Gentry Locke Welcomes Tom Bondurant
As the Roanoke Times reported yesterday, longtime federal prosecutor Tom Bondurant will be joining our firm in October. We are very excited to start working with Tom, who has spent 30 years as a federal prosecutor, the last nine as the Criminal Chief Prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office here in town. He was also involved in Operation Big Coon Dog, perhaps the most felicitously named public corruption investigation of all time. Take that, Teapot Dome!
This development is exciting for another reason: toys. The Roanoke Times has this description of some of the things one might find in Tom's office:
There's a patch-covered jacket of a slain member of the Pagans motorcycle gang, mounted in a frame and covered in glass. There's a pipe bomb, safely labeled with an "Inert" sticker but with a timer that ticks ominously when the bomb is lifted.
There's a drawing of Bondurant questioning a witness and another of his favorite bar in Abingdon. There's a cartoon of him tallying convictions.
In my office, I have a letter opener shaped like a duck and a free paperweight from Thompson Reuters. Advantage: Bondurant.


I can't beat Tom Bondurant for the defused pipe bomb but I do have a Bible (has been described as a weapon: Sharper than a two-edged sword [Heb 4:12]), a trilobite (not live or I would beat out Bondurant!), a meteorite and about 3/4 of the state flags in the small 3 by 5 size in my office.
Oh, and I almost forgot, photographs of a solar eclipse I went to in Hawaii in '91!
We congratulate Tom on joining a great firm!
Sandy