We lost one of our greats this weekend; Gene Zenobi passed away.
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| A dapper Gene circa late 1970s doing what he did best |
Gene was old school. He was from a time when a man's word mattered. He was a deep thinker who approached a trial the way a grandmaster approaches a chess match. He had many theories about jury selection developed over a lifetime of trying cases in Miami Courtrooms. He understood before most of the rest of us that jurors form alliances and he crafted his jury selection to pick jurors who would form alliances for not guilty. He lectured generations of lawyers about jury selection, and his number one maxim- that jury selection starts from the moment you park your car and walk towards the courthouse, is a rule all of us should follow every time we show up for voir dire- we never forget it or Gene when we walk into the REGJB to pick 6 or 12 to start a case.
Gene had a successful private practice; he was there at the start of the cocaine cowboy era in the 70s-80s. A simple kid from an Italian family in Pennsylvania, he rose through hard work, study and skill to the top of his profession both in the Dade Public Defenders Office, and in private practice. In his later years Gene took a struggling and rudderless Regional Counsel Office and turned it into a powerhouse of lawyers who tried and won cases. The foundation of lawyers he recruited and kept remains today, providing world-class legal services to indigent clients.
Gene defended over thirty death penalty cases; argued before the US Supreme Court in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Power, 419 US 345 (!974); had a vast amount of knowledge about history and literature- (we agreed William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was the most significant historical work of the 20th Century); loved jazz; and was the single best horse-handicapper I ever met- and I've met many. He could also be found at many a lawyers-home-poker-game in Miami from the 1980s through the 2010s and beyond. He scooped his fair share of pots.
His, my friends, was a life very well lived. And if you never had a chance to sit at a big Italian dinner and drink great wine and listen to his war stories, well, you missed out on a once in a life-time type of experience. He was a soft-spoken raconteur.
Gene was a colleague and a friend, and in the end, perhaps the best thing we can say about him, from the hundreds of things that come to mind, was that when he was your friend, you could never have a better one; and if he was your lawyer- you had the best.
Rest in peace my friend.
