Books: Devil’s Advocate

THE WORLDS OF CHIPPY PATTERSON (31 I pp.)—Arfhur H. Lewis—Harcourt, Brace ($5).

Philadelphia “lawyers are a breed apart, but even among Philadelphia lawyers “Chippy” Patterson was known as the damnedest fellow who ever came down Broad Street. For more than a quarter century (1907-33), he was notorious as the evil but lovable genius of the city’s criminal courts, an attorney for the disreputable who passionately offered his services (generally free) as a devil’s advocate for all forms of socially unacceptable behavior—and the more desperate the case, the better Chippy liked it.

His father was a bank president, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, chief counsel and a director of the

Pennsylvania Railroad, and young Christopher was related to most of the first families of Philadelphia and New York. Alas, father was too busy to bother much with the children, and mother spent a good deal of time keeping up with the Stotesburys. “Chiffy” and his five siblings were pretty much raised by the servants. At 14. he began to look for compensations, and how he found them is told by Arthur H. Lewis, onetime reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in this clumsy but sensationally readable biography.

Seven-Year Campaign. Chiffy discovered the delights of his father’s cellar, and at 17, he was a problem drinker. One problem led to another. He began to chase chorus girls so enthusiastically that friends changed his nickname from Chiffy to Chippy. There is evidence that he forged a check to finance one of his expeditions, and he slept through most of his classes at the U. of P. But apparently the boy could learn in his sleep long before the hypnopaedia boom, and he had a trick memory besides. With these weapons he stole a passing grade on his bar examinations and then started an allout, seven-year campaign to knock off every bottle and blonde in Philadelphia.

At 29, Chippy realized that his once powerful physique (6 ft. 2 in., 190 Ibs.) was giving way. Alarmed by the increasing frequency of his alcoholic blackouts, he signed himself into a sanatorium and took the cure. He never had another drink in his life. At 32, ten years after passing his bar exams, Chippy Patterson at last felt ready to practice law.

He had no trouble finding clients when news got around that he never took a fee from the poor, even offered them handouts. Within a few months, Chippy’s waiting room and the corridor outside it were jammed every weekday morning with as many as a hundred dips, degenerates, con men, pete busters, second-story types. check artists, swindlers, arsonists, rapists, murderers, and a generous assortment of poor but honest citizens in trouble.

Felonious Gallantry. Chippy refused none of them, and before he died, after 26 years of practice, he had handled at least 125,000 actions at law. On an average day he represented no fewer than 25 clients, spending five hours a day in the courts of Oyer and Terminer, three more in the police courts at night. Often he got to bed at 4 a.m. and was up at 6. Once, when his landlord evicted him for nonpayment of rent, Chippy blithely set up business in the waiting room of Penn Station, where he consulted with clients in the privacy of two facing phone booths.

Despite the crushing load of cases that allowed him and his tiny staff—seldom more than one secretary and one investigator—no time to prepare any of them properly, he built up an impressive record of courtroom success. Items: Chippy handled 401 cases of homicide. “Even with ‘cop killers,'” reports the author, “regarded by all living policemen as bloodstains on their shields, he did rather well.” Chippy handled 25 such defendants; five of them got off scot-free, 15 went to prison, only five went to the chair. In the remaining 376 cases, Chippy won 166 acquittals; 207 of his clients went to jail for an average of only six years apiece; only three were executed.

He was not a brilliant courtroom orator, nor a subtle legal beagle. But he could sense in an instant the secret weakness of a witness, knew every judge and most of the prosecuting attorneys like the back of his hand. And he exercised a mysterious power over juries. They instinctively liked his warmth and kindliness, were awed and charmed by his patrician bearing. They were also amazed by a memory artist who could quote whole pages of law he had not seen for years, and delighted by an impious wit who, in defense of a teen-aged boy accused of raping a woman in her late 30s, could indignantly protest that the charge should be not rape but “felonious gallantry.”

Remembered Delinquency. Chippy found his closest acquaintances among his clients: madams, gunmen, racketeers. And though he wore the same old gravy-spotted suit for months at a time and fishing boots even in court, he was pursued by a horde of feminine admirers—most of them show girls, but many of them wealthy women, all seized by the same magnetism that captivated juries. Chippy, even in his 50s, invariably seemed ready to oblige. At one period he was known to be living with twins, and at another with three women in the same house—the wives of three crooks who, while serving two-to five-year terms, invited Chippy to assume their marital responsibilities, on the theory that the girls were going to be unfaithful anyway and it was better to know who the man was.

Chippy’s professional reputation was never touched by scandal. Once, when he discovered that a jury had been “spotted,” he instantly informed the judge and withdrew from the case. Author Lewis believes that, despite the invaluable services he rendered to organized crime, Chippy had a high respect for the rights of society. The trouble was that he had a stronger feeling for the rights of the criminal. Why? Perhaps partly. Author Lewis suggests, because of his own youthful delinquency. In Chippy’s obituary, one of his legal colleagues feelingly phrased the thought: “As he stood at the bar of the court, pleading for some victim of fortune’s scourge, he seemed to acknowledge at least part of the guilt in being a member of a society which permitted children to grow up in sordid slums, amid ugliness, vice and crime . . . He was more than a public defender. His attitude was almost that of co-defendant.”