Gordon Campbell Rhea grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a town that the Federal Government built in the early 1940’s to help produce the first atomic bomb and end World War II. After graduating from high school, he attended Indiana University, received a Bachelor’s Degree with honors in history, then entered graduate school at Harvard University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and earned a Master’s Degree there. Afterwards, he joined the Peace Corps’ Africa program and served in remote villages in the Ethiopian highlands and in the Ogaden Desert, near Somalia.
Returning to the United States in early 1970, he worked for a year as a carpenter then attended Stanford University Law School, where he received his law degree in 1974. He began his legal career in Los Angeles, defending complex criminal cases, and then moved to Washington, D.C., where he served as Special Assistant to the Chief Counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities. His work there involved obtaining documents, deposing witnesses, writing reports, drafting legislation, and preparing Senators Church and Mondale for hearings. He played a major role in investigating and drafting the Senate Committee’s reports on the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba and on the FBI’s campaign to discredit Martin Luther King and undermine the civil rights movement.
When the Committee completed it work, Mr. Rhea became an Assistant United States Attorney in Washington, where he worked for over five years prosecuting cases ranging from misdemeanors to first degree murders to complex white-collar indictments. He served as the office’s Deputy Director of Superior Court Operations, overseeing all felony prosecutions in the District of Columbia, and as Executive Assistant United States Attorney under United States Attorney Charles C. Ruff, with responsibility for coordinating local and Federal law enforcement agencies, reviewing and authorizing major local and Federal prosecutions, trying high-profile prosecutions in the nation’s capital, and assisting in managing the nation’s largest Federal prosecutor’s office of over 160 civil and criminal lawyers.
In 1981, Mr. Rhea was appointed an Assistant United States Attorney in the Virgin Islands, where he prosecuted several high-profile murder cases and economic crimes. He was already familiar with the Virgin Islands, having received his Peace Corps training on St. Croix in the summer of 1968 before serving as a Peace Corps volunteer. In 1982, Mr. Rhea and Attorney Thomas Alkon founded Alkon and Rhea, a prominent plaintiff’s firm on St. Croix specializing in toxic tort litigation, product liability cases, and complex white collar criminal cases. Alkon and Rhea brought critical litigation against the Hess Oil refinery and the Martin Marietta bauxite refinery for toxic exposure to workers, including asbestos, heavy-metal catalysts, silica, solvents, and isocyanate paints. They also prosecuted ground-breaking product liability cases against automobile manufacturers for injuries caused by vehicle instability, firewall failures, and occupant protection failures; handled litigation involving airplane crashes, turbulence encounters, and a wide range of catastrophic worker related injuries; and served as co-counsel in litigation against Exxon, ESSO, and Texaco for contaminating the sole-source Tutu aquifer on St. Thomas with petroleum and chlorinated hydrocarbons. Mr. Rhea represented several businessmen in Federal criminal investigations brought by the Justice Department’s Criminal Tax Division.
In recent years, Mr. Rhea has averaged three or four trials a year in the Virgin Islands. His major recent cases include his representation of the chief financial officer of a prominent EDC company – KAPOK – in a 2 ½ month-long jury trial that resulted in his acquittal and in many respects helped save the EDC program. He won the largest civil jury verdict ever rendered in the Virgin Islands in a landmark case against R.J. Reynolds tobacco company involving cancer deaths caused by its cigarettes. He also recently represented hospital CEO Amos Carty in his trial and subsequent appeal, in which the Virgin Islands Supreme Court ruled that Carty had acted in good faith and vacated his conviction. In sum, Mr. Rhea has extensive experience in civil, criminal, and appellate litigation, much of it in the Virgin Islands, where he has been a member of the bar for more than forty years. In 2023, the Virgin Islands Bar Association granted Mr. Rhea its highest honor, the Winston Hodge Award.
In addition to his achievements as an attorney, Mr. Rhea continues to pursue his interest in history. He has authored eight books, several of which won national awards and were featured as main selections of the History Book Club, and he has lectured extensively at universities and historical societies. He is also an avid long-distance trail runner and has run numerous marathons during the past several decades. He enjoys hiking and takes advantage of the Virgin Islands’ many trails.
Mr. Rhea’s wife Catherine also has close ties to the Virgin Islands. She moved to Saint Croix in 1978, taught at Lew Muckle elementary school and at Country Day School, and later worked on the island with Prudential Bache and Merrill Lynch. They were married on St. Croix in 1986, and their first son Campbell was born a few months before Hurricane Hugo, which destroyed their home on Little Princess Hill with them and their infant son in it. Fortunately they all survived, and Campbell is now an attorney and a member of the Virgin Islands Bar, based out of Milwaukee. They also have a second son, Carter, who spent much of his childhood here and received his PhD this year in astrophysics.
