One morning at breakfast, the kids noticed a lady staggering up our sidewalk, pushing a swanky new barbeque grill. They called us to the window, and together we watched her zigzag along Hazel Street. Ryan called the police, and on our way to school thirty minutes later, we spied the Char-Broil thief locked in a squad car.
Our biggest financial mistake was also our biggest miscalculation in safekeeping. Attorneys and writers explain the world in analogies, I’ve learned, and Ryan elucidated the relationship between work and family like this: “It’s like I pump PCBs into the river, only to trawl fish from those same waters to feed my family.” Nothing better described our quandary, especially considering that the Fox River, long contaminated by the lumber and paper industries, bisects Oshkosh into socioeconomically distinct plots of land.
Ryan was the bona fide great-grandson, seven generations removed, of Jacques Porlier, fur trader and later first judge in Wisconsin, which gave him a certain kind of confidence. We still drove our beat-up van embossed with a BOOKS NOT BOMBS sticker, later adding TFYQA (Think for yourself. Question authority). Ryan was a first-generation college student. His years in mock trial combined with a decade of idolizing Hollywood lawyers like Rudy Baylor in The Rainmaker led him—and almost everybody else we knew—to imagine a star-studded life. But his conversations with clients deviated wildly from the kinds of closing statements he imagined delivering in civil disputes.
At a sturdy card table in the bowels of the county jail, Ryan learned quickly to lay down the law, literally, to the kinds of tough men he didn’t know in real life—the one in which he followed recipes for apple-prune crisp with Irie, sorted baseball cards with Leo, and paced the house, humming contralto, baby Fern sacked on the wide bank of his shoulder. Ryan and I were prolific reproductively, but he was no rainmaker, quickly becoming comedic and ill-tempered instead, like Vincent Gambini from My Cousin Vinny.
“If you’re going to get caught red-handed, at least steal shit I can justify,” Ryan said to Derek Green the very first time they met. At that point, Green had been charged with misdemeanor theft of movable property from Open Pantry.
Much to our surprise, the Winnebago County Jail had relocated from the second story of the Oshkosh Police Department downtown to its own state-of-the-art facility, built larger and to accommodate future expansion, on a scenic plot of land adjacent to the tri-county dump. Older, more jaded defense attorneys in town entertained Ryan with stories about the old jail. “Do you honestly believe crime has increased that much since the sixties?” one grouchy old lawyer said. “Hell, no. They just started making more stuff illegal. They make a lot of money incarcerating the poor.”
Green was a chronic shoplifter: seventy dollars in gasoline from Kwik Trip, a bottle of Gordon’s vodka, Reese’s king-size candy bars, batteries, hot and greasy tornado rolls. But on the day in question, months before the Walmart heist, with only three cents’ worth of stamps on his electronic benefits card, Green should have considered a food pantry in lieu of Open Pantry.
The attendant at the gas station recognized Derek Green in his faux-leather jacket and ball cap, his mannerisms familiar and antsy as he circled the store, waiting for the right moment to pocket Slim Jim beef sticks and whatever other five-finger discounts might tide him over.
We truly wondered, if Green and his family were starving, why didn’t he consider snitching applesauce or Chicken of the Sea? Of course, what difference would it make? Green was known by police to “intentionally take and carry away merchandise held for resale, without the consent of the merchant,” and he was known to get caught. Whether his getaway vehicle was a kid’s BMX bicycle or a Walmart shopping cart, Green tripped over his own feet and backed himself into corners.
On this evening in November, the attendant had called the police before Green even sailed past the register, looking baffled, as if pointing a finger at his own dumbfounded face. When officers arrived, Green ran anyway, perhaps for appearances, through the parking lot, across a busy street, and into an unsuspecting neighbor’s backyard. The officer pursuing Green issued verbal commands for him to stop, and finally, Green calmly flattened himself on the ground like a little boy taste-testing dirt and dew. He tucked his hands behind his back, accustomed to the step-by-step procedures for arrest, and began his confession.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do it.” Green always apologized, an exemplary and well-mannered thief.
“Come on, man,” Ryan said during their first meeting. “You’ve got a baby to take care of, and here you are stuffing beef jerky down your pants? It’s not like you stole a canister of formula or something.” Back then, Ryan could still mill around with jailbirds on “pod.” It was a large cafeteria that didn’t serve lunch. “How the hell am I going to cast you in a sympathetic light?”
One trait Ryan shared in common with movie lawyers was his gusto and his wide-eyed quest for justice, even though, as time ticked, his gusto would wane, replaced with a less optimistic attitude. Just months before Ryan rented his eighth-floor office suite in the old First National Bank, memorializing the start of Ulrich Law, 404 N. Main was used as one of many Wisconsin backdrops for filming the John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies. Hollywood crews descended on Oshkosh, temporarily restoring our downtown to its former 1930s glory, implementing tracks for a cable car, outfitting storefronts with dramatic awnings, and nailing up old-fashioned billboards for Haddon Hall cigars and Sparkle Desserts.
On set, when the actors emerged from the First National Bank Building on
