He collapsed right in the middle of a packed courtroom. He was

one of this country's most distinguished trial lawyers. He was also

a man who was as well known for the three-thousand-dollar Italian

suits which draped his well-fed frame as for his remarkable string

of legal victories. I simply stood there, paralyzed by the shock of

what I had just witnessed. The great Julian Mantle had been

reduced to a victim and was now squirming on the ground like a

helpless infant, shaking and shivering and sweating like a maniac.

Everything seemed to move in slow motion from that point on.

"My God, Julian's in trouble!" his paralegal screamed, emotionally

offering us a blinding glimpse of the obvious. The judge looked

panic-stricken and quickly muttered something into the private

phone she had had installed in the event of an emergency. As for

me, I could only stand there, dazed and confused. Please don't die,

you old fool. Its too early for you to check out. You don't deserve

to die like this.

The bailiff, who earlier had looked as if he had been embalmed

in his standing position, leapt into action and started to perform

CPR on the fallen legal hero. The paralegal was at his side, her ong blond curls dangling over Julian's ruby-red face, offering him

soft words of comfort, words which he obviously could not hear.

I had known Julian for seventeen years. We had first met when

I was a young law student hired by one of his partners as a summer

research intern. Back then, he'd had it all. He was a brilliant, hand-

some and fearless trial attorney with dreams of greatness. Julian

was the firm's young star, the rain-maker in waiting. I can still

remember walking by his regal corner office while I was working

late one night and stealing a glimpse of the framed quotation

perched on his massive oak desk. It was by Winston Churchill and

it spoke volumes about the man that Julian was:

Sure I am that this day we are masters of our fate, that the

task which has been set before us is not above our strength;

that its pangs and toils are not beyond my endurance. As

long as we have faith in our own cause and an uncon-

querable will to win, victory will not be denied us.

Julian also walked his talk. He was tough, hard-driving and

willing to work eighteen-hour days for the success he believed was

his destiny. I heard through the grapevine that his grandfather

had been a prominent senator and his father a highly respected

judge of the Federal Court. It was obvious that he came from

money and that there were enormous expectations weighing on his

Armani-clad shoulders. I'll admit one thing though: he ran his own

race. He was determined to do things his own way — and he loved

to put on a show.

Julian's outrageous courtroom theatrics regularly made the front

pages of the newspapers. The rich and famous flocked to his side

whenever they needed a superb legal tactician with an aggressive edge. His extra-curricular activities were probably as well known.

Late-night visits to the city's finest restaurants with sexy young fash-

ion models, or reckless drinking escapades with the rowdy band of

brokers he called his "demolition team" became the stuff of legend at

the firm.

I still can't figure out why he picked me to work with him on

that sensational murder case he was to argue that first summer.

Though I had graduated from Harvard Law School, his alma

mater, I certainly wasn't the brightest intern at the firm, and my

family pedigree reflected no blue blood. My father spent his whole

life as a security guard with a local bank after a stint in the

Marines. My mother grew up unceremoniously in the Bronx.

Yet he did pick me over all the others who had been quietly

lobbying him for the privilege of being his legal gofer on what

became known as "the Mother of All Murder Trials": he said he

liked my "hunger." We won, of course, and the business executive

who had been charged with brutally killing his wife was now a free

man — or as free as his cluttered conscience would let him be.

My own education that summer was a rich one. It was far

more than a lesson on how to raise a reasonable doubt where none

existed — any lawyer worth his salt could do that. This was a

lesson in the psychology of winning and a rare opportunity to

watch a master in action. I soaked it up like a sponge.

At Julian's invitation, I stayed on at the firm as an associate,

and a lasting friendship quickly developed between us. I will

admit that; he wasn't the easiest lawyer to work with. Serving as

his junior was often an exercise in frustration, leading to more

than a few late-night shouting matches. It was truly his way or the

highway. This man could never be wrong. However, beneath his

crusty exterior was a person who clearly cared about people. No matter how busy he was, he would always ask about Jenny,

the woman I still call "my bride" even though we were married

before I went to law school. On finding out from another summer

intern that I was in a financial squeeze, Julian arranged for me to

receive a generous scholarship. Sure, he could play hardball with

the best of them, and sure, he loved to have a wild time, but he

never neglected his friends. The real problem was that Julian was

obsessed with work.

For the first few years he justified his long hours by saying that

he was "doing it for the good of the firm", and that he planned to

take a month off and go to the Caymans "next winter for sure." As

time passed, however, Julian's reputation for brilliance spread and

his workload continued to increase. The cases just kept on getting

bigger and better, and Julian, never one to back down from a good

challenge, continued to push himself harder and harder. In his rare

moments of quiet, he confided that he could no longer sleep for

more than a couple of hours without waking up feeling guilty that

he was not working on a file. It soon became clear to me that he was

being consumed by the hunger for more: more prestige, more glory

and more money.

As expected, Julian became enormously successful. He

achieved everything most people could ever want: a stellar profes-

sional reputation with an income in seven figures, a spectacular

mansion in a neighborhood favored by celebrities, a private jet, a

summer home on a tropical island and his prized possession — a

shiny red Ferrari parked in the center of his driveway.

Yet I knew that things were not as idyllic as they appeared on

the surface. I observed the signs of impending doom not because I

was so much more perceptive than the others at the firm, but

simply because I spent the most time with the man. We were always together because we were always at work. Things never

seemed to slow down. There was always another blockbuster case

on the horizon that was bigger than the last. No amount of prepa-

ration was ever enough for Julian. What would happen if the

judge brought up this question or that question, God forbid? What

would happen if our research was less than perfect? What would

happen if he was surprised in the middle of a packed courtroom,

looking like a deer caught in the glare of an intruding pair of head-

lights? So we pushed ourselves to the limit and I got sucked into

his little work-centered world as well. There we were, two slaves

to the clock, toiling away on the sixty-fourth floor of some steel and

glass monolith while most sane people were at home with their

families, thinking we had the world by the tail, blinded by an illu-

sory version of success.

The more time I spent with Julian, the more I could see that

he was driving himself deeper into the ground. It was as if he had

some kind of a death wish. Nothing ever satisfied him. Eventually,

his marriage failed, he no longer spoke with his father, and though

he had every material possession anyone could want, he still had

not found whatever it was that he was looking for. It

showed, emotionally, physically — and spiritually.

At fifty-three years of age, Julian looked as if he was in his

late seventies. His face was a mass of wrinkles, a less than glori-

ous tribute to his "take no prisoners" approach to life in general

and the tremendous stress of his out-of-balance lifestyle in partic-

ular. The late-night dinners in expensive French restaurants,

smoking thick Cuban cigars and drinking cognac after cognac,

had left him embarrassingly overweight. He constantly

complained that he was sick and tired of being sick and tired. He

had lost his sense of humor and never seemed to laugh anymore.

Julian's once enthusiastic nature had been replaced by a deathly

somberness. Personally, I think that his life had lost all sense of

purpose.

Perhaps the saddest thing was that he had also lost his focus in

the courtroom. Where he would once dazzle all those present with

an eloquent and airtight closing argument, he now droned on for

hours, rambling about obscure cases that had little or no bearing

on the matter before the Court. Where once he would react grace-

fully to the objections of opposing counsel, he now displayed a

biting sarcasm that severely tested the patience of judges who had

earlier viewed him as a legal genius. Simply put, Julian's spark of

life had begun to flicker.

It wasn't just the strain of his frenetic pace that was marking

him for an early grave. I sensed it went far deeper. It seemed to

be a spiritual thing. Almost every day he would tell me that he felt

no passion for what he was doing and was enveloped by emptiness.

Julian said that as a young lawyer, he really loved the Law, even

though he was initially pushed into it by the social agenda of his

family. The Law's complexities and intellectual challenges had

kept him spellbound and full of energy. Its power to effect social

change had inspired and motivated him. Back then, he was more

than just some rich kid from Connecticut. He really saw himself

as a force for good, an instrument for social improvement who

could use his obvious gifts to help others. That vision gave his life

meaning. It gave him a purpose and it fuelled his hopes.

There was even more to Julian's undoing than a rusty

connection to what he did for a living. He had suffered some

great tragedy before I had joined the firm. Something truly

unspeakable had happened to him, according to one of the senior

partners, but I couldn't get anyone to open up about it. Even old man Harding, the notoriously loose-lipped managing partner

who spent more time in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton than in his

embarrassingly large office, said that he was sworn to secrecy.

Whatever this deep, dark secret was, I had a suspicion that it, in

some way, was contributing to Julian's downward spiral. Sure I

was curious, but most of all, I wanted to help him. He was not

only my mentor; he was my best friend.

And then it happened. This massive heart attack that brought

the brilliant Julian Mantle back down to earth and reconnected

him to his mortality. Right in the middle of courtroom number

seven on a Monday morning, the same courtroom where we had

won the Mother of All Murder Trials.