With a Bullet

Despite these reservations, Udolf zealously worked Lewinsky, the witness Tripp delivered. On February 2, in a conference call with Lewinsky's attorney, William Ginsburg, Udolf negotiated the terms of a statement Lewinsky would provide in exchange for immunity from obstruction-of-justice charges. At its conclusion, he remarked, "I think we have a deal."

As Udolf tells it today, that was his sole option. "If someone comes forward with evidence that a person is trying to get them to lie under oath, that merits scrutiny," he says. "The only direct evidence of that could only come from Monica Lewinsky. She would have been an essential witness, the only witness."

The hardliners in Starr's office disagreed. They lobbied Starr to veto the verbal agreement, then give them more time to press Lewinsky for a better statement, and that's what he did. "They retracted the immunity agreement the moment it was signed, which I found offensive," Udolf recalls. "As an attorney, I don't have to put something in writing. If I gave you my word, that's it."

He was coming to feel that the office he'd joined wanted "an extended grand jury investigation, which could divide the country. It's abuse of the grand jury to use it for any other purpose than to legitimately investigate criminal conduct, not embarrass people politically and build a case for impeachment."

As if being second-guessed by Starr weren't enough, Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal had resolved to give Udolf a lesson in humility. According to Toobin's book, it was Blumenthal who dredged up embarrassing episodes from the histories of Whitewater prosecutors, then fed them to reporters. In Udolf's case, that effort produced articles about the civil suit in Georgia in which his office was found to have mistreated a suspect in a drug arrest — a case that, not surprisingly, has resurfaced in the sheriff's race.

After eight months working with Starr's team, Udolf took a break to visit his family and to consider whether he should soldier on or resign. "I never made a major life decision without talking to Steve," says Udolf, and this was no different. Since he wanted Chaykin's advice not just as a friend but as a lawyer, he offered a dollar bill for legal services. Chaykin told him, "Figure out what is right, and do that."

Udolf exclaimed, "That's it?"

Chaykin told him, "Well, you only paid me a dollar."

Still, it was the nudge Udolf needed to act on his impulse to abandon the investigation, what he now calls "probably the meanest, nastiest political debacle this country has ever seen."

Having returned home to his family, Udolf and his wife had a frank discussion about his career, which for all the hours spent away from home had not made the couple wealthy, at least by lawyer standards. Udolf remembers his wife making a candid, convincing case: "You've had a good run, done good work, and now it's time for you to make some money for us."

With that, he moved into private practice, settling at the firm Berger Singerman to specialize in criminal defense work for those accused of white-collar crimes, as well as complex civil litigation. The work is lucrative, but for an attorney who had worked cases on a national stage, it's also decidedly low-profile.

If the Martinez case had tested Udolf's ability to keep politics at bay during an investigation, joining the case against Clinton taught him that he couldn't always trust his fellow prosecutors to do the same. The experience may prove valuable if, as sheriff, Udolf's own investigators bring a case to him that has political consequences.

Though Udolf moved decisively into private practice, he couldn't quite restrain his lust for cases that were high on profile, low on pay. One of his first was the defense of David Farrall, a white FBI agent accused of drunken-driving manslaughter in a head-on collision that killed two young men of Jamaican descent who were returning home from choir practice. Farrall was leaving a bar. Since the Florida Highway Patrol botched the investigation, there was no definitive way to know which of the cars was driving the wrong way on Interstate 95 and deserved blame for the accident.

The trial was racially charged, especially after patrol officers initially blamed the brothers for causing the accident only to revise their conclusion and charge Farrall. It received intense media scrutiny. In petitioning for a change of venue, Udolf produced a news analysis that ranked it South Florida's third-most-covered story of 2001, behind the controversy over uncounted votes in the presidential election and the Elián González custody battle.

To Udolf, the media coverage was slanted against his client and failed to accurately render the ambiguities of the case. As the media turned up the heat, Udolf's efforts intensified. Farrall lost his job, his fiancée, and all his savings. "David, all he ever wanted to be in his whole life was an FBI agent," Udolf says of Farrall, whose mother was a secretary to J. Edgar Hoover. "I felt this guy didn't have a friend in the world. All he had was me, and I wanted to do what I could for him."