Musk. lawyer back at it after drug bust

MUSKEGON, Mich. (AP) - Terry J. Nolan is back.

After a bruising seven years in career exile, Muskegon County's best-known private attorney is about to make a fresh start.

Nolan, 51, recently regained his long-suspended law license. He is opening a solo practice called Nolan Law Offices PLLC.

And for the first time since his cocaine-fueled spinout in a humiliating glare of publicity in 2002-03, Nolan agreed to be interviewed by a reporter about his experiences.

"I pretty much lost everything," Nolan said. "I blame no one but myself."

But he says he's ready for his return: clean and sober a day at a time, humbled by his experiences and eager to get back to what he does best -- practicing law.

Early this decade, Nolan was easily Muskegon County's highest-profile criminal defense lawyer and arguably its most successful.

Quick-thinking, hardworking, charming, Nolan had a knack for getting jurors to see his clients' point of view. If persuasion is an art, Nolan was Muskegon's Picasso.

In a 16-year career, he handled countless cases, some of them West Michigan's most notorious. He won acquittals in more than a few -- no small feat in a law-and-order community known for hard-nosed juries and swift guilty verdicts.

Over the years, Nolan won dozens of not-guilty jury verdicts. Clients were acquitted on charges ranging from misdemeanors such as drunken driving and domestic violence, to major felonies including murder, kidnapping, criminal sexual conduct, causing the death of a vulnerable adult, robbery and (ironically enough) cocaine delivery and possession.

Success bred more clients. Clients bred money. Money financed self-indulgence.

Nolan's fall, when it came, came fast and hard.

A crack cocaine bust in July 2002 cost him his law license. A second in November 2003 cost him his freedom. Between them, they shattered Nolan's career, his reputation and his finances.

The baby of a large, close, high-achieving family, he graduated from college, worked for three years as a teaching pro at West Shore Tennis Club, then went to Detroit College of Law. He graduated and passed the bar exam in 1986, returned to Muskegon to practice and founded his own firm in 1990. Along the way, he married and started a family.

Nolan's first brush with criminal trouble came in 1992, when he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor cocaine use committed in 1990. After he successfully served a year on probation, his record was wiped clean, leaving no conviction.

"I had no idea I had a drug or alcohol problem," he says of that period.

Nolan says he stayed sober for several years after that, but then returned to drinking alcohol and snorting powder cocaine. He says he stopped drinking permanently on July 4, 1998, but the cocaine use continued.

By 1999, he began what was to become a repeated round of trips to treatment centers. In 2001, his 17-year marriage ended in divorce.

Because his powder-snorting was beginning to cause nosebleeds, Nolan says, he started intermittently smoking crack.

"I never used it for a very long period of time," he says. "It ate me up so fast."

Yet through it all, his busy and mostly successful career continued. Because of that, "I fooled myself," Nolan says.

At one time, he says, he was handling more than 500 files. Sometimes, with drug-induced energy, he would get up at 4 a.m., then stay up three nights working.

The evening of July 31, 2002, it all collapsed at the end of a multiday crack binge.

He had already enrolled in a four-month residential treatment program that he says he planned to enter the next morning. He had turned over his cases to his law partner, his bank accounts to his secretary.

It was too late. Around 10 p.m., police burst into a Norton Shores home Nolan was visiting, about to use crack with a friend and an undercover agent. The attorney was arrested for possession of less than 25 grams of cocaine, a felony, and taken to jail. The next day, Nolan showed up shackled for arraignment in the same Muskegon courtroom where he had so often stood up with clients.

The eventual upshot was a guilty plea, a sentence from a Kent County judge to two years on probation -- and an 18-month suspension of Nolan's law license.

Again, things got worse.

He says he tried to sell some of his assets and couldn't. Two weeks after his arrest, he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to U.S. Bankruptcy Court records. After working a few months as a loan officer for a Grand Rapids mortgage company, he left to find other employment but couldn't. By the fall of 2003, "I was almost living out of my car in Grand Rapids."

Then he got a job at a Muskegon County car dealership. After some 15 months sober, he says, he used his first paycheck to buy crack.

"It was a pretty brief relapse," he says -- his last illegal drug use to this day, he says -- but it was enough.

On Nov. 10, 2003, he was arrested at a Muskegon Heights home during a drug raid. He didn't have cocaine on him, but his urine tested "dirty" for the drug, so he was charged with violating probation and with cocaine use -- ordinarily a misdemeanor, but upgraded to a felony because it was a second drug offense. This time, he didn't avoid jail. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced in July 2004 to six months behind bars, plus additional probation time that lasted until 2006.

This time, he says, he stayed clean and sober, attributing it to a reliance on God, active participation in recovery programs and close contact with comrades in recovery.

In February 2007, Nolan met with the state bar's Lawyers and Judges Assistance Program to see about reapplying for his law license. A lengthy investigative and supervision process began, including random weekly drug testing, daily recovery meetings, interviews with Nolan and with people who know him and monthly meetings between Nolan and a bar representative.

In October 2008, Nolan got a new job as an intake worker with West Michigan Therapy, a Muskegon substance abuse agency. In that job, he interviewed and did drug testing of people with drug and alcohol problems.

Executive Director Louis E. Churchwell was impressed: "He has a great love of people, and it shows," Churchwell said. "I think he actually helped a lot of people break their denial."

Finally, in March 2009, after a hearing before the Attorney Discipline Board, Nolan was reinstated to practice law, subject to passing the summer 2009 bar exam.

He passed. With that, Nolan arranged to set up his solo practice, aided by loans from investors.

"My mission in my return and getting a `second chance' to practice law is to make amends to all whom I've hurt by my behaviors," Nolan said in a written statement. "I will attempt to live, trusting God, cleaning up my own backyard and helping others."