Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Judge who was accuser is accused

A suspicion of plagiarism came as a hard blow for Greg Holder, known by friends and enemies as a crusader.

TAMPA - Tall and ramrod-straight, the judge strode the courthouse halls in his immaculate Air Force dress blues and chestful of service ribbons. On the bench, he wore his jumbo gold West Point class ring, the one with the words "Duty, Honor, Country."

"I was not from Tampa," said Greg Holder. "And I was different."

Once, he dreamed of being a fighter pilot. From there, the plan went, he'd vault into even rarer air, into the atmosphere - an astronaut.

Instead, he became Tampa's most controversial and divisive jurist, the man whose crusade to clean up the Hillsborough courthouse touched off a wave of resignations from the bench. To some, he was a principled hero, to others a self-righteous snitch.

Now, there is an even uglier description afoot, and to a West Point man a more painful one: plagiarist. If the state panel that oversees judges decides he cribbed a paper for promotion in the Air Force Reserve, Holder may lose more than his robe. The would-be reformer may be remembered as just another stain in the long, sordid chronicle of the Tampa courthouse.

Even if Holder is acquitted at his June trial, the ordeal has already cost him. "There's a tremendous toll, physically and emotionally," said Holder, now 50. "I could send my daughter to Harvard for four years with what this has cost."

Apart from huge legal fees, he has a heart arrhythmia never before detected. He will never be a federal judge, his dream. And though he was nominated to play key roles in Guantanamo Bay terrorist tribunals and in the trials of Iraqi war criminals, the controversy canceled any chance of that.

It also figured in his decision in January to retire from the Air Force Reserve after 28 years.

Ambitions aimed for the atmosphere have radically shrunk. And at the Tampa courthouse, many regard him with deep wariness, suspicious of his motives and his judgment.

Said Robert Bonanno, one of the judges ousted in Holder's crusade: "We knew he would self-destruct."

In 1995, Holder arrived at the Pierce Street courthouse, a squat complex of mildew-grimed buildings where rumors of corruption had circulated for years.

If Tampa's close-knit Latin neighborhoods fed the courthouse much of its talent, outsiders saw a chumminess that made them nervous. Every few years, investigators swept in to sniff around. Courthouse insiders called them occupation troops.

The 1980s saw two judges convicted in connection with fixing drug cases, and the state attorney invoking the Fifth Amendment in a federal corruption investigation. The 1990s brought news that some judges had been improperly sealing criminal records for friends and associates.

Two of them were Bonanno and F. Dennis Alvarez. They were Tampa natives, law partners and longtime pals. As prosecutors they shared a spotty record, once putting a man on death row with the help of bogus evidence.

But scandals seemed to slide right off them, and by the time Holder won election, Alvarez and Bonanno had formed a powerful alliance on the bench.

It was Alvarez who ruled the roost. El Jefe, people called him. The Boss. The raspy-voiced man with the bad knees whose favorite sport - and unrivaled expertise - was courthouse politics.

If you wanted to be a judge, you sought Alvarez's blessing. He had clout in Tallahassee, particularly as a friend of Gov. Bob Martinez. In 13 years in the post, he became the most powerful chief judge in the history of the 13th Circuit.

He was gabby, often gregarious, and the job seemed tailor-made for his temperament. At lunch at Cafe Pepe, admirers paid respects at his table. He dispensed hugs liberally to friends and strangers alike. "He was a judicial godfather," said Tampa attorney Ralph Fernandez, an admirer.

Some judges feared him; most still refuse to talk about him publicly. "We went through a long period when we thought our phones were bugged," said Circuit Judge Debra Behnke.

When good things happened at the courthouse, like the creation of an innovative drug division, Alvarez took credit. When bad things happened, like misbehavior by a judge, Alvarez insisted he was not his judicial brethren's keeper.

And when bad things happened in the House of Alvarez, there was one unspoken and unbreakable rule: Thou shalt not leak to the press.

Holder would do the unforgivable. He would talk, long and loud.

From the start, Holder was on easy terms with reporters, asking about their families, even their dogs. He was an inside source in a closed house, a seemingly incorruptible man. An aggressive self-promoter, maybe, but clearly not beholden to any cozy cabal of good old boys. He kept a poster of the film Tombstone on his wall. "Justice is coming," it said.

Like reporters who had sniffed wrongdoing at the courthouse for years and found it maddeningly hard to nail down, Holder was not from around here. He grew up on military bases and didn't arrive in Tampa until the mid 1980s.

"He didn't really have any roots anywhere," said Bonanno, the former judge. "People who don't have roots anywhere dislike people who do."

West Point permeated Holder's bearing. As a cadet in the 1970s, he marched daily under the glowering statues of generals: Washington, Patton and Eisenhower. The honor code said, We will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor will we tolerate those who do.

Junior year, he turned in a classmate for cheating on an engineering test. The same year, he tracked down a stolen rocket launcher, helping to crack a black market munitions ring.

He wanted to fly a jet for his country. Senior year, he slipped on a flight of stairs, and his concussion shut him out of pilot training. Law was a reluctant second choice.

In his first few years as a Hillsborough judge, Holder made constant headlines. He helped chase down a defendant who bolted from his courtroom. He ordered an open hearing - rare in juvenile court - in the beating of a 2-year-old foster child.

Holder was not always at odds with Chief Judge Alvarez. He once brought Alvarez and other judges along on a refueling jet that took off at MacDill Air Force Base and soared high above Tampa Bay.

When Holder was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the reserves in 1996, he held the ceremony at the courthouse. Alvarez paid respects.

But whatever good will existed between the two men, it soon vanished.

If there was a decisive moment, one decision that set Holder forever at odds with the courthouse powers that be, it came with Judge Ed Ward.

Ward was old guard, a married 18-year judge. When a judicial secretary complained of suggestive e-mails Ward sent her in 1998, Holder went to the chief judge. Do something about this, he said.

If Alvarez took any action, it did not deter Ward from making equally uncomfortable overtures to another secretary.

While the chief judge worked to hush up the brewing scandal - denying to the press he possessed complaints against Ward, though he did - Holder pushed for an investigation.

The case erupted publicly in 2000 when the Judicial Qualifications Commission accused Ward of a pattern of sexual misconduct.

It got uglier still that summer when Holder sent an e-mail to the governor, warning him the JQC was investigating the chief judge. That dashed Alvarez's hopes of being appointed state attorney, a post that had been vacated by the suicide of Harry Lee Coe III. Newspapers quoted a furious Alvarez calling Holder a well-known courthouse leak.

Two weeks later, when it was well known that Holder was out of town on military duty, a bailiff found the chief judge's old friend Judge Bonanno in Holder's locked and darkened office after hours. A grand jury would cite Bonanno's "incredible and conflicting" stories about why he was there.

Again, Alvarez worked to hush it up, urging Holder to let him handle the Bonanno matter discreetly. Holder demanded a public investigation.

He also gave evidence against another member of the old guard, Judge Gasper Ficarrotta, implicated in a sex-and-fundraising scandal. In the end, all four - Ward, Bonanno, Ficarrotta, and the chief judge himself - would leave amid a chorus of derisive snickers.

When Alvarez launched his short-lived candidacy for Tampa mayor - he'd longed to run the city since the age of 12 - the headlines made it clear: No one would forget what happened when he ran the courthouse. For that, he owed Greg Holder.

Bonanno now works as a lawyer in private practice. "Nobody has been more in the cross hairs of Judge Holder than I have," he said recently. "I believe that he believes in what he's doing. I believe you could put him on a hundred polygraphs and he'd pass them all. He believes he's doing God's work."

It should have been an easy paper, no more than a few days' work. The assignment: a by-the-numbers analysis of the Anglo-American bombing campaign in World War II. Countless other students had churned out pretty much the same paper. In the end, it was just a box Holder needed checked for his promotion to colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

The JQC says Holder passed off plagiarized work as his own. Exhibit 1: an Air War College paper bearing Holder's name that liberally steals from the work of a former student, E. David Hoard.

Holder's defense: The cribbed paper is not the one he submitted in 1998, but a fake planted by enemies to disgrace him. But Holder can't produce the paper he says he did write. And he can't explain how a word-for-word copy of Hoard's paper turned up on his secretary's office computer as early as December 1997.

The timing undermines the claim that enemies might have planted the computer file, since it appeared there at least three years before the scandals started earning him enemies.

Asked recently if he hated Holder enough to frame him, Bonanno replied, "I don't hate Judge Holder at all." He added with a chuckle: "It makes me out to be some kind of genius. I don't have that ability."

Margie Kincaid, former head of the Hillsborough Republicans and a longtime Holder supporter, said he is paying the price for bucking the courthouse power structure. She thinks he is being framed.

"Right now I think he's totally depressed," she said. "People are afraid to show they're friends of his."

It did not engender warmth among many of Holder's fellow judges when it emerged that he had informed for the FBI in a courthouse corruption investigation. "If I was on the bench, I wouldn't talk to him unless we were in the sauna, where I was sure he wasn't wired," Bonanno said. "Anything you say can be taken out of context."

The unease extends even to judges untainted by scandal. Some say privately they are glad to see reforms at the courthouse, but disapprove of what they see as Holder's grandstanding and overzealous tactics. Some think his crusade has smeared every judge there. They blame him, as much as they blame Alvarez, for the jokes they still hear at cocktail parties, the arched eyebrow when they mention where they work. A judge? In Tampa? How interesting.

They say ordinary people don't necessarily remember the names of ousted judges or the details of why. They do remember a lot of shady things happened on Pierce Street that reinforce old, old notions about Tampa.

For many jurists, there is something offensive about the very notion of a judge on a crusade. People in robes, they say, should do their talking in court.

Holder, a Roman Catholic, is married to a woman he met as a senior at West Point. They have a daughter in high school and a son about to enter the Air Force Academy. In a recent interview, Holder was far from the voluble, outspoken, guns-blazing judicial maverick he used to be.

His bolt-straight posture did not falter, but the weight of his JQC ordeal showed on his face. "I'm dealing with a trial in two months," he said. "There's not an hour that goes by that I don't think about that."

His lawyer David Weinstein sat beside him, advising him what he could and couldn't say. The plagiarism case was off-limits. Holder's answers were short, careful, bland and lawyerly.

Did he know of the corruption-streaked history of the Tampa courthouse when he arrived in 1994? "No," he replied.

Does he believe he has made it a better place? "I would like to think so," he said.

Does he get the cold shoulder from fellow judges? "Not that I'm aware of," he said.

Once, Holder dreamed he would be a federal judge, that he would pack up his Pierce Street office and ascend to the soaring U.S. district court tower just a few blocks away. An office high above ugly rumors about the men in robes, above the muck of history in a medium-sized Southern town that so often behaved like the most backwardly small.

Appointment to the federal bench is a hope Holder no longer harbors. His only ambition now, if the JQC will let him, is to keep his job alongside his colleagues at the Tampa courthouse.

It is a place where, his supporters say, he ought to walk as a hero, a celebrated reformer. That is not the case. Privately, one Tampa judge wondered aloud whether to spurn Holder's hand should he offer it in public.

If Holder senses the depth of ill feeling, he doesn't want to talk about it. "We have some of the finest judges that have been appointed or elected," Holder said. "I'm proud to work with these men and women."

- Christopher Goffard can be reached at 813 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com