The Crime of Sheila McGough.

• Author: Gwynn, Ellen B.
• Position: Review

The Crime of Sheila McGough by Janet Malcolm Reviewed by Ellen B. Gwynn

Janet Malcolm is a journalist who has written several books and many articles for The New Yorker, and it is a pleasure to read her thoughtful and insightful prose turned on a legal subject. Sheila McGough was an attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, who in 1986 had been practicing law for four years (solo criminal defense) when she got a call from Bob Bailes, a career con artist, asking her to look into his case. She succeeded in getting him released, and then represented him when the federal government charged him with the same offenses and more, primarily bank fraud.

While McGough was preparing for Bailes' federal trial, Bailes was busy selling shares in insurance companies that were chartered before laws were enacted regulating the insurance industry. What this meant, Bailes told potential investors, was that a quirk in the law allowed these companies to operate without regulation. Bailes was such a skilled con man and forger that he was able to produce court documents and other government records to corroborate his outlandish tale. When investors began sending money to be held in McGough's trust account until the sales were closed, McGough immediately disbursed the funds to Bailes. After Bailes was convicted in the bank fraud case and subsequently for the insurance scheme, the government prosecuted McGough for complicity in the deal. She was convicted, served two and one-half years in prison, and was disbarred.

Malcolm believes that McGough was innocent. She succeeds in showing that McGough was extremely obtuse about her client's "business practices," and suggests that probably because of that and her lack of experience as a lawyer and failure to cultivate professional contacts with whom to consult, she aided Bailes in his insurance scare only inadvertently. Malcolm also believes that McGough's idealism contributed to her conviction, in that she refused to testify in her own behalf because she wanted to protect Bailes' confidences. Although these premises are reasonable, from them Malcolm unfairly finds cause to castigate the judicial system for convicting McGough. Malcolm appreciates the fallibility of the system, yet she faults it for that, claiming that McGough was prosecuted not for committing a crime but for being an irritant to the government and the courts, because she persisted in fighting for Bailes long after most attorneys would have accepted his convictions...