This Wall Street Journal ($) article profiles Houston criminal defense attorney, Mike Ramsey, who is heading up the criminal defense team that is defending former Enron Chairman and CEO, Kenneth Lay. The article captures Mr. Ramsey’s homespun wit in the following passage:

Even if he doesn’t succeed in gaining a separate trial, the effort gives Mr. Ramsey the opportunity to showcase is readiness to quickly rebut the charges. He seems to particularly enjoy attacking the bank-fraud charges brought against Mr. Lay in connection with loans he took out between 1999 and 2001. Part of the loan-related criminal charges involves a federal banking rule known as Regulation U.
Mr. Ramsey asserts that the government is unfairly going after his client for an alleged violation of some obscure rule. Until the indictment, says Mr. Ramsey, “I thought Reg U was a tomato sauce.”

As noted on this blog before, Mr. Ramsey is a member of Houston’s remarkably talented criminal defense bar, which in many respects is the legacy of legendary Houston-based criminal defense lawyers, Racehorse Haynes and the late Percy Foreman. A couple of other members of this prominent group of Houston criminal defense lawyers — Dan Cogdell and Tom Hagemann — will be defending clients in the upcoming mid-August trial of the Enron-related case known as the Nigerian Barge case.
Other prominent members of Houston’s criminal defense bar include Dick DeGuerin, who along with Mr. Ramsey, obtained the remarkable acquittal of murder charges for Robert Durst, Dick’s brother, Mike DeGeurin (yes, the brothers spell their last name differently), Jack Zimmerman, Rusty Hardin, David Berg, Joel Androphy, Robert Scardino, Mike Hinton, and Robert Sussman. The expertise and talent of Houston’s criminal defense bar compares favorably with that of any criminal defense bar of any city in the country.