Page 602 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
rights. With administrative support, the head of the office that was charged to comply with provisions of FIRREA providing for equal opportunity for women and minorities, a woman named Johnnie Booker, who was a former civil rights activist, was obviously empowered by the administration and became far more active. All of our actions involving the use of outside law firms were under a microscope and had to be designed to give significant work to law firms that qualified as “MWOBs” (Minority or Women-Owned Businesses; in Johnnie Booker’s case, as it turned out, the W was of little or no significance.)
Because the work that we did was on a huge scale and was highly specialized, the problem was that there were few, if any, law firms that both qualified as MWOBs and were qualified to be of any real legal assistance. Johnnie Booker would have little sympathy, however, for the argument that our work was not something that could be picked up by every lawyer who was out there. So, how was this problem solved? Female and black attorneys left big firms to form their own operations, often “teaming” with the very firm that they had left. We were therefore in a position to retain big law firms who came to us with MWOBs as their outside partners. In the short term, that made a lot of money for a small group of people, created a lot of additional work for the RTC attorneys, and added nothing of noticeable value to the performance of our statutory function. I do not know whether or to what extent MWOBs survived the life of the RTC or whether they were absorbed by the firms from which they had originally come.
Matters of Tate
Soon after President Clinton took office, Albert Casey, a Republican, resigned his position as chief executive officer of the RTC, and in July 1993, Clinton appointed Stanley Tate, a Republican real estate devel- oper from Florida, to succeed Casey. Pending—and in anticipation of—his Senate confirmation, Tate started as interim CEO and immedi- ately made his presence felt. As far as I knew, Casey’s major contributions
• 584 •