Attorneys Under Attack

Courage Under Fire
Corporate attorney Keith Radtke stops a fugitive

It was 9 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, and attorney Keith Radtke had just put his three kids to bed. He was looking forward to watching some TV with his wife, Jody, after a long week. Daine Linderman had other plans. The 23-year-old fugitive, on the run from Wisconsin police after a shoot-out in Hudson, had crashed his Chevy Blazer near the Bungalow Inn in the quiet town of Lakeland, Minn. Desperate for transportation, and with police on his tail, Linderman found his way to Radtke's front door.

Five minutes after he settled in on the living room couch, Radtke, a 37-year-old corporate lawyer with Faegre & Benson, heard a rattling outside the house. Before he had a chance to investigate, the door flew open and Radtke was face-to-face with a man pointing an assault rifle at him and his wife. "Take whatever you want," Radtke told the fugitive, according to the criminal complaint. But Linderman insisted Radtke and his wife head to their minivan in the garage. 

As they walked, Linderman had his attention diverted for just a second and Radtke saw his opportunity. The 6-foot-2-inch, 190-pound lawyer slapped the rifle out of the hands of his 5-foot-10-inch, 145-pound assailant and jumped on him, securing him in a bear hug. Jody ran inside to call 911. Linderman fought back, biting Radtke on his back, neck, arm and wrist. Then he pulled a pistol out from the front of his waistband and shot Radtke in the left lower back. Radtke heard the blast before he felt anything.

Still, he held on to the intruder and struggled to grab the pistol. He slammed his attacker's hand, and the pistol, against the stair rail, breaking it free of Linderman's grip before throwing it into the driveway. "You made me shoot you," Linderman said to Radtke as they continued to wrestle. Finally, police arrived. Linderman was Tasered and taken into custody while Radtke was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul.

That's when the gratitude hit him. He had remembered that earlier in the evening, when he got home, "I really wanted to relax, and my kids wanted to build a skateboard ramp. And I thought, ‘I'd much rather relax, but I should probably go build the skateboard ramp.' So we did that together, and it was fun.

"When I was in the hospital, that was all I could really think about-Thank God that I did that instead of relaxing on the couch and saying, ‘We'll do it later.' If something really is happening here to me, thank God that that's what my kids hopefully will remember.'"

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. The bullet hit no major organs-just muscle and tissue. No stitches were needed. After two days in the hospital, Radtke was released, shaky but on the mend. Today, he is completely recovered.

Linderman, of Lino Lakes, was charged in Washington County District Court with nine counts, including burglary, attempted kidnapping, fleeing police, assault and attempted murder. He's also in trouble with the feds after crossing state lines. He had already fired about 50 rounds at Hudson police officers, who were pursuing him for speeding by the time he arrived at Radtke's home overlooking the St. Croix River.

A familiar face in the Lino Lakes, Stillwater and St. Cloud prisons-his record includes prior convictions for assault, drug possession and auto theft-Linderman was indicted in October 2007. He pleaded guilty to the carjacking and firearms charges in May and has not yet been sentenced.

Because the case is active, and out of respect for his family's privacy, Radtke is tight-lipped. But he stresses that law enforcement are the heroes in this case, not he. "I didn't choose to be in this situation. I just did what I think any parent or spouse would do under the circumstances," he says. "Law enforcement-they come in and they know that by doing so, they might be in harm's way, and they're helping people they don't even know. I'm protecting my family. I think that's what anyone would do.

"I have no idea if I did the right thing and I don't pretend to know that that was the right approach," he says. "For me, it's just simply by the grace of God that everything turned out like it did."

Banned from Mexico
Not that Jeff Anderson, who was assaulted and nearly kidnapped in Mexico City, would want to go back

Jeff Anderson is no stranger to threats. This is a man, after all, who has publicly condemned the Catholic Church for covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests. He expects to feel some danger. He didn't expect this.

Anderson was in the middle of a press conference at his hotel in Mexico City in September 2006-where he traveled to accuse the most prominent cardinal in Mexico, Norberto Rivera, of protecting a pedophile priest-when the trouble started. He was called aside by eight men claiming to be immigration authorities. They asked to see his papers and insisted on escorting him up to his room to review the documents. When Anderson asked to see their identification, the men flashed it too fast for him to read anything. "It was all very suspicious," he says. The men then brought him downstairs.

In the hotel lobby, the men surrounded Anderson and his bilingual co-counsel, Vance Owen of Owen & Associates in Corpus Christi, grabbing and pulling at them and trying to force them into a black van with darkened windows. "I said, ‘Vance, what do I do?' And he says to me, ‘Pray to God.' And I said, ‘What kind of legal advice is that?'

"[Later on] I said, ‘What happened there?' He said, ‘Jeff, it was a kidnapping.'"

The embassy and metropolitan police arrived in time to scatter the men, and Anderson was escorted directly to the airport. Anderson believes the men were sent by Rivera, who thought the lawsuit was designed to extort and blackmail him. A week later, Anderson got a letter from Mexican immigration authorities saying he was banned from the country for at least five years on the grounds that he held a press conference without authorization.

"To cover their asses, they issued the proclamation to make it look like I had done something wrong when, in fact, I hadn't," says Anderson. "Because they had no business trying to detain me, but they were answering to the cardinal instead of to the law, because the cardinal is the law. The Catholic Church used to run that country. Still does, to some extent."

Suffice it to say, he has no plans to return-"I'm bold, but I'm not that dumb," he says. He does plan to fight the action to keep him out of the country, as a matter of principle. And he is still crafting ways to use the U.S. legal system to go after Mexican priests like Cardinal Rivera, who, he says, turn a blind eye to pedophiles within the church and move them around between parishes.

"There's no precedent for accusing a priest, publicly or privately," he says. "Anybody who has tried is suppressed or threatened or intimidated. And that's why it remains such a huge problem in Mexico."

All the more reason for Anderson to persist. He relishes the battle. "The more people react to this, the more I'm hitting the nerves that need to be hit, the more effective I feel and the stronger the moral imperative is," he says. "I pray that I don't lose a client or anybody close to me to violence, and I'm grateful it hasn't come to that, but I know that this is something I have to do."

Opposing Parties from Hell
Two attorneys find danger in the most unlikely of cases

With a client roster that includes violent criminals, Chris Rosengren wasn't expecting a property dispute between an elderly brother and sister to be the case that would make him fear for his life.

The man had filed a mechanic's lien on the property and the sister hired Rosengren to get it lifted. Then things got ugly.

"One day, he waited for my client to get to work. He knocked on her window and he said, ‘If you don't drop this lawsuit right now, you're dead and your fucking attorney is dead,'" says Rosengren, of Gislason & Hunter in Mankato.

Rosengren, a former Army paratrooper and prosecutor, responded with a harassment restraining order. He also got a permit to carry a handgun, a more difficult feat before the conceal and carry law passed in 2003. "I'm not saying I was cowering," says Rosengren, "but I'm also not gonna say that when I walked out to my car I wasn't thinking twice or looking around to see if someone was hiding in the shadows."

As Bloomington police investigated a terroristic threats charge, Rosengren faced the man at trial. "Other than cross-examining him, I never spoke another word to him," he says.

Elizabeth Larsen's brush with danger also took place in Mankato and involved a property dispute. Larsen, a business and commercial litigation shareholder at Leonard, Street and Deinard, was representing a mechanic who'd placed a lien on a property after he was not paid for a well he had built. To settle the dispute, Larsen set up a time with the property owner to come out with an expert and inspect the well.

When she arrived that morning with her client and a law student, she was greeted at the end of the driveway by the property owner - and a silver revolver. "As I'm getting out of the car, the client goes, ‘He's got something in his hands! It's a gun!'" says Larsen. "At the time, it was so out of the realm of normal, rational behavior that I kind of just couldn't believe it was happening. So I was very calm and just shaking my head, like, you gotta be kidding me!" Still, she wasn't going to argue with a man with a gun. She got in her car and drove back to Minneapolis.

It wasn't until later that the experience hit home. She had to face the man in court several times over the next year and a half; he relished the chance to hurl accusations, like "dirty trickster," at her. "I would have panic attacks," she says. "For a good year, I would have times where I would call my mother or my fiancé and say, ‘I just don't know if I can do this. I don't know if this is what I signed up for.'"

Still, she persevered, and is glad she did. "When I face difficult counsel or difficult people now, it's easier because I've already been through it and I don't get quite as worked up as I did in that case," says Larsen. "It made me a stronger attorney."

Worst Clients Ever
Beating up your attorney? Maybe not the best way to dodge those assault and murder charges

William Lehman wanted a new trial and a new attorney to defend him against his felony assault charges. But when the judge denied that request, Lehman took matters into his own hands. He attacked his court-appointed counsel, public defender Mark Groettum, in the middle of a St. Louis County District courtroom in July 2006.

"I was sitting with my back to him at counsel table and the next thing I know, he's got an arm wrapped around me and the other is punching me in the face," says Groettum. He pushed against Lehman to make it harder for the man to continue punching him. With blood spurting everywhere, both men fell to the floor. Then the sheriff's department and court personnel broke up the scuffle. "The jury had to have been really stunned because when he got tackled, we were two feet from the jurors," he says.

Groettum emerged with a black eye, cut lip and bloody face and nose but no serious injuries.

Not surprisingly, this turn of events didn't help Lehman's case. Calling the attack a transparent effort to obtain a mistrial in a case that was not going well for the defendant, Judge James Florey denied Lehman's request for a new attorney after the assault, and ordered that Lehman be shackled and dressed in his orange jail suit for the remainder of the trial. He was convicted on all counts and is serving 14 years at the Moose Lake state prison, plus six months for contempt of court.

In May 2008, the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld Florey's decision in an opinion stating that a defendant gives up his or her right to court-appointed counsel if he or she beats up the attorney he or she already has.

Although he had a contentious relationship with his client, the attack was "out of the blue," Groettum says, and the first in his 18 years as a public defender. He insists the assault was not personal. "This was about a case being lost."

Revelle Loving must not have heard about the Lehman case. He made the same mistake, attacking William Selman, his defense attorney, and punching him in the face as he was being led into a Hennepin County courtroom for sentencing in June 2008. Six sheriff's deputies restrained the 21-year-old man, who was convicted earlier that day of murdering his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. He is now serving life without parole in the Stillwater prison.