A Judge Who Reshaped the Corporate Landscape
By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

Many judges are lucky to handle just one era-defining case during their tenures on the bench. In his 16 years as a federal bankruptcy judge, Arthur J. Gonzalez has handled three.

The first, Enron, came up in late 2001. Eight months later, WorldCom followed, forcing the judge to handle both cases simultaneously. And the last, Chrysler, arrived in 2009.

Now, Judge Gonzalez, 64, is set to retire in March as the chief of the United States Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. His career has been a vivid illustration of the important role that the court, located in a Beaux-Arts courthouse at the southern end of Manhattan, has played in helping reshape corporate America.

The Chrysler case proved in some ways to be the most difficult one of them all.

He recalled how he approved the sale of Chrysler’s core assets to Fiat of Italy just after 11 p.m. on June 1, 2009, after three days of marathon hearings and more than 300 objections. Almost immediately, however, Chrysler bondholders appealed, and within 10 days the matter rose to the Supreme Court.

“If you had asked me at the beginning of the case, I wouldn’t have thought it would have gone to the Supreme Court,” he said in an interview. “But this decision was important for the case to get done.”

After brief deliberations, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, essentially reaffirming Judge Gonzalez’s decision.

On the bench, the judge has a quiet and subdued demeanor, keeping proceedings moving and rarely cracking jokes. Off the bench, however, his mood lightens considerably. During a conversation in his office, which has a dozen Hess toy trucks that he has collected over the years, he points fondly to the numerous pictures of his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers hanging on the wall.

Becoming a bankruptcy judge was not what Judge Gonzales, a Brooklyn native, had planned. After graduating from Fordham in 1969, Judge Gonzalez became a New York schoolteacher, teaching in East New York. (A photo from 1973 in his office shows him with seven of his students from Public School 189, with a thick mass of curly, dark hair.)

His interest in the law was stoked by his role as a representative for the United Federation of Teachers. After taking night classes at Fordham Law, Judge Gonzalez left teaching to take up a position at the Internal Revenue Service. After brief stints at two private firms, he joined the Justice Department’s trustee division, eventually being named to the bench in 1995.

Retirement, he says, should mean shorter work days than the 12 hours he now averages. (He arrives before 6 a.m. and generally leaves around 7 p.m. or 8 p.m.)

And it could leave more time to pursue his favorite pastime, running. He has run 30 of the last 32 New York City marathons, missing two because of injury.

Even now, he runs in triathlons and the annual 86-flight sprint up the Empire State Building. And he regularly runs with a fellow bankruptcy judge, Martin Glenn, who is overseeing MF Global’s Chapter 11 proceedings. Judge Gonzalez finished this year’s marathon at 4:45, far from the 3:26 he ran in 1980 but not exactly where he wants to be.

Judge Gonzalez said he was unlikely to take the well-worn route of former judges (and that of his daughter, a recent law school graduate) of joining a major law firm. Instead, he plans to continue teaching at New York University’s law school.

“If I decide I want to go home, I can go home,” he said. “I have control of my life.”

To those who argued before him, the judge has proved to be an efficient conductor of bankruptcy proceedings.

“He has a demeanor that exuded fairness, but was also very decisive and wrote brilliant decisions at a fairly rapid clip,” said Martin Bienenstock, who worked as Enron’s lead bankruptcy lawyer.

Of the three mammoth bankruptcy cases Judge Gonzalez handled, Enron was the first, filed over the weekend on Dec. 2, 2001. The judge came in early the next day and was told shortly afterward by a clerk that “the wheel,” the court system that assigns cases, had selected him to oversee the matter.

As Enron’s efforts to reorganize failed, quickly dissolving into an extensive liquidation, Judge Gonzalez’s time was consumed in grappling with a mounting investigation into accounting issues. The court allowed him to forgo new cases for six months.

“I think I spent the first six weeks of Enron on the bench every day,” he said.

In May 2002 Judge Gonzalez started accepting new cases again. Two months later, the wheel landed on him, impelling him to handle two of the country’s biggest bankruptcy cases at the same time.

“By the time WorldCom came in, I felt that yes, I could handle both at the same time,” he said. “Enron was not coming to me every day looking for relief.”

Though it was huge — WorldCom was the biggest Chapter 11 case on file until Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008 — Judge Gonzalez said that it was easier to manage. WorldCom successfully reorganized within 15 months, in October 2003, and Enron finally emerged from bankruptcy nine months afterward.

Still, the two cases produced reams of paperwork and required scores of opinions to be written, and Judge Gonzalez did not take on new matters for six years.

Then came Chrysler in May 2009. While Enron and WorldCom were the subject of numerous federal investigations, the carmaker posed its own challenge: politics. Bondholders had battled with the Obama administration over its plan to sell the bulk of Chrysler to Fiat, using the bankruptcy process to shed billions of dollars in debt owed to investors, dealers and accident victims.

Judge Gonzalez acknowledged that it was tough to ignore the cloud of politics surrounding the case, and knew that his decisions would be hotly contested by irate bondholders.

“It was a big political issue of whether the government should be involved,” he said. “But that wasn’t an issue before the bankruptcy court.”

法界奇兵經手恩龍、WorldCom、克萊斯勒棘手案件
岡薩雷斯搞定美三大破產案

對許多法官來說，退休前能接手一件劃時代的大案子，已相當幸運。但在美國聯邦破產法官岡薩雷斯（Arthur Gonzalez）16年的職涯中，他卻接手三件。

2001年岡薩雷斯接手恩龍公司（Enron）破產案，八個月後，世界通訊（WorldCom）也聲請破產，迫使這位法官須同時經手兩案。2009年，他再度接下克萊斯勒（Chrysler）的破產案。

世界通訊是2008年9月雷曼兄弟聲請破產之前規模最大的破產案。歷經15個月後，世界通訊在2003年10月成功完成重整；恩龍也在九個月後脫離破產保護。

2009年5月克萊斯勒聲請破產時，岡薩雷斯明白，此案受政治烏雲籠罩，他所做的決定將引起股東們激烈爭論。然而，他說：「政府是否應介入此案，的確是大型政治議題，但這在破產法院並無影響。」

65歲的岡薩雷斯3月1日將退休，卸下美國曼哈頓破產法院首席法官職位。他的法官生涯凸顯破產法院在整頓美國商界扮演重要角色。

從某些角度來看，克萊斯勒是三件破產案中最棘手的一件。他回想起歷經三天的馬拉松式聽證會與不下300次反對後，終於在2009年6月1日晚上11點多批准克萊斯勒出售核心資產給飛雅特（Fiat）的情景。但幾乎同一時間，克萊斯勒的債權人提出上訴，10天內這樁破產案進入最高法院。

岡薩雷斯說：「剛接手此案時，我絕不認為這會上訴至最高法院。但此案能塵埃落定，這項決定至關重要。」最高法院經初步審議後，與岡薩雷斯想法一致，駁回此案。

岡薩雷斯在法庭的態度相當穩重，極少開玩笑。但下了法庭的他的心情隨之放鬆。他的辦公室放了一些數年來收藏的玩具卡車，牆上也掛隔著數幅他最愛的布魯克林道奇隊的圖片。

擔任法官並不是岡薩雷斯初衷。1969年自福特漢姆大學畢業後，他起初是在紐約擔任教師，當上教師聯合工會的代表後，才挑起他對法律的興趣。在福特漢姆大學法學院修完夜間部法律課程後，他離開教職，轉赴美國國稅局（IRS）任職。短暫服務於兩家私營企業後，進入美國司法部受託管理人執行辦公室，1995年被提名為法官。

岡薩雷斯說，目前他每天平均工作12小時，退休後將減少工作時數。而他也將有更多時間從事他最愛的慢跑運動。除兩年因受傷無法參加外，岡薩雷斯過去32年參加過30次紐約市馬拉松。

岡薩雷斯表示，他可能不會遵循已退休法官的腳步，進入大型法律事務所。他打算返回紐約大學法學院任教，也可能決定回歸家庭多陪家人。（取材自紐約時報）

原文參照：
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/a-judge-who-reshaped-the-corporate-landscape/

2012-02-27/經濟日報/A8版/國際人物編譯林文彬