Patrick Hooty Croy

THIS IS THE prosecution's story: Shortly before midnight on July 16, 1978, a band of young Indians, riding high from a weekend of weed, whiskey and late nights, looted the Sports and Spirits liquor store in Yreka, Calif., a lumber town near the Oregon border, jumped in their getaway car and sped north, chased by the screaming sirens of the Yreka police department.

THIS IS THE prosecution's story: Shortly before midnight on July 16, 1978, a band of young Indians, riding high from a weekend of weed, whiskey and late nights, looted the Sports and Spirits liquor store in Yreka, Calif., a lumber town near the Oregon border, jumped in their getaway car and sped north, chased by the screaming sirens of the Yreka police department.

Adorned with African masks, preserved rattlesnake hides, totem poles, gargoyles and wood-carved monkeys--not a framed certificate in sight--the law office of J. Tony Serra looks more like an occult curio shop. Likewise, the man himself--with his gold-capped front tooth, steel-gray hair flowing past his shoulders and super-wide tie from a previous decade--has a distinctly unlawyerly presence, which is just fine with him. "I don't chum with lawyers. Most lawyers I don't respect.

He could have been sitting at his own funeral. J. Tony Serra -- the ponytailed, pot-smoking criminal defense attorney famous for fighting the government and celebrated in the 1989 film "True Believer" -- listened as a gallery of some of the Bay Area's most respected lawyers honored him. He was praised as a humanist who practiced law out of love and saved the government "millions of dollars" with back-to-back pro bono cases, funded from his threadbare pocket.

San Francisco's virtuoso anti-establishment lawyer, J. Tony Serra--the mesmerizing defender of freaks, drug dealers, Black Panthers, Hells Angels and, yes, even a fire-eater--will stride into Los Angeles Superior Court today on behalf of a wholesome-looking Minnesota housewife accused of plotting years ago to blow up police cars in Los Angeles. Serra will make quite an impression.