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Disappearing act

Hartford lawyer F. Mac Buckley vanished for seven weeks, mystifing friends and colleagues. Now he's back, facing criminal charges, but the mystery lingers on.

Dan Williamson remembers precisely the first time he saw F. Mac Buckley.

Part of the reason he remembers is that Buckley would play a role in his life that no father could forget: Buckley would be the lawyer defending the man charged with beating Williamson's daughter to death with a fire poker while her young son watched. The other reason is that as he and his family sat waiting for Buckley in the jammed Willimantic Juvenile Court nine days after his daughter's death, Williamson kept hearing the buzz.

Mac Buckley was coming. Any minute now. Buckley - the famously flamboyant Hartford defense lawyer who was regarded by some as among the best in the business, the former political candidate and television commentator, the strawberry-complexioned storyteller and champion of city-strapped youths, an eclectic social migrant who was as comfortable in Hartford's seediest boxing gyms as at its white-glove soirees, a man, in short, who was about as close as one comes to a local hero outside the movie theater - was coming here, right here, to this cramped little courthouse. Buckley! Not just another slick-as-butter defense lawyer, but a man of heart, a man of substance. As word passed among the courtroom personnel, harried clerks glanced up expectantly from their files.

``We kept hearing, `Buckley is coming! Buckley is coming!' It was like a rock concert,'' recalled Williamson, 66. ``The personnel in the court were all excited.''

Williamson, who runs a direct-mail business outside Detroit, had already heard about Buckley in the few days that he had been in Hartford. A lawyer friend described him as a big deal, arrogant, but first-rate. Even the state police who interviewed him about his daughter, Heather, had said that Buckley was, well, a hotshot. And at last, nearly an hour late, Buckley was there, striding through the doorway in a dark suit, briefcase in hand, running a hand through his wavy reddish hair. The clerks stared. And when Buckley passed through the metal detector and triggered the alarm, a pair of court officers waved him on, as one nodded and said, ``Hey, Mac.''

So when Mac Buckley disappeared a month and a half later into the fog on an overcast day last March, it shook people to their core. Buckley, 57, was on his way to a court hearing when he vanished in his teal Lincoln Navigator. Not long afterward, the angry and tearful clients began stepping forward. One said Buckley had taken off with his life savings of $237,600. Another was missing nearly $440,000. Several said they had given him retainers of thousands of dollars and never heard from Buckley again. And then there was Dane, Williamson's 5-year-old grandson. Buckley had taken his Walt Disney stock certificate for safekeeping but had never returned it.

A few weeks after he went missing, Buckley was charged with first-degree larceny and forgery and declared a federal fugitive. But many paid little mind to such technicalities. The much larger issue was this: If Mac Buckley could run away, if Mac Buckley could disappear with your money and live a secret life, then whom could you trust? What could possibly happen that would more deeply shatter your faith in the legal system, in your fellow man, even?

When Buckley came back, they found out. ufdropp,2Mac Buckley could not have orchestrated a better moment himself in all his three decades of practicing law.

The defendant sat meekly before the judge in Hartford's windowless Superior Court, his ruddy face creased with torment. But this time it was Buckley himself in the defendant's hard-backed chair. His lawyer, equally downcast, asked that Buckley be confined to a locked psychiatric facility and his bond reduced. This client, certainly, was going nowhere. Just look at his family, his wife and five daughters, even two of his three grandchildren, and all those friends, the lawyer declared, nodding at the crowded wood benches behind him. As he pointed to one of his client's oldest boxing friends, the lawyer's voice cracked and tears spilled from his eyes. And then Buckley, too, crumpled slightly as he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose. After seven weeks, Buckley had returned as astonishingly as he had disappeared, surrendering to police on a Monday morning in April, tanned and 40 pounds lighter. But where he had been, not to mention what compelled him to leave in the first place, is no clearer today than it was the day he roared across the Connecticut border. Friends say he was roaming the Carolina and Virginia beaches. Buckley's lawyers aren't saying. And prosecutors, who have long known Buckley, once a federal prosecutor himself, do not seem inclined to press.

What Buckley's lawyers do say is that their client is a sick man. Hubert J. Santos, Buckley's former law partner and a respected figure in Hartford's tightknit legal community, claims that Buckley suffers from alcoholism and bipolar disorder, a psychiatric condition characterized by manic and depressive episodes. Apparently laying the groundwork for a defense of mental incapacity against accusations that Buckley has embezzled more than $700,000 of his clients' money, Santos told the court that Buckley would likely be on medication for the rest of his life.

Isn't that just what Buckley had said about some of his own clients, that they were too ill to be responsible for their behavior? Isn't Buckley, some wonder, dealing himself the defense lawyer's ultimate trump card? Maybe, they whisper in the courtroom corridor, maybe old Mac isn't as sick as they say.

How is it, for example, that the courtroom got filled so quickly that morning Buckley returned? Santos said in court that he didn't ask Buckley's supporters to come. But someone did. Someone called Johnny Duke, local boxing icon and longtime Buckley friend, the night before and told him that Mac wanted him in court, wanted him to round up ``some of the guys.'' Someone called the Rising Stars, an inner-city basketball team that Buckley helped found, and half a dozen of them showed up. Someone called Buckley's brother and sister quickly enough that they were able to travel to Hartford from Washington, D.C., and New York, respectively. And, then, there was that perfect, poignant postscript that circulated up the courthouse stairs. The puppy.

Waiting to go into court, Buckley confided in an assistant sheriff that he had gotten lonely while he was away and had gotten a puppy. The assistant sheriff later told his brother-in-law, George Cruz, director of the San Juan Center Sports in Hartford and an old boxing chum of Buckley's. ``Mac said everything was coming down on him, and he started drinking, so he took off,'' says Cruz. ``He said the puppy kept him sane.''

The dog now romps on the rolling hills that embrace Buckley's 258-year-old white colonial farmhouse, called Buck Hill Farm, in Marlborough, 10 minutes southeast of Hartford. Buckley himself is on a somewhat shorter tether. Confined to a locked ward at a Hartford psychiatric hospital for two weeks after he returned, Buckley is now free on $200,000 bail, confined to within 150 feet of his home by an electronic monitor, except when he is getting psychiatric treatment in the city. Authorities, meanwhile, are sifting through the morass of his clients' claims and charges, led by the larceny and forgery charges brought in connection with a Hebron couple who said he disappeared with nearly half a million dollars they had asked him to invest.

Authorities have a lot more to consider. There are three lawsuits pending against Buckley. The state's attorney's office has received five complaints against him that could result in possible criminal charges. The Statewide Grievance Committee, which handles complaints about Connecticut lawyers and has twice reprimanded Buckley for violation of professional standards, recently referred to Superior Court three grievances against Buckley for possible disciplinary action, which could include disbarment. The committee is also considering a fourth grievance against Buckley. A court-appointed trustee assigned to oversee Buckley's practice, who found that Buckley maintained 31 separate bank accounts, received 18 claims from clients who say Buckley owes them money, according to court papers.

As many watch closely to see how the system deals with one of its own - the local press and community activists have objected loudly that Buckley is getting special treatment in that he is out on bail at all - the lunch-counter gossip percolates hotly. For example, where is all that money? And just what happened to Mac? Was it drink, or the financial burden of five children and three grandchildren? Was it his love of the roulette wheel, or the rumored Canadian paramour? Was it the disappointments of midlife that collided with his extravagant public persona? Certainly, there are those who found Buckley moodier in recent years, his behavior at times erratic. But was he, finally, too ill to know what he was doing?

Many of his clients most definitely think not. As a thicket of television cameras and reporters waited outside Superior Court for Buckley to show up on that raw April morning this year, Nancy Liebowitz stood nervously in the shadows. A small-boned woman with wispy black hair, Liebowitz says she gave Buckley $35,000 to appeal her son's assault and burglary convictions, for which he was sentenced to 27 years. But Buckley, she says, missed all court appearances and never returned her frequent telephone calls.

When Buckley finally appeared, flanked by his lawyers, Liebowitz darted in front of him. ``What about my son?'' she demanded. ``My son is rotting in prison because of you.''

Buckley, who has said virtually nothing publicly since his return, looked grimly at the sidewalk and kept walking.

``Are you just going to say you're sick?'' she screamed.

Still, Buckley said nothing.

``Yeah, well, I'm sick, too,'' Liebowitz finally called as Buckley disappeared inside the courthouse. ``I'm sick of you.'' ufdropp,2The sky was a cauldron of gray clouds when Mac Buckley wheeled his bulky Navigator out of his long driveway on March 1 and headed down the leafy country road. It was 12:20 p.m. He called his office on his cell phone and told his secretary that he was heading to a 3 o'clock hearing in federal court in New Haven.

He never showed up. No one knows exactly which way Buckley headed that day, but any direction he turned, thunderheads were rumbling ominously. To the south, there was the New Haven hearing that had been called by a federal judge concerned about Buckley's representation of one of his clients. The client, Lloyd Streater, charged with three counts of possession of cocaine with intent to sell, had complained that Buckley had not kept in touch with him.

To the north, in the tiny town of Hebron, Sharon and David Fracchia had become increasingly perplexed at the behavior of their lawyer-turned-friend, Mac Buckley. The couple had allowed him to invest a portion of a $580,000 settlement they received in 1994 after their daughter was killed by a drunk driver. Once close friends of the Buckleys, the Fracchias knew only that Mac had not returned their calls for months and had ignored their requests for information about their account. They would later discover that, on February 1, 1999, Buckley had withdrawn $144,554, according to an arrest warrant. Another $300,000 in investments could not be found.

A little farther north, some 20 miles up Route 6, sits the empty home in Chaplin of the late Heather Messenger, daughter of Dan Williamson, and her husband, David. David Messenger, awaiting trial on charges of killing his wife, says that Buckley took control of his nearly $1 million estate at a time, he would tearfully tell investigators, when he was ``a mess.'' Of that, $237,600 is still missing, including $22,500 that Buckley advanced himself on Messenger's Visa card and $99 worth of cigars he bought from a Florida mail-order company, according to Messenger's lawyer. Buckley must have seen the storm clouds gathering: On the day he left, a regional grievance panel recommended that Buckley's law license be suspended on the strength of Messenger's accusations, and a week later a judge did exactly that. To the east, a client had filed a $100,000 civil suit in Norwich against him a month earlier. The client, Lucien Langlois, a 48-year-old Maine ironworker, claims that for more than two years Buckley had failed to file insurance and negligence claims related to a car accident in which Langlois had been injured; so much time had passed that the statute of limitations had expired. What's more, says Langlois, Buckley never filed for a pardon of Langlois's earlier arson conviction, although the lawyer had assured him that ``as soon as [Connecticut Governor John] Rowland gets in there, I'll take care of it.''

Even to the west, a shadow of discord hung over the St. Agnes Cemetery in Menands, New York, where Buckley's father was buried in 1997. In his will, the elder Buckley said that his son owed him $99,000. But he also said that he forgave the debt, and it was to his father's grave that Buckley apparently headed. The caretaker there said a man asked for directions to the grave of Christopher H. Buckley on March 5, and she later identified MacBuckley's photograph for state police.

Recompense, however, was not exactly the only thing on Buckley's mind during his absence. Two weeks after he disappeared, Buckley walked into a jewelry store in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and bought the most expensive men's diamond bracelet in the store. Buckley, according to a clerk, said he was a trucker on his way to New Jersey and put his Marlborough phone number on his American Express card receipt.

Federal investigators, curiously, did not trace the transaction to Buckley. Indeed, until he turned himself in on April 19, rumors had Buckley variously abducted by the mob, struck with amnesia, and kidnapped by former clients. Everything, that is, but on the run. ufdropp,2Buckley may have been famous for failing to return phone calls, he may have been offensively arrogant, but he was also immensely popular. He was, after all, a man who shelled out $3,500 for a box at Rowland's inauguration earlier this year, only to proclaim merrily to a reporter, ``I love all this horse manure.'' He was also an ESPN commentator on the O.J. Simpson trial who did not hesitate to claim that he ``could have easily done a better job defending Simpson,'' recalls Sherman Cain, boxing reporter for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. ``He'd say, `I trained [Johnnie] Cochran!'''

``He is an extremely likable, larger-than-life personality who is very successful at securing clients based on his stories and reputation,'' says Jonathan Einhorn, a New Haven trial lawyer and police commissioner who worked on several cases with Buckley. ``He loved to talk about himself, and he always had a story. He was a sort of Damon Runyon character at the bar. I mean, you couldn't not like him. Unless you were his client.''

Even some of his clients speak well of Buckley. In 1989, Buckley saved department-store heir Eric Steiger, charged with shooting two men to death at a party, from the death penalty. Just two years ago, Buckley won a former Meriden public works director an acquittal on corruption charges while the former city manager of Meriden, represented by someone else, was convicted of multiple counts. Many clients refuse to speak publicly about Buckley, but one who will is the man who sued him.

``I sued him because I'd had enough. I wanted out,'' explains Langlois, who first hired Buckley 20 years ago to represent him on an arson charge. ``But to me he is still a hell of a guy. If he called today and said: `Come talk to me, we'll square it away,' I'd get rid of my [new] lawyer in a heartbeat.''

There are those who feel that Assistant State's Attorney Herbert Carlson and Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford, who have worked in the same legal circles as Buckley for years, have also come under the spell of Buckley's legendary charisma. Although both said at Buckley's pleading that the lawyer should be treated ``just like anyone else,'' the prosecutor volunteered that Buckley has been a respected member of the community for years, a most unprosecutorlike thing to do. And while Buckley was a fugitive from justice during most of his absence, Clifford released him on bond two weeks after he returned.

Asked if he or Clifford were giving Buckley a break, Carlson says, ``Absolutely not. ... People are entitled to their opinion. The proof of it will be in what actually happens.'' Clifford did not return phone calls.

Nowhere is Buckley more revered than in the boxing gyms of Hartford. Buckley managed and promoted several fighters in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably welterweight Marlon Starling, who became a world champion. While a young lawyer, Buckley spent nights and weekends coaching black youths in scrappy gyms like Charter Oak Terrace and Bellevue Square Boys Club. He listened to their legal problems. He took them to his home and let them stack hay bales to make some cash. He helped send one to college. He loaned another some money to chip in for his grandparents' 50th anniversary party. And always, there was a place for them at the family table with his wife, Donna, a schoolteacher, and their five daughters.

``I love Mac,'' declares Michael Bell, 34, a former fighter whom Buckley managed for 12 years. ``He was the lawyer who came to the projects. He opened my eyes that all white people wasn't bad.''

If boxing was an unlikely devotion for a prosperous businessman's son, and a Republican at that, it provided Buckley with a shot of the celebrity he craved. One boxer who trained with Buckley tells of a night at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas with several Hartford fighters. Buckley bought them all black satin casino jackets and himself a red one and had the group surround him seated in a gold throne for a photograph.

``Then he had us all walk down the corridor in formation,'' recalls John Scully, who trained with Buckley for 12 years. ``He had his briefcase and he said, `You guys walk a little behind me, and everyone will think I'm the president.'''

It was in the casinos that Buckley apparently developed a taste for gambling. Not big time, but enough that the boys knew that if Buckley wasn't ringside, he was probably fingering his chips at the roulette wheel. Cain, the Inquirer reporter, recalls that Buckley routinely memorized the winning numbers. Buckley, says Cain, ``made no secret of the fact that he had a system. He bragged about it. He could tell you the last 20 numbers that came in. He'd say, `I just won $800.' He always said he won. Did he? Who knows.'' ufdropp,2Winning was not the only claim Buckley made about which some people had doubts. Born in New Haven, Francis McKeon Buckley was raised in Scarsdale, New York, and graduated in 1959 from Archbishop Steppinac High School, a Catholic school in nearby White Plains. Although Buckley often said his love of boxing stemmed from his early boxing days, the school does not offer boxing. And while Buckley claimed to have won a 1959 Golden Gloves title, there is no record of such a win in the New York press, which keeps the only record of the fights. Although Buckley founded the Alumni Boxing Club at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, no one, in fact, ever recalls seeing Buckley box.

After graduating from Georgetown University Law Center and with stints as both a public defender and a federal prosecutor under his belt, Buckley sought a different kind of limelight in a bid for Congress in 1974. For four months, Buckley, his uncle, and a fellow prosecutor toured Connecticut's 1st Congressional District in a mobile home plastered with posters of a beaming Buckley. It is a measure of the Republican Buckley's confidence that he ran at all in the heavily Democratic district, having never before tried for a public office. And it is a measure of his popularity that he received 67,000 votes to incumbent Democrat William Cotter's 117,000.

``Mac is a very confident person, and he felt he could do it,'' recalls lawyer M. Hatcher ``Reese'' Norris, who is also a former federal prosecutor and who worked on Buckley's campaign. ``I believed in him. And people loved him.''

Although Buckley's wife, Donna, sometimes joined him on the campaign trail and at ringside, Buckley rarely talked publicly about his family. Buckley was, by the assessment of many in Marlborough, a fond father, if a somewhat absent one. He was nonetheless a regular at the girls' soccer games. One of his daughters, Moira, a lawyer, worked in his office. He often took the whole family out for dinner in the dim corner booth that was famously his at the Marlborough Tavern, a restaurant near their home, and sometimes he attended services at St. John Fisher Catholic Church, where Donna taught catechism. While Buckley's family is apparently supporting him and several of them have appeared at his court dates, none would comment for this article.

But it was his grandson Mark, the first male in a long line of girls, who truly owned his heart. Buckley took his grandson everywhere. He carried him to the gyms in Hartford when he was a toddler and held him up ringside in Atlantic City. He took him to University of Connecticut basketball games and even into court. And when Buckley withdrew from the boxing scene in 1990, saying he wanted to spend time with his family, many thought the reason was Mark, who is now a teenager.

``He lived for that boy,'' says Stan Glowiak, basketball coach at New Britain High School, who helped found the Rising Stars, the inner-city basketball team, with Buckley. ``Mark was always with him, always. That was one of the things that stunned me when he disappeared. I never thought he would leave Mark.'' ufdropp,2Buckley may indeed have left boxing for family reasons, but there were also indications that in the early 1990s his professional life was beginning to unravel. The first sign came when Buckley's law partner of 16 years, Santos, quit their practice in 1990. Although Santos has never publicly talked about the move, colleagues say that Santos had tired not only of Buckley's preoccupation with boxing but also of work habits that had grown erratic. In that same year, Buckley had his home and 58-acre farm property put in his wife's name, indicating to some that Buckley was having financial trouble. He would later have the family cars put in her name as well. And in 1994, all but 10 acres of Buck Hill Farm was sold to a Buckley friend.

It was also in 1990 that June Steiger began wondering just what had happened to Buckley, her son's lawyer. Although Buckley had staved off the death penalty for her son, Eric Steiger had been sentenced to two consecutive life terms. June Steiger says that she gave Buckley $10,000 in 1989 to file an appeal. Buckley, she says, told her he'd ``be in touch.'' But for four years she heard nothing. She called. She wrote letters. She dropped by his office. Buckley never responded. Finally, in 1994, Steiger called one more time and was told by his secretary that Buckley needed an additional $12,500 to proceed with an appeal.

``I couldn't believe it,'' exclaims Steiger, whose complaint about Buckley resulted in a reprimand by the grievance committee. ``I thought he'd been working on it all that time. By then I was frantic.''

It was a pattern that would echo in a number of cases, most explosively in that of David Messenger. Messenger's brother Dennis says that several days after his brother was charged with murder in early 1998, just a few days after he had given Buckley power of attorney and signed over his life savings, the phone rang in the home of the Messengers' 86-year-old mother. It was Buckley.

``He told her he needed $25,000 immediately to get psychiatric help for David,'' recalls Dennis Messenger, owner of a furniture store in Independence, Kansas. ``When I heard about it, I said, `Waaaait a minute. Something is not right here.'''

Instead of sending the money, Dennis Messenger repeatedly tried to contact Buckley by phone and fax. When Buckley did not respond, Messenger and another brother traveled to Hartford and tracked down the elusive lawyer. After a lengthy lunch at the Chowder Pot restaurant, the brothers, somewhat reassured, extracted a single promise from the lawyer: Buckley was to keep their mother in Kansas informed about their brother's case. It could be by phone or mail. Either one. But Buckley was to communicate with their mother. No matter what. ``We looked him in the eye,'' Dennis Messenger recalls, ``and said, `Do you promise?' He said, `Yes.'''

Three months later, Buckley had made no contact with Messenger's mother. Dennis and David filed grievances, and eventually so did one of David's lawyers. Although Santos described the Messenger case as ``a fee dispute'' in a recent court hearing, state police are currently investigating a criminal complaint against Buckley in the case.

Whatever happens, the Messenger brothers feel that Buckley's behavior, in particular his failure to get David Messenger a psychiatric exam in the days immediately following the killing, has made it impossible for David to ever get a fair trial. And they find infuriating that Buckley himself is now claiming to suffer from a mental disorder.

``What a farce,'' exclaims Dennis Messenger. ``If that defense works for him, then it should work for half the inmates in prison. And that's where Mac Buckley should be: in prison.'' ufdropp,2Long before the Messenger family collided with Buckley, things in Buckley's quaint brick office were coming unglued. Robert Pickering, a young lawyer hired by Buckley in 1995, says that Buckley was often inexplicably missing and that record keeping had become ``incredibly sloppy,'' according to Pickering's lawyer, C. Michael Budlong. Client retainers were not kept in separate accounts but were mixed in with other office funds, Budlong says. Nor were there written agreements governing the use of retainer money. And in 1996, according to Budlong, Buckley dropped his malpractice insurance.

``The house of cards had begun to collapse,'' says Budlong, whose client sued Buckley for $50,000 in salary and benefits 10 days after he disappeared.

But Buckley hardly made a secret of the fact that he no longer had malpractice insurance. Lucien Langlois, the Maine client who sued Buckley for failing to file accident claims, pursued Buckley for two years about his case but never got a response to his calls or letters. When, finally, the two men sat down over lunch at the Marlborough Tavern in 1997, Buckley actually invited his client to sue him. ``Mac said, `Go ahead. Sue me. That's what I'd do if I were you,''' Langlois recalls. ``But he said, `I'll tell you right now, I've got no insurance, and there's nothing in my name.'''

Sitting in Buckley's regular booth in the dim restaurant, Langlois thought that Buckley had changed considerably from the sharp, efficient lawyer who had represented him two decades earlier. This Buckley seemed defensive and uncertain, even a little shrill. Langlois eyed the several empty glasses near Buckley's plate and remembered all the rumors about Buckley partying and drinking too much.

``The first time, he was sharp as a tack. He was the Mac Buckley everybody talked about,'' says Langlois. ``But this time, he was different. I just figured he'd been hanging out with his clients too long.''

Nor was Langlois the only one to observe that Buckley had changed. David and Sharon Fracchia, the Hebron couple who had Buckley invest the settlement money they received in connection with their daughter's death, say that the man who so enthusiastically befriended them in 1991 had suddenly dropped out of their lives. Two years ago, Sharon Fracchia says, ``Buckley's whole demeanor changed. He never came over. He never returned our calls.''

Although Buckley paid the Fracchias $362,000 shortly after he surrendered, the couple have no intention of dropping the larceny and forgery charges they brought against him, and their civil suit is still pending. But even if Buckley is convicted, the Fracchias say Buckley has poisoned their trust.

``Mac Buckley took our money,'' says Sharon Fracchia. ``And he knew where that money came from. It takes a certain kind of person to do that.'' ufdropp,2Hubert J. Santos says that kind of person is not a well person. It is a person, he told Clifford in April, who has a serious disorder he did not know he had. It is a person who needs ongoing psychiatric care.

It is true that Buckley did not look his normally robust self that April day. He stood tentatively before the judge, his head bowed, his hand clasping that of his wife. Instead of his usual dapper suit and tie, he wore tired chinos and a black parka with the Rising Stars logo on the back and the word ``Papa'' stitched in orange on the breast. He nodded wanly as Santos described how Buckley had ``helped more disadvantaged kids than 95 percent of the people in the state of Connecticut.''

Clifford seemed inclined to agree. When the prosecutor noted that he still had not been told where Buckley had been all those weeks, Clifford said nothing. Instead, he released Buckley on $200,000 bail, with Buckley's farmhouse as a guarantee.

The courtroom emptied gradually that day. Buckley retreated to a nearby conference room with his family and lawyers. Reporters headed to telephones. The judge lagged briefly to speak to a school group, then he, too, moved on. Within minutes, the conference-room door swung open. Buckley strode out, speaking loudly to Santos just a few steps in front of him. And then Mac Buckley slapped his lawyer on the back and burst into laughter.