Mike Chalos in New York

THE Royalton is the hip place to meet in Manhattan. It lies discreetly off Broadway. A man vets you at the imposing front door. Rhino horns on the wall hint at the potency of its inhabitants. The bar is filled with young rock stars, beautiful models, advertising agency executives clad in black Armani, and Mike Chalos.

“My wife rented a room here for my 45th birthday,” Mike explains. “The beds are on platforms. They weren’t made for fat guys like me. I couldn’t get out of bed. I had to roll out. The bathrooms have cut mirrors. This was frightening when I got up for a pee, turned on the light and saw eight of me!”

Mike missed his vocation. He should have been a stand-up comic. He has an endless fund of stories, many endearingly told against himself. This is the man who stepped out of a pot of yellow paint in Lagos (see Maritime Advocate Issue 2, January 1998) and into a new client relationship with the attorney-general of Nigeria.

The ice clinks in the bottom of my expensive cocktail glass. I am careful to balance on what could only be described as a three-legged milking stool covered in what may be pony skin. I try to look cool.

After twenty-two years practising as Chalos & Brown in New York, Mike decided not to renew the lease on his old office. “I was unhappy,” he confides. “With a firm of twenty-two lawyers,I was bogged down in admin. I really wanted to practise law again. I’m in my element doing trial work, but in reality I was getting further and further away from it. So when the ten-year lease expired on our building, I asked myself, ‘Do I want to stay in the city, or go up to Connecticut or Long Island and be closer to home’?”

Long Island was full of new industrial parks, trading offices, and more maritime activity than he had thought. And it was seven minutes from his home. So he hired a beautiful old building, once used by Teddy Roosevelt’s team, in Oyster Bay. “Well, it had a nautical name,” Mike quips.

“I was a bit concerned that my clients would think I had moved to suburbia. Would they think I was retiring and slowing down? And what would my competitors say?”

Well, of course that’s exactly what his competitors did say, but Mike pops up all over the world and has travelled more than ever in the last two years - to the UK, Greece, Italy, France, Scandinavia and throughout the US from the Gulf Coast to Alaska. “On case work and for PR purposes,” he says. “I can’t help myself.”

“As long as you have a laptop, email and a mobile phone, clients don’t mind where you are - as long as they can get hold of you at a moment’s notice”, says Mike. And clients can get hold of him at a moment’s notice, once they’ve tracked him down and found out what time zone he’s operating in.

In true Royalton globetrotting style, Mike is flying off to San Francisco the morning after our late-night rendezvous at the bar. “I’ve been there for the last three months on and off on a criminal case involving the Neptune Dorado,” he explains. He’s also been spending a lot of time in Tijuana, south of San Diego. There are smirks all round, but I miss the point until Mike explains, “It used to be a naval base with a shady reputation for drinking, women and general running around, but now it has a big new commercial area.” Of course it does.

This is a man who looks like he is thriving and, while his new set-up has just five lawyers, it does have Mike’s son George, who could be described in Austin Powers’ Dr Evil style as a “mini-me”. George has inherited Mike’s looks, size and mannerisms. His second son, Mark, is in Nashville, Tennessee, with the well-known Watergate prosecutor, James Neal, as his mentor. Elder daughter Kristen is destined for the stage and is not surprisingly an excellent mimic, uncannily picking up the quirks of Mike and George.

Youngest daughter Olivia was born eleven years ago in the middle of the trial that made Mike famous, when he acted for Captain Joseph Hazelwood, master of the Exxon Valdez. The judge wouldn’t give Mike any time off to go home for Olivia’s birth, so Mike went to the press with his story. The judge relented and let Mike home for the weekend, just in time for the birth on the Friday evening. Mike was back in court on the Monday morning. Hazelwood now works as a paralegal for Mike, and has moved with him to the Oyster Bay offices.

It is the early hours of the morning New York time, and I have lost track of GMT as we step out into the Christmas-filled, chilly night air. But before the yellow cab arrives there is time to squeeze in one more story.

“My new year resolution is to lose weight,” says Mike. “I went skiing at Beaver Creak in Colorado and got completely exhausted. The village where we were staying was a tiny speck on the horizon and I thought, ‘How am I going to get down?’ I pretended to collapse in the snow, hoping to get rescued by the snowmobile. Instead a guy appeared on a dog sleigh. I was so embarrassed I made him drop me off secretly behind a remote part of the ski lodge. As I was staggering off I ran into a guy from Lloyd-Thomson.”

His next new client perhaps?