KEY POINTS:
Eb Leary is in his Auckland waterfront apartment kitchen drying a couple of mugs for the coffee and dragging on a cigarette.
"You see, the craft never leaves you," he is saying as his slightly faded blue eyes - still able to pin you with an intense lawyer's stare - drift across the harbour to the ferries travelling to the North Shore and over to the Tank Farm beyond.
Over the next hour Leary will chuckle often, cry once, talk a lot about his love of the law, a little about the death of his wife last year and a little about redemption.
You have to own up to what you've done, says the lawyer who, though he has always regretted his big mistake of 30 years ago, says he has never hidden from it.
And judging by the view, getting struck off the law register after representing Mr Asia drug kingpin Terry Clark has not harmed Leary's lifestyle too much. But it makes you wonder why, now that the wavy hair is quite grey, he wants to go back to the bar.
Leary apologises for the instant coffee, he's run out of coffee beans, sits down and lights up another cigarette.
"At 62 it's not a question of age, it's a question of attitude and agility," he says. "And the law never leaves you if you were born into it. It's always present."
His father was a prominent QC and Leary - nicknamed Eb as a baby by a brother who said Ebward instead of Edward - says there was never any real doubt he would follow suit.
Follow suit he did, becoming a young lawyer and one of the more entertaining and promising of the court circuit. Until he met Terry Clark, that is. Those were very heavy times, says Leary.
"You know, everything was rolling in the mid-80s, everybody thought the bubble would never burst. A lot of people operated outside the square and it didn't do them any good and I'm one of them. Much to my great detriment. But, you know, reputation gained is easily lost."
He still finds it hard to explain the inexplicable, not really knowing why he allowed what he would later realise was Clark's "devious charisma" to lead him into what now seem fairly small-fry wrongdoings - introducing Clark to another client who began drug dealing with Clark; not putting money from Clark through his trust account, not complying with audit regulations and trying to deceive the Inland Revenue Department and the drug trafficking commission.
Leary said back then he was a sacrificial lamb of the Royal Commission into drug trafficking and says now that New Zealand had an international villain on its hands and heads had to roll.
But the events were a generation ago and young people today don't even know who this international villain was, thinking Mr Asia is a new Chinese restaurant.
He's laughing away at this and says sometimes you have to laugh at life. He turned to the hospitality industry back then. He and a business partner set up a processing and exporting fish plant in Auckland, selling and exporting salmon.
He reckons they controlled the entire hospitality market "mainly because I got hold of one of those black London taxis for delivery purposes and all your exec chefs in Auckland, all they wanted to do was go 'hey, we want our delivery at two o'clock so we can drive up Queen St drinking Steinlager in the back of a taxi', which was quite mad".
But all the time he was concerned about what he had done. He had not so much betrayed his colleagues, he says, as damned their expectations of him.
He reckons so many have stood by him, becoming referees for his application to practise law again, because he did not try to hide from the truth, wearing it "like a man".
"You know, walk down Queen St and not High St when things are looking dark. People respect you more."
Around the time of the fish business, his wife Geraldine won $830,000 in lotto, giving the couple options.
Some of the money they gave away, but some helped to buy Kingfish Lodge in the Far North, which they developed into an exclusive game fishing resort, hobnobbing with the rich and famous and living on the idyllic Whangaroa Harbour for nearly 10 years.
Going north had nothing to do with hiding from the world, either, he says. In fact, they were looking for maximum exposure to brand the business.
But he was doing other things up there, too. He mentions an old people's hospital in Kaeo where he was asked by local iwi to sit on the board of management. He's proud of the four years he was on the board, turning the hospital into a success in such a poor part of the country.
"You were contributing to what is a very deprived area in making sure they had immediate medical assistance which they couldn't afford to pay for, let alone find a vehicle to go to Kerikeri."
He didn't do this to put things right, he says. He did it out of human decency. But perhaps it was part of his road to personal redemption.
When asked about that road over the past 20 years, Leary pauses and says this is hard to express.
Instead, he hands over a copy of his first application to the New Zealand Law Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal for his name to be restored to the roll of barristers, which was refused.
In it he wrote that the relationship of personal ignominy and redemption calls for explanation.
"For me, this involved many small personal achievements of a very private nature ... "
As I read this out, he appears to be laughing again, as he so often has, but actually he's crying. Suffice to say, he took it hard when his application was first turned down.
But those small achievements include things like being a parent to his wife's teenage son and daughter, employing the unemployable, loyalty to staff, the lotto gifts, special assistance for an immigrant, upskilling of Northland Maori, pro bono services - and the ministration of palliative care.
You have to move on, he says of Geraldine, who died of cancer last year. He doesn't want to say too much about this time but her death is still raw and he hasn't quite moved on.
"Well, you never really do, do you."
She supported him through the bad times and was keen that he got back to court. "She could see I was doing nothing and twiddling my thumbs."
When the couple sold Kingfish Lodge in 2002, they moved to Tauranga. He shouldn't really say this, he says, but God, they're boring in Tauranga.
"I can easily see why Winston Peters used to do so well with those old people because everybody's so mentally atrophied down there. For instance, you'd see the same people week in, week out, still moaning about the bloody aphids on their mandarin tree out in the front garden."
Oh, yes, he's quite excited about going back to court. He has spent the past 18 months updating himself on changes in the law and one thing he hopes to achieve is to liven up the courtroom a little.
Never one to hold back, Leary is not overly complimentary of lawyers who take reams of paperwork into the courtroom and who um and er and read their lines.
He reckons he knows several ways to compress the time a trial takes - "why call the weatherman when you can admit that the sun went down at a certain hour" - saying he used to be known and respected for this.
He also thinks jurors appreciate simplicity so they can cut to the real issues. They also want to see something that is a very serious form of entertainment.
"And I do stress very serious. Nobody's there for the laughs. It's hard to get laughs in court but if you do, make sure the laugh is on you as counsel."
