Ex-Tiburon Mayor Gary Spratling was key figure in antitrust prosecution

The late Gary Spratling served on the Tiburon Town Council from 1982 to 1986 and was mayor for a year in 1983-1984. (via Cathy Spratling)

Former Tiburon Mayor Gary Spratling, who was instrumental in the development of the Point Tiburon condominium complex and cultivated a storied career as one of the nation’s top antitrust attorneys, died March 26 at his Round Hill home following a 1½-year battle with brain cancer. He was 83.

Spratling served on the Town Council from 1982 to 1986 and was mayor for a year beginning in April 1983. He previously served on the town’s Planning Commission from 1978 to 1982 and was commission chair from 1980 to 1982.

A key focus during Spratling’s time in local government was the redevelopment of former Southern Pacific Railroad property, which had seen its last train depart in 1967, said former Tiburon Mayor Stone Coxhead, who served with Spratling on the council between 1984 and 1986.

Tiburon needed to form a redevelopment agency to improve the Southern Pacific property, Coxhead said, which would result in several districts — including the Reed Union School, Tiburon Fire Protection and Marin Municipal Water districts, among others — losing tax revenue during the redevelopment process.

“It was not an easy task,” Coxhead said. “There was probably no one better than Gary Spratling to convince elected representatives of other districts to forego income for a fairly long period of time.”

As Tiburon’s property values soared in the 1980s, developers purchased prime land tracts on and near the Tiburon Ridge and other areas with great views. This led to residents wanting growth to be slowed and limited, though opinions varied on how aggressively to restrict development.

The council approved several emergency moratoriums between 1985 and 1986. While some advocated for a two-year building moratorium intended to buy time to amend Tiburon’s general plan to significantly downzone properties, Spratling and other councilmembers favored limiting growth to 1.25% annually.

Voters approved the two-year moratorium in April 1986, voting out all three incumbents, including Spratling. The moratorium was later struck down in court.

Professionally, Spratling worked nearly three decades in the Justice Department’s antitrust division. In 1995, he became deputy assistant attorney general for criminal enforcement, the division’s top career position. He left in 2000 for private practice, where he remained until retiring in 2017.

Spratling’s most significant professional achievement came in 1993, when he created a plan for business-cartel participants to self-report in exchange for government leniency. The plan offered automatic immunity for self-reporters, immunity for company principals who cooperated with federal investigators and potential immunity for principals who offered evidence after an investigation started.

Antitrust attorney William MacLeod, the former chair of the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Law Section, said in an April 3 interview from the law section’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., that Spratling’s program exposed antitrust conspiracies that proliferated over prior decades. MacLeod presented Spratling with the section’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 and called him “the architect of modern criminal enforcement” in a March 30 post on social-media platform X.

“The likelihood of getting caught, and the likelihood of paying grave penalties for getting caught, increased substantially thanks to this program,” MacLeod said. “And that is the sort of thing that will inhibit people from considering it.”

Gary Richard Spratling was born Nov. 28, 1941, in San Francisco to Ernest Spratling and Margery Bramwell. He grew up on 16th Avenue near Pacheco Street and was the second of four sons, born after brother Robert and before Donald and Richard.

Spratling attended Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, where he was a member of the school’s forensics team and participated in interschool debates and original oratory competitions across California.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 1964 and a master’s in business administration in 1966, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He started law school at the University of San Francisco in 1966, but during his second month of school, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, in which he served two years of active duty, the first teaching at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, the second in military operations in southeast Asia, including Vietnam. His wife, Cathy Spratling, said her husband delivered payments to soldiers stationed in the area.

Following his army service, Spratling returned to law school at the University of San Francisco, graduating in 1971, moving to Tiburon about that time.

Tiburon resident David Irmer, president of real-estate development firm The Innisfree Companies, which developed the Point Tiburon condominiums and commercial space in the 1980s, said Spratling was a “wonderful, wonderful man” who was “never short of encouragement, never short of giving us a high-five — or a scolding if we were out of line.”

Irmer said Spratling encouraged him to get involved with the project, saying that because he was local and had the knowledge, the Point Tiburon development could work.

“That meant a lot to me,” Irmer said of Spratling’s encouragement. “That encouraged my early commitment to Southern Pacific to take on the project. And if it wasn’t for Gary, I probably would not have done it.”

Council colleague Larry Smith, the husband of Ark contributor Diane Smith, called Spratling one of his favorite people and “the smartest guy I’ve ever known.”

“He took more notes in interviews and presentations than anybody that I’ve ever known and used those notes to keep things in focus,” Smith said.

Former Tiburon Mayor Joan Bergsund, who served on the council from 1978 to 1982 while Spratling was on the Planning Commission, said Spratling “knew just the right words to use to tiptoe through that mire without sinking the whole ship.”

Professionally, Spratling began working at the Justice Department’s San Francisco field office in its antitrust division after graduating law school. He eventually became the field office’s antitrust division chief from about 1984 to 1995, supervising criminal, civil and merger litigation across 11 states.

After Spratling was named deputy assistant attorney general, he would commute from Tiburon to Washington, D.C., weekly, his wife said.

While creating the self-report program, Spratling said that neither prosecutors nor private companies thought it would work because it was perceived as too friendly by the government, and businesses didn’t trust the promise of leniency.

“I really put everything into it, because I thought self-reporting was the key,” he told legal trade publication Law360 in 2010.

For his federal work, he received the Presidential Rank Award from Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Law360 reported in 2010, when it also named Spratling one of its 10 most admired competition attorneys.

Spratling left the Justice Department in 2000 and joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, where he stayed until retiring in 2017.

In private practice, he advised companies facing cartel investigations, with a significant portion of his work telling clients “if and when it makes sense” to self-report, the trade publication reported.

Patricia Murphy, who was Spratling’s paralegal from 1978 to 1985, said Spratling would get four to five hours of sleep a night “for as long as I’ve known him,” working from 4 a.m. until midnight so he could be an antitrust prosecutor at the same time as being Tiburon mayor.

“He decided he needed to live two lives in the same amount of time that everybody else lives one,” Murphy said, adding as she looked back on his accomplishments, “I feel like he carved out that career with his bare hands.”

Toward the end of Spratling’s career, one client said they’d drop his firm “unless it was Gary Spratling who would do their work,” Murphy said.

Cathy Spratling first met her future husband after moving to San Francisco from Washington, D.C., about 1981 through a friend working for him as a paralegal. She and Spratling started dating in 1983 and wed in 1999.

She said the first thing that came to mind about Spratling was his sense of humor, adding that he had a great sense of adventure in his travels — they visited Wyoming and Montana early on and Europe — and she learned a lot about food and wine from him.

Spratling was also the life of the party, his wife and Murphy said. The couple would host Christmas parties so large that the invite list would be split in two, with one group attending in the early afternoon and another coming after the first group left.

“We’d add on something else to it, and he was just way over the top on everything that he did, just like his work,” Cathy said. “So he played hard, and he worked hard.”

One of Spratling’s interests that nearly everyone mentioned was his love for cars.

Greenbrae resident Tom O’Neill, who lived in Tiburon for over 50 years and is the founder and director of the Tiburon Classic and Exotic Car Show, first met Spratling when O’Neill co-chaired the development of Shoreline Park in 1986. Their friendship strengthened when they discovered a shared passion for cars and O’Neill worked on starting the classic car show.

O’Neill said Spratling enjoyed American cars, such as the Ford Pantera, and had an appreciation for Italian vehicles, particularly those made by Lamborghini. O’Neill and Spratling also traveled to local and international car shows, including the Goodwood Revival festival, which honors racing cars and motorcycles from 1948 to 1966 and is held at the Goodwood Circuit in Chichester, England.

Spratling also gave back to his community. He was a board chair of Shifting Gears USA, a Marin County-based nonprofit supporting technical-education programs in the county, the first board chair of the Marin Community Foundation and served on various other local nonprofit boards.

“He was a person of ultimate honesty and truth, the highest level of integrity,” O’Neill said, adding that Spratling was “a person that would do anything for a friend that he was asked of.”

Spratling, his wife said, “spent much of his rare leisure time with his beloved family,” including his brothers and their wives in a group affectionately dubbed the “Six Pack.”

Irmer said Spratling was someone who could be phoned anytime, day or night, whenever there was something on your mind.

Spratling “was a hell of a guy you could have a beer with,” Irmer said. “He was one of those men in my life who was extremely meaningful to me.”

MacLeod said attendees at this year’s antitrust-law conference “are basking in the legacy of Gary,” himself included — he interviewed antitrust authorities from Greece and Italy for a conference session, and they talked about their leniency-program successes.

“Gary took this idea and spread it around the world,” MacLeod said.

Bergsund said Spratling was a public servant who would “do the right thing,” while Coxhead said he was held in high regard.

“Gary devoted hours and hours of time to benefit Tiburon,” Coxhead said. “He served Tiburon with distinction and integrity.”

In addition to his wife, Spratling is survived by brothers Donald Spratling of Corte Madera and Richard Spratling of Calistoga, as well as several nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews. He was preceded in death by his brother Robert, who died in 2010 aged 82, and his parents.

A private memorial service will be held June 1, Cathy Spratling said.

Donations can be made to Shifting Gears USA; brain-tumor research efforts at the University of California at San Francisco; or Sonoma Equine Rescue, Rehab & Adoption, a nonprofit Cathy Spratling co-founded that rescues, rehabilitates and places horses in responsible and caring homes, its mission statement says.

Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.

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