Nick Avila's graduation from the University of Colorado's law school in 1976 and subsequent career, no matter how short-lived, were nothing short of a miracle. A product of the city's lower-class Globeville neighborhood, he seemed that rare person: someone who had stuggled to make good--and then became determined to make it easier for those who followed.
In fact, Avila seemed almost obsessed with maintaining an image of how to go about becoming the ideal community lawyer. He returned to north Denver and set up a small neighborhood law office that accepted drop-in clients. He gave away numerous hours of his time to local organizations and provided free legal services for the elderly and the poor.
"I can give you the names of a lot of Hispanic attorneys who wouldn't volunteer their time--they got their degree and they forgot the people," says Donald Sandoval, a former state senator who represented north Denver and who now works for Mayor Wellington Webb. "Nick was known in the community because he didn't."
Somewhere along the way, however, the neighborhood apparently caught up to Nick Avila. In 1984 he was ensnared as part of a ring of small-time crooks who could arrange to have a person's driving record altered or deleted for anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars.
After that it was as if Avila was intent on single-mindedly untying the carefully knotted fabric of a well-spent life. The final tear was made on the morning of March 11, 1988. That was the day he was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for possessing four and a half pounds of cocaine he carried out of the Denver bus station in a nylon duffel bag.
And it seemed as though drugs had become the least of Avila's faults. Although they never proved it, police suspected that the former attorney tried to kill the man who would testify against him. And the prosecutor who put him away still thinks it was Avila who planted explosives in his car the day before the cocaine trial.
When Avila was caught carrying the cocaine he was still on probation from the motor vehicles records case. So later on the same spring day as his drug sentencing, he returned to the courtroom of District Court Judge Connie Peterson to accept his additional sentencing. As she reviewed the numerous testimonials to Avila's good character, Peterson conceded that she was baffled by the man she was about to send to jail.
Repeatedly calling the past three years of Avila's life "a tragedy," the young judge, who had graduated in the same class as Avila from the University of Colorado's law school, allowed that she didn't know who was before her this morning. "On the background and the records and the description by his former wife and his son, it seems almost like a different person than would be involved in this kind of crime," she said.
"It's hard to believe it's the same person, isn't it?"
On this mid-January day, in Courtroom 20 of the Denver City and County Building, a scene is unfolding that Salvador Dali could have painted had he discovered courtrooms as inspiration. Nick Avila, whose license to practice law was suspended in 1986 and then revoked in 1989, is practicing law. He moves slowly, back and forth between the bar and the witness stand. The man he is interrogating is the former highest-ranking federal attorney in the state, Michael Norton.
In place of one of the dark suits Avila once wore are a green prison shirt with a white long-sleeved shirt underneath and green prison pants. His hair, which he once wore slicked back with cosmetic gels, is unruly, where it still covers his scalp at all. A stubby pencil with a blue eraser has taken the place of gleaming metal pens. He is short. His hair and mustache are flecked with white. His prison identification tag flaps against his chest. Leg shackles grab his legs.
Unlike many criminals who go to jail and who over the years learn enough law to irritate law enforcement officials from their cells, Nick Avila entered the penitentiary with a distinct advantage: He already was a lawyer. And despite the technical setback of having his license pulled, he has never stopped acting like one.
In fact, Avila could be held up as an example of why white collar criminals--lawyers in particular--ought not to be sentenced to jail. For the past several months, he has practiced law out of a double cell in the Denver County jail. In place of a cellmate, however, he shares his space with an estimated ten cubic feet of legal papers he has generated since swapping his briefcase for handcuffs.
The mound of paper is a testimony to Avila's frantic activity during the past six years. Between his state and federal cases, he has filed nearly a dozen challenges to his convictions, as well as numerous other complaints against his former state and federal prosecutors, and at least five lawsuits demanding information from various agencies.
Much of this activity is no doubt due to the tremendous amount of time Avila finds himself killing in jail. "Most of the people involved in his cases have moved on," says Ted McElroy, a deputy district attorney in Arapahoe County who recently was appointed as a special prosecutor to handle Avila's numerous appeals. "Mr. Avila, it's been on his front burner for years."
For Avila, though, the flurry of paperwork flows from an altogether different internal wellspring: He insists he's innocent--that prosecutors manipulated evidence and witnesses to convict him.
"It may take me a while, but I'm going to do everything I set out to do: prove that the government cheated to get my convictions," he says. He adds, chuckling, "I've put my life into this. If I charged myself by the hour I'd be rich."
Most of Avila's numerous appeals have been summarily denied. Yet there's a good reason he's here today demanding that the tight-lipped Mike Norton, who left his U.S. Attorney post last year, answer questions about the case of U.S.A. v. Nick Avila. (While dragging Norton into court was an unusual accomplishment for Avila, it turns out to be more a triumph of legal gamesmanship: Norton denied any substantive knowledge of the case, and was dismissed after several minutes of questioning.)
In the past two years Avila has won several important legal victories. The recent decisions in his favor by no means prove Avila's innocence. But they do point to missteps made by state and federal prosecutors as they accumulated the cases against him.
In the most remarkable of these, the state Court of Appeals in 1992 ruled that Avila was entitled to a new hearing to determine whether evidence uncovered since his sentencing might prove him innocent. The hearings are scheduled to end on February 18. At that time District Court Judge Edward Simons will decide whether or not he is entitled to a brand new trial for his involvement in the motor vehicles records scam.
It takes a considerable leap of faith to believe Avila's innocence, not to mention his convoluted explanations of setups, lies and legal misconduct. Both his DMV and cocaine convictions were solid; prosecutors marshaled voluminous evidence against him. Still, on a bright day it is possible to see enough small cracks in the cases to at least illuminate the theory that Avila is telling the truth.
Even more mysterious than Avila's ever-spreading legal trail, though, is Nick Avila himself. How did his life veer so far off course? If he was guilty, it suggests either that for 35 years he had everyone completely fooled, or that something went very wrong as he returned to north Denver to set up his law practice in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The other possibility, of course, is that Nick Avila is innocent.
Although the trajectory of their lives ran parallel for several years, John Astuno concedes that, as part of a middle-class family, he started a step up from Nick Avila. Nevertheless, the two became best friends in middle school. In high school they grew apart, but met again at CU's law school and, after that, in Denver's courtrooms.
Eight years after their graduation together, Astuno heard about Avila's 1984 arrest on charges of conspiring to alter motor vehicles records. "I remember watching the ten o'clock news that night and just being dumbfounded," he says. "I found those charges to be inconsistent with everything I knew about Nick. If you believe that our characters are formed at early ages, then all I know is that he's a real honest, solid person."
For much of his adult life, Nicholas Avila Sr., whose education never moved beyond the eighth grade, worked the coal mines of Wyoming, where he managed both to support his family as a heavy equipment mechanic and contract a case of black lung. He moved his family to Denver in 1958 to be closer to medical treatment for his daughter's skin condition.
It was soon after that Astuno met the then-eight-year-old Nick Jr. "Nick was always a striver--he always worked," he recalls. "He had a tremendous sense of work. He wasn't the smartest kid, but he just really wanted to succeed."
He delivered papers for the Rocky Mountain News. He cut lawns. Later he went to work at a corner store in northwest Denver, where the family had moved, first stocking shelves, then cutting meat, then delivering groceries. When he was sixteen he decided to spend his earnings on flying lessons. A year later he received his small-plane license.
After graduating from North High School in 1969, Avila was admitted to the University of Colorado at Boulder. In his first year he met Barbara Lucero, whom he married the following year. "I was attracted to Nick because he was very independent," says Lucero, who is now remarried and lives in California as Barbara Gottlieb. "He took care of himself through college.
"He seemed very ambitious. Sometimes minorities don't get the same chance as other people. But Nick seemed very determined to succeed and to do well. After he stopped flying, he knew he wanted to be a lawyer. He didn't want to be a millionaire or anything like that. But he had a goal."
Avila's son was born the same year he got married. Despite the pressures of the family, Avila kept up his grades and received a minority financial scholarship to help him pay for school. Recalls Barbara: "We lived on financial aid and student loans. We were very frugal. There was never much money when I was married to Nick."
In 1973 Avila became the first member of his family to hold a college degree. The same year he was admitted to the university's law school.
Even through college and law school, Avila continued to work, first for the federal Bureau of Standards in Boulder, and then later as a defense attorneys' assistant for the indigent. "While he was in law school, I was the head of the Boulder public defender's office," recalls Paul McCormick, who supervised Avila's legal internship. "Nick did very good work--quality work."
In law school Avila began associating with a group of young Chicano students who were active in campus politics. Many of them have since obtained considerable success. Henry Solano was just appointed U.S. Attorney for the Colorado district, replacing Michael Norton. Alex Martinez and Gilbert Martinez are district court judges in Pueblo and El Paso counties, respectively. Judge Michael Bieda presides over an Arapahoe County courtroom. Another CU acquaintance, David Vela, is chief public defender for the state of Colorado.
"We all partied a lot," recalls Gilbert Montoya, now an Arvada attorney who continues to assist Avila in his appeals. "Nick didn't. I think if there was a vote taken then, he would be voted least likely to be in this situation. In fact, a lot of these people seemed more likely to end up here than Nick."
Avila passed the bar exam in 1977 and, he recalls, "I began working pretty much out of my briefcase." The practice built slowly, and in 1982 he began sharing an office with Montoya.
"I had heard that he was looking for someone, so I applied for the job in late 1982," June Garcia, Avila's former legal secretary, remembers. "His first office was on 16th and Boulder, by Olinger's. It was just Gilbert and his secretary and Nick and me. There was a sitting area and the two offices. It wasn't really a busy office at first, but it got busier.
"In January 1983 we moved to 3030 West 38th Street, where we shared an office with Antonio Lucero and his secretary, Maria. Business got better. There were a lot of local residents stopping in. Nick did mostly mainstream, quick cases--you know, traffic, divorce, custody."
Meanwhile, Avila began finding his way into the community. He performed free legal work for Southeast Asian refugees. He taught for free at a local community college. He represented clients for free through the Justice Information Center. "His assistance enabled many indigent clients to resolve their legal problems," Eugene Cisneros, the center's director, wrote in a 1985 letter to the court vouching for Avila's character.
"He was an active individual," says Sandoval, the former state senator. "I met him through the American GI Forum, a fraternal organization that helps Hispanics. He did some work there with the elderly. I saw him one day with an elderly Hispanic lady at the City and County Building. She was going to be her own attorney for a traffic case. Nick said, `Here, let me help you with that.' He looked at a few things and helped her plead her case."
"He was one of the success stories we don't hear enough about," adds McCormick. "I mean, here was a guy who was called `Nick the Spic' as a kid. He came a long way."
Meanwhile, across town, in late 1983, the Denver district attorney's office had begun investigating reports that a small group of people in the state Department of Motor Vehicles would, for a price, alter or delete the driving records of people who'd accumulated enough infractions to lose their licenses. By the spring of 1984 Avila's name had cropped up as a suspect.
On December 17, 1984, he was arrested and charged with two counts each of forgery and criminal conspiracy for planning to have his clients' driving records purged. That evening a newspaper reporter called the family's house to ask for comment from his parents. One of Nick's sisters answered the phone. After listening to the reporter's questions, she replied: "I think you have the wrong party."
Peter McGuire is an intense, wiry Irishman with a headful of longish red hair and the quick, deliberate motions of a bird. He was appointed special prosecutor for the DMV scandal in the summer of 1985. McGuire, who has since resumed working at the Boulder County District Attorney's office, prefers to describe the scam in terms of a wagon wheel.
At the hub, he says, were the people who actually worked for the motor vehicles department, and who did the hands-on records erasing. On the outside--the wheel--were the clients, those who paid anywhere from $125 to $3,000 to have their driving records cleared. Connecting the two were the spokes, the line of people who brought the DMV employees the names, dates and money required to alter the driving records.
According to McGuire, Avila existed somewhere along a spoke. As an attorney who represented people in traffic cases, he was well placed to round up clients willing to pay to regain the privilege of driving, and then funnel the information and payoff to the DMV hub.
And in fact, Avila was proven guilty by two of his former clients, Jose Corral and Richard Zupancic. Both men testified that they had met with Avila to discuss their revoked driving licenses; that he had told them that there were ways to get a new license; and that it would cost a few thousand dollars. Both subsequently had their bad records erased.
Of the 22 people implicated in the scam--including one other lawyer--Avila was the only one who did not plead guilty. In fact, he says, he rejected a plea offer from McGuire, choosing instead to go to trial (McGuire declines to comment on any plea arrangement). It turned out to be the wrong move. Despite his defense that he was innocent, Avila was convicted of all four counts of forgery and conspiracy.
Even though the conviction had labeled him a criminal, Avila had no problem convincing people to offer words of support at his sentencing hearing. Among those who wrote letters to Judge Peterson asking that she consider their recollections of Avila's character were two state senators, three judges and several government prosecutors. "I was just stunned," recalls Robert Martinez, a senator who wrote one of the letters of support. "I have no idea what happened. It didn't sound like the Nick Avila that I knew."
Says special prosecutor McElroy, "Everyone in the Hispanic community except Federico Pea vouched for Nick." Perhaps partly because of the support, Avila was sentenced only to two years on probation. His license to practice law, however, was suspended.
A review of Avila's court files shows that the jury had little ambivalence about nailing him--they deliberated only a few hours before pronouncing him guilty on all the charges. Yet there was one gap in McGuire's case, which has since proved to be Avila's best hope for redemption, and a decade-long headache for McGuire.
McGuire's circle scheme depended on the center and the wheel at one point being connected. That is, a client's money had to be delivered to the Department of Motor Vehicles workers. For instance, DMV employee Debbie Martinez admitted that she passed Corral's and Zupancic's driving records to another state employee, who deleted them. She also testified that a man named Felix DeHerrera delivered their names, dates and money to her--presumably from Avila, who had recruited them.
Despite the district attorneys' best efforts to locate him, however, DeHerrera remained a phantom. Sensing a legal opening, Avila's attorney--and friend--Paul McCormick hired a private investigator to check out DeHerrera. The investigator later interviewed Debbie Martinez and her husband, Noy. In a report of the interview, the investigator wrote that Noy Martinez admitted that he had made up the name Felix DeHerrera.
Since the DMV trial, the issue of DeHerrera's existence has surfaced one more time. That was at Avila's March 1988 sentencing on the federal drug charges, when McGuire stated that, contrary to Martinez's story, federal prosecutors had informed him that Felix DeHerrera was in fact a man named Phillip Guerrero.
June Garcia, Avila's former legal secretary, remembers Phillip Guerrero: "He was very pesty, you know? He would bug the girls in the office, like he thought he was something special. He was around our law offices all the time, doing odd jobs for Nick at the properties [Avila] owned. He would come in a lot to get soda from our kitchen, or something like that."
Avila says he met Guerrero while representing him in a paternity case. The two men subsequently kept in contact. Occasionally, Guerrero would work for him. Along the way they eventually became something like friends.
"If you do any criminal work as a lawyer, your clients are criminals, even if you like them," Avila explains. "Sometimes there's a real fine line there."
Guerrero certainly wasn't the first person with whom Avila had crossed the line separating attorneys from their clients. Indeed, for someone who grew up in a tough neighborhood and then returned there to work, sometimes the line doesn't even exist to begin with.
Avila had known Jesus John Hernandez from years ago. The two grew up in the same neighborhood, and Avila would spend time at the Hernandez family house, near St. Dominic's church at 29th Avenue and Federal Boulevard. At one point the two men dated sisters at the same time. Later, when he returned to the neighborhood to work as a lawyer, Avila represented Hernandez on several legal matters.
In 1984 nearly four dozen people, mostly Hispanic men and women from north Denver, were arrested in a massive federal cocaine sting. Hernandez was named as the head of the ring. His Rolls-Royce was confiscated by federal agents. He subsequently became the first person in Colorado to be prosecuted under the state's new "kingpin" statute, and was sentenced to just over twenty years in prison.
As part of the investigation leading up to the sting, law enforcement officers sought to have Hernandez's phones tapped. Avila's name appeared on affidavits prepared to seek approval of the phone tap. (William Welch, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case, says it was because Avila had represented several of the suspected members of the drug ring; Avila insists his name came up because he himself was a suspect.) He was never charged with any crimes, however, and he still defends his association with Hernandez.
"I guess I knew John was into something illegal," Avila explains today. "I have a couple friends who you could say live on the fringes of lawful behavior. But I grew up with them. And I never abandoned them."
Which, more or less, was Avila's explanation to federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers when, on an August morning in 1987, they surrounded him as he walked out of the downtown Denver bus station, opened his duffel bag and removed one kilogram each of 91.6 percent and 86.9 percent pure cocaine.
end of part 1
