Big Girls Don't Cry : THE DEFENSE IS READY: Life in the Trenches of Criminal Law. By Leslie Abramson with Richard Flaste . Simon & Schuster: 314 pp., $25

By SUSIE LINFIELD

Feb. 16, 1997 12 AM PT

Susie Linfield teaches in the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University's department of journalism

According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, Americans now rank reducing crime (along with improving education) as their top priority--far outdistancing concerns about jobs, the deficit or taxes. We are, evidently, appalled and disgusted by the violence that surrounds us. Except that we are also, evidently, titillated and entertained by the violence that surrounds us, as a quick glance at last year’s, this year’s or next year’s list of hit films and TV shows makes clear.

The ambivalence about crime is mirrored in our attitudes toward high-priced, high-profile, high-stakes criminal defense lawyers. We admire their skill, their celebrity and their wealth. But we are suspicious of their morals, their motives and their methods. And while we’re glad, in the abstract, that somebody’s out there representing the accused, we’re dismayed by the brutal specifics of the crimes in question and the generally unpleasant demeanor of the presumed innocent: must that particular scumbag, that pervert, that sociopath be defended quite so vigorously?

All these issues, and more, are raised in Leslie Abramson’s compelling and disturbing memoir, “The Defense is Ready.” For many reasons--it is possible to hate everything about Abramson from her pushy style to her Menendez defense--her critics will find it tempting to dismiss this book. That would be a mistake.

Leslie Newberger was raised in the immediate postwar years in modest Elmhurst, Queens. The neighborhood was “a good place to live,” but her family wasn’t. Leslie’s mother is a jealous, harsh bully who bequeaths her daughter the gift of self-hatred. Luckily, her father is “handsome, funny, loving”--except that, when she is 14, he skips town without a word. But Leslie proves she can give as good as she gets: She refuses to speak to him for 34 years.

The savior here is her grandmother, a Russian immigrant. Like a figure from some urban Norman Rockwell painting, Grandma putters about her comfortable kitchen whipping up delicious treats and offering Leslie unconditional love. Unlike a figure from any known Norman Rockwell painting, though, Grandma is a militant communist (she tends a shrine to Stalin in her apartment). In between bites of rugalach, she imbues Leslie with a hatred of capitalism, a love of a fairness and an allegiance to the powerless; the first doesn’t stick, but the latter two do.

Leslie’s other major influence is the Holocaust. As stories from the camps emerge, 5-year-old Leslie (who believes she resembles Anne Frank) becomes obsessed with “torment and death.” Her childhood, then, on a personal level, is largely a mixture of humiliation and rejection; politically, it combines a combative pride with knowledge of the ultimate in degraded victimization. What’s most fascinating about “The Defense is Ready” is how these various threads separate and weave together in Abramson’s career.

Fast-forward to the late 1960s, when Abramson graduates at the top of her class from UCLA Law School and joins the public defender’s office. Her portrait of the criminal justice system is hardly encouraging, but it is fast-paced and blunt. Lying among cops, she says, is not an aberration but “endemic” and “pathological.” Judges fare even worse: an “astonishing number” are “remarkably stupid, totally crazy or deplorably lazy.”

But Abramson feels comfortable with her clients; although a far cry from Sacco and Vanzetti, they are, she believes, the “underdogs” her grandmother taught her to defend. (In fact, Abramson insists, all defendants are underdogs vis-a-vis the superior power of the government--a contention that certain recent trials have called into question.)

She does not, however, romanticize crime, alternately describing criminals as “lowlifes,” “punks,” “losers,” ’wimps,” “weenies” and “garbage.” She is quickly drawn to the most complicated--and violent--cases (including murder) for a variety of reasons, including, she refreshingly admits, her competitive instincts and the chance to learn, “every once in a while, about evil.”

More intriguing than any one of her cases, though, is the transformation of Abramson herself. The little girl who was left by her father, mocked by her mother and haunted by the Holocaust grows into a bulldog, characterizing herself variously as “the angry fighting type,” “aggressive,” “domineering,” “zealous,” “manipulative” and “a control freak.” “I will never be a victim,” she vows. “ . . . I can’t be fooled and I won’t be nice.” Hell, no!

After leaving the public defender’s office, Abramson branches out into private practice. In “Defense,” she traces some of her most notorious cases, including the multiple murders at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in West Los Angeles in 1980 (a “horrifying crime”), the 1984 murder of a policeman in Chinatown (“after a cop killing, the LAPD becomes competent all of a sudden”) and the 1986 murder of newspaper marketing director Oscar Salvatierra by his 17-year-old son, Arnel (“Is the only good abused child . . . the dead one?”). Each of these chapters reads like an exciting, compact case study. Ultimately, of course--and alas--they lead to the Menendez brothers.

“Of course” because it’s the Menendezes who put Abramson on the national map, and it’s highly unlikely she’ll ever have a case sensational enough to eclipse this one. And “alas” because even many of Abramson’s admirers do not consider the case to be her finest, and her account of it is certainly not the strongest part of this book.

Abramson [who happens to be married to Times reporter Tim Rutten] makes a characteristically bold gamble for the reader’s sympathy here, describing, in excruciating detail, the alleged sexual abuse of Erik Menendez by his father, Jose--including an account of Jose ejaculating into Erik’s mouth (at age 11) and penetrating him anally (age 12).

This is painful and disgusting to read; more important, it is irrelevant. For if you believe that the Menendez brothers were abused (the heart of Abramson’s defense), you do not need to know the punishing details (any more than if you believe a woman was raped, you don’t need to know exactly “how bad” it was). And if you don’t believe the brothers--which is, clearly, what Abramson suspects--the piling on of these details will do nothing to convince you and will be viewed as obscenely opportunistic. This is true even, or perhaps especially, for those observers who--like this reviewer--agree with Abramson that people who are “maimed by another person’s brutality have a moral right to act.”

While the tone of this book is direct and heartfelt, it is underlaid with deep ironies. The girl who promised to defend the powerless has represented armed robbers who rip off the innocent. The child who was horrified by the Holocaust has, apparently, excised crime victims from her moral equation. The lawyer who defends murderers writes, “for the crimes of abandonment and betrayal there is no defense”; she is speaking of her father. And the woman who turned herself into a warrior has become most identified with a case that many see as epitomizing the culture of therapeutics.

Some will view these contradictions as evidence of Abramson’s ethical hypocrisy; I see them as proof of her authenticity. A moral code, after all, is not a seamless, ready-made garment to be slipped on, or a book of virtues to be memorized, or a set of commandments to be obeyed. Rather--like love--it is the deepest expression of a particular, peculiar self and emanates from within. And--like love--it contains all the puzzling lapses and jagged edges of the radically imperfect self it embodies.

Such morality cannot be developed by segregating oneself from evil but, rather, only through grappling intimately with it. “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered vertue,” John Milton, arguing for a free press, wrote in 1644, adding: “That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil . . . is but a blank vertue, not a pure.”

Leslie Abramson’s morality is not blank. It has been formed in the trenches, a place we enjoy peering into at will but prefer not to visit too often.