‘Knock on Any Door’
Purpura’s story begins on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel in 1960s Nutley, N.J., where the neighborhood boys would hop a bus to see Warren Spahn pitch for the New York Mets.
One day, he stands before a black-andwhite screen, watching rapt as Humphrey Bogart tells a jury don’t blame the murder defendant; it was poverty, abuse and neglect that pulled the trigger.
For a young Bill Purpura, Bogart’s character in “Knock on Any Door” was heroic. Could he do that?
His early studies weren’t promising. An only child, he attended a military academy in Ocean City, N.J., but preferred to hitchhike to Yonkers and bet the trotters.
After four years, he left for nearby Seton Hall University. But there was Dave Brubeck at The Limelight and everything else that was 1970s New York. On graduation day, he was in neither the top nor the middle of his class. He headed west in his Datsun pickup to experience Southern California and race dirt bikes at Indian Dunes.
By then, federal prosecutors say, another young man was ascending to power in the rugged Sierra Madre mountains of northwest Mexico.
After law school outside Los Angeles, Purpura returned east with a wife and newborn son. He had sights on Washington, but settled in Baltimore with a $13,000-ayear job in the old Equitable Building. His boss was Fred Kolodner, described in The Sun as an “Alfred Hitchcock look-a-alike” with a diamond pinky ring. He defended the loan sharks and roustabouts of The Block. Not a white-glove firm.
The cases came like popcorn, Kolodner passing out folders: Go try this. Go try this.
“I was so green that when the judge was giving jury instructions I was taking notes,” Purpura said.
It was an 18-month crash course in criminal defense. In 1981, Purpura opened his own office downtown. He didn’t join the state or city bar associations. He didn’t take long lunches with other lawyers at Tio Pepe. He worked quietly, alone.
The biggest criminal cases went federal and Purpura did, too.
Federal court meant top-gun prosecutors, wiretap investigations and crossexamining FBI agents with law degrees. The feds don’t make paper mistakes, Purpura said. “I was in total fear.”
A world away, the young Mexican had learned to run cocaine into the United States faster than any other smuggler, prosecutors say, and he became a darling of the Colombian cartels. They called him “El Rapido.”
Back in Baltimore, in December 1990 Purpura had the case of the charismatic drug kingpin Linwood Rudy Williams, a man known to sign autographs and oversee a heroin pipeline stemming from Nigeria. Guilty, he got life. Purpura shook off the loss. “Defense attorneys are like golfers,” he says. “They have a very short memory.”
He developed the habits to sustain a legal career over the next three decades. Mornings, he would jog 6 miles. Exercise washed away the horrors he heard in court. He still allowed himself one Marlboro Light a day. During trial, with anxiety gripping his stomach, his lunch was a peanut butterand-jelly sandwich: white bread, Jif and Welch’s.
He showed a flair for theater. In one Bogart-like flourish, he scribbled the name of an absent federal witness on a slip of paper and taped it to the stand.
His first capital murder trial came in Hagerstown, September 1994. Purpura defended Michael Antonio Reese Sr., who stabbed his estranged wife to death then turned on their boys. Reese taped shut their mouths — he couldn’t stand their screams — and stabbed them, too. Prosecutors wanted death; Reese got two life sentences. Purpura