Barnett By The Bay - Eric Safire

In a city where big-name lawyers have small armies of partners, paralegals, powerful clients, skyhigh corner offices and $1000 an hour fees, Eric M. Safire travels a low and lonely road.

    He works solo out of a Fillmore Street Victorian, representing often dead broke clients accused of murder and crimes almost as bad. He also takes up the cause of hard-luck folks who’ve been injured on their job but that’s another story.

     Safire is one of the last of a vanishing breed—the neighborhood criminal defense lawyer. And while he doesn’t have the marquee rep of San Francisco legal legends like Mel Belli, Jake Ehrlich, Vincent Hallinan and his boys, Stewart Hanlon, Tony Serra—the list goes on—Safire’s courtroom cunning, relentless cross examination and skill in compassionately connecting with jurors and planting the seed of reasonable doubt, has won him a large dose of respect from judges and prosecutors over the last three and a half decades.  

    “Eric is a true believer in defending the individual’s constitutional rights,” says Savannah Blackwell, another San Francisco criminal defense lawyer. “I’ve seen him reduce a cop almost to tears on the stand when Eric senses the guy was stretching the facts to establish the cause for an arrest. He’s like a bulldog. It gives you the chills.”

     Yet Safire, in person, and according to other lawyers and prosecutors interviewed, is not the bombastic, swaggering, headline grabber often portrayed in film and television courtrooms. Just the opposite. He has a certain cinematic flair about him but it’s more low-key.

     “Eric Safire was a formidable opponent in the courtroom--honest, clever, creative with a lot of jury appeal who took on cases nobody else would touch,” recalls Paul Cummins, a former prosecutor and chief assistant in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office for 34 years, “He doesn’t talk down to jurors, he kinda relates to them. He goes to court wearing a hat, rain or shine, fought hard, fought ethically. He doesn’t come in bare knuckled. He doesn’t throw dirty punches. I respect him. I can’t say that for all criminal defense lawyers.”

       Cummins, who is in private practice today specializing in workers’ comp cases, says Safire “got more than a few unexpected (courtroom) victories” against the DA’s office. And it was always a shocker. “It’s not because we were better than the defense attorneys. But because our charging standards are so high, we’re not going in with a ‘maybe’ case. When we presented a case and went through oodles of preliminary motions, we should win. So when Eric would win his cases against us, that was a very unusual thing at the Hall of Justice and we heard about it.”

    Eric Safire doesn’t come from a long line of family lawyers, never clerked for a federal judge, didn’t attend a prestigious law school. His dad was a used car salesman in Scranton, PA who later went into the advertising business with Eric’s uncles. Muses Safire: “It’s just like my dad who was trying to sell a reasonable used car, I’m trying to sell reasonable doubt.”

    Safire opened Philadelphia’s first Haagen Dazs shop while in college, then was picked, along with other students, to plan Bicentennial events around the country. That introduced him to San Francisco. He later applied to every law school in Philly but when they were slow in responding, he mailed an application to Golden Gate University’s Law School, was quickly accepted and moved west. “I didn’t’ want to wait around,” he remembers.

     . But when Safire graduated, he couldn’t get work locally and took a job as a public defender in the wilds of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. As a rookie, he tried 80 cases in three years, defending murderers, drug dealers and hunters shooting moose out of season. He won 30 percent of the cases.

     Safire returned to the Bay Area in January, 198l, passed the California Bar exam and hung out his first shingle on lower Polk St., eventually moving ‘up’ to the Tenderloin at 433 Turk. “My father always wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer because they would be respected. As a lawyer, he told me to always show up for my clients and take every case.”

    He took his dad’s advice, every word of it. “Everyone is entitled to a defense and there are varying degrees of guilt,” contends Safire. “I never really know—I never really ask my clients-- if they’re guilty or not. I take a look at the evidence the prosecution has against him and formulate a defense. The other side has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

     Early in his career, Safire was a plaintiff’s lawyer working civil actions, when 19 SFPD plainclothes officers with guns drawn, raided Lord Jim’s fern bar on Polk and Broadway in 1984, arresting the owner on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting two women and accusing him of selling cocaine. About 60 customers and employees were searched and detained for two-and-a-half hours. But it was a bad bust.

   “I hung out at Lord Jim’s all the time and so did a lot of public defenders and people from law school and while I wasn’t there that night, they were,” says Safire. “I sued the city and the police department on behalf of 22 people who were victims of egregious police misconduct.” Eventually, the city settled out of court, paid the detainees “hundreds of thousands of dollars” and the DA dropped the charges against the bar owner for lack of evidence.

     The young lawyer pocketed $5000 in 1990 for six years work and bought a 1971 very used convertible Mercedes. “I loved that car. Charles Breyer, very successful lawyer in town who’s now on the federal bench, drove one and I wanted to be just like Chuck.” (Breyer’s brother, Stephen, is a U.S. Supreme Court Justice).

     Safire didn’t endear himself to the police department or City Hall when he got eyeball deep in an explosive civil case known as “Fajitagate” that erupted into a full-blown scandal for the police department. The year was 2002 when two young men walked by the Bus Stop bar on Union St. at 1 am carrying takeout steak fajitas. They were allegedly attacked by three twentysomething off-duty police officers who had been drinking. One was the son of then deputy police chief Alex Fagan Sr. A fight broke out, there were arrests, followed by a grand jury indictment alleging obstruction of an assault investigation naming a platoon of police brass including the chief that was later dropped.

    Safire represented one of the victims, Adam Snyder, a bartender at Boz Scaggs’ nearby Blue Light Café, who suffered some minor injuries. The three cops were eventually acquitted. Fagan Jr. left the force but the plaintiffs still filed a $2.5 million assault lawsuit against the city. “We settled for a lot less,” says Safire, clearly not gloating over even the small victory. “In those days, before videos and cameras everywhere, it was very hard to beat City Hall.”

     Safire, today works out of a restored two- story Victorian on upper Fillmore, a flashy candy-colored Caddy parked in the driveway. He bought the Victorian with fees from civil cases which, he claims, were often suits “no one else would touch. But my heart was in criminal defense.”

     Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s Public Defender who heads an office of 100 attorneys and 80 support staff that represent the indigent, describes Eric Safire as the “go to person when you are in really big trouble. He’s an amazing lawyer with a huge heart, who takes a lot of cases other lawyers would shy away from, and works those cases really hard. He’s insistent, persistent and his victories are legendary.”

       Adachi is fast to point out he never worked at the defense table with Safire. “When I was fired 20 years ago as chief attorney by Kimiko Burton after she was appointed to fill out a term as public defender, I didn’t have anywhere to go. I decided to go into private practice and Eric was kind enough to offer me a rented office and I got to know him. He has this great sense of humor and is very passionate about social justice.” A year later, with Safire’s support. Adachi ran against Burton in a general election, was elected Public Defender and took over the office “Eric was one of my strongest supporters,” said Adachi, “and became a lifelong friend.”

      (Eric Safire himself took a flyer at elected office when he ran for Superior Court judge in 2006. Lillian Sing, a retired judge, highly regarded and politically connected Democrat, was running unopposed and Safire was solicited to take her on. “It was a last-minute, three month campaign and great fun. I was signing up people in churches, at Muni bus stops. I won North Beach, got 28,000 votes and was defeated.”)

       Stuart Hanlon, a seasoned, high-profile San Francisco criminal defense attorney whose clients have ranged from Black Panther Elmer “Geranimo” Pratt, several Symbionese Liberation Army ‘soldiers’ to ex San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr, argues that “a lot of lawyers look down on their clients. Erik finds the good, the humanity in people he represents. He is a standup guy for young African American men in the Fillmore, a really, really good lawyer who’s never gotten the recognition he deserved”.

       Safire’s reputation is not pristine. A former San Francisco public defender, now a criminal defense attorney, remembers him “from the old days in the Hall of Justice. There’s a lot of stories under that hat not to mention a lot of brains. Eric knows all the tricks and some of them are shady.” He declines to elaborate.

        One Safire tactic that almost worked caused a furor at a preliminary hearing and accusations of “blatant witness tampering,” by the prosecutor. Safire’s client, an alleged Western Addition gang member named Charles “Cheese” Heard, was on trial for murder after he was identified by a witness at a 1 am shooting outside a North Beach nightclub in 2008. “She told the police my client was the shooter claiming he had a gold tooth. I asked for a (police) lineup but the DA squashed it. I filed a motion for lineup with the judge and he refused it. I asked the hearing judge if I could bring in some guys to the courtroom and hold a little impromptu lineup. He said ‘OK.’”

      Safire brought in eight young African American men with “grillz” (mouths filled with gold teeth) and told them to “stand up.” But the witness still picked out his client as the shooter, It wasn’t that hard. He was sitting at the defense table in an orange jail jumpsuit. The case went to a jury trial and to shield Cheese from a murder charge, Safire tried a high-tech tactic: facial identification biometrics, a strategy usually used by prosecutors, not criminal defense lawyers.

     Safire knew that a surveillance camera captured the footage of the person who “probably” shot the victim, persuaded the trial judge to allow testimony from an expert witness from Beverly Hills who made a biometric comparison of still frames from the video with photos taken of Cheese while he was in jail, arguing the defendant could not possibly be the shooter. The D.A. brought in its facial recognition expert from the national crime lab at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, VA. Despite being outgunned. Safire convinced the jury his client didn’t pull the trigger. But that was cold comfort. Cheese was convicted of murder based on “accomplice liability” and got a life sentence. “I beat the D.A. but I couldn’t beat the jury.”                      

    Other cases have been more decisive. Jaime Gutierrez was a gang member as a teenager who grew up, opened an auto mechanic repair shop in the Mission and built it into a success. A homeboy named Abraham “Spanky” Guerra was a notorious Norteno gang member and a paid confidential informant for the SFPDs Gang Task force who attempted to extort Gutierrez for a piece of his business. One day, Guerra showed up with a loaded gun and made a threat. The mechanic grabbed a shotgun. “Spanky fired, Jaime blew him away, was charged with murder one and we pled self- defense,” says Safire”

   Safire’s longtime private investigator Steve Vender who worked the case, says he was “actually helped in our defense by another gang, the Nuesta Familia. Spanky was collecting taxes on drug dealers and not kicking back to the leadership in Pelican Bay (prison) and was about to be ‘hit.’” There were two jury trials. The first was a hung jury and the second was not guilty. Says Vender: “It was some of the greatest courtroom drama I’ve seen in my 23 year career. It pissed off the cops and the DA because Spanky was a snitch and they had to show they could protect their street sources.” Adds Safire. “We stuck with it until we got him out of jail. Jaime’s out today with his family, working, raising his kids.” 

 Eric Safire isn’t one of those attorneys who logs every billable minute, doesn’t return phone calls and is always in a meeting. He does not burn out his staff. Assistants stick around for years, often have double digit tenures and are fanatically loyal. His current personal assistant who’s worked for him for the last 17 years but keeps a low-profile and doesn’t want to be named in this article, puts it this way. “We were introduced by a mutual friend, a private investigator. We sat down and talked. Never gave him a resume. Within 15 minutes he said ‘you’re hired, when can you start?’. I stay because he truly has a heart of gold and wants to make a difference. In San Francisco, all good people find each other.”

   Friends and colleagues insists Safire gives far more than he gets. “Eric has a profound sense of service and his goal is to help people,” contends Paula Canny, a Burlingame criminal defense lawyer who met him in the mid eighties. “Eric is the perfect neighborhood lawyer who can write a will, draw up a trust, probate an estate and defend you. Any neighborhood person could walk into his office and he would know how to solve their problem.”

    Canny claims he is also “a good friend who is with you in tough times. We trauma bonded 12 years ago when I was super, super sick with breast cancer, too sick to practice for a year. He was super helpful, always there for me. He’s real.” Canny returned the favor when Safire was diagnosed with leukemia two years ago in the middle of a murder trial. It slowed him down for awhile but did not knock him out of the game. He’s currently in remission.

     His game extends well beyond the courtroom.

     “Eric Safire is known here as Moshe the Deliverer,” says Nancy Sheftel-Gomes, education director at Temple Sherith Israel on California St. where she runs a synagogue soup kitchen for two homeless shelters and where, she says, “he is a devoted congregant.”

     “Eric picks up the food religiously and delivers it to the shelters and the congregants in lower Pacific Heights and the Western Addition and has been doing it for 25 years,” says Jones. “He doesn’t do the cooking and, fortunately, I’ve never had to use his services.” The lawyer also serves as president of the temple’s cemetery board.

    Safire and the temple have teamed up in other ways. The congregation was supportive of his efforts to reverse the conviction of J.J. Tenison, a local high schooler who was locked up for 14 years for a murder he did not commit Safire’s tenacity eventually sprung him and the lawyer arranged for his client to speak at Sheftel-Gomes classes. “J.J, was so honest with the children. He said, ‘I didn’t do it but I could have done it. I had good parents, was in school but I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and making bad decisions.’”

     Safire works in the north Fillmore and lives in the outer Richmond but his ‘hood, says Sheftel-Gomes and others, is the Western Addition. “Geary Blvd. in this city could be the Panama Canal, the great divide, and when someone needs him down there or anywhere, he’s ready to get in his car and go, anytime of day. Very honest guy. Worries about stuff. Cares about people.”’

   Since 1997, Safire has been sponsoring a pro-am basketball league through the city’s parks and recreation department aimed at keeping inner city youth busy and off the streets. He’s had a couple Golden State Warriors and other pros. But, no surprise, Safire isn’t just a spectator.

    A player became a client. After a game, police followed Alfonso Williams home, found a “little residue on a plate they believed to be narcotic, arrested and jailed him,” recalls Safire. “I was so mad. Alfonso was set to be observed by college scouts. I went out to the Olympic Club, got in a golf cart, caught up with a judge on the second hole, explained the situation, got a release order, and drove him to the basketball court where the scouts were.” Williams wound up with a full scholarship to Kentucky Wesleyan University.

    These days, Safire is taking life a little bit easier but not much. At 64, he is still a single dad. His daughter, a San Francisco City College student, lives with him and with Ringo, his current rescue pooch. He has a 27 year old son interested in left wing journalism with a day job as a server in a new, buzzy San Francisco restaurant. Safire works out four times a week at the Presidio Golf and Concordia Club but he’s no Arnold Schwarzenegger or Arnold Palmer wannabee. He gave up drinking five years ago.

     Safire is strictly a coffee guy now. The habit started when San Francisco’s famed private investigator, Hal Lipset, would invite young criminal lawyers over to his Pacific Heights home to talk cases over morning coffee tea and the New York Times crossword puzzle. “Hal was my mentor. That’s how we all started the day and then went to court.”

    That was more than 200 trials and 40 years ago. And most of those trials he lost—sort of.

        “When you’re defending the accused against ‘the people’ in a criminal case, the city almost never loses,” says Safire. They have the full force of the police department behind them. They have the DAs and their investigators who only go forward on a case when they are sure they’re going to win. The deck is stacked against us and they beat the s--- out of us”.

      But even when Safire wins one, he doesn’t crow about it. “If the guy gets off, that’s huge. But if he gets 10 years instead of 20 years, I like to say that I prevailed. I’m not an intellectually gifted lawyer but I’m a scrapper.”

      How much longer can he keep answering the bell?

      “Retire? Me? Never. I don’t know what I’d do.”

Chris Barnett is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist, media consultant and ghostwriter who specializes in business, finance, innovations, travel, dining and insightful profiles for numerous publications and websites including Journal of Commerce. A former syndicated travel and business columnist with Copley News Service, he also pens a popular column on great bars and saloons around the globe for inflight and other travel publications. Reach him at [email protected]