Louis kept a small, plain office in the heart of Harlem. It was the quintessential poor man's lawyer office furnished with chairs, desks, and tables that looked as if they had been taken from a high school cafeteria. He put in an appearance two days a week and did a certain amount of pro bono work, especially if there was a possibility of publicity. White cops shooting black teenagers. White slumlords evicting old Puerto Rican tenants.

Occasionally, he even managed to break into national headlines, such as during the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from the projects who claimed she'd been abducted by three white men who'd raped her and then branded her arm with a swastika before letting her go. Louis had appeared on the steps of 100 Centre Street with his arm draped around the girl, decrying "the racists in our midst" and lambasting the New York City police for not trying hard enough to catch the criminals.

During subsequent questioning, the girl had given conflicting reports. The NYPD spokesman indicated that the investigation was "ongoing" but that the BOLO (Be on the Lookout) for the suspects had been canceled. Louis held another press conference, this one outside his Harlem office, where he suggested that a "white, Catholic-controlled police department" was reluctant to pursue the case because of "racists in their own midst, and where that might lead." Sopping up a monsoon of sweat, he even suggested that the perpetrators were police officers.

"My client, who is only gradually recovering from this traumatic event-including, with the aid of a counselor, regaining memories she had understandably blocked-remembers that her assailants 'talked like police officers.' I'm not saying that they were police officers, but it is certainly a possibility." His Greek chorus of young hoodlums mugged ferociously for the television cameras and jeered a couple of cops who'd shown up to see why the crowd had gathered.