Snookered: how small farmers and big-city lawyers dug up a way to hoist Navy brass with their own petard.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover Story

Kiran Mehta casts about, scanning the folks filling rows of brown plastic seats and squeezing in folding chairs along the walls. Outside the Washington County Agricultural Center, pickup trucks are still easing into parking spaces on Plymouth's Water Street. More than 100 people, many of them men with weathered faces wearing overalls or khaki work pants, will pack this place tonight. With their starched white shirts, dark suits and ties, Mehta and his companions stand out like neon in a church.

Bill Sexton, a cotton farmer who is chairman of the county commissioners, sits at a table up front. In the crowd is Doris Morris, wife of a commercial fisherman and president of her church circle. Ronnie Askew farms 600 acres with his 80-year-old mother. Gerda Rhodes, the local livestock extension agent, lives with her family in her home-place, built in 1927 near the Washington-Beaufort county line.

Forty years ago, just down the road, Sexton's dad told his own father he would convert swamp to cropland. He got a one-word reply: "Crazy." Sexton wonders how his granddaddy would describe tonight's meeting. Mehta, same age as Sexton but Bombay-born and Harvard-educated, is wondering, too. A Biblical passage comes to mind. Nathanael, from the city of Cana, scoffed when told a man from a nearby village claimed to be the Messiah: What good could come out of Nazareth? Mehta laughs to himself. "What good could come out of Charlotte?"

On this November night nearly two years ago, working people of two of the state's poorest counties meet three big-city lawyers from Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman LLP, a Charlotte-based firm with more than 165 lawyers in five offices in the Carolinas. Clients include Bank of America, Wachovia and Microsoft. Business, the bigger the better, is its bread and butter. Mehta, Raymond Owens Jr. and Christopher Lam get up to make their pitch.

We propose to represent Washington and adjoining Beaufort County to block the Navy from taking your farms and businesses for a jet-fighter landing field. We'll represent the counties--Washington alone would lose 22,000 taxable acres, worth $300,000, 3% of its annual budget--but everybody will benefit. We'll stick with you, to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. And we'll do this pro bono. "Suddenly we had fancy lawyers, dressed to the nines, articulate and well-educated, offering to work for free," Washington County Manager David Peoples recalls. "A lot of people were asking, 'Are we about to get snookered?'"

They had been warned. A rear admiral, reaching into bottomless pockets, had set the rules of engagement. "My lawyers are already working on this issue," Atlantic Fleet commander Robert Natter had told a news conference that summer. "Those who want to throw money at lawyers to oppose us had better start throwing more money."

Kennedy Covington lawyers, allied with a team from the nonprofit Charlottesville, Va.-based Southern Environmental Law Center, have matched the Navy salvo for salvo in a battle fought with words, wits and reams of documents, including an epic 200,000-page paper chase. The case resides in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, where a three-judge panel is deciding whether to bar the Navy permanently from buying land for the airfield.

So far, they have prevailed in a showdown that could be the biggest pro bono case in state history. The law firm has invested more than 3,000 hours of legal work--estimated value, in excess of $1 million. And somebody did get "snookered." Among its meanings: deceive or cheat, which is what residents feared the lawyers might do--and were certain the Navy was doing--to them. Another is, to thwart.

Held in sway is more than the 30,000 acres the Navy covets. It's also a way of life. It can be glimpsed south of Plymouth along the straight, two-lane stretch of Highways 45 and 99. Thunderheads swell on the horizon, and the thermometer stands at 92. Gerald Allen, 62, walks in from his soybean fields after checking on his help, a full-time hand and a part-timer. He farms 2,300 acres, much of which he and his uncle began clearing in 1967 when he returned from the Air Force.

"I graduated from high school, served in the military, then came home and went to work--the American dream." This year, he says, the tassels of his corn nearly reach the sky. "It was dry until about the first of June, then we started getting rain, just in time for it to pollinate." The black dirt he tills is special. Some farms here--the Navy would take 75--date to Colonial times, but many were wrestled from mire and mud by the men and women who live on them. In the 1950s and '60s, a lumber company clear-cut thousands of acres of cypress swamp, leaving a jumble of stumps, bushes and water moccasins. Then it went out of business.

Neighbors formed a drainage district, a cooperative matrix of ditches and...