TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL F. RINZEL

FOR DANE COUNTY BAR ASSOCIATION

Interviewer: Teresa Kobelt

Date of Interview: July 27, 2014

Location of Interview: Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

Transcribed by: Ann Albert

ATTORNEY KOBELT: This is Teresa Kobelt with the Dane County Bar Association History Memorials Committee. I'm sitting here with Dan Rinzel. It is June 27, 2014.

ATTORNEY RINZEL: We think.

ATTORNEY KOBELT: -- we believe. We are at the Grand Geneva Resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. We're both attending the State Bar Conference, and Dan has graciously agreed to speak with me today.  Dan, do I have your permission to record this interview?

ATTORNEY RINZEL: Yes, you do.

ATTORNEY KOBELT: And to publish this interview?

ATTORNEY RINZEL: Yes, you do.

BY MS. KOBELT:

Q           All right. So I guess I just want to start with a little bit of background, where you were born, your siblings, where you went to school.

A            Well, I was born in, actually, in Hartford, Wisconsin because that's where the Hartford Hospital was, although I grew up in Germantown, which is about 15 miles away. Washington County at that time was, ah, in 1942 was a pretty rural farming county. It was -although Germantown is only 15 miles from Milwaukee, it only had 622 people. And it's one of those towns where everybody knew everybody and everybody knew what everybody was doing, which had, you know, advantages and disadvantages.  My dad was a carpenter. My uncle farmed – the family farm, that is, where my dad's family lived was across the road, and that was a big farm of maybe 160 acres or so. And my uncle farmed it along with my other uncle.

Q           I'm gonna stop you first.  All right. We have moved to a quieter setting. I think this recording will work out better. So you were talking about your uncle's farm.

A            It was my uncle's farm. It was one -- my dad was in a family with nine children, and he grew up on a farm. My mother did also, so it was a farming family. And they needed -- they needed help. So from the time I was, like, about seven or eight years old, I would work on the farm or help out on the farm on occasion.  And I really liked it because I could drive a tractor at age, you know, 10 or 12, which was a big thing. So I worked there.  And then my dad was a carpenter, and I worked with him also during the summers. In fact, I kept doing that all the way through law school, high school and law school. And by the end I was getting paid two dollars an hour, which was pretty darn good.

Q           When was this?

A            That would have been in, let's see, up through the mid Sixties.

Q           Okay.

A            But -- so I did a lot of, ah, there was a lot of manual labor, not too much intellectual labor, although I did a summer with the Chicago Police Department as an intern.

Professor Herman Goldstein was who taught at the University of Wisconsin, and he had -- his area was in police administration. And he formerly worked as a special assistant to the superintendent of police down in Chicago. He was O.W. Wilson, the reform superintendent that Mayor Daley brought in after some big scandal involving the police department down there.

Q           How old were you about then?

A            I was in my early twenties. I was still -- I was in, I think, the second year of law school. I lived down there for three months on the north side of Chicago with another law student who was also interning. I was assigned to the community relations section of the department at police headquarters. I worked at headquarters, which meant that all of the Chicago police supervisors worked on the same floor.  Superintendent James Rochford was in office at that time, and they were all in the same vicinity. All the assistant superintendents oversaw a section of the          city. So they were all there, and I got to know a lot of them, which was kind of a heady thing. And I would on weekend evenings, instead of going out and partying, I rode around in police patrol cars, which was kind of a party. But for, you know, for a country boy from rural Wisconsin, it was quite an education. There were a lot of -- a lot of calls, domestic disturbances, drunks on the street, a rape case I remember. And, you know, they would arrest people and haul 'em in on occasion.

In fact, one time I remember I was -- the officer I was with arrested somebody, and I can't remember what it was for, if it was just hassling someone on the street or something. And he gets to the police station and he gets the guy out of the backseat, and he was handcuffed, and then he does -- I look into the backseat where the guy was, and I said, "There is a big knife" -- by big, like, two-foot knife -- that he had. And he said, "Gee, I thought I frisked that guy." You know, I was sitting right in front of him, so -- And, you know, a lot of -- some of the officers handled -- like, the way they handled domestic disturbances were much different than now.

Q           How so?

A            Well, they didn't -- they didn't automatically arrest anybody. Now, you know, if somebody's got a mark, at least in most jurisdictions now, a couple – somebody calls the police, "My husband is beating me up," whatever, by the time the police get there, they change their mind and say, "Never mind, it wasn't any big thing." They're still -- somebody's gonna get arrested now if somebody has a bruise or a mark or something, or a black eye. Back then, this wasn't the case at all. I remember one place we stopped, a house we stopped at,       a couple -- obviously, the woman was very agitated. The guy was probably drunk. And so basically, their solution was to take the guy and say, "Look, she obviously wants to have sex, and you aren't taking care of her, and that's your job," so -- and, "Oh, okay." Okay, great.

Q           Well, considering this was in law school, do you think it shaped at all which direction your career took?

A            Absolutely. It was very dramatic. It was real gritty stuff, you know. And seeing -- Herman Goldstein was the -- he was really a police reformer. He became nationally -- he was nationally known. Now he's retired for some years, but he wrote the book or books on police administration. He was in demand as a consultant not just in the United States, but in foreign countries because of all his work in that area. And he popularized a number of different approaches to law enforcement, including community policing and aggressive patrol. You know, you're           supposed to be out there with your patrol car driving around, not cooped up behind the coffee shop getting free doughnuts. That was not his idea of what – how police ought to be patrolling. He had a lot of innovative ideas.

Toward the end of law school, I took a directed seminar from him. I went down to Chicago and did some research on -- I listened to maybe, I don't know, 100 hours of police tapes covering one day. There were a number of different phones that came in from different sections of the city. And I was trying to do an actual -- understand how -- what police actually did. So I listened to all of these tapes. I was trying to -- he wanted to know what was the actual call demand on the police over a 24-hour period. So we tried to pick a day that would be fairly typical, day of the week that would be fairly typical. I listened to all of the calls that came into the Chicago Police Department for a 24-hour period and then classified them. And there were, of course, multiple calls, but sometimes for the same incident. And so Herman actually cited that report some in one of his published articles, and it was -- I think the result was that there's a heck of a lot of very routine stuff that has very little to do with what we normally think of as police work. I mean, there were a lot of non-crime calls that came in. The bulk of what came in was non-crime. Then when you counted up the fact that it was -- if there was, you know, somebody heard gunshots or somebody got shot, there might be ten calls on that one particular report. So it was kind of interesting. Of course, the police in Chicago were quite suspicious of what I was doing because -- and in fact, a lot of 'em, even ride-arounds, right-alongs, when I was down there, would ask me, "Where do you work?" "I work at headquarters." Oh, yeah? Who do you work for? What are you doing here?" "Well, we're just riding around here." “Great, okay. What's your" -- "I'm a law student." "Oh, yeah? Well, what do you know about wills?"

There was a lot of racial tension in the police department down there at that time. And this was between -- you know, '68 was the Democrat National Convention, big riot in Chicago. We all remember that. Well, maybe you're too young. But the '68 convention was when McCarthy was challenging Hubert Humphrey. Johnson was not running again. The Democrats had their convention. Mayor Daley was in charge, Mayor Daley. And the antiwar folks were out demonstrating. They were backing McCarthy, who did not win the convention.

There were riots in the streets. The police tried to move the crowd out of Grant Park. A huge number of people got arrested. A lot of people got injured. I was there in '67. '66, the year before, there had been some riots on a minor scale, people throwing Molotov cocktails, burning some places down. It was all race-based. So there was a lot of racial tension in the police department. So when you were riding around with two white officers, you might get quite a different perspective on things than if you were riding with two black officers. I don't think they had too many where there was one black and one white officer. But it was -- it was a -- it was an eye-opening experience for me. And I learned a lot. So anyway, I was thinking about going into police administration, but it didn't work out. I mean, I had a couple -- Herman got a couple interviews for me, but nothing panned out.

I worked my way through law school, so I did a lot of stuff. I had a paper route. I washed windows. I raked leaves. I was a night watchman at a girl's sorority house, which was interesting, and -- only on the weekends.

Q           Was it only interesting on the weekends, or is that only when you worked?

A            No. That's the only time I worked. You know, they had to have somebody there who could keep people from breaking in, I guess. Well, not breaking in, but, you know, if somebody would come in and some drunk guys would try to follow them in or something like that.  That didn't happen very often.

Anyway, and then I also, I worked -- I got a kind of a clerk job at Wisconsin Legislative Council at the State Capitol through a friend of mine who also worked up there. And we worked -- we did, you know, copying papers and filing stuff. I also did some research papers. The Legislative Council conducted research projects for the Wisconsin Legislature. The projects were approved by the legislators who sat on the Legislative Council Committee. There were also some non-legislators who were members of the Council, including Professor Frank Remington, whose criminal law class I had taken at U.W. Law School.

Earl Sachse was the long-time executive director of the Council at the time, and Bonnie Reese was his deputy. Bonnie liked the work I had been doing, and when I applied for a full-time job after law school graduation, she recommended me to Earl Sachse, who agreed to hire me at a salary of $6,500 per year in June, 1968. Luckily, I had less than $1,500 in student loans when I finished law school. My first big assignment was staffing the Wisconsin Little Kerner Commission Study. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968, and riots erupted in major cities across the United States, including Milwaukee. The original Kerner Commission was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Governor Kerner of Illinois. They were tasked to investigate the 1967 riots in Detroit, Chicago, and other U.S. cities. They did a report and made some recommendations.

The Legislative Council members wanted to do a similar investigation and report for Wisconsin. Senator Walter John Chilsen from Wausau was designated as chairman. Senator Chilsen's district had very few minority residents, but he was sincerely interested in identifying problems and recommending possible solutions. And he was very easy to work with. This assignment was a heady experience for me. I had long been interested in civil rights issues and had marched with Father James Groppi in Milwaukee in support of adoption of an open housing law. I was tasked with setting up hearings on various topics the committee wanted to cover around the state, including hearings in Milwaukee, Madison, and Racine.

Some of the hearings concentrated on education, some on housing, and some on police and community relations. Bonnie Reese provided general supervision and heavily edited the file report, but left most of the groundwork to me. I recall a meeting that Senator Chilsen and I had with long-term Milwaukee Police Chief Harold Brier at Chief Brier's office. Brier was a crusty, much beloved chief who we expected to have little sympathy for our investigation. During our meeting the chief made frequent references to "colored people," and at one point I suggested that he might get a better response from the community if he referred to them as "black people."

"Young man," Brier said to me, "what does NAACP stand for? It stands for National Association for Advancement of Colored People. I just call them what they call themselves." After we left the meeting, I apologized to Senator               Chilsen for causing a scene, but he just brushed the incident aside. It took almost a full year to complete the hearings and finish the report. Some of our recommendations were enacted into law.

In the spring of 1968, while still a law student, I ran for and was elected to a seat on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. This was primarily through the efforts of my roommate, Jim Sensenbrenner, who was also attending U.W. Law School and had worked as a staffer in both the State Legislature and the U.S. House. Sensenbrenner was later elected to the Wisconsin Assembly and then to the U.S. Congress, where he still serves.

The chairman of the Legislative Council at the time was State Senator Jerris Leonard. Leonard ran against then U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1968.  Leonard lost that race, but Richard Nixon won the U.S. presidential race and in 1969 appointed Leonard as head of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Leonard knew me from my work with the Legislative Council, so I wrote him a letter stating that I had always wanted to work for the Justice Department in the Civil Rights Division. He invited me to Washington for an interview and offered me a job. I was sworn in as a GS-13 trial attorney on October 6, 1969. It was a proud day for me, despite the fact that I had to give up my position with the Dane County Board.

My first assignment with the Civil Rights Division was with the education section, which was in the process of filing lawsuits to desegregate numerous school districts across the South which had been segregated under state law. I spent a lot of time in Mississippi and in fact, over the course of two years, visited almost every county in the state. The chief judge of the Southern District of Mississippi, Judge Cox, was a fearsome guy. He did not like civil rights cases and routinely dismissed them and gave a lot of hassle to the Civil Rights Division lawyers who appeared before him. And he had a bit of a temper. I remember being in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Jackson one day and meeting with the U.S. Attorney. And he looked out the window, and he says, "Look at what the judge is doing right now." Somebody had parked in his space, 'cause there's a sign that said "Judge Cox" -- had parked there. Judge Cox is driving this Cadillac. He took the Cadillac behind this guy and pushed the car over a ledge and --

Q           Oh, are you kidding?

A            No. It was only -- it wasn't real steep. It was, like, two or three feet.

Q           But still.

A            Yeah. And then he -- he ordered the marshals to go out and find that guy and arrest him. And I don't know what happened ultimately, but that was Judge Cox. The Civil Rights Division lawyers needed to get an order signed by the judge. There were a group of us, and I was the youngest guy. They told me to go see the judge in chambers and get the order signed. I said, "You gotta be kidding." They said, "Oh, no. You gotta get it."

Well, I knew the judge -- Archie Manning was the big senior star of the Ole Miss football team. Ole Miss was going to be playing somebody in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. So I went in there and I just started talking to him. I said, "How do you think Ole Miss is gonna do come the Sugar Bowl?" "Oh, I think Archie is gonna beat -- he's unbeatable."  " You know, Judge, I think you're right. He might -- I bet Ole Miss is gonna just beat the tar out of those guys."   He says, "I think you're right too."

And I said, "Judge, I got an order here." He said, "Let me see it." He didn't even read it.  He just signed it. So I brought it back, and they're, "How did you do? Did he throw you out?" "No, he didn't. He just signed the order. I don't know what the problem is. You guys aren't treating him right."  So stuff like -- I learned to speak with a bit of a drawl, when necessary.

 I did get run out of a county one time by a sheriff 'cause they were opening schools and we were supposed to be monitoring the schools. And I was driving around down there, and he stopped me. He said, "What you doin', boy?"  I said, "Well, I'm" -- I showed him my credentials. "I am an attorney with the Justice Department Civil Rights Division just monitoring the situation." He said, "You know, you just -- I gotta tell you something. You just start up trouble down here. You know, we got it under control. There is no problem here. And if I were you, I'd get out of the county." So, you know, we didn't have cell phones or anything. So I drive out. He's following me till I got over the county line. And I call back to the office and I'm outraged. "This is ridiculous. I'm a federal official. He can't do this. This is outrageous."

My office said, "Calm down. Calm down. What do you want us to do?" "Well, I don't know, but somebody needs to talk to him."  Well, you know, somebody may have talked to him, but they aren't gonna go arrest the sheriff for    telling me to get out of the county. So I got over it. But it was -- stuff like that happened sometimes.

Or the guys on the school board I met with over in the Delta area, they said they wanted me to go talk to Justice Black the next time I was up in Washington. And they thought I really could talk to Justice Black from the Supreme Court. You know, he was the guy, 'cause they knew he was from Alabama. They figured he had sold them out on the school desegregation stuff. "Somebody needs to explain to him directly what is happening down here to our schools." I said, "All right. Well, I'll do my best to talk to Justice Black next time I'm in Washington up there."

So anyway, that was -- I did that for several, three or four years.  I also got involved in a voting case down in Alabama. And there were some very hard-working lawyers down there. I remember they needed me to testify as a possible witness in that case 'cause I had accidentally started -- I was interviewing people, doing this preliminary thing. I found out they were trying to stop -- they were going to hold a Democrat primary in a way to make sure that there were no blacks who were going to be voting in it. And this one guy, he was an older guy, he knew who I was, but he was not totally in touch with what was really going on. So he told me what was going on, and we started a lawsuit. And they wanted me to come down in Mobile to help them with the trial, not try the case, but help them with preparation and maybe testify.

And I got down there at, like, seven or eight o'clock at night. I went over to the office where they were all working. There were probably four or               five lawyers there and a couple paralegals. And they said, "Well, why don't you look at this? Can you help with this and do this?" And next thing I know it's, like, five o'clock in the morning. And I said, "Geez, we gotta start trial here at 8:30. Why don't you go get a little rest at the hotel and come back." So -and that's the way they did a lot of stuff. Some of these guys never slept. I could never do that. That's what they did. Eventually, I ended up getting transferred over to the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division. We had some school desegregation things in the north, Boston, which had some riots, potential for further riots. Southy, South Boston, was the white area, and East Boston was the Italian area. And then there was Roxbury, which was mostly black. Anyway, it was very volatile.

I was up there with a task force for a while. And there was a woman, Louise Day Hicks, who was the chair of the Boston School Committee. She lived in South Boston and was kind of the leading opposition to desegregation. So John Conroy, who was another Civil Rights Division lawyer, and I, we went over to visit her along with an FBI agent just to, you know, introduce ourselves and say we're here and we're just trying to keep the peace and blah, blah. And she thought we were gonna arrest her. And she -- she was really upset initially till we calmed her down.  And then, of course, there were people who wanted us to arrest her after that.

So then I ended up being pulled off Boston and sent down to Louisville. And I was kind of the senior            lawyer down in Louisville, Kentucky at the time. Things were pretty calm in Louisville. We did have a couple of quasi riots and charged a couple of people with criminal civil rights violations.  I really didn't know much about criminal law at that time, but eventually out of that situation I got transferred over to the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division as a deputy section chief. And this was, you know, my three years to stay in Washington were long gone, but it was very interesting work, and I got a couple promotions.  And the Criminal Section was in the Civil Rights Division, but we prosecuted police misconduct, police brutality cases and racial violence cases and involuntary servitude, slavery. So we would go after the Ku Klux Klan if they got violent in some places.

And we did -- most of what we did were police misconduct cases where somebody got beat up or shot or whatever. We'd get thousands of complaints a year and   prosecute, you know, maybe a hundred of 'em. We had to be very selective. It was very hard to prove to a jury police misconduct beyond a reasonable doubt. Most of what we charged were misdemeanors because that's what the statute provided. There were some felonies. If somebody got killed, then it was a felony. But if they were beaten to an inch of their lives, it was only a misdemeanor.  Moreover, the cops were all practiced witnesses. They were used to testifying. Most of our victims were less than upright citizens. They had been doing something wrong, and they frequently had criminal records, lengthy records. So we had generally -- you know, we had, like, an informal rule that there's got to be some blood on the sawdust.   I mean, technically speaking, you know, false arrest is a violation of the Civil Rights Act. If you're acting under cover of law and you arrest somebody without probable cause, that's a potential crime. But you're never gonna get a criminal conviction out of that unless something more happened.

I remember Herman, I came back a couple times, did a couple of seminars with Herman Goldstein, with his class in the U.W. Law School. So, you know, I'm trying to explain to these kids what the limitations were. And Herman thought it made sense. Some of those students did not. But anyway. I became eventually a section chief, and that was probably one of the better jobs I ever had because I could go try a couple cases a year, but not too many, and do a lot of Grand Jury investigations because we always took everybody to the Grand Jury because we wanted to get -- anybody who was on the scene of the     incident, we wanted to know what their story was, pin them down. We didn't want to get surprised at trial with somebody coming up with some new story. And we'd invite the person we were likely to charge, invite them to the Grand Jury.

The Grand Jury rules changed a lot during the time that I was there. The Justice Department by its own internal procedures became much more careful about how we treated subjects and witnesses. I mean, they used to -- I know they used to bring people in, and even though we knew -- they knew -- I never did this 'cause they had changed by the time I got there -- even though the person you knew was gonna take the Fifth Amendment. Later, if you were gonna charge somebody, you invite them to the Grand Jury. You don't subpoena them to the Grand Jury. If they say no, that's it. And if they say yes, they're presumably going to testify.  But previously they would bring these guys in, even though they knew they were taking the Fifth, and they'd ask 'em if they love their mother. "I take the Fifth Amendment," you know. It's all behind closed doors, no transcript. All that's changed now. So we were much more careful about how we dealt with suspects.

But sometimes the cops would come in because they thought they could beat the rap, and they'd probably  end up committing perjury, and then we'd charge them with perjury too as well as the misdemeanor offense.  So -- and it was very interesting work.  And I got -- I remember we had a case out in Hawaii. We had sent a lawyer out there. And police departments around the country varied a lot, and some were really bad in the sense of they would routinely violate somebody's rights.

By the way, my brother was a police officer. In fact, he was a police chief. He just retired recently out of Brown Deer. I had a brother-in-law and a nephew who were all police officers in Wisconsin, so I certainly knew the other side of the situation.  But New Orleans and Philadelphia too were bad police departments. In Philadelphia, they had this practice, they called it "booking the subject," which meant for them, if they're trying to get a confession out of somebody, handcuff 'em to a chair, put a big Philadelphia telephone book on their head and then hit it as hard as you can with a nightstick. And it doesn’t leave any marks, but it's very painful. And that's what they'd call "booking" somebody.

Q           Oh, God.

A            Yeah. It's not good.  There were similar routine practices in New Orleans. In Philadelphia, the supervisors in the homicide squad, you know, they'd tell people, they'd bring this case to them and say, "This is what we got."  “You got a confession?" "No, we don't have a confession." "You better book 'em." And they did that quite routinely. So in Hawaii, the Honolulu Police Department had a similar -- they just beat the crap out of people.  They didn't book 'em. But we had this case out there where we had sent a young lawyer out who was a pretty good lawyer. He had gone out, and he was authorized to seek an indictment in the Grand Jury. And the U.S. Attorney was not too excited about the case. Anyway, he got no-billed by the Grand Jury, which is quite unusual.

A Grand Jury that votes a no bill when the prosecutor has presented an indictment sometimes happens, but usually if the prosecutor argues strongly for an indictment, a true bill is returned by the Grand Jury. Well, that did not -- that did not happen all the time in civil rights cases. In fact, we had one guy, his name was Bill Gardner. We called him "No Bill Gardner" because he had several no bills. And I remember being out in Oklahoma one time, and we had presented a case. The U.S. Attorney didn't really take a position, but we could tell he didn't like it too much. I said, "Well, we're gonna go back in and ask the Grand Jury for an indictment." He said, "Wait a minute. I got another matter, it just came up, I've gotta go in."

He goes in. "I don't need you guys." So he went in by himself without us. When we went in, the Grand Jury is just really cold. Obviously, what he had done was gone in and say, "These guys from Washington, forget it, they're on the wrong track," or something because we had a pretty good case, but the Grand Jury declined to indict. U.S. attorneys varied a lot in how they reacted. And the FBI, which did all our investigations, varied            a lot too because they worked with the police, you know, local police on most of the stuff that they did.  And then we'd send the FBI a request for an investigation. They had to go interview these guys and give them their rights. And people that they'd been working with, sometimes it didn't work too well.  So there were obstacles to overcome.

But the point about the U.S. Attorney, when I talked to him about the Honolulu case, he said, "Okay, I'm gonna let you guys go forward on this next case after you got run out of town on the last one a couple years ago, but on one condition."  I said, "What's that?" He said, "You have to come out here and handle the Grand Jury.”  Oh, don't throw me in that briar patch. I went out to Hawaii a couple times, which is a long flight, but an interesting place.

So anyway, I stayed in the Civil Rights Division. I eventually became a deputy assistant attorney general for one year, which was above -- I had three different sections I supervised. And here I had been there for now 15 years. And the assistant attorney general gave me this letter he had gotten from Senator Bill Roth from Delaware, who was the chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee at that time. And he was looking -- he was asking my boss for some recommendations for the slot for staff director and chief of staff for something called the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It was part of       Government Affairs. I had really never heard of it, at least not much. So I look at it, and he said, "See if you can find the senator some names, resumes of some people. I don't care who it is."

I said “okay.” And I started looking, and I said, "this looks like a pretty interesting job to me." So I put my resume in. And then I found several really weak candidates and put their resumes in too. And I got interviewed by the senator's chief of staff, who was a really good guy. And, you know, they kind of liked me. And they said, "How much time have you spent in Delaware? " I said, "Well, I've driven through it a couple of times to go to Ocean City, Maryland for the beach. I don't really honestly know very much about it." And he said, "Well, that's good because Delaware is a small state, and everybody knows everybody, and if we hire somebody from Delaware for this job, it's gonna be very hard to fire them. Somebody like you we        can fire very easily."

Q           What a job qualification.

A            That's right. But it was true. It was -- so I got the job, and I started work there. And it was a very interesting committee because we had very broad authority. And historically, that subcommittee had been used to investigate all kinds of things. There was Senator McClellan, I think, from Arkansas, if I'm not mistaken, who was chairman at one point. And he had a staff of about 50 people. Under the committee rules, the chairman had subpoena power     just on the chairman's signature, which was very unusual. And he'd sign subpoenas blank and let his staff go out and do their investigation. The subcommittee had very broad jurisdiction. One of the issues always in a Congress is who's got jurisdiction over this and what are you doing in that because this subject is not in your jurisdiction.

Members protect their turf. We could investigate almost anything that the chairman wanted to investigate. And the ranking member at the time was Sam Nunn from Georgia, and he and Roth got along very      well. The other thing good was that we didn't have what's called markup authority, so we did not consider bills. We only considered -- we only did investigations. And we would do a report and make recommendations. If we drafted legislation, somebody else would get the legislation to review, which meant the subcommittee could be much less partisan.

And Nunn and Roth got along pretty well. But Roth was kind of a moderate Republican. Nunn was a pretty conservative Democrat. And we'd do a lot of joint investigations with both the minority and the majority staff.   And then eventually, the Senate changed hands, and Nunn became the chairman and Roth was the ranking minority member. And I stayed on. We did a broad range of investigations, including international drug trafficking, money laundering, bank money laundering. We were investigating the Bank of Boston because they were taking big cash deposits for the mob up there. And so we had a series of hearings, and we got these t-shirts that read "I do my laundry at a bank in Boston," you know. We didn't put those on for the hearing.

We did an embassy security investigation after there had been some security lapses, and we did a lot of "staff DCLs," or congressional delegations, consisting of staff trips to these countries. On the embassy security investigation, we went to Germany, East Germany, the Soviet Union. We visited Leningrad -- well, what was Leningrad at the time took a train, overnight train to Moscow. And we had               some FBI agents and four or five staff members. And we started this -- I remember starting this poker game on the train. It was an overnight train. The food in Russia at the time was horrible, but the vodka was pretty good, and the -- what are those fish eggs?

Q           Caviar?

A            -- caviar was delicious. So that's what we mostly did.

Q           When was this, about?

A            It was in '85, '86 -- no. Something around that time. But the Iron Curtain -- there was still a wall in East Germany and in Berlin between Germany and East Germany.  Anyway, the problem with the poker game was not just the vodka, but by that part of the trip we had U.S. dollars, we had German marks, we had East German marks, we had been stopped in Finland, we had some Finland currency, and we had Russian currency. And it became very difficult to decide what was in the pot, what the total value was. It was terrible. But, you know, it was a good trip.

Brezhnev was the head of the Soviet Union at the time. We got followed all over by the KGB. I mean, one of the big things we were looking at was the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow. And it turned out they had used Russian contractors, which, you know, they had to use, but, I mean, the entire building was one big radio antenna. You know, it was totally, there was no way to hold a private conversation there. So here they got this thing they had built for millions and millions of dollars, and they never moved into it. They couldn't move into it.

When we took that trip to the Soviet Union, I remember the food, how bad the food was and how bad the service was in the Russian state-owned restaurants. We went to the finest restaurant in Leningrad, and we finally got -- and of course, our Russian wasn't too good. So we finally got it across that we wanted chicken. And that seemed relatively safe. So we ordered the chicken, and it took a couple of hours. And finally, they finally delivered the chicken, which was cooked on the outside. When you tried to cut into it, the inside was frozen solid. It was still frozen solid. All you got was --

Q           Oh, my God.

A            And they wouldn't come back. The waiter wouldn't come back to take the complaints. So it was -- that's what turned me off on state-owned restaurants. Same thing, we were also in Czechoslovakia. That same -- they were better, but, you know, you couldn't  -- you couldn't just call up and make a reservation because they didn't take reservations, or they were booked or something or whatever. You had to go through the embassy. And the embassy staff had to rely on their local Czech or Russian employees to do stuff. And it was tough for embassy people. Like in Moscow, they would tell us -- well, of course, you're being watched a lot, but they said they'll come in -- you go to work, you come to the embassy, and they'll go in your apartment and they'll toss things, and then they'll just -- they'll leave a couple of cigarettes butts in the toilet just to show you that they were there. So they were under a lot of tension all the time. They'd go up to Finland or someplace for weekend getaways. That's a tough, tough life.

Anyway, we did a lot of investigations. And worked there in the Senate for 10 years. Then I went into private practice with a firm. I went to another firm where I've been for the last, since 2002, Redmon, Peyton & Braswell, in Old Town Alexandria doing very mundane things. I used to do a lot of trial work. Now I do more wills and estates 'cause there isn't as much time pressure. That's it.

Q           Looking back on your career, what do you find the most gratifying aspect?

A            Well, I liked the time I spent in the Civil Rights Division. I think we accomplished a number of things. I think we made police departments -- I think the quality of policing in the United States has dramatically improved over the last 25 years. And I'm very grateful that Professor Herman Goldstein got me interested in that area. And he used to bring me back on occasion for his seminar, a University of Wisconsin Law school seminar that I took when I was there. And I -- you know, and I think my brother and my brother-in-law and my nephew -- my brother, by the way, was at one point president of the Wisconsin Association of Chiefs of Police, so he knew a lot of people in the state. I think that everybody, the whole business of policing has become more professional. That doesn't mean there aren't bad cops around. Of course, there are. And they do things they're not supposed to do from time to time. So I think -- I like to think I made some contribution to that. Not as much as guys like Herman Goldstein, but some.

And the Senate was very interesting and exciting. I had a pass. I could get on the Senate floor and watch the debates in person. That was also very enjoyable.