Corky Goldstein

Stephayne McClure-Potts and her husband Michael waited until after 5 o’clock, using the back door to avoid the throngs of news reporters camped outside.

They knew Corky Goldstein only by reputation—a pint-sized lawyer who stood up for people in trouble. He was active in their Jewish community and often took on criminal defendants whose cases seemed hopeless and who had no ability to pay him.

For years, the couple looked after a young Ukrainian immigrant named Artur Samarin, enrolled him in the local high school and secured welfare benefits to help him establish a new life. He became their surrogate son, adopting the name Asher Potts.

The problem: Artur was four years older than he let on, a fact that meant his dalliances with his classmates constituted sexual assault and which left his adoptive parents open to criminal prosecution.

“When this all hit, we needed someone to protect us,” McClure-Potts said. “And real fast.”

In the relative solitude of Corky’s Harrisburg office, the veteran attorney walked the couple through his usual debriefing: They needed to tell him everything—even the uncomfortable facts that made them unsympathetic to a jury—or else he couldn’t defend them. He explained the harsh penalties they faced, empathically, but plainly. Finally, he secured a safehouse they could call home until the media firestorm died down.

Before they departed, he left them with one final instruction.

“Anybody wants to know anything,” McClure-Potts remembers him saying at that first meeting, “they go through me.”

Now, on the eve of his retirement after five decades practicing law, it’s a conversation Corky’s having for possibly the last time. He’s guiding his last few clients through the complicated court system—one, a juvenile accused of sexual assault, and others nearing the final stages of probation or rehabilitation—and assisting younger attorneys.

“I treat clients with the same respect—the way I’d want to be treated—no matter what,” he said. “They’re scared. They’re stressed. And they’re the ones who’ll suffer the penalties.”

Like a Corkscrew

Anyone who’s ever spent any time with Corky is most familiar with the particular renown he’s earned in his hometown. On an ordinary Tuesday night, it takes at least 20 minutes for him to cross the 20 feet of the Subway Café dining room as he stops to greet three or more sets of acquaintances on his way to his table in the far corner.

For each group, he possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of their triumphs and tragedies. Corky soaks up the kinds of details most people forget, and he’s known to pick up conversations weeks later, right where he left off. The waitress, he also knows—from her previous job—and he knows the circumstances under which she departed that job, too.

“If you met Corky at a cocktail party, you had to put a time limit on him,” joked longtime Dauphin County DA Ed Marsico, now a Common Pleas judge, who’s known Corky for decades.

His own children often ribbed him for the amount of time it took to run errands across town as he stopped to speak to acquaintances at every stop.

“My dad would give the same respect and time to the check-out lady in the grocery store as he would to the governor of Pennsylvania,” said his daughter, Stacy, now the principal of School of the Future in New York City.

The fast-talking lawyer is a shopworn stereotype, but Corky’s personality is a bit different from the Billy Flynns and Vincent Gambinis of fiction. For him, conversation is more akin to tennis. After one volley—perhaps an anecdote about former Sen. Arlen Specter, for whom he worked as a young prosecutor in the 1960s—he’ll serve up a question to draw his partner deeper into the fray. Then he’ll redirect again to ask the person’s opinion about some recent event. In the process, he learns the intimate details of people’s lives: their hopes, ambitions and regrets.

But Corky doesn’t use the information for his own betterment. Despite his attention to detail and garrulous demeanor, he never seriously pursued a career in politics beyond stints on the Harrisburg school board and Harrisburg City Council in the 1970s and a couple abortive races for judgeships in the early ‘90s.

“There’s not a wedding or a funeral that Corky will not pay his respects at, but there’s no agenda to it,” said William Costopoulos, a friend and fellow defense attorney who’s known him for more than 50 years. “He’s not working the crowd for cases. He just does it.”

Instead, Corky’s curiosity seems rooted in a genuine interest in the lives of others and a desire to see them at their best.

It’s a trait he’s possessed since childhood.

Born and raised at 2617 N. 2nd St., just a few blocks from the home he resides in today, he developed a reputation for his boundless energy and unremitting curiosity from a young age. That’s how his actual name, Herbert, came to be replaced with Corky.

As his mother Evelyn would say: “He’s like a corkscrew. He’s up and down.”

The neighbors took to calling him Cork and then Corky. Based on his father’s advice, he tried to remake himself as “Herb Goldstein” when he left to study pre-law at Penn State University, but no one took his rebranding seriously. For example, he was asked to run for president of his class that first year using his nickname—the same moniker he’d use as president of his fraternity and in the Lion’s Paw Senior Society. Later in life, when newspapers referred to him by his birth name, it only served to confuse readers.

Eventually, he relented, petitioning the court to have his name changed permanently.

“I never felt like a Herbert,” he recalls. “When people called me Herbert, I felt like I didn’t know them. You can’t get everything in life—you just accept it—and I’m fine being Corky.”

Compassion & Grace

The Potts’ criminal case moved through the legal system for years, a chaotic period that left the couple’s finances in shambles. Michael’s health deteriorated, eventually requiring him to get a pacemaker. Stephayne, meanwhile, couldn’t find work despite holding a structural engineering degree.

Besides taking their case pro bono and putting the couple up at a safehouse, he’d meet them at a gas station to fill up their tank or provide them with gift cards to help pay for groceries, Stephayne said.

“He’d say, ‘Oh, I was just given this Giant gift card,’” she remembered. “He’d try to do it so Michael didn’t feel embarrassed—a little white lie to protect his pride.”

It’s the kind of gesture that Corky’s mother taught him at a young age.

When Corky was a child, he remembered his mother coaching him how to help a schoolmate whose family was struggling financially—without making it feel like charity.

“Why don’t you give those to him?” he recalled Evelyn, known as “Goldie” during her time as a Republican state committeewoman, saying to him. “Just say you’re not wearing them anymore, and he can have them if he wants them.”

Despite their party affiliation, the Goldsteins were known as a socially liberal Jewish family who channeled their middle-class privilege into all sorts of charitable activities. At home, Corky’s parents taught him to always look past the distinctions of race, class and even sexual orientation. “We are all in the same boat in life,” his mother often told Corky and his two brothers.

“They were very thoughtful about people,” Corky said. “Maybe that’s because they were Jewish, and they understood persecution. They understood that we, as a family, must be open to all people.”

Corky caught the attention of then-Philadelphia District Attorney Arlen Specter by happenstance during a criminal mock trial, when he was a student at the Penn State Dickinson Law in Carlisle. The leader of the defense team fell ill a few days before the event and Corky, who was president of the student bar association, stepped up to take his place.

Specter offered him a job the next morning.

As time went on as a young criminal prosecutor, however, Corky had a nagging feeling he was on the wrong side of the aisle—despite the close relationship he developed with his mentor, who would become a lifelong friend.

“Sometimes when I was prosecuting people, I felt that we were over-charging them,” Corky said. “We might be charging them with aggravated assault, and I didn’t think it was worth that.”

He brought Specter around to his view of such cases a few times. More often, he didn’t.

But an opportunity to stand on the other side of the aisle came in 1969, when he was asked to set up Dauphin County’s first legal aid office, now known as Mid-Penn Legal Services, as part of a program through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty. At the time, poor people had even fewer options to access the courts, particularly in routine civil matters.

The toughest part of the job was earning the trust of those who most needed the help, as Corky and his two staff attorneys—all three of them white men—traversed the community to get the word out about what they were doing.

“Just because it’s there, that doesn’t mean people are coming in,” he said. “They’d been promised so much over the years that they don’t trust you, thinking it’s just window-dressing.”

In addition to building relationships with local Black leaders, the job led to Corky’s first foray into education—setting up programs in local schools to educate students about the law. Meanwhile, law students from Dickinson joined the staff after class and during the summer as the program expanded.

“We went out at night to speak to people directly,” he said, “and, little by little, they began to trust us.”

That, in turn, led to long-running shows on local TV and radio in which he answered the public’s questions about the law and how the courts operated. The programs, which at one point reached an audience of many thousands of listeners, were another form of outreach to people who ordinarily couldn’t afford legal representation—and for whom the American justice system was an intimidating force beyond their comprehension.

When he left legal aid, Gov. Milton Shapp appointed Corky as the state’s chief deputy insurance commissioner and, after that assignment, he went to work as a private defense attorney.

Corky, however, regularly took pro bono work and continued his outreach efforts. Both the Dauphin County and statewide bar associations recognized the work he did on behalf of low-income clients.

“When you’re in private practice, everything costs money, and your client may not have the money to do it,” he said. “That’s why, for me, pro bono is truly the purest sense of being a lawyer.”

No Lost Causes

People who have crossed paths with Corky across six decades of public life in and around Harrisburg describe a figure who’s often funny, sometimes infuriating and always fiercely loyal to the people and the principles he holds dear.

“He will not walk away from you when you’re down,” Costopoulos said.

And he knows firsthand.

In 1976, Costopoulos was arrested and charged with 12 counts of false swearing, perjury and conspiracy related to his defense of accused murderer Dennis Klinger. The charges—alleging Costopoulos conspired to have Klinger lie on the stand—were dropped two years later. In the heat of the moment, Corky was one of a steadfast few who stood behind him, offering to help his friend.

“He was one of the first people who reached out to express his outrage, and I appreciate that to this day,” Costopoulos said. “He wasn’t proactively involved but, emotionally, he was on my side. And when you’re down, that helps.”

Long before the Potts family came knocking, Corky developed a reputation for championing unpopular causes and pitching in to help former rivals.

In 1982, he’d served four years as city solicitor for Harrisburg’s last Republican mayor, Paul “Tim” Doutrich. That year, Doutrich engaged in a highly contentious campaign against an ascendant Democrat, future “mayor for life” Steve Reed. Corky immediately volunteered to help ease the transition for what would be the first of Reed’s seven terms and ultimately became a longtime friend of Reed’s.

Despite their political differences—it would be at least another two decades until Corky officially departed the GOP—the two carried on a personal and professional relationship that lasted the rest of Reed’s life.

“I did not leave the Republican Party,” Corky said. “The party left me. There was no room for a modern Republican anymore, so I became a conservative Democrat.”

In 2009, when Linda Thompson defeated Reed in the Democratic primary on her way to a divisive tenure as mayor, Corky once again stepped up to lend a hand—advising her on public relations matters, serving on her transition team and on a special team assembled to address issues in the school district.

“Corky spends time contributing wherever and whenever he can,” said former council President Gloria Martin-Roberts, another lifelong city resident who’s known Corky for decades. “That’s always been his personality—very kind and very caring.”

Martin-Roberts said that Corky doesn’t pay attention to whichever politician happens to be in charge at a given moment. He’s always there, she said, trying to do what’s best for the city.

And, despite his long history in city government, he brought humility to the Herculean task of trying to stabilize the finances of Harrisburg city schools.

“His style is participatory,” Martin-Roberts said. “He’s a good listener. He’s respectful of the experience and knowledge and commitment of others. He didn’t sit on that board thinking he knew everything because he’s an attorney.”

That’s a trait many of Corky’s colleagues have seen in action.

Precious few criminal cases ever make it to trial—Marsico puts the number at just 7% during his time as district attorney. The typical course of action is that defense attorneys and prosecutors reach a compromise long before that point, pleading to lesser charges on their clients’ behalf.

“He played upon his skills as a people-person,” Marsico says. “Corky used his ability to make friends with everyone in town to work out good deals for his clients. He knew which clients to beg for. If Corky said, ‘This is a good kid, he can turn himself around, please give him a second chance…’ Well, Corky had credibility in those situations.”

Marsico witnessed Corky argue cases both from the vantage point of a prosecutor and as a judge. In all that time, he said, he’s seen a grit in his colleague but also a genuine love and respect for the institution.

Whenever Corky was arguing a case—whether that was in court or behind the scenes, negotiating a plea deal—the prosecutors knew he’d done his homework.

“He’d been a prosecutor and, based on his experience and his knowledge of the law, that gave him the ability to walk into a prosecutor’s office with gravitas,” Marsico said. “That comes with experience . . . and not every lawyer has that.”

Non-Retirement

In a career practicing law that spanned at least 56 years—depending, of course, on when you start the clock—Corky has represented hundreds of people, some of them quite infamous.

There was the Carlisle prostitute accused of murdering a black madam, the honors student accused of plotting a bombing and mass shooting, the NFL player accused of DUI and assault… and the list goes on and on.

So many lives, so many futures, so much hanging in the balance. All of them sat down with Corky for the same frank conversation, and each of them received the same benefit of the doubt.

“People think their life is over,” Corky said. “They’re all over the news and they’ve lost their reputation and they think it’s the end. But I have to tell them—it’s not.”

For Stephayne McClure-Potts, her meeting with Corky came at a time when it felt like her whole world was falling apart. In some important ways, it was.

After years of legal skirmishes, she was ultimately sentenced to five months in federal prison on charges related to Social Security fraud and harboring an illegal alien. She ultimately served three months—in the same prison that once housed Martha Stewart, something McClure-Potts says Corky negotiated for her. Afterward, she spent five months under house arrest.

Her husband, Michael, never faced jail time due to his heart condition. He died about a year ago at age 64.

With their finances in shambles, Corky also negotiated a more reasonable monthly restitution payment—$50 per month—to pay back the welfare money they received on their adoptive son’s behalf.

Today, McClure-Potts ekes out a quiet living far from prying eyes and the media limelight. She’s convinced that, had it not been for Corky’s intervention, she’d still be in prison.

“The day we came to see him, that evening, emotions were very high for us with everything going on,” she recalled. “People were talking treason.”

Through it all—the accusations, the punishments, the tabloids and even a possible Hollywood treatment—Corky stayed by her side.

Every time she applies for a job, McClure-Potts knows that she’s a Google search away from rejection. She still routinely speaks to Corky, and he’s still lending her his steadfast encouragement. That’s helped her weather several fraught years.

“I’m working through my husband’s death now, still grieving,” she said. “Every now and then, I catch a breeze, though, and I just keep moving forward. Time heals all wounds, and I know eventually nobody will even care.”

On the prospect of Corky’s retirement, she chuckles to herself.

“He deserves it, but a lot of people are going to go to jail,” she said. “People doing some crimes better behave themselves.”

Corky’s been plotting a course toward retirement from his law practice for years, gradually resolving his outstanding cases and laying the groundwork for younger colleagues to ease into the stressful work of criminal defense.

He wants to spend more time with Linda, his wife of 50 years, his two daughters, their spouses and his grandchildren. Beyond that, he plans to spend more time in the classroom, teaching students and mentoring young lawyers on the criminal justice system.

But, at every step of the way, he’s also expressed great hesitance to let his life of 70-hour workweeks and after-hours phone calls come to an end.

“I think, at 81, it’s the right time,” he said, from a back table at the Subway Café.

He paused and considered that thought, a cockeyed smile spreading across his face.

“But I don’t think I’m actually going to retire. Not really. I have much more I want to try to accomplish.”

If you like what we do, please support our work. Become a Friend of TheBurg!