Quiet voice, but fierce intellect

NEWARK -- They are both Italian-Americans, both Catholic, both born in Trenton, and both held up as heroes by the conservative Federalist Society. But there the similarities between Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the man who hopes to sit alongside him, Samuel A. Alito Jr., start to dissolve.

When President Bush nominated Alito to the nation's highest court last week, America learned that his nickname was ''Scalito" -- a reference to him as a Scalia disciple that began appearing in print in the 1990s and has stuck ever since, repelling liberals while attracting conservatives determined to reshape the nation's high court.

But interviews with friends, teachers, colleagues, and law clerks last week -- covering his youth in New Jersey to his service under President Reagan to his work as a prosecutor and 15-year tenure as a federal appeals court judge -- reveal a man who is the mirror opposite of Scalia in both temperament and style.

Reserved where Scalia is opinionated, cool where Scalia can get hot, deliberate where Scalia leans acerbic, this son of schoolteachers has left a dusty footprint.

No one doubts Alito's conservative bent or his belief in sharply limiting the role of America's courts. But Alito's carefully charted rise from a comfortable New Jersey suburb through Princeton and Yale Law School to a seat on a federal appeals bench suggests an understated determination propelled by a killer brain. One admiring colleague likened him to a ''quiet assassin," able to destroy a legal argument with one lethal question.

On the bench, he is known for speaking up infrequently but with penetrating ferocity. ''He sits back and asks very few questions," said longtime friend Walter Timpone, who worked with Alito in New Jersey's US attorney's office. ''But the one question he asks can tear your case to shreds. You don't even know you're bleeding."

The signs of his ambition are subtle. Like Bush's previous two nominees -- newly installed Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, who withdrew from consideration -- Alito has cultivated supporters among liberals, law clerks, and fellow judges to former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who last week called Alito ''an expert judge."

Friends describe a brilliant and agile legal mind but a contained personality, an unassuming man who drives a '99 Ford Taurus. Alito sometimes displays a dry sense of humor: He once displayed plastic pink flamingos outside his chambers to poke fun at a fellow judge who had put up bronze lions.

His love of the Philadelphia Phillies once led him to a fantasy baseball camp, where he cemented his reputation as a decent fielder and a lousy hitter. He is a gourmet cook who often heads to Newark's Ironbound district for Portuguese and Spanish fare. And the 150-year-old Newark coffee shop he frequents sells a dark roast called ''Judge Alito's Bold Justice Blend."

But beyond these colorful flashes is a quiet man who operates close to the vest, colleagues say. It is a reserve that melts when he wants to make his case in a courtroom.

''The transformation of Sam Alito from the way he is if you're just sitting around chatting with him to when he goes to the podium as an oral advocate is breathtaking," said former colleague Carter G. Phillips, managing partner of the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood.

In court, Phillips added, Alito has ''charisma, he's got charm, he's got force. . . . I can't believe this is the same guy who sometimes makes you feel like you're pulling teeth when you try to get him to say anything. Because up there he's just fabulous. . . . Law jock, nerd, you pick the phrase -- he just loves the law."

As a boy growing up in Hamilton Township, a Trenton suburb, Samuel A. Alito Jr. spent his free time devouring literary classics, traveling with his high school debate team, dutifully serving as the student body president -- and dreaming of becoming a public servant like his father.

He also honed a piercing analytical mind that could intimidate teachers and schoolmates. ''He would listen to others' opinions, but I always thought I had to stay on firm ground because he might challenge me," said his high school English teacher Elaine Tarr.

Alito was born on April Fool's Day 1950, the son of teachers who emphasized education above all else. He and his sister, Rosemary, grew up on a tree-lined street that still recalls a modern-day Mayberry, the cherry-sweet town from ''The Andy Griffith Show."

Alito's 90-year-old mother, Rose, along with her sister Dorothy still live in the brick-faced home that she and her late husband, Sam, built. Longtime neighbors can remember their son playing Wiffle ball on the streets or reading comics on the side porch.

Family friends snicker at Bush's romantic description of Alito as the son of an Italian immigrant. While true, they note, Alito's father was mostly a consciously assimilated American.

''You would have never known" his immigrant status, said Pattie Brusnahan, still the Alitos' next-door neighbor, whose parents were born in Italy. ''Mr. Alito was young when he came over here. There was no accent, because they took pride in being Americans. We are talking suit-and-tie people."

Alito's mother, who rose to become an elementary school principal, was a feisty educator. ''She definitely had her opinions, an absolute firebrand," said Tarr.

By contrast, his father, who later became the state's director of the Office of Legislative Services -- overseeing nonpartisan research for the New Jersey Legislature -- was a soft-spoken, analytical man with a head of white hair and a pipe always hanging from his lips. He would spend hours at night in the house hunkered down with maps and research.

''Rosemary, his sister, was very similar to Sam," noted Tarr. ''Introverted and quiet."

Sam Jr.'s challenges to teachers were polite, deliberate -- and pointed. ''I didn't see much spontaneity," said Tarr. ''The kids will call out in class or react in a vocal way, but that was not his style."

Alito's parents once wrote her a letter saying their son enjoyed her class discussions, even though he did not always agree with the comments on his papers. That letter reflected the Alito style -- gracious, but not afraid to challenge.

Tarr tailored a challenging reading list for the academic star and met with him after class to discuss the authors. ''When I said it was OK to build a piper cub plane, he'd build a 747," she said. ''He never did anything halfway."

''Sam and his sister were definitely intellectuals," said David Bonanni, for whom Alito baby-sat. ''They were the smart kids, certainly a step above the rest of us." (Rosemary is now a top employment attorney in New Jersey.)

Everyone on Fenwood Avenue knew the Alitos. Like most people on the street, they were parishioners at Our Lady of Sorrows parish, where Alito was baptized.

Alito played the piano and trumpet (badly, he has told friends), served as editor of the school newspaper, and ran track. A senior yearbook photograph shows Alito as school president, dressed in a suit and tie and smiling with a gavel in his right hand.

In 1968, Alito carried that self-discipline, seriousness, and nascent ambition into the halls of Princeton, where his senior yearbook entry declared: ''Sam intends to go to law school and eventually warm a seat on the Supreme Court."

Former classmates described Alito as focused, reserved, and studious to the extreme. Unlike other students who were busy protesting against the Vietnam War, Alito and his small crew of friends listened to classical music and studied until the wee hours.

''We were too serious in retrospect. It wouldn't have hurt to have a little fun," said David Grais, his college roommate.

Alito, a student in Princeton's Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, was not nearly as involved in extracurricular activities as he had been in high school, though he joined the ROTC and won a debate competition during his sophomore year.

He leaned conservative on a mostly liberal campus, but he mostly shunned political activities. ''I knew Sam, but I didn't know he was conservative. I didn't hear a political peep out of him until years later," said Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst at Fox News and a former New Jersey Superior Court judge who served on the bench with Alito in New Jersey.

Indeed, while at Princeton, Alito chaired an undergraduate task force that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy, accused the CIA and the FBI of invading the privacy of citizens, and said discrimination against gays in hiring ''should be forbidden."

The campus was still an all-male school, and instead of fraternities, students chose cafeteria clubs. But Alito opted for Stevenson Hall, the alternative to the eating clubs. Alito and his small band would collect their food every day and sit at a table where they would have intense, scholarly discussions rather than get involved in protests or other forms of politics.

''Sam is not the activist guy," said Grais. ''He is a very careful and scholarly guy. . . . Going to the extreme is not his style."

During his senior year, Alito traveled to Italy and spent his days in local cafes, where he wrote his thesis on the Italian legal system.

''Sam was probably the most judicious student I ever had. He had, and still has, a keen intelligence and a fine sense of justice," said Walter Murphy, his senior adviser at Princeton.

Alito took those skills to Yale Law School, where he rose to become an editor of the school's law journal. He also joined the Army Reserves, serving for the next eight years until his discharge as a captain in 1980.

In 1974, he published an article built around the Supreme Court's two leading cases striking down the use of public funds for religious education. In it, Alito expresses some skepticism about the court's decisions, but his true subject was the internal machinations of the court. He described how various members of the court sought to influence their colleagues, and strongly suggested that the justices were motivated by values and experiences unrelated to the text of the Constitution.

Readers of Supreme Court decisions ''should be very hesitant about attempting to discern the Justices' motivations from the written opinions," Alito warned.

In 1977, after clerking for an appeals judge, the Yale law grad joined the US attorney's office in Newark, an intense place filled with domineering personalities who made reputations on mob and public corruption cases. Alito was a quiet, stolid figure in the office -- an intellectual who banked on brains rather than bombast.

Assigned to the appellate division, where he crafted legal briefs, Alito made a quiet, but formidable, impression on colleagues.

''As a young assistant, he was monk-like. He was a very quiet guy, but he was lethal," said V. Grady O'Malley, then an attorney in the office. ''Like a quiet assassin."

''If you gave him an assignment to come up with a legal brief, he would closet himself and within a day or two would come up with something that was just a marvelous piece of legal writing," added Edward Plaza, who was a fellow assistant US attorney.

Another colleague, Ralph Jacobs, said coworkers approached Alito for advice on case management and legal strategy. ''I would use him as a sounding board if I had a difficult legal issue," he said.

By 1981, Alito's success in New Jersey had positioned him for a slot in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department. The department was fast becoming a breeding ground for young conservatives on the rise and eager to add intellectual heft to the political right. Soon they were building legal cases against such liberal causes as busing, affirmative action, and strong federal regulation. Chief Justice Roberts was part of this cadre.

Alito joined the Office of Legal Counsel, where he served as a generalist but ''did a fair amount of work on affirmative action cases," said Joshua Schwartz, who worked with him and is now a law professor at George Washington University.

Schwartz said Alito wanted to hear arguments from all sides. ''He was conservative in the old-fashioned sense of cautious," he said.

''Very bright and very capable lawyers sometimes carry with them a certain style of aggression and a willingness to engage and challenge and argue," said another coworker, Marc Miller, now a professor of law at Emory University. By contrast, Alito was ''among the least confrontational people I've ever met."

On Feb. 23, 1982, the 31-year-old lawyer walked up the marble steps of the Supreme Court to argue his first case before the nation's nine top justices. After arguing that an employee of the Army and Air Force Exchange Service who had been fired after a drug arrest was not entitled to damages, he won on a 9-to-0 vote.

Two years later, he lost a conservative cause when he argued that the Reagan administration had the right to ban ''editorializing" on public broadcasting because the stations were taxpayer funded. On a 5-to-4 vote, the justices rejected that argument, concerned that such government interference would ''be a breach of public broadcasting's compact" with the public.

That same year, he successfully argued a case allowing the administration to waive environmental restrictions for certain companies and factories. Most of his cases, however, were low-profile, involving such issues as Amtrak freight fees, notification of welfare rule changes, and military employment disputes. During his Reagan tenure, Alito argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court and lost two. During Reagan's second term, pressure on the Office of Legal Counsel mounted, as the lawyers there coped with such controversies as the Iran-Contra scandal and the antiballistic missile treaty. (Alito's precise role, if any, in crafting legal responses to the Iran-Contra scandal is unknown; Democratic lawmakers have vowed to investigate.)

Despite the pressures of the era, ''I never saw him lose his temper or even approach losing his temper," said Charles J. Cooper, a partner at the Washington firm Cooper & Kirk who previously headed the Office of Legal Counsel and hired Alito to work there.

Schwartz also recalled that it was difficult to tell whether Alito was angry. ''He has a very, very guarded temperament," he said.

So guarded, in fact, that few of his colleagues knew in 1985 that Sam Alito was about to marry Martha-Ann Bomgardner, the law librarian he had met while doing research in the US attorney's office many years earlier. ''I guess his wedding was on a need-to-know basis," said former colleague Phillips. Two children followed: Philip, now in college, and Laura, a high school student. Alito's wife is now a substitute teacher.

In 1987, Alito was appointed US attorney in New Jersey, returning to run the office where he had launched his career. The job offered Alito a chance to cut a high profile on big corruption cases that came through the office.

But the newly appointed US attorney often seemed uncomfortable in front of a crowd and ceded public speaking to his first assistant, Michael Chertoff, who later succeeded Alito as US attorney and now serves as Homeland Security secretary.

''He didn't see a reason to hold press conferences on a daily basis," said O'Malley, who specialized in organized-crime cases. ''He didn't relish the limelight."

Still, Alito knew he needed to make his mark. During his first year in office, he appointed himself lead attorney in a camera-ready case involving the attempted murder of an FBI agent who had been shot in a hotel room while interviewing a suspect.

Alito ''had a sterling reputation as an appellate lawyer, but he wanted to get in the trenches with the rest of the troops," said Stuart Rabner, who assisted with the trial and is now chief of the US attorney's criminal division. ''He rolled up his sleeves and functioned as any trial attorney would. He met with the witnesses; he handled the argument and examinations of the witness. . . . It was a gripping story and Judge Alito appreciated that."

The jury convicted on all the charges.

Alito, who would later bristle at the nickname ''Scalito" because of its perceived pejorative ethnic tinge, was acutely aware of the Italian link to organized crime in New Jersey, and therefore prosecuted mob cases zealously, said his friend and fellow Italian-American Walter Timpone.

On his watch, the office undertook a number of organized-crime cases, notching some significant wins. But Alito took a hard hit on the most high-profile one. In 1988, a jury handed down a stunning acquittal after a two-year trial in a case known as Accetturo et al -- a sprawling effort, launched before Alito's appointment, to target the New Jersey faction of the Lucchese crime family.

The acquittal drew barbs, and Alito would later write an angry letter to the National Law Journal, seeking to fend off the criticism.

But prosecutors who worked the case say what is not known is that hours after the verdict was read, after Alito had faced the television cameras and reporters' questions, he gathered the case lawyers in his office and asked what had gone wrong.

''Sam sat us down and told us that we had to live with this," said O'Malley, the lead lawyer on the case. ''But he was very supportive of the team. And he said that an acquittal like that doesn't just happen. Being an appellate lawyer, he recognized all the pitfalls that trials have. He told us, 'We may never know, but there was something wrong here.' "

Four years later, Alito was proven right. Four of the lead defendants pleaded guilty to jury tampering. O'Malley said that had Alito not instructed his lawyers to continue seeking indictments against members of the Lucchese family, the jury tampering might not have come to light. ''With Sam, if you showed you were on the right track, he'd say, 'I'll take the heat.' He was not afraid for his reputation," O'Malley said.

Despite his successes, the stress of these cases weighed on Alito. Paul Weissman, deputy chief of the fraud division at the time, recalled that Alito once described an anxiety dream to colleagues.

In it, Alito was forced to persuade the judge in his case in the course of a 30-second elevator ride. Then Alito rushed to take his case to the judge's clerk, whose disheveled office only underscored the enormity of what Alito was up against: A clerk so single-mindedly focused on one case that he never left his office.

In 1990, after President George H. W. Bush nominated Alito to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and he was confirmed on a unanimous Senate vote, he could have chosen to move to Philadelphia, where the court meets. But he chose to remain in Newark, traveling to Philadelphia only when he was scheduled to hear oral arguments or discuss a case.

His national reputation as a hero to conservatives and villain to liberals was cut early, in a 1991 abortion case. Pennsylvania had enacted a series of restrictions on abortion, including that married women notify their husbands before terminating a pregnancy.

The case presented a test of the Supreme Court's rulings that states could place limits on abortion if the restrictions did not amount to an ''undue burden." Alone on the appeals court, Alito declared that the law's spousal notification clause, which included exceptions, was not an ''undue burden." When the Supreme Court heard an appeal of the case, it struck down the spousal-notification requirement.

Five years later, in 1996, Alito provided more fodder for liberal critics when, again alone on the court, he argued that Congress had no authority to ban machine guns that were not sold across state lines.

Critics, such as Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said other cases decided by Alito showed ''a pattern of deference to large institutions." Sunstein added, ''If he is similar on the Supreme Court to how he has been on the lower court, he would be a very reliable vote for powerful institutions that individuals are challenging."

But as an appeals judge, Alito was neither predictable nor always easy to categorize politically. In 1988, Alito ruled that Pennsylvania police did not have ''probable cause" when they pulled over a car based on a bulletin that an armed robbery suspect was a black man driving a black sports car. The police officer ''could not justifiably arrest any African-American man who happened to drive by in any type of black sports car," Alito wrote.

In another case, he ruled that an Iranian woman could argue that she deserved amnesty because her feminism put her life in jeopardy in her home country. And he ruled that the City of Newark was discriminating against Muslims by banning beards on police officers.

''Unlike Justice Scalia, he's got a much more sensitive eye toward religious freedom issues," said Jeffrey Wasserstein, a former Alito law clerk and current Washington lawyer who describes himself as a liberal. ''He really tries to limit his decision to the case at hand. He isn't seeking when he dissents to needle the other members of the court."

As Alito prepares to step into the partisan warfare that increasingly divides the US Senate, supporters and critics alike are parsing his 15-year record on the appeals court, his three years as US attorney, and his seven years as a Reagan lawyer for evidence to bolster their own cases.

Meanwhile, Alito's peers are not surprised to see him arrive at this moment. ''He's a judge's judge in the sense that he thinks deeply about these very difficult problems we have to deal with," said Anthony J. Scirica, chief judge of the Third Circuit. ''He has spent most of his career in public service. He is 'Mr. Clean.' "

Sarah Schweitzer and Sacha Pfeiffer of the Globe staff wrote and reported portions of this story. Other contributors were Charlie Savage and Michael Kranish of the Globe staff and correspondents Alan Wirzbicki and Rushmie Kalke.