Willie E. Gary

It looks like you looked up the movie while I was, I was, did you look up the movie? Do you know who it is? Yeah.

Well, it's, so I know Fox's character is named Willie, Willie, Willie E. Gary.

Okay.

That's right.

Abe was stunned.

He saw his future on the line and hired a prominent attorney named Willie Gary to defend him, and the case went to trial in October 2007.

At one point, Abe walked into the courtroom hauling a garbage bag stuffed with thousands of lottery tickets he'd bought over the years.

It was proof that playing the lotto was a regular habit of his.

Gary argued that Abe couldn't have known the tickets would be winners, so there would be no reason to steal them.

The jury sided with Abe.

It took them barely an hour to reach a verdict, but Willie Gary's legal fees cost him $800,000, money that Abe really couldn't afford to lose, because by the end of 2008, just two years after winning the jackpot, most of Abe's fortune was gone.

At that point, he had about $1.5 million in cash and roughly $3 million in assets like his house and cars.

Um, and then went to the Gary Law Firm.

Many people know Willie Gary, got movie, The Burial, but a small boutique firm in Florida.

And I clerked for them.

And so I clerked all through my second and third years of law school, and then went to work there in commercial litigation under a genius name, Manuel Sofias.

When we watch, you know, TV and we hear, oh, so-and-so's never lost a case.

How realistic is that? And when you do lose your first case, and we think about Willie Gary, right? We watched that movie on Prime and it was like, I've never lost a case.

How realistic is that? And if you ever have lost a case, how do you get over that?

Well.

What seemed like a simple spat between friends would end up making local and national headlines.

Ford is represented by his lawyers, Arnold Levine and Michael LaRuto, while Willie Gary was in Shakespeare's corner.

The case was Ford's word against Shakespeare's.

but it only takes the jury a little over an hour to throw out Ford's case.

Only at Taco Bell.

advice that the sleuths heed.

Sleuthster looks at three such lawyers, Arnold Levine, Michael LaRuto, and Willie Gary.

These were the lawyers during Shakespeare's trial against Ford.