Legal action under federal environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act was an option, but the manual that governs U.S. Attorney conduct required him to get permission to bring such a suit. Bureaucrats at "Main Justice" frowned on suing states, however; they preferred negotiations that Lehtinen believed would "negotiate away the rule of law" and doom his beloved Everglades.
Lehtinen and his staff scoured the manual for legal causes of action for which he didn't need permission. He found them and then waited for October. Lehtinen reasoned the administration wouldn't dismiss the case on the eve of an election, especially as Bush the Elder was devastating Michael Dukakis over pollution in Boston Harbor. And so in October 1988, Lehtinen sued Florida in federal court for violating its own water quality laws and for harming federal property -- Everglades National Park, for one.
"He was the guy who brought the lawsuit that started the whole movement toward Everglades restoration," says Charles Lee, Florida Audubon Society lobbyist.
A resourceful man unafraid to play his hand to the limit -- and willing to make enemies -- Lehtinen and his destiny have been entwined with the River of Grass since his birth in Homestead in 1946, the year before Harry S. Truman dedicated Everglades National Park.
Lehtinen (LAY-tin-in) grew up in the wilds south of Miami in a house built by his carpenter father. "You could go half a mile and be in the Everglades," says his older brother, Doug.
Hunting, fishing and camping in the Everglades gave Lehtinen proprietary feelings for the marsh and disdain for court-bound Everglades litigators. "Some of them you think almost couldn't find the Everglades," he says. "None of them ever camped. None of them has seen the sunrise from a tree island. None bit by a rattlesnake."
A dressing down
As Lehtinen talks in his Pinecrest home, his hands busily stretch and twirl rubber bands. The house's large family room has been turned into a library of thousands of volumes and scores of PBS tapes, a fair number on Vietnam.
It's no abstract interest. Lehtinen volunteered to serve in Vietnam. There, in 1971, he was wounded in the face by enemy fire. Blind for months, he recovered sight in only one eye. Surgeons used part of his hip to rebuild his face. The left side still looks sunken and unanimated. He received a medical retirement from service in 1972. For years he struggled with dizziness and vomiting.
Back in the states, Lehtinen continued a gold-plated academic career, earning two master's degrees from Columbia and graduating first in his Stanford Law class. He joined the reserves, becoming an Army captain in a special forces unit.
In 1980, he was elected as a Demo-crat to the Florida House and four years later married colleague Ileana Ros, a Cuban-born Republican House member who in 1989 became the first Hispanic woman elected to Congress. In 1985, he switched to the GOP and was in the state Senate in 1988 when Reagan named him U.S. Attorney.
Lehtinen's tenure as U.S. Attorney had controversy. He attributes allegations about his temper, demotions of attorneys and handling of politically charged matters to a small number of prosecutors upset at how hard he worked them. He resigned following one such dust-up. He also had notable victories, and his office also prosecuted Manuel Noriega. But his singular achievement was the Everglades suit -- "one of the most creative contributions in the history of modern environmental law," according to William H. Rodgers Jr., a University of Washington law professor. "If you were naming a list of people saving the Everglades, he'd certainly be at the top of the list."
That suit also put him at the top of a different list at the Justice Department. Michael Finley -- then the park's superintendent and Lehtinen's co-conspirator in their October surprise -- remembers a summons to Washington for a dressing down from Lehtinen's bureaucratic bosses at "Main Justice."
As Lehtinen and Finley exited a car on a rainy Washington day, Finley cut his finger on his umbrella. "If that's all the blood you lose in here today," Lehtinen told him, "we'll be lucky."
"They just beat up on us," Finley recalls. " 'What authority do you have to do this?' We were 'rogue.' They said to Dexter, 'you never will be confirmed as U.S. Attorney.' They beat on us awhile. (Then) Dexter looked down at his watch. (He said) 'I hope you gentlemen will excuse me, but I have a luncheon appointment at the White House.' You could see their jaws drop."
In trumping his angry bosses, Lehtinen left unsaid that he was just one of a mass of U.S. Attorneys invited to lunch. The suit went forward, and the state settled, though Lehtinen has persistently accused Florida of backsliding on the deal. "I'm one of those guys who believes promises aren't worth the paper they're printed on," he says. "You need a hammer. That's why I believe in court."
The sparrow view
After leaving the U.S. Attorney's office, he found a bankroll for his hammer. The Miccosukees, an Everglades tribe of approximately 500, hired him. The tribe complains its lands are used -- in Chairman Billy Cypress' words -- as "the dumping ground" for polluted water and as a reservoir for the park to the tribe's detriment.
It's a nuance of Everglades politics that the marsh's self-annointed defender and his tribe client often have used research and experts -- funded by the tribe's casino riches -- not to battle industry but to thwart environmental groups and their poster-child agencies, Everglades National Park and the federal Fish & Wildlife Service, the enforcer of the Endangered Species Act.
In one instance, Lehtinen and the tribe are battling environmentalists' efforts to protect the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow. Lehtinen says part of the sparrow population took up residence as squatters in an artificially dry Everglades area in which it doesn't belong. To keep its adopted habitat dry enough means keeping water unnaturally high -- and harmful -- on land, including tribe land, to the north.
To Lehtinen, it's yet another example of the park putting itself over the rest of the Everglades and a federal agency blocking true restoration for the sake of a single species. "Government agencies are special interests, like sugar, no better and no worse," cautions Lehtinen.
Unless agencies focus on the greater good, restoration will fail, he says."You need clean water at the right levels. Then everything will right itself. They want to manipulate just the way the (Army Corps of Engineers) did. It's flood control for the sparrow. When we restore water levels, something's not going to like it. They're not committed to the tough love."
Brad Sewell, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, doesn't share Lehtinen's sparrow views. "It's been a problem to have him be a vocal and forceful advocate for causes that are harmful to the Everglades," Sewell says.
Nathaniel Reed, founder of 1000 Friends of Florida and a key figure in Florida environmental history, says, "Dexter sometimes believes he alone has seen the Holy Grail and unless you see it exactly as he saw it, he doubts you saw it." Nevertheless, Reed adds, "we would not be where we are without the incomparable assistance of Dexter."
Lehtinen's commitment was evident at a May hearing called by U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler. Hoeveler was concerned a Big Sugar-inspired state law meant the state was welshing on its settlement of Lehtinen's 1988 case, which Hoeveler oversees. State lawyers came to Hoeveler's high-ceilinged courtroom in Miami to argue that the bill's flawed start had been amended into a "big step forward for Everglades restoration."
When they finished, Lehtinen, short and stocky, rose without being called. "You're standing up, Mr. Lehtinen," Hoeveler remarked. That was all the invitation Lehtinen needed to begin carpet-bombing the bill. His aides handed out a 59-page compilation to judge, attorneys and spectators. It had pages of enlarged excerpts from the bill to demonstrate Lehtinen's contention that the bill introduced loopholes allowing Florida to renege. He had witnesses: Cypress, restoration task force Chair Richard Pettigrew and Republican Congressman Clay Shaw.
And Lehtinen had command of his material, exhaustively but energetically distilling meaning from minutiae. Reed approached Lehtinen afterward. "I just wanted to thank you," Reed said to him. "That was superb."
Hoeveler said he wouldn't retreat from cleanup guidelines and in a subsequent order said he would name a special master to oversee the process -- a Lehtinen idea.
Moving water
Lehtinen plans to keep the pressure on Florida. And he has another case, less in the headlines, before the U.S. Supreme Court that is as big as his Everglades lawsuit.
On behalf of the tribe, Lehtinen sued the regional water management district in 1998 over a facility called the S9, which ships suburban stormwater runoff into the Everglades. That makes it a pollution source, he says, and the district is violating the Clean Water Act by operating it without a permit. (A permit will mean costly changes. Without the S9, Weston in the rainy season would flood in just days.)
So far, Lehtinen's convinced the district court and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that he's right. The water district, the city of New York, the southern California water authority and other government groups want the Supreme Court to rule him wrong. Governments routinely move water among different basins for flood control and water supply and don't want to meet pollution requirements to do so.
"A huge case with national ramifications," says John Fumero, the water district's general counsel.
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, Lehtinen will argue it himself. "I love the idea, in your marriage, in your social life, in your work, in your political life, (that) there are no final victories and no final defeats," Lehtinen says. "Victory goes to those who stay in the trenches -- at least they have the most fun."