So just who is Judge J. Leonard Fleet, besides a huge thorn in the state’s side and a folk hero to many South Florida homeowners in the controversial citrus canker battle?
He’s a no-nonsense jurist who once pulled a gun in his courtroom, emptied the chamber of all but one bullet and dared a threat-making defendant to “take your best shot but you better score, because I don’t miss.”
He’s a former defense attorney who upset prosecutors so much during his days on the criminal bench that they compiled a dossier alleging bias, tried to get him removed and considered him, in Fleet’s words, “a defense attorney in a black robe.”
He’s a 68-year-old Florida native who grew up Jewish in Live Oak, a town 20 miles from the Georgia border, where his family owned a clothing store, the Ku Klux Klan harassed them with midnight phone calls and he got thrown off the high school newspaper after writing an editorial decrying racism.
“Leonard is a dedicated, compassionate man,” said Robert Fuer of Hollywood, Fleet’s former law partner. “He follows the law. The law is what he does. And he believes the law is here for the people, not the state. He doesn’t want to see people’s rights trampled.”
Even if it means incurring the wrath of entire bureaucracies and powerful industries.
For the record, Fleet doesn’t have a personal stake in the canker fight. He has no citrus trees. His backyard is a golf course. Last summer, he and wife Ellen moved from Weston to a $235,000 condominium in a gated subdivision of Palm-Aire Country Club in Pompano Beach.
“I pull up to my parking spot, get out and have nothing to worry about,” Fleet said on Wednesday. “The only thing I have to fix when I’m home are my divots.”
Ask him his golf handicap and he replies, “As high as the law allows.”
Fleet won’t talk about the citrus canker case until it’s over, and he has instructed his staff to turn down all interview requests.
But Fleet, labeled “a people person” by Fuer, couldn’t resist giving a visitor a quick tour of his chambers on Wednesday. On his door is a University of Florida bumper sticker that says “Alligator Alley,” and behind his desk is a framed front page from The Gainesville Sun from the day his alma mater’s football team won its first national championship. On his desk is a wooden plaque that reads “Shalom Y’all.”
There’s a broken clock made of Florida cypress hanging on his wall, a remnant of his partnership with Fuer.
“We were in business together over 10 years on just a handshake,” Fleet recalled. “When we dissolved the partnership, we divided up all the furniture and the only thing we both wanted was that clock. So we flipped for it. I won, but he wanted it so bad I told him he could have it for five years. Fifteen years later, he gave it back to me. Like that.”
Also on his wall is a 1935 advertisement for J. Fleet and Sons, the clothing store his grandfather Jacob founded. He spoke about the family history that led from Russia to Philadelphia to Live Oak, a railroad town where his grandfather started his business by pushing around a “rain barrel,” a big whisky cask filled with clothes.
“My grandmother said the Fleets would spread out and be known from coast to coast,” said Fleet, a father of six and grandfather of 12.
For the last two years, Fleet has been at the center of an epic constitutional and economic fight involving the state’s aggressive campaign to stop citrus canker, a bacterial disease that blemishes fruit and perhaps weakens citrus trees but does not harm humans.
The state Department of Agriculture has destroyed more than 2 million trees, including 600,000 on residential property, in an effort to stop the blight before it gets to the big commercial groves in Central Florida. The latest outbreak began in 1995 near Miami International Airport, and the state has since advocated destroying all trees within 1,900 feet of a diseased tree.
Fleet has questioned the science and law behind the state’s efforts, effectively scuttling the tree-cutting campaign. In a series of dramatic rulings, Fleet halted the use of blanket search warrants by state inspectors and bolstered homeowners’ rights. In so doing, he has earned the enmity of big citrus growers and state agriculture officials.
“His rulings have allowed the canker to spread,” said Casey Wohl-Pace, spokeswoman for Florida Citrus Mutual, a trade group. “For a judge to look at [the studies] and say this is ‘junk science’ would be like for me to say the surgeon general’s report on smoking was junk science.”
But homeowners are skeptical of the state’s methods and motives, and they’ve found a kindred spirit in Fleet, a Broward County circuit judge since January 1983.
“If this country is to be destroyed, it will not be by enemies outside our borders,” Fleet said when handing down a recent canker ruling. “It will be by individuals willing to forgo civil protections in pursuit of economic security.”
At the same hearing, he said he would “not be intimidated” by Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson or citrus industry representatives. “They can continue to call me all the derogatory names they wish,” he said.
To understand the mettle behind the man, you must look back.
He survived triple-heart bypass surgery in 1986, saw his daughter Lisa survive life-threatening surgery for a brain tumor in 1991 and endured his share of controversy earlier in his judicial career. He was reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court for the 1992 gun episode, and he transferred from criminal to civil cases soon afterward.
Growing up in Live Oak, Fleet encountered prejudice and learned compassion. The KKK marched through town every Saturday and would harass his family with midnight phone calls.
In a 1991 interview with the Sun-Sentinel, he recalled being spat on and urinated on by football teammates who didn’t want to play with a “Jew boy.”
His grandfather lived with a black family upon first moving to town. Fleet joined the NAACP as a high school student, and as an adult he has been active with B’nai B’rith.
His parents wanted him to be a physician, but all that changed after his family doctor was killed. The doctor’s black mistress was charged with the murder. Fleet sat through the trial and was enraged how the case was handled.
“She didn’t have a chance,” Fleet said in 1991. “I knew in that courtroom I wanted to be a defense attorney.”
He got his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Florida, then moved to South Florida. He was in private practice for 23 years.
“All this, my life’s experience, all this baggage comes with me into the courtroom,” Fleet said in 1991. “I’ve always been a civil rights activist since those early days.
“I saw the law raped and plundered when I was growing up. And because of that, I don’t want to take part in misusing the law in any way. That kind of commitment means I will always take exception to ineptitude, lack of preparation and concern.”
He wakes up at 5 every morning, is in his chambers at the downtown courthouse in Fort Lauderdale by 6:30. The only signs of his age are thinning hair and a hearing aid.
“He’s strong as an ox and sharp as a tack,” Fuer said. “He called me on my birthday last week. He always remembers. I don’t think he’ll retire until they make him. He’s got such a strong work ethic.”
Fleet has handled all manner of cases in his own inimitable style, delivering stinging rebukes to fish big and small in his gravelly Southern baritone.
But he has gotten in hot water for his behavior, like the time he told an Italian attorney he must be Jewish because of his large nose and the time he expressed disgust with a black lawyer by saying “this man is still on the back of the bus.”
“He’s got a sense of humor and sometimes there’s a strange twist to it,” Fuer said. “I know he’s sorry about the gun incident. That was out of character. A bad day.”
In the mid-1980s, Fleet upheld the right of a topless restaurant to operate, and he once ordered the arrest of an AIDS-infected prostitute mistakenly released from a hospital. He has thrown out drug arrests based on video from the television show Cops and ruled in favor of Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused a blood transfusion for a sick son.
He once declared the state’s statutory-rape law unconstitutional, wondering why a 15-year-old could consent to have an abortion but not have sex.
And he has had a run-in with the Department of Agriculture before, in a 1989 case involving a fatal carnival-ride crash at the Broward County Fair. Fleet was incensed when the department tried to suppress a damaging report.
“Perhaps more troubling than anything else is the apparently brazen manner in which [department officials] have treated the fundamental rights of the public,” he wrote. “The constitutions of both the United States and state of Florida make it abundantly clear that the government belongs to the people, not to those who have been elected to govern.”
Thirteen years later in Judge Fleet’s courtroom, the past appears to be prologue.
Michael Mayo can be reached at or 954-356-4508.
