Tony Serra is a legend in courtrooms all over California and especially everywhere that marijuana growers and dealers have gone on trial. Now, he’s the author of a new book, mostly written by him, but also with words by Mendocino County’s own legendary cannabis activist, Pebbles Trippet, who thinks he might be “the greatest criminal defense lawyer of the 20th century.” That could be. I’m certainly not going to argue with Pebbles.
I recently caught up with Serra in San Francisco where he sat behind a desk and autographed dozens and dozens of copies of the 74-page book titled Rat, and subtitled "Informants are Ruining the Sixth Amendment." Wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and still very much a hippie, Serra gave away all the copies that he autographed with the same words: “Tony hates rats!” and that he signed with a flourish, “J. Tony Serra.” His act of generosity made perfect sense; after all, he took a vow of poverty years ago and has kept to it ever since, rejecting property, ownership and stuff.
For those who don't remember, the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a fair trial, a lofty idea which was denied the Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Black defendants known as “The Scottsboro Boys,” and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who died in the electric chair in 1953 as convicted Russian spies, plus union men and women who went on strike and organized the unorganized into trade unions.
The launch for Rat took place on April 1, 2024, April Fool's Day, but the free books were not meant to be a prank or a bit of foolishness. Serra is no one's fool and never has been. On the cusp of 90 and in poor health that has forced him to stay off his feet, he looks back at a long and distinguished legal career that spans 50 years. He has defended Black Panthers, White Panthers, Hells Angels, American Indians such as Bear Lincoln, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Raymond "Shrimp" Boy Chow, plus environmentalists and cannabis cultivators and activists including Brownie Mary and Pebbles Trippet. Weed has long been his drug of choice, though he once liked to use LSD and wander the streets of San Francisco.
"He's an actor in addition to being an attorney," former San Francisco DA Terrence Hallinan says. In fact, Serra provided the inspiration for the celluloid lawyer in the 1989 movie True Believer starring Hollywood actor, James Woods. Today, April Fool’s Day, Serra is his real self, and he’s also a veteran actor performing before a live audience of admirers and fans on the second floor of an old building on Townsend Street in the city where he has lived much of his life. His mother committed suicide by walking into the Pacific at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, an event that he has compared to novelist Virginia Woolf’s suicide. Woolf filled her coat pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse in England in March 1941 and drowned herself.
The highlight of Serra’s performance on April Fool’s Day had to have been his spirited delivery of Dylan Thomas’ signature poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night," that has become an anthem and theme song. It features the lines, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He’s still raging but he knows that his raging days are numbered. "At some point I'm gonna die," he tells the audience. Not easy for Serra the fighter to admit.
Rat is a kind of last will and raging testament in a life highlighted with memorable moments, including the time he served in the federal prison at Lompoc because he refused to pay income tax. He was not disbarred and in fact continued to practice law when he was behind bars. Henry David Thoreau, one of the fathers of civil disobedience, would have cheered.
To this day, Serra doesn't have a cell phone, a bank account or a credit card. But to hell with money: that's his philosophy. He has legions of friends and fellow lawyers, such as Stuart Hanlon and Omar Figueroa— who were in the audience, along with a handful of ex-cons and fugitives, when he talked about the noxious role of rats, snitches and informants in the American legal system, perhaps more accurately known as the American system of injustice.
The whole time that Serra talked and read from his book—a good hour—he sat. He's no longer able to stand for more than a few moments. The sedentary life doesn't suit him. Serra was always at his best standing, pacing in a courtroom and cross-examining snitches who sat on the witness stand.
Now, Rat — a thin book with a big punch and with an image of a long-tailed rat on the red and black cover—speaks loudly and clearly for him. "I hate snitches," he bellows as he reads the opening sentence. He adds, "Snitches are polluting our system. They destroy the fabric of the judicial process.” A snitch, Serra explains "is a person who cooperates with enforcement to have a suspect (real or imagined) arrested and convicted."
He adds, “Informants are sometimes not even charged with a crime; sometimes they are given great leniency in their own pending cases, and other times they are given monetary rewards, new identities, removal to another location and extensive immunities for crimes they admit to committing.”
For decades, Serra has tangled with rats and snitches in courtrooms, though when he thinks of the archetypal snitch he thinks of Judas, who is said to have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver which led to his crucifixion. The gospels according to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John offer different accounts and interpretations of Judas’ role. Take your pick.
Today, snitches often play crucial roles during trials, but they are less visible than judges, lawyers, bailiffs and defendants. Call them secret weapons for prosecutors. “Rats are omnipresent in our criminal judicial process,” Serra says. He adds, “In marijuna prosecution, beware as informants come from every milieu!...From neighbors, from the property owner, even from the buyers and users of marijuana.” On the last page of Rat, he writes, "we are in a war...the war on drugs, the war on terror."
Serra is certainly not the only person who hates snitches. "A rat,” he explains at the launch for his book, “is despised by inmates, has no friends and is estranged and alienated from friends, family and children.” Indeed, kids learn early in life to abhor "tattletales." I first heard about snitches in the 1950s at about the same time that I heard about the “goons and ginks and company finks” that Woody Guthrie sings about in “Union Maid.” Growing up in an old left family, I knew which side I was on.
Yes, Serra hates snitches, but he also expresses a kind of empathy for them. "They develop psychological disorders," he says. In a way, they condemn themselves to a kind of solitary confinement in a society that abhors them.
San Francisco criminal defense lawyer, Michael Stepanian, dredges up a gruesome image to describe what Serra has done to snitches: "He's been crawling up the rectum of snitches and rats his entire career, working his way through the warmest part of the body until he gets to the heart and then he destroys the beast." Dirty but necessary work.
For Serra, a snitch is an envoy from the world of totalitarianism who infiltrates and pollutes the American legal system and undermines democracy. For Michael J. Monson, Serra's editor and publisher at Grizzly Pulp Press, (grizzlypulp.com) a snitch is perhaps the most indelible character in the darkest American novels and films. "There's always a snitch in pulp fiction and pulp cinema," Monson says. “There's no one more pulp than a rat." Slimy and loathsome, they're nobody's friend.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955.)
Serra is the biggest rat of them all. LOLOL