April 9, 1999 | Television lawyers -- real ones and actors -- are as culturally popular in millennial America as TV cowboys were back in the 1950s. Of all the current legal wranglers, Roy Black may be the most gentlemanly -- think Gene Autry as a criminal defense attorney. "I'm not an obstreperous kind of person," this 54-year-old has said. "Like ones who get carted away by the bailiff or the marshal. That's not my style. I'm low-key. I don't scream or yell a lot."

You can catch the low-key mouthpiece on the tube all the time. He moderated the O.J. Simpson case for NBC. He was on the news as a winner after he successfully defended William Kennedy Smith against a rape charge, and as a loser when another client, sportscaster Marv "Jaws" Albert, copped a plea admitting he sank his teeth into a woman. When Black isn't giving legal TV sound bites, he practices law in Miami, where he lives with his wife, Lea (no kids).

I interview Black at Ellen's, a downtown Manhattan restaurant on lower Broadway, next to the courthouse. The joint has a respectable noir quality about it. This is not a contradiction. Ellen's is a place for lawyers and low-ranking city employees and Mafia fixers who want cheap eats because they lack expense accounts. The place is decorated with placards of various girls who won the designation "Miss Subway" in the late '40s and '50s.

I meet Black at the door. He's a friendly looking middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair (more salt than pepper) wearing butterscotch-frame glasses. He reminds me of Quentin Crisp because his face is still caked with makeup (he just appeared on "Court TV"). As we walk through the restaurant, men rise from their tables to shake Black's hand. He generously gives each the time of day.

Black has agreed to lunch to promote his book, "Black's Law: A Criminal Lawyer Reveals His Defense Strategies in Four Cliffhanger Cases" -- his account of four cases that don't involve celebrities, but stress his view that the American legal system is skewed to the advantage of the state, not its citizenry. "I [love] the image of being a single crusader representing the dispossessed riffraff of society against the state with its well-funded, popular prosecutors. The Miami justice system blends law and economics to create a monster conveyor belt capable of speeding each defendant to the state penitentiary at the lowest possible cost per unit, and it's a pleasure to derail that factory machinery by throwing a constitutional monkey wrench into its gears." The book is both entertaining and literate, but I miss hearing about Marv Albert's choppers.

After Black and I are seated beneath a photograph of "Miss Subway, 1953" (she's cute), I say, "If this lunch were a scene in a novel, I would be an impostor who has just killed his wife and wants free legal advice."

He laughs. "First, don't say a word to the police ..."

"If the cops stormed in and arrested you for murder, who would you want for your mouthpiece?" I ask.

He immediately answers, "Johnnie Cochran." The two are longtime friends. Black launches into a story about Cochran being mashed in an elevator full of randy female prosecutors. During the telling, our anonymous-looking waiter leaves menus.

I open one and ask, "Do you believe in evil?"

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