde rescuing the six year old Natalie from bullies in a New York hotel lobby in 1882, then soothing her with a fairy tale, one of his unpublished works of genius?

Ultimately the mysterious author trains her monocle on herself. In cryptic sketches from her own life that are paired with each chapter like parallel universes, Souhami’s story runs alongside that of her subjects in search of common ancestry. As for the “meaning” to be found in Natalie’s and Romaine’s gilded love story nearly a century later, Souhami the biographer compares her own unconventional Modern (or Postmodern) Life with those of her subjects and finds more similarities than differences. Leaving aside her own dominating mother and the call girls and petty thieves that have warmed her bed, there is an ex-girlfriend, for instance, a physician that Souhami’s present (unnamed) lover calls St. Gwen. Dr. Gwen’s overscheduled life with one wife, a rescue cat and two daddies for their son sounds very à l’Amazone; so does Souhami’s bittersweet memory of their former, less complicated, life together.

The more things change the more they stay the same, as the French saying goes. Wild girls just want to have fun. Find somebody else to pay the bills whenever possible. And get a little brilliant work done on the side.

Who’s Who in Diana Souhami’s Lesbian Lovers Pantheon

Gertrude and Alice. The lesbian marriage of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Featuring their poodles called Basket and The Lost Generation of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Setting: Paris France, 1910.

Wayward Radcliffe grad and medical school dropout (Stein) runs off to Paris, spends inheritance on ugly paintings by unknown artists (like Picasso) while writing unpublishable nonsense and failing to turn Hemingway gay, then makes good when she finds true love with a survivor of the San Francisco earthquake (Toklas), who becomes her mustached Girl Friday, soon graduating to wife of 39 years.

Gluck. The story of a lesbian control freak and the women and flowers she tames on canvas.

Setting: London, 1920s.

Boyish artist Hannah Gluckstein, heiress to a catering fortune, refuses to toe the line and conform to the requirements of her controlling Jewish family. Becomes a successful society portraitist and seduces her subjects with the awesome erotic power of her art deco landscapes and flower paintings. Good businesswoman and serial monogamist: moves on when lovers cannot conform to her requirements.

Greta and Cecil. One of the great fag hag classics of all time, this is the narcissistic passion of Greta Garbo and the gay man who won’t take no for an answer. (With an honorary lesbian role for Cecil Beaton.)

Setting: New York, 1940s and 50s.

A social climbing spendthrift, British society photographer Cecil Beaton is too lazy to go into the family firm so he builds his own cottage business around the glamorous celebrity who obsesses him. But behind closed doors and drawn curtains, Garbo disappoints. Having bootstrapped her way to Hollywood stardom through a working class childhood in Sweden, only to lose everything when her Beverly Hills bank fails during the Depression, Greta becomes a prisoner of her own fears and isolation from lesbian love affairs (with Mercedes de Acosta and Cécile de Rothschild) that both attract and repel her—a tragic figure interested only in herself. Greta and Cecil seem made for each other until Cecil blows it by breaking his vow of silence and publishing his dreary diaries. Banished forever for a mere $50,000! Was it worth it?

Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. The tragic double biography of the king’s beautiful mistress (Alice Keppel), Edwardian Britain’s queen of the double standard, and the beautiful lesbian daughter whose true love she thwarts.

Setting: London 1918.

Childhood sweethearts-turned-celebrity-debutantes Violet Keppel and Vita Sackville-West fall in love and rebel just like Mrs. Keppel did, only lesbian affairs are not to be tolerated in polite English society. Vita caves in to social pressure, leaves Violet to return to her family and becomes a famous novelist, gardener and seducer. Violet marries out of spite and fritters away her better talent as a writer but never renounces her lifelong passion for Vita. Their love letters are legendary but few of Vita’s survive.

The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. The psychodrama behind the great lesbian courtroom drama surrounding censorship of The Well of Loneliness.

Setting: London and Paris, 1920s.

On the death of her indulgent father, an English country squire, Radclyffe Hall inherits a fortune and leaves foxhunting behind to start calling herself Johnnie and make her way as a writer in London wearing men’s clothing. Soon news of a clandestine love affair with a naval officer’s wife (Una Troubridge) kills Mabel Batten, the older woman Johnnie lives with in sin. In fact Mabel was Una’s aunt! Oops. Guilt ridden but sex-starved, Una divorces her husband causing terrible scandal, taking the dachshunds with her to Johnnie’s and putting her daughter Cubby in boarding school. Una and Johnnie make a domestic partnership pact (1) never to part and (2) forever to search for Mabel’s forgiveness through paranormal channels. Johnnie’s depressing second novel champions gay rights and same-sex marriage. Except for the badly written sex scenes, it is a bit ahead of its time. Johnnie defends herself famously in court when the book is censored. She and Una soldier on for another 25 years.

[The published piece was edited for space. The sidebar never ran in the magazine.]

The Advocate | June 7-2005
Jeanette Winterson speaks out on sex, America’s religious fanaticism, and her new novel, Lighthousekeeping

Raised in poverty, religious fanaticism and intolerance, Jeanette Winterson left home at 16 and burst on the literary scene 20 years ago with her award-winning autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit—the tale of a lesbian girl who defies her crazily religious mother. With offbeat androgynous heroes, reworked fairy tales and stories within stories, follow-up novels like The Passion established Winterson as a European-style fabulist with an international fan base.

In the 1990s she caused a major literary controversy with two steamy novels that barely disguised her affair with her married female agent. In 2000 a 12-year relationship with critic and broadcaster Peggy Reynolds ended in a “dark period” of bad press and poor reviews of her novel The.PowerBook. Winterson rebounded in 2003 with an ambitious web site and a popular children’s book, The King of Capri. She recently published a second children’s book, Tanglewreck.

Now 45 and single, Winterson splits her time between the 18th-century house she restored in London’s East End and her 18-acre farm in Oxfordshire, where she grows her own food—part of her passion for working to eradicate hunger in the world.

Winterson returns to her storytelling roots in religious fanaticism and fundamentalism with her eighth novel.Lighthousekeeping (Harcourt, $23) is the story of Silver, a Scottish orphan who becomes a blind man’s apprentice tending a lighthouse built by the Stevenson family. Growing up there with the ancient blind man’s gothic tales, Silver discovers the secrets of the former lighthouse keeper, the religious fanatic Babel Dark, who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

You were a Pentecostal preacher at 7. Is America in a religious revival?
Yes. It’s marked by two things: moral fervor on the one hand and indiscretion on the other. People are no longer worried about what they say. Their moral fervor gives them license to say whatever they like. And that’s when you get the return of the intolerance that we thought we were pushing back.

How did this happen?
In the Clinton era the Right were backing off a little bit; the liberal Left did have the upper hand. All that stuff with Kenneth Star and Monica Lewinsky was trying to embarrass the Left into a position where it no longer felt it could talk about moral issues. But an indiscretion of the president does not mean that the liberal Left is morally bankrupt. When I see this retreating and allowing the right-wing agenda to move forward, it’s frightening. Mrs. Winterson [JW’s adoptive mother] was a religious fanatic. I know what they are. They believe in their own mission, and they’re not going to pull back to save anybody.

How do we recognize fanatics?
Intolerance. They’re always so rigid that they can’t allow anything else to come in and contaminate their thinking. They call on God as though God were the same as they are. We’ve seen this over centuries. Everybody who wants their own way eventually says it’s God’s will.

Christianity has been so co-opted.
I hate it when George Bush and his rich cronies take the high moral ground and say this is God’s way, this is Christianity. Jesus wasn’t giving tax breaks to the rich. He was looking after single mothers and prostitutes.

Exactly.
You’ve got two kinds of religious fanatics now—the right-wing Christians here and the right-wing fundamentalists [of Islam]. And between them they’re going to blow us all up. Each of them is as intolerant, as fervent, and as wrong as the other.

And as powerful.
And you’ve not got the Left apologizing for being liberal. We’re always doubting, hesitating, asking ourselves questions. That is good, bit sometimes it saps our central belief in who we are and what we’re trying to do. Every good thing that’s ever happened in your country and mine has been the work of the liberal Left. Every reform. Every civil liberty. Every fight for human rights.

Has anyone given you chapter and verse from the Bible about your sexuality?
Not anybody close to me. Once I left the church I didn’t meet any more religious fanatics. Met a few barmy creationists who give lectures.

Do gay sex and the Bible go together?
No, I don’t think the Old Testament is credible, not for modern society. We have to move past that. We can’t worry about not eating shellfish or animals that chew the cud.

How can gays take back the Bible?
They can’t take back the Old Testament. There’s too much in there which is oppressive and frightening. What we can do is claim spirituality. God is religion-proof. If God exists, if there is a forming intelligence out there, it’s not going to be one that wants to kill gay people and persecute unmarried mothers and take away everybody’s welfare benefit.

You left home at 16. What would you say to a kid who has to leave home today, whether by choice or because their parents kicked them out because they’re gay?
I’d say don’t do drugs or drink, don’t end up in the streets, don’t sell your body. It’s going to be incredibly hard. Bit you can do it. And it’s worth doing it, instead of staying in a place which will warp your imagination and sap your energy and twist your desire.

What is the best ecstasy: food, art, or sex?
It very much depends on the person you are. I want a life of off-the-chart experience. I want real food and real art, and of course I want sex, love, to be significant. By that I mean that it should be intense and you should really feel something. I wouldn’t quarrel with anybody who said, I find my ultimate experience through sex—or growing lettuce.

[Outtakes from the published interview are archived at www.advocate.com. Audio from Suzanne Stroh’s conversation with Jeanette Winterson is used by permission. The British Library launched its new web archive with Jeanette Winterson’s web site, designed by the London-based design studio pedalo (www.pedalo.co.uk). Visit the author’s site and its online community at www.jeanettewinterson.com. Learn more about the pilot project atwww.webarchive.org.uk.]