Billy Ball

“The joke I get a lot of the time is, ‘I didn’t know you were back—is Steinbrenner giving you another chance?’” Billy Martin has heard it before.

Not only does Martin bear the same name as the famous Yankee manager, who was fired five times by George Steinbrenner, he spends a good deal of his time working in the sports industry. He got his start representing athletes with the help of another legendary coach, John Thompson.

“I met Coach Thompson years ago when he was still at Georgetown,” the Blank Rome attorney says. “Years later he was speaking with David Falk [the super-agent who negotiates contracts for Michael Jordan and many others]. He said, ‘I’d like you to talk with [Billy] and see if he can assist you in representing some of your clients.’ And Dave immediately introduced me to several of the top NBA players in the business.”

Now Martin’s client list is filled with all-stars. He has represented boxing champ Riddick Bowe, athletes from all three major Pittsburgh sports franchises and a host of NBA players, including

Rod Strickland, Allen Iverson and Juwan Howard. Being razzed about his name goes with the territory, although it does help in one regard: “People don’t forget your name,” he says.

Not that there’s much chance of that happening. After 30 years of trying civil and criminal cases before federal and state courts, Billy Martin would be a famous name even if no other Billy Martin had ever worn pinstripes. He is regarded as one of the nation’s top trial lawyers and is a go-to legal analyst on national TV during high-profile trials. (If you followed the O.J. Simpson trial on NBC’s Washington, D.C., affiliate, you probably saw him analyzing the case and sharing insider information he got from his close friend Johnnie Cochran.)

This day, Martin wears a navy Armani suit, a light-blue twill shirt and no jewelry other than his watch and wedding band. Crow’s-feet fan from his eyes when he smiles, which he does a lot. He appears younger than his age (57) by at least a dozen years. 

Though his 5-foot-10-inch frame is dwarfed by his athlete clients, the amount of work he puts into staying fit gives them a common bond. But Martin makes sure not to mix business with pleasure. “I keep the relationship to the office,” he says. “Although I go to events, I don’t hang out with the clients. If I have an NFL player who is playing football tonight, I don’t want my client to look over to the sidelines, see me, and start thinking, ‘Uh-oh, is there something going on? Is everything OK?’”

On the walls of Martin’s office are the obligatory photos of him standing arm-in-arm with famous clients. And there are ones of him with his family. His favorite is a shot of his children and grandchildren with the words “The Gang” etched into the wooden frame. When he talks about them, deep dimples crease his cheeks.

“I love what I do,” says Martin, “but the most important part of my time and energy is spent with them.”

---

Martin grew up in the little town of Sewickley, Pa. His father was a steelworker, as were most of the Martin men. “My dad hauled steel in Pittsburgh for 30 years,” says Martin. “My brother was a steelworker, my uncles were steelworkers. As I was coming up I thought it was a decent way to make a living. But that’s not what I wanted to do.”

What Martin wanted to do was argue. He would debate points with friends until they either agreed with him or wanted to smack him. On more than one occasion his exasperated teachers were forced to play their trump card—“I’m the teacher. Go sit down”—to keep the class moving. But he never stopped asking questions.

Then one day he learned about Thurgood Marshall and his future came into focus.

“I recall reading everything that I could by Thurgood Marshall,” he says. “I always thought that I could be a good lawyer one day. I dreamed of being as eloquent as him.”

Martin paid his way through Howard University and earned an academic scholarship to attend the University of Cincinnati College of Law. He clerked for the city’s law department and tried his first case—a minor traffic issue—as a third-year law student.

“I thought I had won the case,” he says, “and at the end of arguments [defense counsel] stood up and told the judge that I had not shown venue. I had never said the crime occurred in the city of Cincinnati, Hamilton County, state of Ohio. I included everything else. … I’m not sure if that was 140, 150 jury trials ago, but I’ve never lost another one on that type of technicality.”

After graduation, Martin worked as a Cincinnati prosecutor, and by the age of 29 he was the No. 1 man in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Dayton. He performed so well that he was told he could pick any city in which to work. One of the few African-American U.S. Attorneys Martin knew of at the time was Billy Hunter in San Francisco. “So I called Billy and he hired me.”

In California, Martin began to handle cases of national importance. He often battled against Cochran and was lead prosecutor in the Alaska Pipeline investigation, as well as one of the handlers for Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno, the first made member of La Cosa Nostra to become a cooperating witness. Martin’s career was rewarding and he might have stayed put if family matters hadn’t intervened. “My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer,” says Martin, “and I wanted to get back to the East Coast. [Washington] was close enough for me to drive home every other weekend to visit my dad for that last year of his life.”

At that time, Washington was known as the murder capital of the world. Martin was asked to put together a homicide unit of prosecutors, FBI agents and detectives. They targeted gangs, shut down major drug operations, and immediately lowered the murder rate. Martin became a hero to metro cops, and when he left the attorney general’s office, the Marshal Service gave him an honorary badge, which he prominently displays in a Lucite block in his office.

---

After 15 years as a prosecutor Martin switched sides. “My friends in law enforcement refer to it as going over to the dark side,” he says. “It wasn’t really a big transition because my clients, be they the United States of America or John Q. Citizen, deserve the best prosecution or the best defense that I can give.”

His prosecuting experience serves Martin well. “If I receive a discovery packet, I can tell almost instantly if something is missing,” he says. “I know if there is a piece of evidence hidden somewhere. I know how to go back and try to find it.”

Nowhere was this more evident than in the manslaughter trial of former NBA star Jayson Williams. During the trial, Martin argued that key testimony by the prosecution’s gun expert was tainted due to a secret examination of the shotgun. After the testimony was thrown out, Martin demonstrated to the jury how the shotgun could malfunction if handled in a particular manner.

“Billy had a very dramatic summation where he flipped the shotgun closed to demonstrate how it could happen,” says Martin’s co-counsel, Joe Hayden of Walder Hayden & Brogan in Roseland, N.J. “It startled everybody, but it was very effective.” 

Representing famous clients carries additional considerations as well, such as dealing with members of a celebrity’s entourage. “I tell the client early on that I can’t go through your agent and I can’t go through your mom or your dad,” Martin says. “You and I have to talk one-on-one.”

Martin is adept at controlling the information being fed to the press. He weighs his words carefully when talking to the media, giving an occasional tug on his Vandyke while sparring with the hordes. “Every word has significance,” he says. “You don’t say anything just to say it.”

After one closed grand jury hearing, Wright was accompanying Martin as he was leaving the courthouse. “That was my first experience with the media,” Wright says. “They saw [Billy] when we got in the elevator, and they all rushed the elevator. … There were media people running with walkie-talkies [relaying his every move]. We go out front and there’s like a gazillion cameras. So the next day we get The Post and he says, ‘Look at page five.’ There’s a picture of us and I have this huge grin on my face. He says, ‘You’ve got to have a poker face. You can’t ever let the media

know that it was a win for you in court or it was a good day or a bad day. You just have a poker face and you state what you need to state and you move on.’”

---

“I still get butterflies before I stand up and argue,” says Martin. “When I play golf, I know that I have to get to the practice range before I play a round, and I need to hit 24, 25 balls; it’s muscle memory … and lawyering is like that. In the first five minutes, you’re going to be talking fast, you’re going to be nervous, but after that it’s all gone—I’m comfortable. So I build in enough issues to talk about for three to five minutes to allow me to calm down and hit my stride.”

Once he does, look out. In the courtroom or on the links, Martin plays to win. “The competitiveness is within,” he says. “If you and I are playing, I just want to beat you.”