VEGAS ICON
Remembering Attorney William Terry
Written By Mark Fierro police officers got in trouble, they went to Bill Terry. If attorneys or judges got in trouble, they went to Bill. Any question about a bar hearing or a disciplinary hearing, they could rely on Bill. He kept it low-key. He never talked much about it. But judicial disciplinary work was one of his specialties, probably more so than any other attorney.”
“If
“I don’t particularly value anyone else’s opinion on law, except for Bill’s,” Pitaro said. “He was the only one. If I had a question, I would run it past Bill first. Someone said to me, ‘Bill Terry is the only person you allow to give you advice.’ I said, ‘you’re right.’ Look at the [Ted] Binion case with Sandy Murphy — when it got reversed, [Alan] Dershowitz took all the credit. Actually Bill wrote that. That was his.
That’s how Tom Pitaro, Terry’s longtime close friend and confidant, and himself a giant in the Las Vegas legal community, described Terry, the celebrated Las Vegas defense attorney who died January 15 at age 74.
“The thing I’ll say about Bill is that most attorneys are practitioners of the law. Bill was a student of the law. That, to me, is a profound difference. He would understand the philosophy and the essence of the law. He was a true student of the law.”
If you spent any time with Terry, whether across the courtroom or across the permanent inversion layer of cigarette smoke that settled over his desk, you got the sense that there was a nuclear reactor-fired intellect at work within his mind.
And there was really only one man Terry would turn to: Tom Pitaro.
In that rarified air at the peak of the defense bar, Bill Terry was one name that countless attorneys of all stripes turned to for advice.
28 | VEGASLEGALMAGAZINE.COM
Prominent attorney Ozzie Fumo, a longtime friend of Terry and partner of Pitaro, said of Terry’s relationship with Pitaro: “Tom was Bill Terry’s guy. If Bill had a question, he would always want to know what Tom thought. But Bill was better than any of us. He was the best. The only person he could turn
