I stepped into Judge Ivan Glass’s courtroom and looked around. No judge. No bailiff. No clerk.

”Where’s His Holiness?” I asked Lisa Mayes, the assistant district attorney who had been assigned to prosecute Johnny Wayne. She was sitting at the prosecution table and contemplating her fingernails.

”Back in chambers. He’s not in a good mood.”

Glass had been a notorious drinker and womanizer for more than three decades. He’d been divorced twice, primarily because of his affinity for younger women, but the good people of the First Judicial District didn’t seem to mind. They elected him every eight years. Glass’s father had been a judge, and his father before him. To hear Glass tell it, the bench was his birthright.

He was known among the defense bar as Ivan the Terrible because of his complete lack of compassion for criminal defendants and because he treated defense attorneys almost as badly as he treated their clients. I got off on the wrong foot with him right out of law school. The first day I was in his courtroom, he put an old man in jail because the man couldn’t afford to pay his court costs. I knew what the judge was doing was illegal-debtors’ prisons were outlawed a long time ago-but he seemed to do whatever he wanted regardless of the law. I did some research and found Glass had been doing it for years. I wrote him a letter and asked him to stop.

He wrote back and told me young lawyers ought to mind their own goddamned business. So I sued the county for allowing one of their employees, the judge, to commit constitutional violations during the course of his employment. By the time I was done, the county had to pay out nearly a million dollars to people Glass had jailed illegally, and Glass was seriously embarrassed in the process. He hated me for it, and one of the ways he exacted vengeance was by appointing me to cases like Johnny Wayne Neal’s.