I didn't know Harlem existed. I didn't know there was such a place, because I grew up in white Queens, where five miles is 100 miles. So I went to the school and, being a smart cookie - as they called us in those days - I had a million questions. How did this place exist? How come I didn't know about it? Why are people living like this? Do they want to live like this?

I took anything that came across my doorstep. I started getting a reputation.

My anti-authoritarian instincts let me directly to criminal defense work.

I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people's revolution.

Put the strong, masculine figure in a school with tough kids and you have a certain control. It's very demeaning to the kids and very demeaning to the tough, black guy, but that's how they worked it.

I couldn't add my talent, which is prodigious, to a defense of someone even accused of hurting a child.

I would never defend a cop - though I did on a few private cases, when cops were acting not as cops but as private citizens.