When it finally came out that the girl made up the story because she got pregnant by her twenty-one-year-old boyfriend and had simply been afraid to tell her parents, Louis did not offer an apology. Instead, he went on the offensive. The girl, he said, was the exception, not the rule.

"For every mixed-up child who tells a little fib to get out of trouble, there are hundreds of young black women who have been abducted and raped by the sort of men my client described, and the police do nothing."

Undaunted and logically incomprehensible, he then threatened to sue the City of New York because one of the detectives had slipped up and actually referred to the girl as "a liar" in the New York Post, which had, of course, used the statement as its main front-page headline. For once, J. Samuel "Settlement Sammy" Lindahl, the city's attorney known as Corporation Counsel, held firm under pressure from the Police Benevolent Association, the powerful police union, and because anybody with the vaguest idea of the law knew the city had no liability.

Although publicly he'd expressed outrage at Lindahl's refusal, privately Louis smiled, slicked back his heavily pomaded hair, and moved on. Didn't hurt to try. He laughed to himself.

Louis's favorite office, however, was actually in a Fifth Avenue high rise. The interior had been tastefully furnished in rich leathers, dark woods, and lots of polished brass by the city's hottest professional designer, who'd charged a cool million dollars for her services. That was where he spent the bulk of his working hours, meeting with his "money clients"-many of them white businessmen who merely wanted him to "smooth the way" for their ventures into the black neighborhoods of Manhattan, as well as across the rivers in Brooklyn and New Jersey.