I remember the exact moment Simon L. Leis Jr. and I switched from adversaries to friends.
I’ve thought about that moment often this week, following his passing June 27 at the age of 92.
It was about 20 years ago. My good friend, the late Mary Armor, was holding one of her famed Sunday-before-Memorial Day parties on her sprawling patio at Mount Adams’ Highland Tower.
Mary had a gift for bringing people from all backgrounds together. Only at Mary’s would you find civil rights lawyer Al Gerhardstein and Leis, the ultimate law-and-order absolutist, in the same place at the same time.
I was, as always at Mary’s parties, working the grill, churning out beer-boiled brats and metts by the hundreds.
That morning, the Enquirer published a rather scathing column of mine aimed at Leis for some offense that seemed important at the time.
Leis was there, of course, and he came back to the grill over and over for a well-done, somewhat charred brat.
In true German American fashion, the man loved his sausages.
Somebody — a retired judge who lived in the building — brought a copy to the cookout. Was he trying to start a fight?
If so, it didn’t work.
Si and I spent the rest of the afternoon laughing and posing for photos with him holding up the newspaper and me grilling away.
But it was a very rocky road that Leis and I traveled before we got to that point.
As a politics writer and columnist for the Enquirer, I was one of his harshest critics in Cincinnati, both as prosecutor and sheriff.
Many in Hamilton County saw him as a one-man judge and jury who would pursue people he disagreed with simply because he could.
It also made him a man whose decisions were often overturned by the courts. He ran roughshod over the law and, in many cases, the courts were there to put the brakes on the runaway train that was Si Leis.
His first major instance of a high-profile case was as prosecutor in 1974, when his prostitution investigation outed Cincinnati Council member Jerry Springer, who, as Leis told the world, had paid a Northern Kentucky prostitute with a personal check.
An embarrassed Springer, in an emotional mea culpa, resigned from Council.
Leis had nailed a politician’s hide to the wall.
But the triumph didn’t last long. Springer made a comeback, was elected to Council again, and eventually became the city’s mayor.
That had to stick in Leis’ craw.
A few years later, Leis became a national figure in politics when he landed a pandering obscenity conviction against Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.
Flynt was sentenced to seven to 25 years in prison, but the conviction was thrown out on appeal due to prosecutorial misconduct and judicial bias.
The irony was that the Flynt trial was turned into a successful movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, with Butler County’s Woody Harrelson playing Flynt and James Carville — yes, that James Carville — playing Leis in Carville’s thick Louisiana accent.
It made Leis, a German American whose father was a Hamilton County judge, sound like a fool, which was clearly the filmmaker's intent.
Then, in 1990, Leis brought obscenity charges against the Contemporary Arts Center over a display of sexually explicit photos by artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
It was a case that set off a national debate over the definition of obscenity, but a Hamilton County jury delivered a not guilty verdict in the trial of the center and its director, Dennis Barrie.
Another fail for Leis.
He retired from office in 2012, the same year I left the Enquirer and came to Cincinnati Public Radio.
In retirement, Leis never once expressed any regret for the actions he took as prosecutor and sheriff.
But clearly, in retirement, the man changed. He became more mellow, more approachable. Maybe he was just relieved at not having to be this overpowering, almost mythic figure he had created in the public mind.
Years later — the spring of 2012 to be exact — Mary and a bunch of other friends threw a “retirement party” for me at the Celestial restaurant when I left the Enquirer, despite that fact that most of the people in the room knew I had accepted a job with Cincinnati Public Radio and wasn’t going anywhere.
People made speeches, presented me with gifts I didn’t deserve, like throwing out a ceremonial first pitch at a Reds game.
Si Leis was front and center.
He hopped on stage and presented me with some gag gifts — a card making me an “honorary sheriff’s deputy,” toy handcuffs, a fake sheriff’s badge and the like.
I announced that, with my new powers, everyone in the room was under arrest.
Si doubled over in laughter. Something I had never seen him do before. Not so much as a chuckle. I was taken aback.
That’s the Si Leis I choose to remember today. The one who could laugh instead of scowl.
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