‘Helena Star’ tale told at Gilkey Square book signing

Attorneys do not usually make a living drawing attention to cases they have lost.

Stewart Riley, a retired, longtime Seattle criminal defense lawyer, is clearly an exception to the rule.

Riley has spoken at length about a high-profile courtroom defeat early in his career – as he did during a stop at Seaport Books in La Conner on Thursday – and has expanded it into his debut as an author.

Riley’s newly released “Helena Star” details the epic tale of a major international drug smuggling operation whose prosecution in Seattle more than four decades ago became a major media event.

Riley defended Roman Rubies, the ship’s captain, after the aging 161-foot freighter was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard nearly 150 miles off the Washington coast, its hold loaded with 37 tons of marijuana worth an estimated street value exceeding $70 million.

That trial led Riley to embark on a second act – as a true crime writer.

“I had an incredibly fascinating career,” Riley told a large crowd gathered outside at Gilkey Square for his first-ever book launch. “I was in the courtroom nearly every day. Many lawyers are never in the courtroom. So, my colleagues kept asking me why I’d never written a book.”

Riley, happy in retirement, often admitted he was “too lazy” to take on a book project.

“I was a reluctant author,” he conceded. “I had no dream of ever writing a book. But after closing my office six years ago I began thinking that I should maybe think about possibly writing a book.”

Riley eventually compiled a list of 15 cases he had worked, each worthy of a book. He ultimately chose the Helena Star case.

“When I started doing the research,” he recalled, “I realized how much I had forgotten about the case. That’s when I decided to give writing a book a whirl.”

Riley had quite a story to tell.

He took the ship captain’s case quite by chance. Riley had been meeting with a client in lockdown when the captain approached him about taking his case. He and Riley struck up a rapport.

“This,” Riley said of Rubies’ role in the drug bust, “was the only black mark on a life well-lived.”

The captain could only offer a modest retainer. He had dumped $5,000 in cash off the ship’s stern while being pursued by the Coast Guard, hoping the authorities would dismiss him as a minor character in the smuggling scheme.

Riley focused on jurisdictional issues: the Coast Guard had seized a Colombian ship “on the high seas of the Pacific Ocean” far removed from American shores.

“I tried to get the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case,” Riley recounted, “but it only hears about one per cent of the cases that request a hearing. The Supreme Court didn’t take it.”

In the book, Riley updates readers on how key characters and the ship itself fared.

“I don’t want to tell everything,” he said. “I want to keep a little mystery.”

Riley was more than willing to share details – not all of them flattering—about how he evolved first into a top-flight attorney and then a published author.

“I graduated from the University of Washington Law School in 1969, second in my class – second to the bottom,” he quipped.

He was surprised he was granted an interview to serve in the King County prosecutor’s office under the late Charles Carroll, who had been an All-American football player for the Huskies.

Riley was even more surprised when he got the job. He rose to become a senior prosecutor before resigning to open his own legal practice in Pioneer Square.

“I sat in my office waiting for the phone to ring,” he said. “In the beginning, the phone hardly rang at all.”

But the practice and Riley’s reputation steadily grew.

Riley hopes to follow a similar path as an author.

“The more I got into it the more I actually started to have fun,” he noted.

He spent most of 2019 composing “Helena Star” and planned marketing the book last year. But then COVID-19 got in the way.

Having sold several hundred copies already, despite the pandemic having limited promotional opportunities, Riley has achieved his initial goals.

“I wanted to give readers a look into the mind of a criminal defense lawyer like me,” he explained. “And second, the public assumes what defense attorneys do is put violent offenders back on the street, but that’s not the case. My hope is that people will come away with a more complimentary view of criminal defense attorneys after reading this book.”