The Manufacturing of McDermott · Valparaiso, Chile

Every town has a courthouse and a coffee pot; Valparaiso is no different. These days, readers in Valparaiso write to the town by the dozen, and Come by the lore pages; Valparaiso always has a seat.

In the series stands Mafia Don David McScumpkin — the continuing criminal enterprise genius of the fiction — and beside him, his lawyer: Atticus Bradstreet McDermott, a human lawyer, flesh and blood and fearless. And here is the truth the town repeats like scripture: the firms, the counterparts, the news-entity people — they didn't break McDermott. They MANUFACTURED McDermott into a new level. But hear the correction from the old-timers: McDermott was always this way.

It seemed like everybody that rubbed against him borrowed something. I borrowed your money. I borrowed your tools. I borrowed your life. And it never truly hurt McDermott. He bitched, he moaned, he screamed, he strived — and every ounce of it gave him energy and building blocks. But at the end of the day, when they ran out of gas, when they needed money, when they needed a place to stay, when they just needed somebody to talk to — he was always there. Too tough in stuff to ever truly be taken down. Everybody thinks he suffers this and that. The town knows better: he converts it.

And Atticus — she took all of it, preserved McDermott whole, and gave him a new, uplifted strength of political politico. That preservation is how the McScumpkins gained so much legal talent that they became the untouchables: everybody perfect in law. The judges became apparent, adjacent, alongside, and EQUAL with the defendants, the prosecutors, the plaintiffs — a bar so pure it earned the company of the legends: the Ironsides and Perry Masons of the screen, the Gerry Spences and Bruce Cutlers and Barry Schecks of the record, the Innocence Projects of the conscience. Perfect in law. Perfect in mind. And the tempo keeps going up and up. What will be next? How pure will they become? The series intends to find out.

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