“These gentlemen at the head of Harris’s organization decided I showed the kind of prowess that was integral to keeping their workforce… working. So they flew me and my wife to South Florida on a private plane. I had never flown first class before, let alone on a private plane. But they flew me there on their plane and put us up in a waterfront hotel suite with our own butler and made me a business proposition, one that felt difficult to say no to.” He pauses. “I’m not quite sure why I mention the plane or the oceanfront butler. Maybe to suggest to you I was more than slightly out of my depth with my employers. Not that I’m saying that I didn’t have a choice in working for them. I believe you always have a choice. And the choice I made was to defend people who, by law, deserve a proper defense. There’s honor in that. I never lied to my family about it. I spared them some of the details, but they knew the general picture and they knew I didn’t cross any lines. I did my job. I took care of my family. At the end of the day, it’s not all that different from working for a tobacco company,” he says. “The same moral calculation needs to be made.”

“Except I wouldn’t work for a tobacco company either,” I say.

“Well, we don’t all have the luxury of your strict moral code,” he says.

There’s an edge to how he says this. I’m taking a chance, arguing with him, except it occurs to me that this may be precisely why he is walking me through his history, the version of it he wants me to see. To test me. To test whether I’m going to do exactly that—argue, engage. This has to be why he presented his story this way—this is the first test. He wants to see whether I’ll blindly let him spin in order to ingratiate myself to him or whether I’ll be human.

“It’s not that my moral code is so strict, but it seems to me that your employers are causing all sorts of harm and you knew that,” I say. “And you still chose to help them.”

“Oh, is that the distinction?” he says. “Do no harm? What about the harm you do when you rip a child from her family right after she loses her mother? What about the harm you do when you deprive that child of knowing everyone who could have reminded her of her mother? Everyone who loved her?”