Pat Maloney Sr., 81, a flamboyant trial lawyer whose numerous multimillion-dollar verdicts landed him in years past on the Forbes magazine list of the nation’s top moneymaking lawyers, died September 11 [2005] of pulmonary fibrosis at his home in San Antonio.

   Combative and controversial in a personal-injury and product-liability career that spanned more than a half-century, Mr. Maloney won more than a hundred cases where the verdict topped $1 million. He was known as the king of torts.

   […] Mr. Maloney often said that his most memorable case was a 1979 capital murder trial involving two young Vietnamese brothers who worked as crab fishermen on the Texas Gulf Coast. They were charged with killing a longtime crabber who had terrorized them as part of an orchestrated effort to drive the newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants out of the coastal area. […] He represented the brothers pro bono.

   Even though he was not a criminal lawyer and his clients had shot the victim six times in the back […], he managed to get an acquittal for the two young men.

   The French director Louis Malle made a movie about the trial, Alamo Bay (1985), and Mr. Maloney wrote a vanity novel about it, Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor (1999). The main character is a colorful San Antonio lawyer named Frank Hogan.

***

   South African political exiles in Britain in the early 1970s, after the government of Hendrik Verwoerd had smashed the internal liberation movements in the post-Sharpeville state of emergency, were cheered to see the name of Arthur Maimane on television screens as an ITN [the British Independent Television News] staffer. Here was a journalist who had made it in world media, from small beginnings in the newsroom at Drum magazine, which had opened up a new world of journalism in South Africa in the 1950s. Maimane worked also for Drum’s sister daily, Golden City Post, and had somehow remained a ‘free spirit’ too, having moved in 1958 to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.

   This was an escape from the colour bar and oppression at home, but also from the attentions of the township gangsters who had murdered his fellow Drum news editor and role model, Henry Nxumalo, in 1957. Maimane’s crime reports and his Hadley-Chasesque short stories, under the name ‘Arthur Mogale’, had not gone down well in the Johannesburg underworld.

   […] He returned to the ‘new South Africa’, first for a year with the liberal, fringe Weekly Mail in May 1990, during which he was again ‘the first black journalist,’ this time to report on the dismantling of apartheid legislation. From 1994 to 1997 he served as managing editor of the Johannesburg Star, and also became a columnist on the Sunday Independent.

   “Set in Johannesburg in the fifties, the central incident is the rape of a young white woman by a black man and the crumbling of her comfortable white suburbia life as she gives birth to the child. The young man avoids arrest but is unable to shake off the implications of this rape – an angry and desperate gesture against the indignities imposed on him by apartheid – as fate draws him back to the victim of his crime and to confront himself and his place in a racist and violent society. Maimane has written a vivid hard edged account of the harsh realities of township life under apartheid, introducing us to Sophiatown in all its vibrancy, violence and its colourful characters and to a South Africa filled with contradictions and frustrations.”