Houston’s Fierce Superlawyer Who Battles Celebrities Like Diddy and Deshaun Watson — Here’s What Fuels His Relentless Fire!
“You could not challenge Tony to do shit because he would take it personally and he would better himself not to come in second place,” says retired Marine First Sergeant Chris Calhoun, who had Buzbee as a platoon commander. “He’s a cocky son of a bitch, but he will not back down. . . . I thought he was going to be a damn general. The only thing that stopped him from staying in the Marines was he didn’t get paid enough.”
Buzbee left the Marines as a captain and soon enrolled in law school at the University of Houston. He had two goals. The first was he wanted to make a lot of money. More money than he could ever imagine. The second was he never wanted to be a nameless and faceless corporate lawyer. You were going to know his name.
Yes, it does take three elevators to get to Buzbee’s office on the seventy-fifth floor of the JPMorgan Chase Tower in Houston. A question about his beginnings makes him look out the window at the green skyscraper nearby housing the law firm where he started, before he left to open his own shop in a strip mall: “I always laugh at them and tell them, ‘I look down on you boys now.’ ”
Buzbee is bold, but that has occasionally backfired in memorable ways. He’s lost three bids for public office, including in a runoff for Houston mayor in 2019 and in a city-council race in 2023. “Maybe I should have thought through that a little bit more,” he says of his mayoral run, offering a rare regret. A woman once destroyed an estimated $300,000 worth of art, including two Warhols, at a party at his home, and a burglary at the same home resulted in an estimated $21 million worth of stolen goods. He quit drinking a few years ago after he was arrested on a DWI charge that was eventually dismissed.
Then there’s the time he wanted to take his son with him to hand out $30,000 from his Rolls-Royce to the homeless. Frances warned him that maybe there was another way to give out money to those in need, but he did it anyway. Well, word got out and some of the people started attacking the car and grabbing money from inside the vehicle, with Buzbee and his son inside.
“Everything he does is in a grand way, and handing out $30,000 in cash to people who are homeless in the Rolls is a very grand thing to do,” Frances tells me. “I thought there was safer and better ways to do it, but it makes for a very Tony Buzbee story.”
Back at his office, the shark is swimming and waiting to eat again. Buzbee insists he’s not worried about what’s unfolding sixteen hundred miles away in a Manhattan courtroom in the criminal trial for Combs. Buzbee is pleased with how the prosecution is working the case, even though “they’re not going to do it the way I would do it.”
Then, toward the end of our time together, he repeats a line from Patton that he thinks about a lot: Twenty years from now, when you’re sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, “What did you do in the great World War II?” you won’t have to cough and say, “Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.”
Buzbee thinks of these celebrity cases as part of his own great war, and he’s far from Louisiana and sure isn’t shoveling shit. He has the big-ass mansion on maybe the best street in Houston, the seven-thousand-acre ranch, the cars, the jet, generational wealth, the wife, the ex-wife, the kids, and more sharks than he knows what to do with. The quest for material wealth long ago ceased to provide his motivation.
“I don’t need any more money, and there’s not any stuff that I need,” he tells me.
So I ask him about the one obvious thing he still craves. “But don’t you need to win?”
“Of course,” he says with a mischievous smile.
The shark never stops searching for blood in the water.
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