TWO ABORTION clinics had already burned and an angry swell of picketers had descended on a third, hastily set up in a squat, red brick building along one of the busiest streets in Cincinnati. Al Gerhardstein was on edge, worried about late-night bomb threats and the man who seemed to be in charge of it all, a mail handler from Hebron, Kentucky, who wore ski masks during protests and described himself as the “defender of the unborn.”
On a frigid February morning in 1987, Al walked to the courthouse to see a judge about prosecuting picketers who had rushed the clinic’s doors, chanting “Damned to hell!” and elbowing the young women who struggled to get by. As the lawyer for Cincinnati’s Planned Parenthood, Al had successfully pushed for a court order to keep picketers across the street. But every Saturday morning, dozens defied the injunction, bounding off the sidewalks and falling to their knees at the building’s front doors. As volunteers shielded patients, Al took names on a four-page contempt of court form, which he rushed straight over to a court clerk for a signature.
It seemed to Al as if Cincinnati had become ground zero for the national extremist groups that were using kerosene and sledgehammers to destroy clinics. Two years earlier, someone had tossed firebombs into the basement windows of two of the city’s women’s health centers, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Planned Parenthood set up a temporary clinic just down the street from the Cincinnati Zoo, but picketers gathered there, too.
Al had stationed video cameras on the roofs of nearby buildings. Now he walked quickly through the courthouse with footage of the most recent protest in his worn leather briefcase.
The thirty-five-year-old civil rights lawyer would see Judge Thomas Crush, a well-respected Republican who had issued strict orders to rein in the picketers. Already the judge had thrown several dozen people in jail for contempt of court, and Al had come with a list of new names. The U.S. Department of Justice would eventually declare anti-abortion violence a form of domestic terrorism, but back in 1987, the attacks on clinics in states like Virginia, Alabama, and Florida had only begun to intensify.
Al was organizing his files on a desk at the front of the courtroom when his cell phone rang. He had recently started carrying a portable phone, and it was the size of a brick, gray and bulky. The sound startled him, and he quickly whispered, “Hello?”
“Al, there’s a suspicious package next to the clinic.”
Al pushed his chair back and stood up. Ann Mitchell, the executive director of the city’s Planned Parenthood Association, sounded unusually panicked even though she had been fielding threats for months.
“We’ve evacuated the clinic,” she said in a rush.
When the judge came in minutes later, Al said, “Your Honor, we need to stop for the day.”
He drove straight across town to the clinic, terrified that someone would end up hurt. The firebombs that had torched the health centers two years earlier had been planted when the buildings were empty. A daytime explosion at a clinic packed with doctors and patients would surely be lethal. The bomb squad had already cordoned off the streets when Al drove up. Swearing, he turned around and headed back to his office in the historic, fourteen-story Cincinnati Enquirer building, one of the city’s most iconic high-rises. Al called Mitchell, trying not to think about the abortion doctor from Illinois who had been kidnapped or the clinic in Florida that had been bombed in the early-morning hours of Christmas three years earlier.
“It’s okay,” Mitchell said, sounding exhausted, when she finally answered the phone. A bomb, six inches long with a cigarette for a fuse, had been found leaning against the wall of the clinic. The fuse had been lit, but the bomb squad dismantled it in time.
Al shook his head, his fingers wrapped tightly around the phone. This has just escalated, he thought.
Had he known as a boy that he would one day defend abortion clinics, Alphonse Gerhardstein probably would have been stunned. In the late 1950s, the Roman Catholic priests at St. Mary’s Parish in suburban Cleveland had seemed almost otherworldly, and Al, an altar boy, spent much of his childhood trying not to fidget through endless Sunday church services with his four brothers and sister.
Al had inherited his mother’s olive skin and angular features. Carolyn Gerhardstein was a second-generation Italian who cooked boundless batches of rigatoni and volunteered at the parish, ironing robes and dusting the shelves of the sacristy. She worked nights as a nurse at the local hospital, and though the family wasn’t poor, they worked a large garden to put extra food on the table and canned fruit from the cherry trees and currant bushes behind their wood-frame house on the outskirts of Cleveland. Al’s father plowed a makeshift baseball field into the backyard.
Richard Gerhardstein, stocky and a good foot taller than his wife, had been a medic during World War II but took a job driving dairy trucks after he left the service. There was no money for vacations, but on Saturday mornings, Al and his father would drive to a market on the west side of town to pick up day-old bread and food in dented tin cans that were considered unfit for selling. Opening one of the unlabeled tins was like playing the lottery to eight-year-old Al, who never knew whether he would uncover green beans or potatoes or dog food. On a lucky day, he would find a fruit cocktail, one of his favorite desserts.
In the summer before sixth grade, Al’s father won a promotion and the family moved to Parkman, a rural corner of Ohio forty miles east of Cleveland. Parkman was more of an outpost than a town, with a one-room post office, an aging grammar school, and a small Catholic church. Amish families traveled the narrow streets in horse-drawn buggies.
Al’s father had been named manager of a commercial chicken farm, overseeing a staff of sixty, and for the first time in two decades with the company, he had been promised a pension. The first thing Al noticed when his father pulled the family’s Pontiac station wagon off a barren stretch of Highway 422 and onto the farm’s gravel road was the eight aluminum chicken houses. They were a quarter mile long apiece and shimmered in the sun.
The second thing Al noticed was the smell of chicken shit. The place reeked of it, and Al held his nose as he raced through the chicken houses with his brothers and sister. There were 108,000 squawking, pecking chickens and a processing building where more than one million eggs a week from farms in the area were candled and packaged for sale. All six children were put on the payroll, and Al spent weekends collecting eggs and saving the extra cash for college.
After work, he and his brothers would take their guitars down to the processing building because there was an echo in the egg cooler and their folk songs sounded particularly synced. But Al was lonely in Parkman. There was no library or college among the monotonous miles of fields and farms, and at fifteen he decided to find a ride every Monday morning to a well-respected Catholic high school thirty miles away. He stayed with an aunt and uncle during the week, and though he missed his family, the time away from home was worth it to Al. He joined the school’s cast of Bye Bye Birdie and became president of the local Junior Achievement chapter, where he was taught capitalism but eventually asked his advisers why they also couldn’t study socialism.
At home on the weekends, Al worked the farm with a sixteen-year-old Amish boy named Manassas Kuhns, who wore a wide-brimmed hat and a shirt with hooks instead of buttons, in line with the humble Amish dress code. Al was endlessly fascinated by Manassas. Like many Amish boys, he had stopped attending school in the sixth grade, but he could easily fix the pneumatic tube system in the egg processing room.
Manassas believed the world was flat.
“Have you listened to the news?” Al said, exasperated, one Saturday afternoon as they collected eggs. The good ones would be processed and shipped; oversize eggs with double yolks would be turned into liquid or delivered to Al’s mother for family meals. “Haven’t you heard of our space program?”
It’s 1964, Al thought, and the Apollo program promised to land humans on the moon.
“It’s fake,” Manassas said in a heavy German accent.
Al knew that his friend didn’t watch television or read a newspaper, but how could a boy who understood the workings of complex machines have trouble believing that scientists were capable of building a spaceship? Al had never met anyone so intelligent with such a limited worldview, and his friend’s insular life at a time of great scientific advancement seemed sad and unfair.
“It’s true,” Al pressed, pushing his cart down the aisle of the chicken house. “You can’t imagine that a spacecraft can fly?”
“I don’t believe in any of those things,” Manassas said, and went on collecting eggs.
The Vietnam War was raging when Al enrolled in Beloit College in Wisconsin in 1969, but the number on his draft card was low and he settled into an academic regimen crammed with classes on government and law. Behind square brown-rimmed glasses, Al was electrified by thoughts of a changing, conflicted country. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and in Cleveland three years earlier, someone had posted a sign outside of a bar that said, NO WATER FOR NIGGERS, launching a deadly race riot. If the right laws were passed and protected, Al decided, they could level the playing field between the powerful and the weak.
On campus, he quickly made a name for himself. He carried a giant poster of women and children who had been killed in the Vietnam War and pushed for a moratorium on classes after the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State University. He also lobbied to bring beer to the menu at the student union.
Al wasn’t thinking much about girls when he walked into the dining hall his freshman year at Beloit, but Mimi Gingold was striking, with brown hair that hung down to her waist, neatly parted in the middle. Al had met her weeks earlier in an American studies class, and now she was standing with a distinguished man in a crisp, three-piece suit.
“This is Al, Dad,” she said. “He’s from Cleveland.”
“Oh.” Archie Gingold, visiting for parents’ weekend, shook Al’s hand. “That’s the home of the Richman Brothers.”
Al knew about the fine suits made by the famous brothers at their tailoring plant on East Fifty-Fifth Street, but he had never had the money or the need to buy one. He looked at Mimi. “Is your father in merchandising?”
Mimi laughed. “No, my father is a judge.”
Al’s eyes widened. He had never met a lawyer or a judge. “I’m very interested in municipal government, sir,” he said. “Do you mind if I have dinner with you?”
Archie Gingold had spent years on the bench as a juvenile court judge in St. Paul, Minnesota, turning formal adoption hearings into celebrations with cookies and Kool-Aid and keeping delinquent teens out of detention centers by setting up a series of group homes. He would retire in the late 1970s having overseen ten thousand adoptions. “Law,” he told the magazine at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, his alma mater, “has a benevolent side to it whether we wish to acknowledge it or not.”
To Al, everything about Mimi was exotic and new. She was studying to become a teacher and talked passionately about making education “relevant” in inner-city schools. Al had never been out of the country, but Mimi had traveled to Turkey in high school through a student exchange program. Her mother had set up the first hospital candy striper program in St. Paul and served family dinners on linen tablecloths. Mimi had been raised Lutheran, but, like Al, she was starting to question religion. “Do you believe in original sin?” she once asked.
Al was smitten. Just before he proposed during their senior year at Beloit, Al brought Mimi a candy bar called “Powerhouse” and a card that he made himself. There were no lavish words of love and longing, but years later, Mimi would remember Al’s perfect line. “Together,” he wrote, “we will build a powerhouse.”
Al loved to watch his father work, and on the chicken farm, Richard Gerhardstein was a fair boss. He was proud of his position in management, and though he lived on a farm and was constantly checking in at the chicken houses, it seemed more like a grand responsibility than hard labor.
Once, the power went out in Parkman and the farm’s electric water pumps stopped working. Chickens started to die, and Al, his father, and the family teamed up with Amish workers to devise a meticulous plan to have the fire department fill up fifty-gallon drums, which sent water flowing directly to the cages. Al stood in the rafters of the chicken house gripping the hose from a fire truck, and when the water came on, he was lifted right off his feet.
Al married Mimi at Beloit in the fall of 1972, traveling to St. Paul for a wedding reception thrown by Mimi’s parents, with beef Stroganoff and wine on the menu, and then on to the chicken farm for a party hosted by Al’s parents, with pasta and breaded veal. A few months later, Al’s mother called. She had always delivered the bad news in the family, but when she phoned just before Christmas, it was the last thing Al was expecting.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“They’re closing the farm and we’ve got to move.”
“What?”
“He’s worked so hard,” Carolyn said quietly.
Al drove home to Parkman. Richard Gerhardstein was always springing from one project to the next, but Al found his father despondent and quickly learned that there would be no severance pay and no pension. After thirty years with the corporation, his sixty-two-year-old father had simply been let go. “They didn’t protect me,” Richard said, and Al felt sick.
His older brother, James, on leave from the army, drove to Cleveland to confront Richard’s boss. Couldn’t they find another job back in the dairy in Cleveland? Al’s younger sister, Kathy, studying nursing at Ohio University, wrote a letter to the company: Dad has worked a long time, and his manager had assured him of a pension. That didn’t happen.
But the company held firm. For years afterward, Al would watch his father lie about his age on job applications to secure low-paying work in a parking garage or an auto-parts store. He was never the same.
Al saw abuse everywhere, in the way his father’s company had treated a loyal employee, in the way poor blacks were charged with minor crimes while affluent white-collar criminals got off with a fine, in the way a break-in at the Watergate Hotel seemed to be undermining the office of the president of the United States. Al also believed the admissions test to get into law school was elitist and a touch corrupt, and though he applied to Harvard and Yale, he refused to take the test or pay an admissions fee. He wrote a letter to each school. Take me on my own terms or don’t take me at all. Most ignored him.
But New York University reached out, eventually offering a full scholarship to study public interest law, and the young husband whom Mimi liked to call a “country bumpkin” moved into a five-story building with a parapet roof in midtown Manhattan. On Sunday mornings, Al and Mimi would splurge on croissants and apricot jam at a Hungarian patisserie near Saint John the Divine, with its Roman arches and rose window that glowed in the sun. But on most days, they gobbled cold lo mein over the kitchen table as Mimi graded papers and Al prepared for class.
He had been assigned to the criminal law clinic at NYU, and to the case of Six Fingers Gibson. According to prosecutors, Six Fingers had picked the pocket of an undercover police officer on a subway platform, stealing one dollar. Charged with robbery, he was being held in jail on Rikers Island in the East River.
Al spent hours crafting a defense. How could a man nicknamed Six Fingers, clearly an expert pickpocket, fail to recognize an undercover officer with a one-dollar bill sticking out of his pocket? Al drew an elaborate diagram of the subway platform to present to the jury in court, and on the day before the criminal trial, he went to the jail to present his legal theory to Six Fingers, an African American man in his forties who had been living on the street.
“You’re right,” Six Fingers said when Al told him about the plan. “I do pick a lot of pockets, but I didn’t pick that pocket.”
Al sat back in his chair, wowed by his legal prowess and certain he would win his first trial. Six Fingers reached across the table.
“But I do have six fingers,” he said, pointing to the nub just beyond his pinkie.
Al was astonished. Earlier, the prosecutor had offered a deal—a guilty plea in exchange for time served. Six Fingers looked at his eager young attorney and apologized. “I know you really want to try this case, and I think you’ve got a good theory here. But I’ve got to get home.”
Al cut the deal.
The churn in the legal system seemed outrageous to Al, who watched poor defendants cycle through the courthouse again and again for minor infractions, separated from their jobs and families, without access to counseling or rehabilitation programs. The system is rigged, Al thought, and the public has been duped into believing that neighborhoods are safer when jails are full. He could have spent the rest of his life as a public defender, striking quick deals for petty criminals like Six Fingers. But Al wanted to do something more than feed the system.
He wanted to challenge it.
Al started thinking about a job just after his first year of law school, when big-name firms came to campus to court young lawyers with offers of internships. Even classmates in his public interest law program were heading to prominent firms, which promised interesting pro bono opportunities to help clients who couldn’t afford a lawyer.
Al decided to interview for a summer clerkship with one of the law firms that regularly recruited at NYU. He dressed in his only sport coat and headed downtown to meet one of the firm’s partners, who walked him through the firm’s hushed hallways, pointing out the art collection and arresting views of the city. They lunched at a private club, where Al watched lawyers order white wine in the middle of the afternoon.
“Talk big and do big things,” the partner said with an air of confidence that Al found intriguing. Maybe he could find his place here, in a high-powered law firm in Manhattan, earning serious money and working his way from a cubicle to an office to a partnership. One of his best friends was already heading into mergers and acquisitions and would one day negotiate billion-dollar oil deals over rounds of expensive vodka.
After lunch, Al roamed the partner’s office, nearly convinced that he had found a good fit. On a drafting table in the middle of the room, he lingered over a blueprint of a proposed exit ramp from the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island, with a miniature house, much like those in the game of Monopoly, fixed on top.
“So what’s this?” he asked the partner.
“This was the old lady who wouldn’t sell her house.”
“What side are you on? Are you representing the old lady or the developer?”
“The developer. Our job is to get rid of her.”
Al imagined the woman in her family home, fighting high-powered men in expensive gray suits. “What if she doesn’t want to leave? What if she has a connection to the land?”
The partner shrugged. “We’re trying to offer a fair number. But, you know, that’s progress.”
Al decided to be a different kind of lawyer. When summer came, he took an internship at a nonprofit organization that helped ex-offenders, thinking about his father-in-law, the judge, who had once told Al, “One day, people will see the importance of offering everyone a second chance, that people are capable of changing.”
When it came time to look for a permanent job, Al reached out to the leading civil rights attorney back in southern Ohio, Robert Laufman, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who had won a landmark case on racially discriminatory lending practices.
Al wrote Laufman a letter, asking for a job. Laufman wrote back, “Civil rights lawyers don’t make enough money to hire.”
Al and Mimi decided to move to Cincinnati anyway, and with a loan from Mimi’s parents, they bought a Victorian house a few miles from downtown for $37,500, throwing her grandparents’ oriental rugs across the hardwood floors and planting petunias along the length of the wide front porch. Most of their neighbors were black, and the young couple liked the idea of having children in one of Cincinnati’s few integrated neighborhoods.
While his friends settled into jobs in the high-rises of New York City, Al settled into the cramped offices of the Legal Aid Society, where he sued a supermarket chain for discriminating against black employees and landlords for evicting black families. Laufman tracked Al’s legal work, and two years later was impressed enough to ask Al to join the civil rights practice, which, in its entirety, consisted of Laufman, a second attorney and Mary Armor, the office manager, who worked in a narrow hallway, squeezed next to a fussy copy machine. Laufman worked on his old dining room table, and Al bought a desk when the YWCA was getting rid of furniture.
He charged clients thirty-five dollars an hour and wore a brown corduroy jacket to work nearly every day, the one he had worn to his job interview in New York City. Once, back in school, when Al rode his bike from NYU to a hearing at a Manhattan courthouse, the judge had looked at Al’s scuffed loafers and jacket and called down from the bench, “Are you going camping or are you going to court?”
Al complained about it to his father, but Richard Gerhardstein was unsympathetic. “If you want to be a lawyer you need to dress like a lawyer,” he admonished.
A few months after Al joined Laufman’s civil rights practice, Mary Armor insisted they go shopping. On a lunch break from a trial, she dragged Al to a downtown department store and helped him pick out a wash-and-wear suit jacket, pants, and a raincoat for $100.
There wasn’t much money for salaries, but over six A.M. racquetball games, Al and Laufman talked about their cases against the police, Ohio’s prisons, and the City of Cincinnati. Al began to see himself as a legal crusader of sorts in a town that was gaining a reputation as one of the most conservative in the country.
In 1985, Planned Parenthood became a client. As a civil rights attorney, Al believed more than anything in the right to free speech. But as protests at the clinic intensified, picketers would lock arms, forming a hissing, angry wall, often reaching for patients and their escorts as they fought to get inside.
“You can’t arrest us because we’re praying,” one woman told Laufman, whose fifteen-year-old son had been helping women into the clinic.
Al filed a class action lawsuit and listed John Brockhoeft, the man in the ski mask, as the named defendant. Armed with an injunction, Al helped put fifty-seven people in jail for contempt of court, stopping just once when Mimi went into labor with their third child, Jessica. Armor went to court that day on Al’s behalf and told Judge Crush, “Al won’t be able to come in.”
An anti-abortion activist who was sitting in on the hearing said, “I didn’t even know that he had children.”
“Just because you support Planned Parenthood doesn’t mean you’re against having babies,” Armor said, picturing Al at his desk, scrawling notes on a legal pad with his three-year-old son, Adam, perched on his knees.
Brockhoeft was elusive in the early months of 1987, when the pipe bomb was planted in the bushes outside the Planned Parenthood clinic. But a year later, federal agents found him in northern Florida in a car packed with bomb-making materials. Part of a militant Christian group called the Army of God, he would serve twenty-six months in prison for the thwarted Florida attack and four years for one of the bombings in Ohio.
Al continued to represent Planned Parenthood, even when the archbishop of Cincinnati asked him to stop by for a visit. The Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island, had recently excommunicated the director of Planned Parenthood. “Why are you still representing Planned Parenthood?” the archbishop asked Al. “You’re going to go to hell.”
“That’s not really appropriate,” Al replied. “The work of the church in the inner city with poor people and with immigrants gives us plenty to agree about. Let’s focus on that instead of reproductive rights.”
The archbishop wasn’t happy with Al’s answer, but on the way out, he gave Al a rosary for his mother. Al thanked him and went back to work.