LA TIMES April 21, 2003
Myrna Oliver
Times Staff Writer

Nor­bert A. Schlei, key lawyer in the Kennedy and John­son admin­is­tra­tions who found legal under­pin­ning for the 1962 block­ade of Cuba, wrote land­mark civil rights leg­is­la­tion and once waged a strong bid to replace an entrenched Repub­li­can Cal­i­for­nia sec­re­tary of state, has died. He was 73.

Schlei died Thurs­day at an acute care hos­pi­tal in Los Ange­les of infec­tions caused by long-term immo­bil­ity, his wife, Joan, said Sat­ur­day. She said Schlei had been vir­tu­ally uncon­scious since suf­fer­ing a heart attack March 25, 2002, while jog­ging in Santa Monica.

Con­sid­ered a legal wun­derkind, Schlei was the Demo­c­ra­tic can­di­date for the 57th Cal­i­for­nia Assem­bly Dis­trict in 1962 when he was tapped by Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy as an assis­tant attor­ney gen­eral in charge of the office of legal counsel.

At the time, Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother, quipped that Schlei — only 33 — had been named so there would finally be “some­one younger” than he in the Jus­tice Department.

But Schlei, who clerked for Supreme Court Jus­tice John Har­lan after grad­u­at­ing from Yale Law School, proved a schol­arly asset to the Kennedys and later to Pres­i­dent Lyn­don B. John­son and Atty. Gen. Nico­las Katzen­bach dur­ing crises and in forg­ing the land­mark Kennedy-Johnson civil rights reforms.

Schlei was the prin­ci­pal drafts­man of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Eco­nomic Oppor­tu­nity Act of 1964, the Vot­ing Rights Act of 1965 and the Immi­gra­tion Reform Act of 1967.

“I felt I was lucky,” Schlei told the New York Times in 1995, “because I was able to turn what abil­ity I had to some­thing important.”

Schlei had barely moved into his quar­ters in August 1962 as head of the office of legal coun­sel just vacated by Katzen­bach, when he was put to work. The Uni­ver­sity of Mis­sis­sippi had refused to allow James Mered­ith, a black stu­dent, to enroll that fall, and Kennedy sent Schlei to Oxford, Miss., to get Mered­ith into the school.

Hardly a month later, as the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis devel­oped, Kennedy asked Schlei to study the legal basis for pres­i­den­tial action in con­nec­tion with Cuba after U.S. sur­veil­lance con­firmed that Rus­sia was installing surface-to-air mis­sile sites in the Com­mu­nist island nation. Schlei responded with what became Kennedy’s Octo­ber jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a naval quar­an­tine on all offen­sive mil­i­tary equip­ment being shipped to Cuba.

“It is our view,” he wrote, “that inter­na­tional law would per­mit use by the United States of rel­a­tively extreme mea­sures, includ­ing var­i­ous forms and degree of force, for the pur­pose of ter­mi­nat­ing or pre­vent­ing the real­iza­tion of such a threat to the peace and secu­rity of the West­ern Hemisphere.”

The lawyer sup­ported the view with ref­er­ences to self-defense rights, the col­lec­tive and mul­ti­lat­eral secu­rity oblig­a­tions of the U.S. and the 1934 Cuban-U.S. Treaty, which estab­lished U.S. rights for its naval base at Guantanamo.

Although Schlei had to aban­don his bid for assem­bly­man to go to Wash­ing­ton (incum­bent Repub­li­can Charles Con­rad was reelected), he tried for elec­tion in Cal­i­for­nia four years later when he ran for sec­re­tary of state.

Schlei hand­ily defeated six oth­ers in the 1966 Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary, polling nearly twice as many votes as were received by his near­est competitor.

He also col­lected more than 2.7 mil­lion votes, a remark­able tally for a Demo­c­ra­tic statewide office seeker in that penul­ti­mate gen­eral elec­tion against Repub­li­can Frank M. Jor­dan, incum­bent for 23 years and at the time the only Repub­li­can statewide office­holder. Nev­er­the­less, Schlei lost the gen­eral elec­tion Nov. 10, 1966, as Jor­dan was swept to vic­tory in the Ronald Rea­gan Repub­li­can landslide.

Schlei, a per­son­able Demo­c­ra­tic cam­paigner, was only yards from Robert Kennedy at Los Ange­les’ Ambas­sador Hotel when Kennedy was fatally shot on the night of the Cal­i­for­nia pri­mary in 1968. He largely bowed out of pol­i­tics after serv­ing as a del­e­gate to the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion that year in Chicago.

A highly suc­cess­ful trial and secu­ri­ties lawyer who rep­re­sented such clients as Howard Hughes’ Summa Corp. in lengthy lit­i­ga­tion brought by ousted Hughes exec­u­tive Robert Maheu, Schlei him­self was tried in a Florida fed­eral court­room in 1995.

The charges and their after­math were a cloud on Schlei’s bril­liant career.

Schlei was acquit­ted of eight counts, includ­ing wire and bank fraud and money laun­der­ing, but was con­victed by a jury of con­spir­acy and secu­ri­ties fraud for pur­port­edly help­ing five oth­ers sell $16 bil­lion in fake Japan­ese gov­ern­ment bonds from the mid-1980s to 1992.

He was sen­tenced to five years in fed­eral prison and lost his license to prac­tice law for 3 1/2 years. But he never went to prison, remain­ing free on appeal. The 11th Cir­cuit Court of Appeals vacated the judg­ment and, in 1998, Schlei aban­doned motions for a new trial to clear his name. Instead he agreed to a nego­ti­ated set­tle­ment of a year’s unsu­per­vised pro­ba­tion on one mis­de­meanor count of con­spir­acy to pos­sess coun­ter­feit for­eign secu­ri­ties, and resumed his law prac­tice in L.A.

Joan Schlei said Sat­ur­day that Schlei had been com­pletely exon­er­ated after fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors con­ceded that there was a “pos­si­bil­ity the instru­ments are valid” and that Schlei had been wrongly prosecuted.

Schlei main­tained all along that he had done noth­ing ille­gal, and that pros­e­cu­tors who issued charges against the oth­ers after a sting oper­a­tion had added him only because of his high pro­file in Demo­c­ra­tic and gov­ern­ment cir­cles to “get in the papers” and make the trial “newsworthy.”

At issue were bonds the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment claimed were coun­ter­feit and cre­ated by a forger they impris­oned in 1983. Schlei coun­tered that the secu­ri­ties were legit­i­mate, that they had been issued in 1983 by Japan’s min­is­ter of finance, Michio Watan­abe, at the request of for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Kakuei Tanaka after Tanaka left office in a bribery scan­dal. Schlei said he had never sold the secu­ri­ties and had sim­ply tried to help about 30 clients pur­chase them with the under­stand­ing that the secu­ri­ties would be redeemable only if they could per­suade a cur­rent Japan­ese gov­ern­ment to honor them.

Among the highly promi­nent char­ac­ter wit­nesses who tes­ti­fied on Schlei’s behalf dur­ing the trial was key Repub­li­can U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter of Penn­syl­va­nia, who had known Schlei since they were stu­dents together at Yale.

Born Nor­bert Anthony Schlei on June 14, 1929, in Day­ton, Ohio, Schlei grew up in mea­ger finan­cial cir­cum­stances, tak­ing odd jobs deliv­er­ing papers and gro­ceries to help his fam­ily. He paid his way through Ohio State Uni­ver­sity as a waiter, but man­aged to grad­u­ate with hon­ors in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture and inter­na­tional rela­tions and earned three var­sity let­ters for golf.

He served as a Navy offi­cer dur­ing the Korean War and later went to Yale Law, where he grad­u­ated first in his class and was edi­tor of the Yale Law Jour­nal. After a year clerk­ing for Har­lan, he moved to Los Ange­les in 1957 to work for the pres­ti­gious law firm of O’Melveny and Myers.

In 1959, Schlei helped form the firm Green­berg, Shafton and Schlei where he remained until he went to the Jus­tice Depart­ment in 1962. In later years, he was asso­ci­ated with dif­fer­ent law firms, most notably the Wall Street firm of Hughes Hub­bard & Reed from 1972 until 1989, whose Los Ange­les office he established.

He was co-author of “Stud­ies in World Pub­lic Order,” a book on inter­na­tional law pub­lished in 1961, and in 1962 wrote the book “State Reg­u­la­tion of Cor­po­rate Finan­cial Practices.”

Schlei sat on the boards of sev­eral cor­po­ra­tions involved in inter­na­tional real estate and secu­ri­ties. Long involved in real estate devel­op­ment, Schlei had begun in 1959 to rep­re­sent Janss Corp., which devel­oped West­wood Vil­lage and the Conejo Ranch area near Thou­sand Oaks.

In addi­tion to his wife, the for­mer Joan Mas­son, he is sur­vived by three sons and three daugh­ters from his ear­lier mar­riages to Jane Moore and to attor­ney Bar­bara Lin­de­mann — William, Andrew, Brad­ford, Anne, Blake and Eliz­a­beth; and four grand­chil­dren. Two other sons, Gra­ham and Nor­bert L. Schlei, pre­ceded him in death.

Call­ing hours will be 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednes­day at Gates-Kingsley Funeral Home, 19th Street and Ari­zona Avenue, Santa Mon­ica. Grave­side ser­vices are planned for 11 a.m. April 29 at For­est Lawn Hol­ly­wood Hills.

His wife asked that memo­r­ial con­tri­bu­tions be made to any of these orga­ni­za­tions: Amnesty Inter­na­tional, the Amer­i­can Heart Assn., the Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety, the ACLU or the Con­sti­tu­tional Rights Foundation.