True Confessions of a Little Rock Lawyer (Opinion)

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. And lately it even seems to be fashionable.

Edmund Andrews, an economics reporter for The New York Times, has been the man of the hour since an excerpt from his upcoming book, “Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown,” was published in The New York Times Magazine a couple of Sundays back.

If you haven’t read that excerpt – called “My Personal Credit Crisis” – I would recommend it highly. It had me sweating more than the finale of “American Idol”: An intelligent, educated and informed professional took on a mortgage with a monthly payment of $2,500 knowing full well that he had only $2,777 in monthly income after child support and alimony. When he described how “overdraft protection” ran his credit card debt up to $50,000, my heart was in my throat.

Fortunately for Mr. Andrews, he presumably has a nice advance from his book publisher to help tide him over while he waits to be foreclosed upon.

Not so for Little Rock lawyer Gene Cauley. He, too, has had to acknowledge very bad financial habits. But instead of just losing his house and gaining a book deal, Cauley is losing his law license and going to jail.

In his petition to voluntarily surrender his law license, Cauley confessed to the state Supreme Court: “I failed to safely hold the last $9.3 million of [escrow funds held for clients] and pay the[m] over when required to do so. I made false statements to others to explain my failure to pay over these funds, which I used for other and unauthorized purposes.”

Cauley is scheduled to enter a guilty plea to two federal charges of wire fraud and criminal contempt on June 1, which will be the confession that matters. And people who suggest that he’ll somehow escape prison time simply don’t know anything about the federal justice system.

He may not get the same 15-year sentence as Keith Moser, another former Little Rock lawyer who helped himself to client money, but he’ll do significant jail time.

Now it’s time for my confession. I have been feeling guilty ever since I learned that Cauley had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. I feel guilty because, while I’m truly not happy that Cauley turned out to be a crook, I have enjoyed what I consider vindication.

If I had known that it was the first of many, I would have taken notes on that first angry phone call from Gene. I can’t even remember what set him off that time, or the many other times. If I had $20 for every time he threatened me with a libel suit or, more recently, a restraining order, I’d take my husband out for a nice meal.

Cauley, I quickly deduced, is a classic bully. I’m only an amateur psychologist (or maybe I’ve just been a mother for a long time), but I suspect he became frustrated with me and with Arkansas Business because he didn’t have any control over what we reported. He told me several times to just leave his name out of our newspaper, and I reminded him that he had chosen to be a litigator, a real estate investor, a bank investor and (briefly) a director of a publicly traded company. He chose the most transparent lines of business, the public records of which we regularly mine for news.

Last fall, when one of our reporters contacted him about a lawsuit he had filed, he responded with a registered letter that contained what he said was his final “quote” for publication.

We didn’t use it at the time, but now it seems especially appropriate.

“Arkansas Business is similar to the nearby landfill — each is inhabited by trash and emits a foul odor throughout the community. You will grow weary searching for a knowledgeable person who considers Arkansas Business to be anything other than a public nuisance. Until I see that Arkansas Business offers something other than the lists, gossip and inaccurate articles it has historically peddled — and had made a public and suitable amends for its repeated bad acts — this will remain my quote on any and all future inquiries, regardless of subject matter.”

Amends must be made for bad acts, Gene Cauley says. And about that, he is right.

(Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business, sister publication to the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal. E-mail her at [email protected].