Mesmerism in Miami

Moralists may wonder why the U.S. press and public spent seven weeks following the affairs of burly Melvin Powers, 24, and his lissome, lippy aunt, Candace Mossler, 46, in intimate detail. Most lawyers, though, are morally certain that they know exactly why a Miami jury so easily acquitted Candy and Mel of killing her millionaire husband, Jacques Mossler, 69: the defendants had in their corner hulking, booming Houston Lawyer Percy Foreman, whose never-failing tactic is to act as if the murder victim, not the suspect, were on trial. By "trying" everyone except his clients, Foreman has lost a defendant to the electric chair only once in more than 700 capital cases.

At 6 ft. 4 in., Percy Foreman, 64, is probably the biggest, brashest, brightest criminal lawyer in the U.S. The 250-lb. son of a onetime Texas sheriff, Foreman chose brains over brawn as a teen-ager when he landed a contract to load cotton at 25-c- a bale, then hired laborers to do the job at 8-c- a bale. At 16, Foreman quit the hamlet of Bold Springs to seek his fortune in Houston; he shined shoes, delivered papers, and hustled through the University of Texas law school. Of his clients, he likes to say mysteriously: "They may not always be right, but they are never wrong."

Denounce the Dead. Right or wrong, his clients pay for their freedom. Not long ago, Foreman pocketed $200,000 for winning Houston Oil Heiress Cecil Blaffer Hudson a record divorce settlement of $6,500,000. If his clients lack cash, Foreman accepts anything else of value. He now owns more than 40 houses and an office building in Houston, plus several hundred acres scattered throughout Harris County (Houston). His wife pads around their $75,000 home in a pair of house slippers studded with diamond engagement rings earned from his clients.

Foreman is worth every carat. Recently he took on a Houston father who had gunned down his stepdaughter's teen-age lover in plain view of witnesses. Foreman excoriated the dead sinner, hauled a church pulpit in front of the jury, delivered a sermon on teen-age vice, and tearfully recited a Sir Walter Scott poem about "pious fathers." The father was acquitted.

In Miami, where he represented Melvin Powers and called signals for a team of defense lawyers, Foreman confronted wholly circumstantial evidence--and the relatively easy job of raising a reasonable doubt in the jurors' minds. According to Prosecutor Richard Gerstein, who had won 24 previous capital cases, Aunt Candy and Nephew Mel had lived and loved together on Financier Mossler's money. Aggrieved over their lurid affair, Mossler allegedly planned a divorce that would have cut off their income and her potential inheritance. To avoid that disaster, argued Gerstein, Mel jetted over from Houston to Miami one June day in 1964, jumped into a white car provided by Candy, drove to a bar near Mossler's Key Biscayne home and picked up a king-sized Coke bottle. At the odd hour of 1 a.m., Candy took her children out for a drive to mail some letters, suffered a migraine headache and went to a hospital, where she received several phone calls from an unidentified man. Meanwhile, Mossler's neighbors heard him scream, "Don't! Don't do this to me!" and saw a man hurtle away in a white car. When Candy got home, her "dear husband" was dead of a crushed skull and 39 knife wounds.

In his opening statement, Lawyer Foreman depicted Mossler as such a "pirate" tycoon and depraved homosexual that "many times" more than 39 enemies would have been glad to take turns with the knife. But he did little to support the allegations. He had no need to. Arrested in Houston, Powers had been held incommunicado for several days by Texas Rangers. As a result, his only statement, which might have helped to incriminate him, was inadmissible at the Miami trial; the prosecution had to rely on indirect evidence. Witnesses placed Powers aboard a Miami-bound jet the afternoon of the murder and at the bar. But the Coke bottle never turned up, a palm print of Powers found in Mossler's kitchen could have been days old, and a bloody handprint on Mossler's body was unidentifiable. The white car, found at the airport, was bloodless; neighbors could testify only that it looked "similar" to the getaway car.

Tawdry Witnesses. By introducing no witnesses for Powers, Foreman limited the state's opportunities to cross-examine, while he himself went to work to tear down the state's witnesses and make the most of Candy's. Under Florida procedure, Foreman's no-witness tactic also entitled him to the opening and closing arguments.

A master cross-examiner, Foreman made hash of the state's witnesses--a clutch of convicts and others who told in gutter argot of assorted sexual stunts that they said Mel boasted of performing with Candy. Sex, the defense scoffed, does not prove murder. After one Texas thief and drug addict testified that Candy gave him $7,000 to kill Mossler, and an ex-con carnival worker said that Mel offered $10,000 for the same job, the defense produced both men's wives to testify that their husbands were liars. Another con, who claimed that Mel had asked him to kidnap Mossler, was so deflated by Foreman that part of his confused and contradictory testimony was stricken.

Armchair Detectives. Over and over, Foreman alluded to an alleged conspiracy between Miami police and Mossler's other relatives to railroad the defendants and get control of the estate. The jury, well aware that Dade County (Miami) police are currently under fire for various scandals, quickly got the hint. To cap it all, the defense produced 1) an ex-Mossler handyman who said that he had seen the financier cavorting half naked with three youths; 2) an insurance agent who owned a white convertible, and had once lived with Mossler; 3) police testimony that Interior Decorator Fred Weissel, an alleged homosexual and owner of a white car, had been questioned after he was found beaten and bloody six miles from the scene on the night of the murder. In his melodramatic, five-hour summation, Foreman thundered that a "cabal" was out to get the defendants, strongly implied that the police were shielding Weissel. The all-male jury put in 16 1/2 hours before it could agree. And much of the time was spent in theorizing about the possible guilt of Weissel, although the jurymen had heard little evidence connecting him with Mossler--a tribute to the mesmeric skill of Lawyer Foreman. As for Widow Mossler, she and her nephew are now free to enjoy a duly inherited $28 million of her husband's money.

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