Mark B. Sandground Sr., Machiavellian divorce lawyer, dies
When the soon-to-beex-wife of one of his clients threw her husband’s entire collection of tropical fish out on their front lawn, Mark B. Sandground Sr. told his client to collect and freeze them immediately for use as evidence at trial.
He once advised another well-heeled client seeking a divorce to serve her husband nothing but frozen food for dinner for three months, to encourage the speedy end to the soured marriage.
While representing an actress in a child-custody battle, he found out that her soon-tobe-ex-husband had once posed for a nude poster in their early years of financial struggle. He had an aide track the poster down to a dingy bookstore in Hollywood and fly it back to the East Coast courtroom in time for closing arguments. Showing the image to the jury and elderly judge, Sandground feigned shock and dismay — and won his case.
“People come to me because they have confidence in my judgment,” Sandground once told The Washington Post. “I’ll do anything to win for a client.” If an opposing lawyer “gets up off the ground after I finish with them,” he told another interviewer, “I haven’t done my job.”
Sandground, a Washington-area divorce lawyer who drew media attention for his Machiavellian embrace of winning at all costs, died Dec. 30 at a hospital in the District. He was 88.
He had been hospitalized for cancer treatment for two weeks before his death and continued to work on divorce cases from his hospital bed, said his son Mark B. “Chipp” Sandground Jr.
Four times married and three times divorced, the elder Sandground was for more than 60 years the widely known — and often unorthodox — advocate for hundreds of women and men seeking maximum settlements and minimum costs to get out of their collapsing marriages.
These ranged from multimillion-dollar demands for alimony and support payments to fights over who gets the silverware and art collections to joint custody agreements for the household dog, including the details of doggy visitation rights on alternate weekends and Wednesday nights.
Like a Machiavellian character might have advised, fear was always an effective weapon.
“People choose him like they choose a sawed-off shotgun,” a woman whose ex-husband had been represented by Sandground told The Post in 1984. Washingtonian magazine called Sandground “the bad boy of the divorce bar,” noting such office decor as the oil painting of a rat and photo of an angry Doberman pinscher. The National Law Journal profiled him under the headline “The Nastiest Lawyer in Town.” Sandground once referred to himself as “the Prince of Darkness.”
In 1988, a committee of the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility found he had “actively and knowingly” helped a client conceal assets from an opposing lawyer in a divorce case. The committee recommended suspension from law practice for a year and a day, but the penalty was cut to a public reprimand noting his otherwise “unblemished record.”
Sandground insisted he had done nothing wrong, and Washingtonian reported that he wore the censure of others “like a badge of honor.”
Boldface-name clients
Predictably, most of Sandground’s clients were moneyed enough to pay his several hundred dollar hourly fees. A few were top government officials or media celebrities, including congressional spouse Rita Jenrette (who caused a stir with the claim to Playboy that she had carnal relations with her husband John on the Capitol steps a few years before his bribery conviction.)
Sandground’s other boldface-name clients included John Heckler, whose messy divorce in the mid-1980s from Margaret Heckler, then-secretary of health and human services, generated headlines.
He also represented Paula Parkinson, an insurance lobbyist who claimed to have had affairs with members of Congress, amid a Justice Department inquiry in the early 1980s examining whether her alleged paramours had exchanged votes for sexual favors. No charges were brought.
Mark Bernard Sandground was born in Brookline, Mass., on June 6, 1932. His father was a parasitologist on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. He grew up in Indianapolis, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1952 and from the University of Virginia law school in 1955.
The next year, he helped Richard Nixon during the successful campaign for reelection as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower. He then entered private practice and, over the years, worked on his own and in firms with partners and associates. One such arrangement ended badly. In the middle of the night in 1981, four lawyers with whom he had practiced moved out of their Connecticut Avenue office without notice or explanation.
He worked seven days a week, including holidays, and took a one-upmanship approach with legal opponents by scheduling nighttime meetings on Christmas Eve or the Fourth of July.
His marriages to Judith Hollenberg, Marcia Gurevich and Evelyn Jaeger ended in divorce and, he admitted, were largely his own fault because he was working long hours and “never home.” He once said he was an absentee father to his two sons, both from his second marriage, but those relationships improved when the children reached adulthood.
In addition to his son Mark, of Washington, survivors include his wife of 26 years Judith Pugliese Sandground of the homes in Falls Church, Va., St. Michaels, Md., and Key West, Fla.; another son, Bruce Sandground of Phoenix; and four grandchildren.
In a death announcement, Sandground was described by his family as “an omnivore at the bar.” Divorce cases were his primary work, but he also represented foreign governments and businesses with dealings in the United States. He was a Francophile who once postponed a deposition in one of his legal cases for a class on French cooking.
Sandground also had a start-up interest in two Washington restaurants, the Palm and the since-shuttered La Niçoise. One of his wives once said he wore a coat and tie to Sunday breakfast. To fix the morning coffee, he usually put on a sports coat before going to the kitchen. In less formal attire, he enjoyed deep-sea fishing.