 |
| TAMPA ATTORNEY PROVED LEGENDARY AT LITIGATION |
| recommended that his young charge attend Washington's Georgetown University. Problem was, the university required a high school diploma, and Whitaker's grade school had never issued one. Adamson contacted a friend who also happened to serve as a school trustee. Whitaker typed a request for the document himself, and soon received his diploma in the mail. "I perpetrated the biggest fraud in University history," he would later recall. Earning his law degree from Georgetown in 1915, Whitaker would join and leave a partnership in La Grange, Georgia, within the space of the next year. He moved to Tampa the following year, and opened his own law office in the Guiddens Building in 1917. A year after his success with the mullet case, the ambitious attorney capitalized on his notoriety by launching an unsuccesful bid for mayor, facing Charles H. Brown in 1920. "[I] never expected to get elected, of course," he said later. "But I figured a campaign would make me a personality, and a lawyer's got to be known as a personality." Elected to Florida's House of Representatives in 1924 - an era when voter fraud and stuffed ballot boxes were rampant - Whitaker was among the first to back legislation permitting the use of voting machines in Hillsborough County. Hillsborough residents would go on to elect him in 1926 to a state Senate seat, a position he would win again in 1930. He served as president of the Senate from 1931 to 1933 and, after a defeat in 1934, returned again for a third four-year term in 1938. In 1939, Whitaker sought to regulate gas and electric utililty rates with a Tampa Utility Board bill. Tampa Electric honcho Peter O. Knight and others charged that Whitaker's primary goal was to further the interests of the competing Tampa Gas Co. On May 4 of that year, state Rep. Raymond Sheldon of Tampa stood on the floor of the House and waved a loaded .38-caliber revolver in the air. "Gentlemen," he said, "do you think I'm carrying this gun for fun?" Sheldon charged that on April 11 six men had taken him and fellow Hillsborough County Rep. E.P. Martin of Plant City to a room in the Floridian Hotel, where they threatened to kill them both if they did not support the utility bill. Sheldon said he and Martin tried to compromise, agreeing to support the measure if Whitaker would "let the people" name the board's membership. As written, the bill placed the duty of appointing the first board in the hands of Mayor R.E.L. Chancey, Whitaker's brother-in-law. Whitaker refused the deal. Hoping to send the matter to committee for further investigation, Sheldon charged that Tampa Gas paid Witaker $10,000 a year to retain his services, and that the senator wanted to control the utility board to "unload the gas company on the taxpayers." The bill eventually passed after Sheldon refused to reveal the identities of his alleged extortionists. OFF TO JAIL It was in a highly publicized trial twelve years later, in which 57-year-old midwife Diamante Urga was charged with abortion and manslaughter, that Whitaker faced one of his more serious challenges. Refusing an order by a judge to hand over trial notes concering a prosecution witness to County Solicitor Paul B. Johnson - notes he had used to bring out certain discrepencies in the witness' testimony - Whitaker was found in contempt of court. Refusing to pay a $250 fine, he turned himself in at the sheriff's office to serve the requisite ten days in jail. Whitaker was detained for four hours until the state Supreme Court ordered him released on a writ of habeas corpus, under which any man jailed may demand a showing of why he is being held. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the papers were private property, and the contempt citation was set aside. Urga was convicted nonetheless. |
| A master at parlaying folksy manner into legal and political success, Patrick C. Whitaker Sr. was one of the more colorful figures ever to emerge from the ranks of Tampa government. Standing all of five foot six, a bit overweight and with a penchant for Scotch and cigars, Whitaker enjoyed success in local courtrooms and the Florida Legislature that helped to shape one of the more tumultuous periods of this century. Opening his first law office in May 1916, within a few short years the young attorney had earned a reputation as Tampa's most formidable criminal lawyer, his appearnaces drawing crowds of fellow barristers to the courtroom to study his techniques. By the time of Whitaker's death in 1965, his defense was said to have saved more men from the electric chair than any other attorney in the state. A master at the art of mass manipulation, he favored capturing and maintaining a jury's attention by removing his false teeth in the midst of a presentation. Offering a mumbled apology, he would casually sprinkle the teeth with adhesive powder and put them back in place before continuing. The year 1919 marked Whitaker's first big trial in Tampa, a seemingly simple case that helped to launch his reputation as a prosecutor's worst nightmare. A half-dozen youths had been arrested on charges of fishing out of season. Though flat broke, they convinced Whitaker to represent them in exchange for a fish dinner. It was while watching his clients clean their catch, mullet, that he made a key observation: Mullet have gizzards, just like chicken. "They said sure," Whitaker would later recall, "all mullet had gizzards. They feed on grass on the bottom of the waters, and the gizzards help to get the sand out of their systems." At the trial, he told the judge that the men couldn't be charged with catching a fish out of season, because the mullet couldn't be a fish. His proof: books showing that fish have no gizzards, "I conceded that mullet lived in the water like a fish, but that didn't make him a fish," he later recalled. "Whales live in the water, but they aren't fish. Beavers live in the water, but they aren't fish. The only thing I could think of was that these mullet were some kind of aquatic fowl." The case was dismissed. It would later result in the state Legislature's redrafting its fish conservation law to scpecificallly mention mullet, whether fish or fowl. GEORGIA UPBRINGING The eldest of state legislator Daniel Brittain Whitaker's five children, Patrick Crisp was born June 29, 1894, in Franklin, Georgia. Completing the rural equivalent of the eighth grade, Pat was 15 when he convinced his father to allow him to attend business school in Atlanta. Five miserable months of study ended in his taking a shipping clerk's position in a Conyers, Georgia, mill. It wasn't until his father recommended that he serve as secretary to Congressman W.C. Adamson that he found his calling. He arrived in the nation's capital a few days before President Woodrow Wilson took office, and was at Adamson's side when the Congressman drafted many key pieces of legislation, including the so-called Eight-Hour Law, the first to limit working hours. The pair would later take a trip to the Panama Canal and, forced to wait in Tampa for a boat to Cuba, enjoyed a couple of days seeing the local sights. Whitaker was immediately enchanted with the place, Ybor City in particular. "I've traveled far and wide," he later said, "and there is no place comparable to it. A young man could live freely here and get ahead." Impressed by Whitaker's enthusiasm, the congressman |