The man who defended subway vigilante Bernard Goetz and child killer Joel Steinberg, lawyer Darnay Hoffman, killed himself in a West 70th Street apartment earlier this month. He called himself the "attorney of last resort," and his friend, James Edstrom at Times Square Gossip, wrote a tribute to him:
Darnay was never in the lawyer business to make money. Most clients he never charged, because most of his clients had no money, but they needed help and that was what was important to Darnay. He even spent his own money to help them. Darnay helped people who had nothing and asked for nothing.
Darnay Hoffman also had many high profile clients. The subway gunman Bernie Goetz, convicted child killer Joel Steinberg. He was involved in the JonBenet Ramsey case. But his most important clients were people who had no where else to turn. Over the years he took on cases for me against several landlords and he always won. He took on a magazine for me in Australia that refused to pay. He got the money. Recently he won two cases against a New York Newspaper that were suing my friends. I got the plaintiffs Darnay and he defended them and won. Anyone I ever sent to Darnay, got the best. If you had money, you got the best. If you had nothing, you got the best. Every case was important to Darnay and he was a master of the law.
Edstrom adds, "I think the pressure of always helping everyone finally got to him. He always had to be the knight in shinning armor. He always had to save his family and friends. If you had Darnay as a friend, you were protected."
When Goetz, who shot at a group of black men trying to rob him on a 2 train in 1984, was about to go to trial over a $50 million lawsuit filed by one of the would-be robbers who was paralyzed by the gunshot wounds, he told the NY Times that the group "represented the failure of society.... Forget about their ever making a positive contribution to society. It's only a question of how much a price they're going to cost. The solution is their mothers should have had an abortion." Hoffman said in his closing argument to the jury that Goetz did destroy himself with his words, "You're in a terrible position, because you're going to have to ignore [Goetz's] character. He made it tough for you. The one thing you don't do is come up to the Bronx, in front of a black jury, and tell a black mother her son should have been aborted."
Hoffman was divorced from the Mayflower Madam, Sydney Biddle Barrows, and the Daily News reports that he died in her apartment.
