by Richard W. Millar, Jr.

A couple of my favorite humor writers, Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen, have made their livings writing about strange people doing even stranger things in Florida. While their work is fiction, there are sufficient threads tethering their efforts to reality that serve to magnify their humor while at the same time making the reader feel like he has mistakenly wandered into a voodoo shop in New Orleans’ French Quarter where the bizarre is on full display.

The Florida Bar has had its own contributions, which could have easily fit into some point in a Barry novel. I bring you one such now. And, as Mr. Barry is wont to say: “I swear I am not making this up.”

In 2020, a Florida lawyer named Barry Gainsburg was arrested for “Exhibition of a Dangerous Weapon,” which in every day parlance would be called a “baseball bat.” At the time, he was on probation because of a prior disciplinary action. He was subsequently charged with three felonies, triggering a requirement to report them to the State Bar. Unsurprisingly, he did not report them, offering, as a Referee later noted, “conflicting explanations.”

According to the trial testimony, the victim, one Jordana Harrison, saw him driving erratically and took a picture of his car and its license plate. He “yelled vulgarities and threats at her” . . . and “took a baseball bat out of his trunk and brandished it at her in a threatening manner.” She called 911 and when the constabulary arrived she could hear Mr. Gainsburg screaming and telling the officers he was COVID-positive and was going to spit on them.

He was convicted of a first-degree misdemeanor and was sentenced to five days in jail and six months of probation with a condition that he undergo a mental health exam.

I don’t want to suggest that a lawyer threatening a passerby with a baseball bat is so usual that it doesn’t warrant a column, but if that were all there was to it, I probably would have passed on writing this. It is what happened next . . .

During the Bar’s investigation into the baseball bat incident, Mr. Gainsburg was not inclined to rest on his laurels, so to speak, but decided to take on Bar’s counsel, leading, as you might expect, to additional charges. Mr. Gainsburg (see probation condition above) believed that the Bar’s lawyer, Linda Gonzalez, was the devil or, more specifically, Satan, and that she should be required to admit it. To do that, and I have to give him credit for some sort of twisted ingenuity, he changed his e-mail address from baydude@yahoo.com to lindagonzalezissatan@gmail.com. That way, every time she emailed him she would be admitting her evil status and everyone on the email chains would see it.

So, what was originally a one-count complaint became two counts: threatening with a baseball bat and bullying bar counsel.

His “gotcha” defense was entrapment. His theory was that the Bar refused his petitions to permanently retire and if they had been granted, he would no longer have been a lawyer and thus could not have violated the Rules of Professional Conduct.

I am not sure that the late Evil Knievel could have jumped the gaps in that logic and the Referee didn’t buy what he was selling and found that the “‘defense’ itself is indicative of his lack of remorse.” And lack of remorse was an aggravating factor in considering sanctions.

It didn’t help that he claimed Bar Counsel was playing tricks on him, stating:

Give praise and glory to Jah. Your email is exactly why I am filing my federal complaint against you as an individually named defendant. You are vindictive. And you behave like Satan because you don’t follow Jah’s commandments—you ae [sic] a liar and you serve injustice—an abomination and perversion of the law . . . You seem to have anger issues and be a control freak in my humble opinion. [Bold in original]

The Referee found that Mr. Gainsburg had “engaged in multiple acts of dishonesty in the instant proceedings” and that his conduct mirrored his earlier conduct for which he was on probation. The Referee’s recommendation was disbarment. Maybe the Bar should require him to change his email address to iamabouttobedisbarred@gmail.com.

Richard W. Millar, Jr. is tired and retired. He can be reached at dickmillar9@gmail.com.