Indictment doesn’t faze lawyer

At 69, Noel Gage could be basking in his retirement years, enjoying the fruits of a long and successful career as a civil lawyer.

Instead, he finds himself locked in a legal battle with the U.S. government, defending himself against criminal charges that include conspiracy and fraud.

His case goes to trial Tuesday, and it's a day Gage welcomes.

"We know what the result is going to be," he said during a recent interview. "I'm going to be acquitted."

Gage has made such bold statements frequently since his indictment in May, displaying an unusual level of confidence for a criminal defendant.

He repeatedly has insisted on his right to a speedy trial, and he has gone on the offensive with television advertisements that imply what he openly asserts in other settings: that the insurance industry manufactured the case.

"What they want to do is silence guys like me, so that the victims of injury and accidents do not get fair or adequate compensation," Gage said, sounding much like his commercials.

Gage and his wife, Ivy, moved to Las Vegas in 1997 with the intention of retiring, or at least slowing down.

But the two trial lawyers began receiving referrals and eventually started their own firm, Gage & Gage.

"It was all word of mouth," Ivy Gage said. "Before this indictment, we didn't advertise, because your best advertisement is a happy client."

After spending most of his career as a civil defense attorney, Noel Gage began specializing in plaintiff's work, primarily representing clients in personal injury and medical malpractice cases.

Ivy Gage focused on her area of expertise: employment law.

The couple sometimes tried cases together, with Ivy working behind the scenes and Noel playing the role of courtroom advocate.

Noel Gage's cases in Las Vegas attracted little publicity, but they did bring in money.

One case listed in the federal indictment resulted in $18 million in settlements. The lawyer's typical cut? Forty percent.

Meanwhile, the Gage family moved into a 9,800-square-foot mansion, currently valued at $4.8 million, in the exclusive Queensridge community of northwest Las Vegas.

Then the indictment came down.

The first target was Howard Awand, a medical consultant accused of recruiting a network of doctors and lawyers who secretly conspired to cheat their clients and enrich themselves.

Prosecutors claim the conspiracy, which involved personal injury lawsuits, began in early 1999 and continued until late 2005.

Noel Gage later was added to the indictment. He surrendered on his 69th birthday and spent much of the day in custody before a judge granted his release.

He and Awand remain the only two defendants in the case.

Senior U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush, a visiting judge from Washington, will preside over both the Gage and Awand trials in Las Vegas. Awand's trial has been delayed until Oct. 29.

Jury selection for the Gage trial, which is expected to last several weeks, is scheduled to begin Tuesday with prospective jurors filling out questionnaires.

Noel Gage agreed to be interviewed for this story against the advice of his attorneys.

"I wanted the truth to come out, and what the public was getting was not the truth," Gage said. "They were getting spoon-fed misstatements by the government, all of which were designed to impact me adversely."

Even before the indictment, Noel Gage wanted to tell his life story. He has sought out authors to take on the job, and now he wants the story of his criminal case turned into a movie.

The younger of two sons, Noel Gage was born and raised in New York City. His father was educated as a pharmacist but couldn't find work during the Depression and had to rely on a job as a "grease monkey" at a gas station, where he got 25 cents an hour for a 40-hour work week.

"As a kid, my folks were of very modest means," Noel Gage recalled.

His mother, a former hotel bookkeeper, stayed at home during his childhood. After World War II, his father returned to work as a pharmacist.

After graduating from high school in Queens, Noel Gage attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He received a bachelor's degree in 1959 and a law degree in 1962.

Gage said he had an interest in law at the time but also thought a law degree could lead to other opportunities.

"I decided in law school I wanted to be a trial lawyer, because I thought that would be exciting," he said.

And it has been. He represented the Michigan Supreme Court in a sick building syndrome case, and was the personal counsel of John Gavin, who was the U.S. ambassador to Mexico in the 1980s.

Gage also has represented corporations such as Volkswagen and executives such as Edward Cole, the former president of General Motors who died in a light plane crash in Michigan in 1977. Noel and Ivy Gage also sued IBM numerous times before the company hired the pair to train their in-house counsel.

Noel Gage, who earned a medical degree in 1985 from a foreign medical school operating in Texas, said he enjoys "helping the people involved, whether it be Joe Blow on the street or the president of General Motors."

His clients have included a black sales representative from Michigan who accused IBM of racial discrimination and a young college student who was kidnapped from a hotel in New Mexico before being raped in the desert.

The rape victim claimed the hotel had failed to provide adequate security. Both cases attracted the attention of Court TV, which taped the trials, and both resulted in what Noel Gage described as large, confidential settlements.

In recent months, Noel Gage has shown recordings of those trials to a reporter in his home theater. He also showed his visitor portions of the videotaped deposition of John Akers. He took the deposition of Akers, then IBM's chief executive officer, in 1990 in preparation for the sales representative's discrimination trial.

Like an athlete watching replays of his game highlights, the lawyer enthusiastically searched through the deposition tape for a memorable moment in the questioning, commentating along the way.

"We're getting close," he told the reporter at one point. "I think I've got his buttons pressed here."

The tense exchange between the two men begins with Akers asking whether the lawyer is accusing him of fraud.

"Answer my question, witness," Noel Gage responds.

"I don't understand your question," Akers says. "My understanding is you're accusing me of fraud."

The lawyer then tells the court reporter to read back the question and tells Akers, "It's capable of a simple answer, and if the shoe fits, wear it."

The remark drew an immediate objection from the executive's lawyer, who called it argumentative.

A chief executive officer's deposition is known in the legal field as an "apex deposition." They don't come easy, and Noel Gage counts the Akers deposition as a significant career accomplishment.

"For a lawyer to be able to get an apex deposition of the CEO of a major corporation, such as IBM, is most unusual," he said.

Akers sought unsuccessfully to block the deposition at both the trial court level and at the Michigan Court of Appeals. Noel Gage said Akers then avoided the deposition for months.

The lawyer believes IBM's attorneys decided to settle the case midtrial because Akers did not want to testify in court.

In 1995, the Gages teamed up in Texas to win an $11 million jury verdict for a couple who were harassed by a credit card company and a collection agency. The couple had a credit card debt of less than $2,000, and their court victory made the front page of USA Today. Today, the article is mounted on the lobby wall at the Gage & Gage law offices.

Noel Gage said the Texas Supreme Court later reduced the verdict, but his clients still received "several million dollars."

A Las Vegas lawyer who worked with Noel Gage on several cases remembers him as a zealous advocate.

"He had a no-holds-barred method of advocacy, and there's no quarter given at all," she said.

The lawyer, who asked not to be identified, said she has read the indictment but never saw Noel Gage participate in the type of activity it describes. Many people dislike him, she said, but "being a jerk as an attorney is not against the law."

"I just didn't like the pit-bull tactics," she said. "I didn't think it was necessary."

She said Gage can be "charming and engaging" in some settings, but "when you get into court with him, it's a different story."

"People would give him money just to make him go away," she said.

Yet Noel Gage is also a father and grandfather who has managed to navigate the prickliest of personal relationships. Not only has he maintained a close friendship with his first wife, with whom he shared a 30-year marriage, but his ex-wife and Ivy Gage consider each other friends.

"We've got the most unusual dysfunctional family," Ivy Gage joked.

Noel Gage recently arranged for his ex-wife, who has multiple sclerosis, to move from Michigan into a luxury condominium down the street from his new family.

The illness forced Hilda Gage, now 68, to retire in January 2006 after 10 years on the Michigan Court of Appeals. She previously spent 18 years as an Oakland County Circuit Court judge in Michigan. She also has taught at the National Judicial College in Reno.

She and Noel married in 1958 and had three children. Their only son died in 1974 at the age of 6 from dysautonomia, a disease of the autonomic nervous system. Their two daughters are now in their 40s.

Both Noel and Hilda Gage said their marriage ended after their lives went in different directions.

If Hilda Gage has one complaint about her ex-husband, it's that he didn't spend enough time with their children.

"I think clients always came first," she said during a recent interview at her new home, with her ex-husband at her side.

Noel Gage acknowledged that Ivy has the same complaint.

He and Ivy met in Michigan after his law partner hired her to work at their firm. The pair later moved to Texas, where they were married in 1991.

"Noel's just a very charismatic guy," Ivy Gage said. "As nasty and as aggressive as he is as a lawyer, is as kind and compassionate as he is as a human being."

Ivy Gage, now 47, said she considered the age difference before starting a life with Noel. Her own father died at 54, when she was just 19, and the experience convinced her that having a short time with someone special is better than having no time.

"You just don't know what life holds down the road," she said.

"That's what I tell juries," added her husband. "Life is not measured in years. It's measured from moment to moment."

Together Noel and Ivy Gage have three daughters, ages 8, 12 and 15.

Since her husband's indictment, Ivy Gage has worked tirelessly on the case, helping review more than 200,000 documents that federal prosecutors have turned over during the discovery process.

Noel considers her an important part of his defense team, which includes prominent Las Vegas lawyer Thomas Pitaro.

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz, a renowned author and civil libertarian, also has signed on to the team, although he is not expected to participate in person at the trial.

Noel Gage said he sent Dershowitz a copy of the indictment last year with a cover letter explaining who he was and what charges he faced.

"He got back to me literally the next day; he was so offended by the nonsense in the indictment," Gage said.

Dershowitz has not commented on the case.

Ivy Gage said she is convinced of her husband's innocence and would not have put her children through all the stress of trial preparation if she believed he had intentionally harmed a client.

"If I felt that he had done anything wrong, I would be the first one to tell him to go down to the U.S. attorney's office and make a deal," she said.

Contact reporter Carri Geer Thevenot at cgeer@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0264.