The staff of the Enforcement Division (formerly Compliance Division)
of the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission
at the time of my retirement in mid-summer 1995.
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In the late summer of 1972, after I was graduated from the Georgetown University School of Law and had taken the Virginia Bar examination, I began seriously considering what I should be doing as a newly minted attorney-at-law. On the advice of Eva Hinton and Gardner Palmer, both good friends active with me in the Citizens Association of Georgetown, I applied at two Government agencies: the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. In August of 1972 each of these agencies offered me a GS 11 general attorney position. Friends told me that the SEC promised the better career path, but I was impressed with my interviews at the FTC with Executive Director Basil Mezines (a Delta Phi Epsilon brother, from Eta Chapter at George Washington University) and with Consumer Protection Bureau Director Robert Pitofsky (now the Chairman of the FTC), who both convinced me that their agency was in the midst of a complete rejuvenation, with excellent opportunities for exciting case work. Pitofsky at our first meeting offered me a position in his Bureau's Compliance Division, then headed by Maurice Meyer, recently transferred from the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
I accepted the FTC's offer and in October 1972, right after I learned I had passed the Virginia Bar examination, I started work, sharing for the next several months an office with Joseph Koman, legendary FTC attorney and raconteur.
My first major assignment was to assist Henry Pons, the Compliance Division's senior attorney, in the litigation of civil penalty action that the U.S. Justice Department had filed a few months previously in Northern California on behalf of the FTC against Bestline Products Corporation and its chief executive officer William Bailey.