Mike / David

Mike (in goggles top row) and David (second from left, bottom row) rowed for Quincy House in the Head of the Charles, sponsored by the Underdog hot dog restaurant near Adams House.

Mike giving pro bono counsel to Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

David in 2018.

As a kid, Mike’s go-to reading was true crime, so it’s no surprise that he went on to work on both sides of the legal system, defending Christine Blasey Ford and Andrew McCabe, and prosecuting Oliver North. And in one gratifying foray into public service that Mike describes as a “weird excursion,” he represented the interest of the seas, serving as President Obama’s Director of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  His first question when he was tapped — “You know I don’t know anything about this, don’t you?”, prompting these old pals to joke that Mike’s college summer jobs teaching swimming might have been “the missing link” — “the fact that they might have known that you knew how to tread water would make you perfect for a civil service position.”

One through-line over the arc of Mike’s “jagged” career has been bringing corruption to light, including his investigation of the Baltimore Police Department, a notorious case that was featured in David Simon’s We Own This City on HBO.  Mike and David muse over the age-old question — does corruption arise from individual flaws or structural weakness, and has it changed or is it “the same old human vice?”