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The man obscured by Abscam

By LUCY MORGAN
Published August 27, 2005

As a circuit judge, Richard Kelly loved to rock the boat. His fellow judges and many of the lawyers who practiced before him were uncomfortable.

And they should have been.

Kelly didn't like it when a defendant had been in jail too long without his day in court. Sometimes he overreached and did something to meddle.

Some of the lawyers never got over the fact that the young upstart lawyer from Zephyrhills defeated longtime Circuit Judge Orville Dayton, a fixture in Pasco County politics.

The lawyers around Dade City had grown accustomed to Dayton and to having their way around the courthouse.

One of the things Kelly did was to stop the practice of automatically sending fathers who failed to pay their child support into the orange groves owned by a prominent attorney to work off their debts.

He was the kind of public official that wouldn't use an office stamp to mail his utility bills and he never let the county pick up the tab for a long distance call home. He was a stickler about things like that as a judge. He brought his own lunch and ate at his desk, often offering half of his sandwich to any visitor.

And he would bend over backward to see that a poor defendant facing serious criminal charges got his day in court.

That's how I came to meet St. Petersburg lawyer Anthony S. Battaglia almost 40 years ago.

A black man named Allen Smith had been charged with murdering a couple of elderly Zephyrhills residents. There was much evidence against him and little chance he might escape conviction in a day and age and place where racism was not uncommon.

Kelly reached across county lines and appointed Battaglia, a defense attorney of incredible ability, to defend Smith. Kelly and Battaglia had been law school classmates, federal prosecutors and close friends.

At the time the courts paid virtually no money to private lawyers selected to defend people in murder cases and most big time lawyers spent a lot of time avoiding appointments and shoveling them off on younger members of the firm.

Battaglia arrived in Dade City in person and took on Smith's defense as though it was a cause celebre. He lost - the first time around. But he shortly won a new trial for Smith after learning that jurors and family members of one of the murder victims had encountered one another outside the courtroom.

Smith was again convicted, but spared the death penalty. Battaglia had saved his life. Smith remains in a Florida prison cell.

Kelly survived impeachment by the Florida House and an investigation by the Judicial Qualifications Commission during his days as a circuit judge. The complaints made against him came from lawyers and his fellow judges who accused him of embarrassing them.

Yes he did, and he was proud of it.

But his old enemies had the last laugh when Kelly went on to win a seat in Congress and got caught up in Abscam, an FBI sting that resulted in the conviction of a handful of politicians who accepted cash from undercover agents seeking favors from Congress.

Kelly always said he was conducting his own investigation of the suspicious characters around him. Some of us believed him. He was just arrogant enough to think that he could take on the world by himself and everyone would believe he had done the right thing.

Battaglia was there to defend him, but Kelly rejected a federal judge's offer to dismiss the charges against him if he would just claim entrapment. To do that he would have been forced to admit guilt. Instead he went to prison.

He spent the rest of his life railing against the FBI and the tactics they used to ensnare him. He left Florida where everyone knew him and moved to Stevensville, Mont., a small town about 25 miles outside Missoula.

He died this week in the Bitterroot section of Montana. The Missoulian, the nearest newspaper, reported the death of an 81-year-old man named Richard Kelly. They omitted the part about him being a controversial judge, a member of Congress and a victim of Abscam.

They never knew him.

[Last modified August 27, 2005, 01:14:20]