THE MISERY BROKER

How Raoul Felder redefined the high-stakes divorce. - BY JOHN CASSIDY

By Robert Mayer
(Originally published in The New Yorker - )

No. 437 Madison Avenue is an anonymous concrete and glass office tower just south of the Palace Hotel. On the thirtieth floor, to the left of the elevator bank is a set of fake brown doors painted to resemble the entrance to a run-down Los Angeles office circa 1938, with signs that say; "Sam Spade: Criminal investigations" and "Phillip Marlowe: Private detective." Between the fake doors, a real one bears the legend "Raoul Lionel Felder." Inside, there is a small waiting room decorated with dozens of framed headlines, some of which go back several decades. They include "DR. ESTRANGLED LOVE" (GQ) "THE DEAN OF DIVORCE" (the News), "SCOURGE OF STARS, RICH SPOUSE'S NIGHTMARE" (the Times), and "CAPTAIN DIVORCE" (Vanity Fair). Felder, who is sixty-nine years old, is a shameless self-promoter, but much of the publicity that he has received he has earned. In forty-one years as a marital attorney, he has sued more famous men than any other divorce lawyer in America.

The list of his targets includes Martin Scorsese, Carl Sagan, Tom Jones, Lawrence Taylor, Johnny Carson, Frank Gifford, Peter O'Toole, Al Roker, Brian De Palma, and Joseph Heller.

It would be doing Felder a disservice, however, to portray him simply as a tormentor of famous males. A couple of years ago, when he was representing former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, he said of Giuliani's then wife, Donna Hanover, "She's howling like a stuck pig. She reminds me of the little kid who murders his parents and complains he's an orphan." This past October, Felder sued Liza Minnelli for ten million dollars on behalf of her estranged husband, the concert producer and promoter David Gest. In a ten-page complaint that delighted tabloid editors from Florida to Fleet Street, he described Minnelli as a washed-up, overweight alcoholic who beat Gest so badly during drink-addled rages that he suffered "unrelenting headaches; vertigo; nausea; hypertension; scalp tenderness; insomnia; mood dysphoria; photosensitivity; and phonophobia."

One morning shortly before Christmas, I went to see Felder, pausing in a corridor to inspect a life-size photograph of him, a fierce expression on his bearded face. His wood-panelled corner office overlooks the back of St. Patrick's Cathedral. When he rose from a big wooden desk, he was taller than I had expected, over six feet. He had on an expensive looking brown three-piece suit, one of more than three hundred he owns, and a cream cotton shirt with the words "Honest Lawyer" stitched on the breast pocket. Beneath his shiny bald crown there were deep lines on his forehead, large brown eyes, a fine Roman nose, and a wide mouth.

Felder is an inveterate collector. The wails of his office are lined with ornaments, toys, books, magazines, papers, photographs of him with famous people, and all sorts of other paraphenalia: an old globe that he picked up in a flea market, an F.B.I. baseball cap, and a plaque from the Brooklyn School for Special Children, honoring him as a "distinguished humanitarian." On his desk he keeps a glass replica of the black Maltese falcon statuette featured in John Huston's 1941 film version of Dashiell Hammett's novel, and two engraved quotations from Raymond Chandler: "Trouble is my business" and "Everybody has something to conceal." Amid the bric-a-brac are some valuable pieces of art, including two Rodin sculptures and two Picassos -an etching and a painting-that Felder received when he represented Picasso's son Claude in a divorce case. (Claude's wife claimed that he had promised to give her some of his father's work. The jury didn't believe her. Claude rewarded Felder with the painting and the etching.) After introducing himself, Felder offered me a cup of white Fauchon tea, explaining that it contains more antioxidants than any other brand. Although he likes to imagine himself as an old-fashioned gumshoe, he has also been heard to describe himself as a "classic hypochondriac Jew." His over-all health is sod, and he exercises every morning, but he lives in constant fear of a heart attack. Some years ago, he was walking on Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn, when he felt short of breath. His doctor ordered an EKG and an angiogram, which were both normal. Felder insisted on also having a new type of CT scan, which detects calcification in the walls of the heart arteries. A normal calcification count is below a hundred; Felder scored a thousand. His doctor told him not to worry: the link between calcification and heart disease wasn't proved. Far from reassured, Felder went to the medical center that pioneered the arterial scan, St. Francis Hospital, in Roslyn, Long Island, and had another one, only to record a calcification count that was almost off the scale. "What can I do about it? Nothing," he said when he told me this story. "I wish I'd never had it. I try to forget it. But I can't."

Felder's clients pay some of the highest fees in the business: an hourly rate of five hundred and fifty dollars, and a retainer of at least twenty-five thousand dollars. He proudly points out that he was the first divorce lawyer to receive a fee of a hundred thousand dollars and the first one to receive a fee of a million dollars. Divorce law isn't usually seen as a cyclical industry but Felder has noticed that it ebbs and flows with the economy. During the recession of 2001, and particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, his business dropped off sharply; lately it has rebounded. Felder's wife, Myrna, works with him, along with six other attorneys. At any one time, they handle between a hundred and two hundred cases, dealing with divorce, prenuptial agreements, and paternity suits. Some of Felder's rivals accuse him of taking on too many clients, and it is true that he doesn't know the details of every case his firm takes on. However, he oversees them all, and he certainly works hard. He gets to the office every morning at seven and often stays for twelve hours or more.

About three-fifths of Felder's clients are women ---an imbalance he attributes to the sociology of gender. "When men leave their wives, they tend to get recommendations for divorce lawyers from their colleagues," he said. "Women, especially women married to rich men, often don't have a network of professional contacts. So they turn to me." Over the years, Felder has represented more than three thousand clients, a number of whom have retained him more than once. The record -seven times- is held by two women. One was a former beauty queen who got divorced and remarried every few years; the other kept switching back and forth between two husbands.

After we had drunk our tea, Felder summoned Brett Kimmel, a burly thirty-five-year-old lawyer who handles many of the firm's celebrity paternity suits. Kimmel, who grew up in Miami, has cropped hair, a beard, and a brusque manner. He quickly updated Felder on a case involving a former girlfriend of the music and fashion mogul Sean Combs (a.k.a. Puff Daddy, P. Diddy), who was suing Combs for a big increase in child support. The case, which had been filed in Westchester County, where the petitioner lives, was due back in court in the New Year. Kimmel had been attending the court hearings alone, but Felder was ready to step in if he considered it necessary. "When I started practicing law, there used to be a father's day in court," he said, referring to a regular date in the court schedule when the judges would deal with paternity cases. "With AIDS and birth control, you would think the rate of impregnation would have gone down, but it hasn't. People don't seem to care, particularly the rappers."

As soon as Kimmel had finished, Jodi Sharp, a slim woman with blond hair and pale skin, came in and briefed Felder on the expanding legal battle between Gest and Minnelli, which now encompassed three cases: Gest's original suit, for ten million dollars in damages; a countersuit from Minnelli, in which she accused Gest of stealing millions of dollars to her; and a divorce action in which Gest and Minnelli were suing each other. None of the cases had reached court, but both sides had started fling motions. Sharp, who is twenty-eight, worked in a family court in New Jersey before joining Felder's firm, in 2002. She and Felder were spending a lot of time on the phone with Gest, who was in Honolulu. "I just talked David down from a palm tree," Sharp said. He's ill, and he's obviously upset about it all. Sometimes he can't get out of bed. Noise bothers him; everything bothers him."

Gest and Minnelli, whose portrayal of Sally Bowles in the 1972 film "Cabaret" won her an Academy award, started dating in 2001. They met when Gest was producing a television special, about Michael Jackson, whom he has known for many years. In March, 2002, at Marble Collegiate Church, on Fifth Avenue, Gest and Minnelli got married. It was the fourth wedding for Minelli, who is now fifty-eight, and the first for Gest, who is fifty-one. Elizabeth Taylor acted as a maid of honor;Jackson was the best man. "Liza, I love you more than any words can say," Gest declared. "You have made me a complete person. You are everything to me. And I cannot think of living life without you."

The union lasted sixteen months. Last summer, Minnelli ordered Gest out of her New York apartment, following an argument, and soon after that she told him not to come back. Gest flew to Hawaii, where the couple had been building a house; and it is there, he claims, that he developed his chronic headaches.

Felder was under no illusions about the challenge he was facing. As far as the divorce case was concerned, Gest stood to gain little. Before marrying Minnelli, he had signed a lengthy prenuptial agreement, which imposed strict limits on what both parties would receive in a divorce. Gest's claim for damages was outside the scope of the agreement, but persuading a Jury of New Yorkers that the five-feet-four daughter of Judy Garland had battered a grown man would be no easy matter. "She has a built-in advantage as a popular celebrity," Felder explained. "We have to overcome the fact that she's so well liked, and that people don't believe that women beat up men." He handed me an article he had written for the December, 2oo3-January, 2004, issue of the magazine Gotham, in which he pointed out that every year in America there are eight hundred and thirty five thousand cases of domestic violence against men-one every thirty-eight seconds. (The figure includes violence by a men against partners.) "She has thirty years as a celebrity; he's hardly known," Felder went on. "The public looks at him and says, 'Oh, he wears dark glasses. He looks kind of weird. Maybe he's after her money'. Well, she threw a lamp at him. He has a black eye. That's why he wears dark glasses."

One of Felder's strengths as an advocate is his ability to sound utterly serious when he is saying something preposterous. Gest wore dark glasses long before he married Minnelli. Felder knows this, of course, but he rarely lets an inconvenient fact derail one of his soliloquies, especially when he is talking to a reporter. Most domestic cases are resolved before a trial, and tarnishing an opponent's reputation in the media can be an effective way of pressuring the other side to settle. Felder adopts the tactic without hesitation- often to the fury of opposing lawyers. One of Minnelli's attorneys, Frederic Siegel, had already mentioned Felder's name repeatedly in a court filing, which Felder regarded as a breach of legal etiquette and a sign of nerves. He hadn't encountered Siegel before, but he claimed not to be worried about him. "Apparently, he's from Connecticut," he said, in a tone of voice that made it sound as if Stamford were somewhere in rural india. "He attacks me. What good does that do? He doesn't understand. This is hardball. This is the big leagues."

The first court hearing in the Gest-Minnelli divorce took place in early January. When I arrived at Felder's office on the appointed day, he was discussing tactics with Jodi Sharp. He was wearing a conservatively cut blue suit, with a white silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. During the holiday he had been cogitating further on what to do about Gest's public image. "The problem is that everybody who hears about him laughs at him," Felder said. "I have to balance that. Somehow, I have to paint a picture of what life was like with her." Felder also had to deal with the awkward fact that his client wouldn't be in court. Gest had remained in Hawaii, claiming he was too sick to travel. In response to his absence, Minnelli's lawyers had filed a motion asking the court to force him to make himself available for a deposition. Felder said he would ask the judge to allow Gest to be questioned via a video hookup, but he didn't seem very hopeful of success, even though there were some possible precedents that he was planning to bring up. "We're wrong on the law, but let's see how far we can take it," he said to Sharp. "Pick out some good sentences."

Although Gest was supposedly in seclusion, on New Year's Eve he had been spotted in Honoulu attending two pop concerts, which he had also produced. Felder told Sharp to call Gest and ask if his doctor had accompanied him. "David, sorry to bother you again, I have one question," Sharp said. "When you did your shows on New Year's Eve, was your doctor there with you?" After listening for a few minutes, she told Felder that Gest's doctor hadn't travelled with him to the shows but had met him there. Felder seemed only mildly reassured.

The court hearing was downtown, at 80 Centre Street. Felder's driver, a good-natured Brooklynite named J. Kevin Connelly drove Felder, Kimmel, Sharp, and me there in a black Lincoln Navigator. Connelly, formerly a professional pool hustler, started working for Felder in the winter of 1989. "The first thing he said to me was 'Kevin, is your coat warm enough to get home in?' I thought, I've found my home," Connelly recalled. "The second thing he said was 'What you hear in this car must stay in this car.' "While we negotiated the traffic on Fifth Avenue, Felder lamented the negative coverage that Gest was recessing, especially in the Post, courtesy of Minnelli. "She's been hitting him with Liz Smith and Cindy Adams," he said. "They are friends of hers."

When we pulled up outside the courthouse, Felder removed the silk handkerchief from his jacket. "You have to be humble," he said. The courtroom, which was on the third floor, was small and shabby, with scuffed wooden benches and old cream paint peeling from the wails. Minnelli and her attorneys arrived a few minutes before the hearing was scheduled to begin. She was wearing a dark winter coat, a pink scarf, and bright-purple gloves. Beneath the scarf, she had on a silver necklace with a black crucifix hanging from it. A pair of diamond earrings framed her instantly recognizable face, which was heavily made-up. "Please make me look pretty," she said to the newspaper sketch artists who surrounded her.

Justice John Stackhouse emerged from his chambers. Before being appointed as a divorce judge, Stackhouse spent twenty years in the criminal courts, where he earned a reputation as a disciplinarian, but when he saw Minnelli he walked over to her and shook hands before climbing up to his bench. "Ms. Minnelli, I'm happy that you are here," he said. "You don't have to stand. I am sorry Mr. Gest is not here. Medical reasons, apparently." For Felder, it was an inauspicious start. After Minnelli had signed some forms, the judge allowed her to leave. Then he heard arguments on the motion to force Gest to appear for a deposition.

Felder put on horn-rimmed glasses and addressed the judge in a commanding voice. His client had been admitted to the hospital four times and was still in bad shape, he said; only yesterday, he had been given twenty injections in his head to relieve the pain. Yes, he had attended a concert over the holiday, but he had been medicated before the show, and his doctor had been in constant attendance. If the other side would only agree to a video deposition, the main stumbling block that was preventing the case from proceeding would be removed.

Frederic Siegel, a broad-shouldered fellow with a thick neck and short black hair, immediately brought up Gest's activities on New Year's Eve. "Concerts are quite loud, particularly if you are backstage," he said. "Apparently, the headaches didn't bother him at that time, and he was able to participate in those concerts. He's also been apparently spending time with Stone Phillips and the crew from 'NBC dateline' and they have been following him around. So he's not too ill to spend time and give interviews.... He brought this lawsuit. He should be here." After Siegel had finished, Justice Stackhouse looked at Felder and said, "I think the issues raised by Mr. Siegel are good ones." Then Stackhouse went on, "Mr. Felder, you are in a difficult position talking about bumbling blocks when your client isn't here. That's the biggest stumbling block of without a plaintiff, the case cannot go forward."

If Felder was disheartened, he didn't show it. The next order of business was a motion he had filed to force Minnelli to submit to a blood test. Striding toward the center of the courtroom, he said the defendant suffered from "a certain condition" that she had hidden from her husband, a deception that amounted to a crime punishable with a year in jail. Judge Stackhouse quickly interrupted him. "What is the relevance?" he demanded. Felder replied that the defendant's crime -her failure to tell Gest about her condition- was germane to the "cruel and inhuman treatment" she had meted out to him during the marriage. Before Felder could say anything else, Siegel stood and asked for a conference in the judge's chambers, on the ground that these were highly confidential matters. Stackhouse agreed to the request.

After the lawyers disappeared, the reporters, who included representatives from the Times, the News, and the Post, huddled excitedly. "Is it herpes?" one asked. "Is it syphilis?" another said. About twenty minutes later, Felder and the other lawyers came back into the court without the judge. Samuel Maull, a veteran court reporter for the Associated Press who has covered many of Felder's cases, sidled over to Felder and whispered, "Does she have the clap?" Felder smiled and replied, "A gentleman doesn't say" Maull was clearly amused by Felder's outrageous attempt to sully Minnelli's reputation. "That's why I love Raoul," he told me as we waited for the judge to return. "He's always got something. He was wrong about the law, though. The penalty is up to ninety days in jail and a five-hundred-dollar fine."

When Justice Stackhouse returned, he did not appear to be diverted by Felder's antics. "I've admonished Mr. Felder not to suggest that Ms. Minnelli has committed any crimes," he announced. "I do not Want to hear anymore about crimes. There are no crimes committed by anyone in this case. I don't want to hear about that." Felder interrupted the judge. "Crimes of the heart," he said. Judge Stackhouse still wasn't amused. "I don't even want to hear crimes of the heart," he said sternly. "I do not want to hear the word 'crime.' This is not a criminal court. This is a matrimonial court. The word 'crime' does not belong here, and I will not abide it. If you use that word 'crime,' you will pay me for it. O.K.? It comes at a thousand dollars a letter. If you want to use it, use it, but it's going to cost you five thousand dollars every time. O.K.?" Felder nodded. "From here on in?" he asked. "From here to in," the judge replied. "You got three free ones, but those are the last ones." Felder looked like a high-school senior who had been caught cheating on his S.A.T.s.

After issuing his public reprimand, the judge ordered Felder to provide a court officer with Gest's medical records, so that he could make a final decision on the deposition, and set a date for the next hearing. As we drove back uptown, Felder insisted that things hadn't gone too badly. "She basically admitted that she had the condition," he said. "We saw that she doesn't like being in court. She was wearing gloves, so they wouldn't see her hands shaking." Kimmel and Sharp, who were sitting in the rear seat of the Navigator, kept silent. I sensed that they didn't want to sound disloyal by admitting the obvious in my presence: Felder's attempt to tarnish Minnelli's image had misfired, and it had been a bad day.

Felder was born on May 13, 1934, in Brooklyn. The apartment building his family lived in, at the corner of McKibben Street and Manhattan Avenue, about a mile from the Williamsburg Bridge, no longer exists. Felderk father, Morris, emigrated from Vienna to New York when he was a boy. He trained as a veterinarian, but, when trucks replaced the horse-drawn wagons that supplied most of his business, he went to Brooklyn Law School. He kept an office at 66 Court Street, in downtown Brooklyn, where he handled real estate and other local matters. Felder's mother, Millie, was an immigrant from London's East End. Felder shared a bedroom with his elder brother, Jerome, who was stricken with polio at the age of ten and walked on crutches.

Felder went to P.S. 141 and Eastern District High School, where he was a modest student, partly because, he now believes, he had attention-deficit disorder. "It was always very hard for me to study,' he told me. "My mind goes on two levels, and it is very hard to pull them together." Felder's parents paid for his tuition at N.Y.U,where he majored in English and minored in chemistry. After graduating, he began medical school in Berne, Switzerland, because it was easier to get into than an American college. Harvey Feinberg, a New York psychiatrist who was a classmate at the Swiss school, told me that Felder would have made a fine physician, but he quit after a year and a half. "I never really liked medicine," Felder explained. "However successful you are, you always end up sticking your fingers down somebody's throat."

In the late nineteen-fifties, Felder enrolled at N.Y.U. Law School, and in 1959 he became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. The job, which was based in Brooklyn, involved investigating frauds, counterfeiting, and organized crime, but it paid less than ten thousand dollars a year. In 1963, Felder saw a chance to make better money through a connection of his brother Jerome, who had become a renowned songwriter, under the name Doc Pomus. Between 1958 and 1961, Pomus and his songwriting partner, Mort Shuman, wrote more than five hundred songs, including"'-this Magic Moment" and "save the Last Dance for Me," for The Drifters, "a Teenager in love" for Dion and the Belmonts, and "Viva Las Vegas," for Elvis Presley.

Shuman was married to a beautiful lounge singer, Esther Tobi, who performed at Cafe Sabra on West Seventy-second Street. Esther was a volatile woman. She and Shuman argued constantly and Shuman wanted to get a divorce, which was far from easy. Under New York State law at the time, the plaintiff had to prove adultery on the part of the other spouse. Felder quit the D.A.'S office in order to represent Shuman. One night when they were having dinner, Shuman mentioned that every time Tobi returned after one of their frequent separations, a Belgian waiter called Henri,who had served as the best man at their wedding, was carrying her bags. Felder sensed an opening. "How do you know he isn't screwing her?" he asked. Shuman was aghast, but Felder persuaded him to call Henri from the restaurant and told him what to say: "I know you've been sleeping with Esther, but don't worry about it. Our friendship means more to me than that." Henri fell for it and confessed that he had been sleeping with Tobi. Shuman asked him to come to the restaurant. When Henri arrived, he told Shuman, "Don't worry, she laid there like a lox." Shuman got angry, but Felder calmed him down and persuaded Henri to testify in court the following day. A reporter from the News was there to hear the testimony. The story ran under the headline BEST MAN KISSES AND TELLS." Shuman won his case, and Felder was in the divorce business.

Today, divorce is a major industry and many big law firms have marital divisions. But when Felder started out marital law was not considered a respectable profession, and most divorce lawyers worked on their own. The legal restrictions on divorce meant that often an attorney's primary task was establishing adultery. "The old-time lawyers, they used to have a team-a girl, a photographer, and a key man," Felder recalled. "The key man's job was to open the door of the hotel room for the photographer." Felder claims that he never adopted such underhanded tactics, but the historical record shows that he sometimes came close. In one case, he showed the court a porn film that the wife of his client had made. In another, he claimed that his client's husband, who was represented by Roy Cohn, had forced her to participate in "unnatural acts" and produced a set of Polaroids to support his argument. Cohn's client quickly settled the case.

In 1966, the New York State Assembly made divorces easier to obtain. Somebody wanting to end a marriage still had to show that his or her spouse was "at fault," but the grounds were expanded to include cruelty and abandonment as well as being separated for more than a year. Although Felder's business benefitted greatly from this reform, he opposed it at the time, partly for ethical reasons. Despite his popular image as a high-priced mercenary, he likes to think of himself as an old-fashioned moralist. "I thought it would make a mockery of marriage," he told me. '"It was wrong to make adultery the only ground, but it was also wrong to make it so that divorce was there for the taking."

In 1980, another reform was introduced, revolutionizing the economics of marital break-ups. Previously New York was a "title" state, and the husband generally kept any property registered in his name, which often included the marital home and the family business. The new law introduced the principle of "equitable distribution," which the courts interpreted to mean a sharing of all property acquired by either party since the marriage, including bank accounts, real estate, and other investments. Many people believe that the 1980 reforms amounted to an overdue recognition that marriage is an economic partnership as well as a legal one, but Felder thinks that the law is now unfair to men. "The pendulum has swung too far the other way," he said. "Now the wife gets half of everyrthing, even if she doesn't deserve it." What particularly infuriates Felder is that the courts don't confine themselves to dividing existing marital property. In some cases, they also assess the future earnings potential of the higher-earning partner (the man, usually) and share some of it with the lower earner (the woman, usually), in the form of a lump-sum payment. "Take the case of a doctor who walks out on his wife and runs away with the nurse -they all run away with the nurse," Felder said. "Well, they'll say his medical degree has some value. Some expert will come in and put a value on it, to force him to pay up. But it has no value. It is not a marketable asset. He might decide to go out and work for Mother Teresa."

According to Felder, the politicians in Albany who revised the divorce law buckled to political pressure. "Women, they are very organized," he said. "They go to the legislature. Men tell their troubles to a bartender." Still, his reservations about the law haven't prevented him from exploiting it to win bigger settlements for his female clientele, and bigger fees for himself. "When you are a lawyer, you deal with the law as it," he says blithely. He doesn't waste time pondering the potential contradictions between his beliefs and his actions, but he does have some standards: "I don't take incest cases. I don't take cases where the men beat the wives, or the children are abused."

Most of Felder's cases ultimately revolve around money. Recently he has been representing the wife of a wealthy real-estate developer who impregnated a stewardess on his yacht. Felder sued for divorce on the wife's behalf and demanded half the husband's fortune, which she claims is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But the husband has so far refused to provide any detailed information about his assets, and the case is bogged down. Such stonewalling is not unusual. Sometimes, the wrangling is resolved only through the testimony of independent financial experts, whom the divorce lawyers hire to bolster their arguments. "We don't spend a lot of time these days on 'He said, she said,'" Stanford Lotwin, a marital attorney who represented Donald Trump in both of his divorces, told me. "It's become more a battle of forensic accountants." In one of Lotwin's cases, the accountants alone have billed more than a million and a half dollars. "We've all had to change the way we operate," Lotwin said. "There's less room for theatrics, although Raoul manages to find the opening."

While the changes in the divorce law and escalating fees should provide a strong incentive for both parties to settle, emotion can still intervene, "I don't want you to think that, with all the changes, people don't want to rip each other's throats out," Lotwin went on. "They do. That will never change. These people, when they are fighting over all this money, they can barely stand to be in the same room with each other."

Felder tries to avoid getting caught up in the bitterness and resentment he encounters on a daily basis, but sometimes he can't avoid it -especially if he has helped to foment it. After reading in the newspapers that the developer was trying to buy a landmarked building, he obtained an injunction on the wife's behalf to prevent the multimillion-dollar deal from going through, and he also persuaded the court to make the developer pay his wife's legal fees. When Felder ran into the developer at a hearing, the greeting he received consisted of two words: "Fuck off."

"This is not meeting the other lawyer at the golf course and talking it over," Felder told me. "We deal with extremely angry people. This work takes your blood." In some cases, inevitably, Felder's own clients end up unhappy with him. Some of them fire him. One woman, a disturbed Californian, threatened to kill him. "The problem in this business is that nobody goes away happy," Felder said. "You never win one hundred per cent. You never get full vindication. It's always degrees of losing to people. They are in a losing situation. Their marriage fell apart."

Felder is full of unlikely stories, such as the one about the sheikh's wife who invited him to the River House, on Sutton Place, and served him a platter of smoked salmon yhat had been arrranged in the shape of the Star of David, saying, "You people like salmon, I hear." The woman wanted Felder's help in getting a divorce, but he refused to take the case when he discovered that her husband had thrown his wife's previous lawyer, an Englishman, from his yacht. Thatis a fairly tlypical Felder yarn: short, snappy, and so absurd it is probably true. Other Felder tales involve a Russian gangster, a central-Asian President, and a prominent NewYorker who, unknown to the outsideworld, was a bigamist. (Folder represented one of his two wives.) When Felder tells his stories, his thick eyebrows point upward and outward, making him look a little like the devil in a friendly mood. After all these years, he still finds his job invigorating. Every new client provides him with a lift, a challenge, and the potential of another vignette to add to his collection. "The music is the same, but the lyrics are always different," he told me. "I love lyrics. My brother was a lyricist."

Felder's knack of reducing complex cases to simple narratives has helped him to become a successful media commentator, a role that complements his regular career. The publicity he receives helps to bring in high-profile clients (or their exes), who provide more fodder for the tabloids, which leads to more invltations for him to appear on television and to write books. In January, John Wiley & Sons published his seventh book, "Bare Knuckle Negotiation: Savvy Tips and True Stories from the Master of Give and take." His publicity campaign started at the General Motors Building, at Fifth Avenue and Fiftyninth Street, where CBS'S "The Early Show" is taped. Felder explained some of his negotiating tactics to the TV audience in crisp sound bites: "Know your opponent"; "Have no sense of shame"; "Be prepared to walk away." Then his driver, Connelly, dropped us off at CNN'S studio in the Time-Lif eBuilding, where Felder answered some more softball questions, and added a few supportive remarks about David Gest. As we walked back to Felder's office, we encountered a newlywed couple getting their picture taken outside Radio City Music Hall. Felder offered his congratulations, then took out a business card and handed it to the groom, gaping, "If you ever need a divorce lawyer, get in touch."The couple looked bemused, but Felder seemed to enjoy his joke. "It's like I always say" he said. "Marriage is the first step to divorce."

Later in the day, he appeared on the Fox News Channel, which is based at 1211 avenue of the Americas, the United States headquarters of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. When he got off the set, we walked across Forty-seventh Street to Langan's Bar and Restaurant, where we ran into Steve Dunleavy, the columnist, who, as it happened, was due to visit Felder's office the next morning. During the nineteen-eighties, Felder and Dunleavy worked together on Fox's "A Current Affair": Felder acted as a legal consultant; Dunleavy was an on-screen reporter. They swapped a few stories, and Dunleavy, who was chugging Aussie-size vodka-and-tonics, tried to persuade Felder to join him. Felder, a modest drinker, agreed to have one glass of wine, then he got up to leave, saying, "I'll see you in the morning at ten o'clock, Steve." "I'll be there," Dunleavy replied. "Have I ever let you down?"

A couple of days after this encounter, the Post featured Dunleavy's byline beneath the headline "HIP-HOP MOGUL DASH RAPPED ME." The story began, "A leggy former model says she was horribly raped by powerhouse rap mogul Damon Dash in a 15-second, forced-sex encounter on New Year's Day 2003, a blockbuster $15 million news suit charges."Toward the end of the story, Dunleavy noted that the plaintiff, a thirty-two-year old woman named Kirstie Thompson, has hired celebrity lawyer Raoul Felder."

Felder isn't the only divorce lawyer who leaks lurid information to his friends in the media, but he is the acknowledged master. He claims that he is only following his clients' wishes. "People say, 'You feed the story to the pressed,'" he told me, sounding aggrieved. "I've never fed a story in my life where the client didn't want to go public." Whether that is true or not, some of his colleagues in the divorce bar admire his ability to leak. "He uses the media very effectively," said Harriet Newman Cohen, whose clients have included the actor Laurence Fishburne and Alison Stern, the former wife of the radio personality Howard Stern. "It's part of his M.O., and he's not doing anything that divorce lawyers are not allowed to do."

Felder displayed his media savvy in one of his most famous cases: the Robin Givens-Mike Tyson divorce. Givens, an actress, retained Felder in October, 1988, after she hired and fired Marvin Mitchelson, the California attorney who became famous in 1976 when he sued Lee Marvin for palimony. At the time of the Tyson-Givens marriage, the heavyweight boxer was the biggest sports star in the world, and Givens was widely seen as a gold-digger. Felder insisted that Givens wasn't after Tyson's money. He spun the marriage as a tragic story in which she fell in love with Tyson and tried to help him conquer his demons. Subsequently, however, Felder issued a libel suit against Tyson for a hundred and twenty-five million dollars on Givens's behalf. The legal dispute was eventulally settled for an undisclosed sum, and Folder was feted as the new Mitchelson.

The reviews were less glowing when he represented Rudolph Gitztiarti in his divorce from Donna Hanover. The Giuliani-Hanover saga began in May of 2000, when Giuliani announced at a press conference that he was discussing a formal separation with his wife of almost twenty years, apparently to spend time with his "very good friend" Judith Nathan. Divorce actions that start badly rarely improve with age, and this one was no exception. Hanover immediately struck back suggesting that her husband had also been conducting a long-standing relationship with a staff member. Hanover's attorney Helene Brezinsky quickly sought a court order to keep Nathan away from Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence, so that the couple's two children wouldn't encounter her.

Felder, who was a political supporter of Giuliani before being hired as his divorce lawyer, launched a series of public attacks on Hanover, one of them on Mother's Day, accusing her of banishing her husband to a small bedroom during his treatment for prostate cancer, forcing him to rely on Nathan for sympathy. Felder also suggested that Hanover was primarily interested in staying at Gracie Mansion, adding that somebody would have to "pry her off the chandelier to get her out of there."

These harsh statements weren't accompanied by success in court. Justice Judith J. Gische banned Nathan from Gracie Mansion, a decision that was upheld in a higher court, and She also rejected an attempt by Felder to prevent Hanover's lawyers from speaking publicly. "Given Mr. Felder's extensive use of the press, it was ironic, to say the least, that he, of all people, should have sought a gag order," Victor A. Kovner, one of Hanover's lawyers, said recently. Finally, on July 10, 2002, as a trial was about to begin, Giuliani agreed to pay Hanover almost seven million dollars, tax free, on top of twenty-two thousand dollars a month in child support, and three hundred and seventy thousand dollars in legal fees. Speaking on the court steps, Brezinsky claimed that the settlement represented a "spectacular win" for her client and her children, an assessment that many commentators agreed with. (Post headline: "DONNA MAKES THE CREEP PAY.")

One of Felder's longtime critics is the matrimonial attorney Norman Sheresky. Back in the nineteen-eighties, after Sheresky told a reporter that "Felder pretends to be a trial lawyer when he is not," Felder sued him for libel. (A judge dismissed the case.) In May 2001, following Felder's comments about Hanover, Sheresky returned to the attack, commenting to the New York Observer, "somebody ought to put a muzzle on him." Despite his intemperate tone, Sheresky raised some pertinent questions about Felder's aggressive public-relations strategy, which sometimes rebounds on his clients. At one point, Giuliani's publicity got so bad that he and Felder approached Howard Rubenstein, the veteran public-relations man, who had previously represented Felder's firm. Rubenstein told Giuliani and Felder to avoid any public comments, but this advice was ignored. "When an excited Raoul meets an excited Rudy, anything can happen," one of Felder's acquaintances told me.

Certainly, representing Giuliani wasn't an easy assignment. "For one thing, he's a lawyer, and lawyers have strong ideas about how to handle things," said Eleanor B. Alter, who represented Mia Farrow in her custody battle against Woody Allen. Stanford Lotwin also stressed the fact that it isn't necessarily the marital attorney who decides how to handle the public-relations aspect of a divorce. 'You have clients who say, 'The last thing I want is to see my name in the newspapers.'" Lotwin said. "You have other clients, like Trump, who say to you, 'When you come back from court today, hold a news conference.'".

These arguments are hard to dispute, but, when I gave Felder the opportunity to shift some of the responsibility for his ungentlemanly behavior toward Hanover onto Giuliani, he spurned it. "That was me -that was one hundred per cent me," he said. "I knew she was a phony. I recognized her. I'd represented women like her over the years." Felder went on, "She said, 'oh, the kids, the kids, keep them out of it.' The fact is on New Year's Eve, 2001, she pushed the kids before the cameras. But she wouldn't let them go to the Republican Convention with him, or to his last State of the City address."

Felder also argued that the seven-million-dollar cash settlement was a good deal for Giuliani, whose earnings potential was transformed by his response to September 11th. "These days, he and Clinton are the most sought-after speakers in the country," Felder said. "He also has his own consulting arm. it's no Secret--- they represent major corporations, they represent Mexico. They are doing very well." Had the case gone to court, Hanover's lawyers would surely have argued that since Giuliani was married when he was the mayor, all of his future earnings should be treated as marital property. All have undertaken not to comment publicly about the settlement," Felder went on. "But if you look at the numbers... I would not, if I was on the other side, call it a tremendous victory"

Felder and his wife live in an eight-room apartment on Sutton Place, overlooking the East River. They own another luxrury residence, above the Museum of Modern Art, which Felder uses primarily to store his out-of-season suits; a summer house in Sag Harbor; and a condominium in Miami Beach. The Felders started courting in 1962, when Raoul was working in the D.A.'S office. Myrna, who grew up in Forest Hills and attended Pembroke College, in Rhode Island, was dancing in the Broadway musical: "Stop the World-I Want to Get Off," under the stage name Rawley Bates. They got married on May 26, 1963, and subsequently had two children: a daughter, Rachel, who is a correspondent at People; and a son, James,who is an aspiring writer.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Myrna went to law school at Raoul's suggestion, and then she joined his firm. A few days after taking the New York bar exam, in the summer of 1971, she found herself in court. "He put me right in at the deep end; l've been there ever since," Myrna told me. She is a small woman, with brown hair and a girlish voice that disguises the fact she is a former president of the Women's Bar Association of the State of New York. She takes on cases of her own, as well as handling much of the firm's appeals work and helping Felder with some of his cases. "He's the creative genius, I'm the technician," she said. "Sometimes the bright ideas he comes up with need a technical execution. I handle that."

Felder's profession inevitably invites speculation about his own marriage. Rachel Felder, who is thirty-six, told me that it is founded on mutual respect, including respect for each other's quirks. "My father is comfortable in the spotlight, my mother doesn't do many interviews," Rachel said. "He does his thing, she does hers. It works for them.." When I asked Felder if he had ever considered getting divorced, he said that he hadn't. "He doesn't really believe in divorce," one of his oldest friends, Liz Trotta, the New York bureau chief of the Washington Times, told me. "I have heard him say it many times."

As a young lawyer, Felder was something of a firebrand, but to the dismay of his wife, who describes herself as a "New York liberal," he now writes political columns for conservative publications like the American Spectator and the Washington Times. Felder started voting Republican in 1980, but in 1992 he supported Bill Clinton, a decision he quickly came to regret. Four years later, Felder deserted Clinton for Bob Dole. "I fell for it the first time, but not the second time," he said. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Felder was outraged, not just by the fact that the President had frolicked with an intern in the Oval Office but by the tawdry nature of their affair. "He was having phone sex with Lewinsky and playing with himself," Felder said with a dismissing shake of his head.

His best friend is another Clinton-hater, the comedian Jackie Mason, who grew up on the Lower East Side. The two met by chance outside the Carnegie Deli more than twenty years ago. They dine together frequently and they have forged a successful business partnership, co-writing two books and appearing together on a television talk show for PBS, "Crossing the line," and a radio show for the BBC, "The Mason-Felder report." Mason described Felder to me as an exceptionally, unbelievably compassionate person," but also as a Jekyll-and-Hyde type personality." He went on, "It's amazing to me what a terror he is in the courtroom. When you talk to lawyers privately, they tell you he is the worst lawyer in the world. That's how you know there is a lot of jealousy about his success. Of course, some of it is him. There is no modesty about his success. He daunts it almost exhibitionisticatly. He wears those fancy clothes, he buys a new car every twenty minutes. He bounces around like he owns half the country"

Felder certainly aspires to be a larger-than-life character, but he also takes his work seriously. "He has a very good shop, and he has people there who work very hard for hih," Harriet Newman Cohen said. "He represents his clients very energetically and vigorously" Mel A. Sachs, a New York attorney who has worked alongside and opposite Felder, told me, "He's able to size up the legal problem, which is what most lawyers can do, but he's also able to size up the opposing lawyers and the judge. He does a tremendous amount of background research." Sachs worked with Felder when he represented the art dealer Alec Wildenstein, in his acrimonious divorce from the socialite Jocelyne Wildenstein. "The key in any case is preparation, and no stone was left unturned," Sachs said. Doyle handled the case like a general."

Felder doesn't like vacations -he hardly ever uses the Sag Harbor summer house -and he spends a lot of his free time at home reading legal briefs. One of the keys to his productivity is that he is plagued by nightmares, and he is able to sleep only four or five hours a night. "The nightmares are so severe that he sometimes wakes in a cold sweat. When I asked him about them, he replied, "Do you know Blake's horrifying etchings? That's what I see. I'm going to die one night in one of them."

Another of Felder's strengths is his ability to console women. "He was very paternal," Jeanne Carter Halpern, who retained Felder when she separated from her first husband, in 1979, said. "I was about twenty-nine, and he just took over as a father figure. He got in touch with my parents. He was wonderful to men." After her divorce, Halpern, who was working in the music industry, went to law school, then joined Felder's arm, where she worked for nine years. "When I became a divorce attorney, I copied a lot of things Felder did," Halpern said. "If you are a woman with no children, he would suggest one course of action, which might be settling quickly and getting on with your life. If you had children, he would suggest another course of action, which was about protecting the children's future at all costs. He is very practical and down to earth."

Despite appearances to the contrary, Felder can also be discreet, even in cases involving celebrities. Eleanor Alter recalled representing Christie Brinkley, the supermodel, when Felder represented Brinkley's then husband, Ricky Taubman. Although the announcement that the couple was splitting up received a lot of media attention, the divorce itself was settled with little publicity. Newman Cohen recounted similar experiences in dealing with Felder. "I have had cases where the papers would have enjoyed what is going on, and he didn't go to them," she said. "He has clients whose privacy he protects."

Felder's longest-standing client is Rina Kerzner, a Long Island woman who has been battling her former husband for fourteen years. The ex-husband, an electronics distributor, tried everything to avoid giving her money, including declaring bankruptcy in Florida. "I have no time for divorce lawyers," Kerzner told me recently. "They think the clock is ticking and that the clients have to pay. They have no feeling for the client. But Felder, he's a different tlrpe of divorce lawyer." Felder eventually won Kerzner a judgment of almost one and a half million dollars, which she still hasn't collected, because her ex-husband is fighting it. The case is now in the New York State Supreme Court. "Everybody sees Felder as a big-shot lawyer and a guy who's just after the money" Kerzner said. "But when I needed help he was there."

Kerzner incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, but Felder has waived them. Jeanne Carter Halpern told me that, when she was working for Felder, about half of his cases were effectively pro bono, including one in which the client had been reduced to living homeless on Forty-second Street. "I like that side of him," Halpern said. "Not the media figure."

At the end of January, Felder was back in court on David Gest's behalf, this time pursuing his claim for ten million dollars in damages. Jodi Sharp and Brett Kimmel again accompanied Felder, and as we made our way downtown I noticed that there was some tension between the two men.'The previous day, a Post story about the Sean Combs child-support case had made it sound as if Kimmel were now the lawyer bringing the lawsuit against Combs and that Felder had been replaced. "Do you know Brett?" Felder said sarcastically. "I work for him."

When we reached the courthouse, at 111 Centre Street, Minnelli's lawyers had arrived, but there was no sign of their client. Justice Shirley Kornreich was dealing with a number of other cases in quick succession, and Felder had to wait his turn. Eventually Kornreich, a diminutive woman with black hair and an acerbic tongue, summoned to her bench the two sets of lawyers involved in the Gest-Minnelli case. As in the divorce case, Felder had asked the court to grant Gest permission to give evidence via a videoconference, while Minnelli's lawyers had demanded the right to interview Gest face to face, which is the usual practice in assault cases. "This man is very ill," Felder insisted. "He has brain damage now. It's worse than I thought."

Kornreich appeared no more impressed by Gest's purported injuries than Judge Stackhouse had been. "These are all subjective," she said, dismissing the colorful descriptions of Gest's ailments which Felder had included in his court papers. Felderwouldn't give up. He tried to cite a number of cases in which video-conferencing of witnesses' testimony had been allowed. "I know the law," Kornreich snapped. Don't give it to me."

The hearing was brief. 'When it ended, Felder stopped in the corridor outside the courtroom and tried to spin some reporters, telling them that Minnelli's lawyers were trying to stall the case. He also read out some of the details of Gest's medical condition which he hadn't been allowed to bring up in court: "He feels like his eye has been pulled out of its socket. Part of the diagnosis is traumatic head injury... postconcussion syndrome... closed-head injury... traumatic brain injury" One reporter asked how Minnelli had responded to the allegation that she was responsible for this litany. "She says it never happened," Felder replied. "If she can remember what happened-if she was sober."

Out of the reporters' earshot, Felder complained to Sharp and Kimmel about Judge Kornreich's dismissing attitude toward him. "She won't listen to anybody," he said. "If there was any question about having a jury, that settled it." (Under New York law, the plaintiff in a civil case can allow a judge to decide the case or demand a jury.) Kimmel, who had been holding his tongue all day, took the opportunity to commiserate with his boss. "She's tough," he agreed.

As we drove back uptown, Felder insisted that, despite a second discouraging day in court, he wasn't perturbed. The legal battle was in its early stages, he said, and Gest was keen to take the witness stand and tell his story. However, subsequent developments suggest that Felder has cause to be concerned. After almost a year in Hawaii, Gest still hasn't returned to New York. Moreover, in February, Felder suddenly changed strategy, filing a motion to consolidate the divorce and assault suits into one case before Judge Stackhouse. Last week, the judge denied the motion.

In addition, a potentially lucrative proposal to turn the Gest-Minnelli dispute into a reality-television series has fizzled. Last fall, Harvey Levin, the creator and executive producer of "Celebrity justice," a daily news-magazine show that focuses on famous people's encounters with the legal system, suggested to Gest and linked that they should consider resolving the assault case in a televised proceeding, with a real judge and a jury selected from the public, which would be shown over several weeks in prime time. Levin promised to give Gest and Minnelli hefty appearance fees, as well as guaranteeing to pay whatever judgment the jury decided upon.

The reality-series proposal wasn't as outlandish as it might seem. After his marriage to Minnelli, Gest tried to get a reality series about their life together off the ground. (The program fell through when Gest and Minnelli tried to restrict what the camera crew could fill) The negotiations between Levin, Felder, and Gest reached an advanced stage,but they broke down earlier this year when, over Levin's objections, Gest went ahead with his appearance on "Dateline," and was shown getting a series of injections to his head. Levin pulled out of the deal. Felder, who had been looking forward to Starring in a higll-prolllc television series, was upset about its demise. "At the last moment, David shut it down-even though they had hired the judge, the other side had agreed, and there were millions of dollars involved," he told me forlornly.

It doesn't look as if Gest v. Minnelli will be one of Felder's big successes, but he won't let that worry him too much. "When l started out, I was on the outside looking in," he told me recently, in one of our final conversations in his office. "I was never in that inside group." Now, despite the occasional setback, Felder is where he always wanted to be. In addition to his legal career, he is working on an autobiography, a mystery novel, and a Broadway musical featuring the compositions of his brother Jerome, who died in 1991. Last year, Governor George Pataki appointed him to a statewide Commission on Judicial Conduct, which allows him to sit in judgment on judges. The panel recently recommended the removal of a judge in Troy, and Felder submitted a concurring opinion that ended with a citation from Shakespeare.

When he was young, Felder's mother gave him some advice that he took to heart; "Always be a moving target. That way they can't get you." Although he turns seventy next month, Felder has no plans to slow down. "This is a business in which you never have to retire," he Said. "As long as I've got my mind, I can keep going." Just before I arrived at his office, an eighty-six-year-old man had called up. He told Felder's secretary that he was blind, he had recently had a quadruple bypass, and his wife had left him, taking the contents of their safe-deposit box with her. Could Felder do anything to help? "It's like Chaucer," Felder said. "Everyone has a story. Every life has a tale."