Janet Reno has a real log-cabin story. It begins about 1947, when Truman was president and Miami wasn’t the land of a thousand conspiracies. Her mother, Jane, guided by government pamphlets, laid log upon log to help build their three-bedroom home.
It has been modified only slightly since then. A broad screened porch serves as the living room. Jane Reno insisted air conditioning not be installed. She liked it hot.
It was nearly 20 miles from downtown on 20 acres of palmetto scrubland. Henry and Jane Wood Reno wanted to be in the country, where they could have horses and cows.
They sold off much of the property to pay for their children’s educations. They kept the square patch that surrounds the house, an oddity today behind a funeral home, next to condominiums and near cookie-cutter strip shopping malls.
You cannot see it from the road. You must turn at the mail box and drive 20 yards down a dirt path. Thick brush and trees remain bowed from Hurricane Andrew six months ago. Janet Reno and her mother rode out the storm in the house.
This is where Reno has lived for more than 40 of her 54 years and what she will leave if the U.S. Senate confirms her as the nation’s next attorney general.
“That house is symbolic of who Janet Reno is,” said Richard Gregory, one of Reno’s top assistants as Dade County state attorney. “This is the way she is: Unpretentious. Private. Simple. And she lives her life the way she feels comfortable.”
For 15 years, Reno has been the top prosecutor in a county that is a mosaic of criminal intrigue. It’s a choke point in the international drug war, for immigration problems, for criminal conspiracies and public corruption.
Few have been in a better position to see the challenges facing the nation on justice issues than Reno.
She has lost often. She has been criticized for her handling of controversial cases and in some instances for not handling them. The trial conviction rate of her office is modest, but there are enough complexities in the Dade County justice system to make numbers a dubious measure.
At the same time, she has established programs for victims, witnesses, children and families seeking support payments. She also endorsed a widely studied drug court here, which emphasizes treatment over jail time.
Even the critics back her
She has shown a consistent ability to make converts of her detractors. And, perhaps the best measure of all, she continues to win re-election and most recently ran unopposed, no small accomplishment for an unapologetic liberal Democrat in an increasingly conservative county.
“She is the Teflon prosecutor,” said defense lawyer Edward Shohat. “If there are any clues to her skills, look at the election results. She came through every time.”
When her office failed to win a conviction of Miami police officers in the beating death of a black insurance agent, Arthur McDuffie, in 1980, Miami exploded with racial violence. Reno quickly went into the black community to allay doubts. She told citizens: “You have a perfect opportunity to get rid of me. I am up for election in the fall.” Community leaders who had called for her resignation now strongly endorse her.
Les Brown, a community organizer back in 1980, said he believed Reno’s office had wrongly investigated him for nearly a year in connection with a city contract. He stood at her office at the Richard Gerstein Justice Building each day to protest.
Now a highly successful motivational speaker, Brown said of Reno: “I’ve watched her for a long time. She is a person with a strong sense of integrity and government service. She is firm and she is relentless. And I have absolutely no reason to say anything good about her.”
Defense lawyers have often argued with her, but they don’t challenge her motives.
“I’ve had very serious run-ins with her, toe-to-toe, Louis and Dempsey arguments,” Shohat said. “She can be very volatile and very strong-willed. But she will stand her ground and always stand behind the people who work for her.”
Martin Dardis, who was chief investigator under Reno’s predecessor, Richard Gerstein, and under Reno for two years, once publicly called her a “moron” over her handling of a drug case. But he said that he never questioned her character and that he believes “she has the potential to be one of the greatest attorneys general ever.”
Her one persistent critic, John B. Thompson, a lawyer and a leader of a self-described pro-family group, questioned Reno’s sexual orientation and accused her of being soft on pornographers when he tried to unseat her in the 1988 election. Dade County voters re-elected Reno by a 2-1 ratio.
Reno has said, “I’m just an old maid with a great attraction to men.”
A fanatic about ethics
Friends describe her as extremely family oriented, devoting time and attention to her sister and two brothers, their children and cousins, all of whom stay at the family home at one time or another. She is a member of AARP, the NAACP, the Greater Miami Opera, the Tropical Audubon Society and the National Council of Jewish Women.
Sara Smith, a lawyer and a friend of Reno’s for nearly 30 years, said she thought so much of her that she listed Reno as her children’s guardian in her will, even when Smith’s parents were living.
Unlike President Clinton’s two previous top choices for attorney general, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, Reno has had an extensive public career and by most accounts is as good a politician as she is a prosecutor.
“She has a reputation for impeccable character combined with the fact that she is tough, combined with the fact that she is accessible,” said Pat Seitz, president-elect of the Florida Bar Association, who has known Reno for more than two decades. “She’s somebody who truly doesn’t care what people think about her because she is going to do what is right and do it well.”
Current and former assistants said Reno is a demanding boss: blunt, direct and fanatical about ethics.
For example, she regularly checks computer printouts to see if her assistants have accumulated parking tickets. If they have too many to suit her, she calls the assistant in for an explanation.
When she found one with more than 100, Reno confronted him, and he invoked his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.
“Janet almost took his head off,” said one of her former assistants. “She believed so much in the system and that you don’t play games with the system. You could not show contempt for the court system.”
Reno paid the sticker price for her car because she didn’t want any suggestion that she got a break. “I told her I would go in and negotiate the price and not tell anybody who I was,” said George Yoss, her former chief assistant, now a defense lawyer. “She wouldn’t do it. She paid list price. Nobody does that.”
Questions about success
Her reputation for rectitude notwithstanding, Reno’s office has had a mixed prosecution record. The Miami Herald has reported that her office loses a higher percentage of trials than all but one other prosecutor’s office in the state. But it also has the fourth-best conviction rate when taking into account plea bargains.
She also has been criticized for not vigorously pursuing public-corruption cases and for handing off cases to federal prosecutors when there is joint jurisdiction.
Richard Gregory, one of Reno’s top prosecutors and a former federal prosecutor, said that the lower success rate is more a product of quirks in Florida’s judicial system than a flaw in Reno. For example, judges can plea bargain independent of prosecutors. Also, Dade County has more than 200 police departments, he said, and many do not review charges with the prosecutors before they are brought.
Reno has a broad view of justice that encompasses a number of programs that she might be expected to recommend if confirmed as attorney general. Women seeking child-support payments have called Reno at home (her number is listed), and she has responded with help. One woman whose husband was killed now works as a counselor in the victim-assistance program.
“She doesn’t see numbers, she sees people,” said her friend Smith. “To her, social problems aren’t abstract. They are solvable.”
Though some describe Reno as a workaholic whose job is her life, Smith said they don’t understand the 6-foot-2-inch Reno’s enthusiasm for the outdoors, poems by Kipling and Maya Angelou, and a wide range of music.
“If you’ve never been to the Everglades, the best way is to be introduced by Janet Reno,” Seitz said.
A family of independents
Reno’s parents, now dead, were journalists. After majoring in chemistry at Cornell University, Reno attended Harvard Law School, where she graduated with honors. She opposed the Vietnam War but didn’t take part in demonstrations.
Reno became a lawyer, Seitz said, “because she didn’t want somebody bossing her around.”
But when she returned to Miami in the early 1960s, she was rejected for a job with a large Miami firm because she was a woman. She worked in private practice, lost a race for the state Legislature, then in the 1970s became a partner in the large firm that had earlier turned her down. Eventually she became a top assistant to Gerstein. When he retired in 1978, the governor appointed Reno to succeed him.
The day she was sworn in, Dardis said, her mother stood with a cold beer in her hand and said, “Right on.”
Much of Reno’s character was shaped by her mother. Smith described Jane Reno as a “woman who loved to do things that women weren’t supposed to do.”
Over and over Jane Reno offered this homily to her children: “Good, better, best. Don’t ever rest until good is better and better is best.”
Jane Reno reportedly wrestled alligators. Smith said she knows Jane Reno had to be taken to Baptist Hospital because an alligator was attached to her toe. She also mimicked the locally famous 100-mile route of Florida’s Barefoot Mailman just do show a woman could do it too.
Jane Reno allowed a lone room air-conditioning unit in her house, and that only because a cousin who had moved in required it for a medical condition. Everyone else had to rely on the breezes to beat south Florida’s heat and humidity. They spent nights on the porch singing, talking politics, reading poems and playing double-board Scrabble.
“Her mother had a profound impact on everybody,” Seitz said. “She was a woman with strong opinions who didn’t mind sharing them and didn’t care what you thought of her.”
Her children are similarly independent. Reno has a brother who is a columnist for Newsday, a sister who is a county commissioner in Stuart, Fla., and another brother who works on boats in the Caribbean.
No last-minute pick
The house helps hold the family together. Reno holds staff picnics there and extended-family reunions. You can hear opera there one minute, country and western music the next. They scared a skunk and a raccoon out recently. Reno lists her home as her largest asset, worth $342,946 of her $557,793 net worth. She has no debt.
Reno has refused to talk to the press about her nomination. Some colleagues joke that since the nomination, Reno has been made to sound like Mother Teresa, raising the question that if she were such an obviously qualified candidate for attorney general, why didn’t Clinton nominate her instead of Baird?
Smith said the Clinton transition team contacted Reno after the election to see if she was interested in the attorney general’s job. At the time, she declined because her mother was suffering from lung cancer.
Jane Reno died just before Christmas, about the same time Clinton was announcing Baird’s nomination.
“We all knew Janet would never leave while her mother was still alive,” said Seitz.
When Baird withdrew her nomination and Kimba Wood’s never became official, Clinton again turned to Reno.
Her friends gave her a briefcase to take to Washington. “It’s from Orvis, not Gucci,” Smith said. “She’s going to be a whole breath of fresh air.”
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Janet Reno’s confirmation hearings, which are to begin at 9 a.m. CST Tuesday, will be televised on C-Span and CNN, and broadcast in Chicago on WBEZ-FM 91.5.
