Photo by Mark Peterman “If I were not a deputy county attorney, I might have had a lot more to say.” — Tom Liddy, Phoenix attorney

The Liddy name is back in the public eye with a controversial court case. And all that hubbub? Tom Liddy is just fine, thankS.

Tom Liddy stepped into the scene, his sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened, his hair messy from the excitement of the day. He looked every bit like a preacher about to hold a revival in the shadow of Maricopa County’s towering courthouse.

But the 47-year-old lawyer had arrived on that December afternoon not to deliver the Gospel but to tell a large crowd about a young man he considered to be another type of martyr.

“I am here on behalf of Adam,” Liddy called out to 100 or so law-enforcement officers who had gathered at a rally for their recently jailed colleague, detention officer Adam Stoddard. Liddy told them he had just returned from a county jail, where the officer was doing fine and grateful for the support.

“I was with him when he went to jail,” Liddy said, his voice rising with every beat. “And his brothers and sisters treated him with the utmost respect.”

The crowd applauded wildly. And as he went on in a passionate, improvised speech decrying the events that brought him there that day, the detention officers applauded again and again with nearby television cameras capturing every hallelujah moment.

This unscripted flash of drama would have been unusual for almost any other government lawyer. But for Liddy, a former radio talk show host and Republican operative who became an unlikely deputy Maricopa County attorney about two years ago, it seemed a natural part of his repertoire.

In fact, the spotlight may be where the son of infamous conservative talker G. Gordon Liddy finds himself most comfortable. Over his varied career in Arizona politics and law, Tom has been content to fight in the trenches and out of the limelight. But he is arguably at his best behind a microphone or in front of a television camera.

Tom says he became intensely aware of the media’s sway early in life because of his father’s role as of one of the most notorious public figures of the 1970s. A prosecutor and later an FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy was the architect of President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks squad, known as the “plumbers,” which sabotaged and spied on Democrats during the 1972 presidential campaign. When Tom was 10, his father was sentenced to 20 years in prison for orchestrating the break-in at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters inside the Watergate Hotel. It was the longest prison term handed out in the scandal, which eventually led to Nixon’s resignation.

Those days were hard, yet Tom talks with great admiration and respect for his father, who went on to have a wildly successful career as an author, pundit and actor after a presidential pardon freed him in 1977. Friends say the heritage is both a blessing and a curse.

“He could be one of the most enthusiastic people I’ve ever met,” says Phoenix political consultant Stan Barnes, who has known Tom for more than a decade. “I’ve never seen him go halfway on anything.”

But Barnes also knows people can judge sons by the acts of their fathers, and that’s hard to escape for children of celebrities.

Still, professionally and politically, Tom has done very well for himself in Arizona. He arrived here in 1998 after serving in the Marines, graduating from Fordham Law School in New York City and working as deputy counsel for the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C.

In the Phoenix area, he quickly fashioned himself as a budding conservative maverick and ran for Arizona Senator McCain’s old 1st Congressional District seat in 2000. He lost to Jeff Flake in the Republican primary,  then was elected chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party in 2003, the same year he was given his own talk show on KFYI 550 AM. He eventually teamed up with co-host Austin Hill and moved their show to KKNT 960 AM, where it was nationally syndicated in some 40 markets. Creative differences ended the show in 2006, Liddy says.

After working in private legal practice for the next year, Liddy had lunch with Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas in late 2007 and was eventually offered a job working  cases in the agency’s civil division. “I thought I was taking a vacation from politics,” he says. “There was nothing particularly glamorous about it. I was happy to be a public servant, get a paycheck.”

Last fall, Liddy landed a case he considers one of the most important of his career. It began when Stoddard was caught on a courtroom security camera taking a document from a defense attorney’s confidential files.

 “It’s a completely different animal when you have a client whose liberty and reputation is at stake,” Liddy says. “I feel like the stakes to me were much, much higher on that day than they were in any of the 300 political speeches I’ve given in the last 10 years in the state of Arizona. Much higher.”

Courtroom video of the incident hit YouTube and went viral. It drew attention from the likes of CNN. Lawyers nationwide condemned Stoddard for breaking the sacred attorney-client privilege. Phoenix lawyer Craig Mehrens, who is representing the attorney with the pilfered paperwork, accused Liddy of misrepresenting the facts in his aggressive public campaign.

When Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe ruled last fall that Stoddard’s action amounted to contempt of court and ordered the officer to publicly apologize, Stoddard refused under Liddy’s advice. He stayed in jail for 10 days, and Liddy says he felt immense pressure to get his client out.

Yet Liddy says he was somewhat reserved throughout the process, even at that December rally to free Stoddard. He sees much broader political implications to the case and was champing at the bit to do what comes naturally – make some political hay out of it. “If I were not a deputy county attorney,” Liddy says, “I might have had a lot more to say.”

Knowing his history, that’s probably true.