For more than 15 years, Jeff Haney and I have been writing partners, defending our clients and slaying dragons.

Other than my wife, I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that I was in contact with more often than Jeff Haney.

I spoke to Jeff, sat with Jeff, texted Jeff at all hours of the night, bothered Jeff Jeff Jeff pretty much every day for all those years. No weekends, completely off-limits — we pretty much kept it going.

Jeff never took off work because he was sick. Never.

Jeff did have one idiosyncrasy… Every Monday morning at 9:30, we have our team meeting. We all sit down, have coffee, and work through the plan for the week.

You could set a Swiss watch by it… Jeff would come in around 9:38… nine forty-five… so he never called in sick, but if you added up being late, Jeff missed about a year and a half of work.

We used to say if you put Jeff and Mark in a room together, you’d end up with one really smart guy. The reason is this: Jeff was brilliant. Jeff was 160–170 IQ. Jeff was that part of my brain that was missing. Jeff could count six decks of cards. Jeff was very proud of the fact that he wasn’t allowed in half of the big casinos on the Strip, and in the rest he just got lucky not to get 86’d. I used to brag on him for that every time we would meet a new client. He would just smile.

Jeff was a sports reporter and editor at the Las Vegas Sun for more than 10 years. Those were the days when the Sun won a Pulitzer. The newspaper was at the top of its game.

When the wheels started coming off the Las Vegas economy in 2007 and dragged on for years, Fierro Communications was looking for a new writer with new ideas and a different voice.

Jeff came in, and he had a different voice. Jeff had some sort of temporary imbalance in his sinuses and hearing; as a result, when we sat down for his interview, he was essentially screaming at the top of his lungs. I was cracking up. I hired him on the spot.

We quickly found that it was a fit for the ages. I was the outgoing one you couldn’t shut up, and Jeff was the one sitting back taking the measure of the situation, virtually silent 90% of the time in public meetings. He would then have plenty to say when we sat down one-on-one and started writing together.

Over the years, we started being more and more active around the courthouse. We started writing a column for what was then a new magazine, Vegas Legal Magazine.

We produced day-in-the-life videos. Later we added our creative director, Kel Durant.

Fast forward: we started officing with Dominic Gentile in his office at Tivoli, and the three of us sat on top of each other in this little tiny office made for one.

Gentile’s team moved out when they joined a national law firm… then COVID hit, and suddenly we were in a football-field-sized office with our little team of five or six people, and because of COVID we had to sneak into the empty building every day to save clients and slay dragons. It was us against the world.

To give you an idea of just how good we were as a team, of the last nine Class A felonies we handled (four of which involved shooting deaths that took place on video), only one of our attorney’s clients went to prison. It was always self-defense, and we were successful in working with our attorneys to prove it.

Obviously, that has everything to do with the fact that we were working with brilliant attorneys like Dominic Gentile, Paola Armeni, and Ryan Helmick — but the reason that we got to work with such great attorneys is because of the level of work that Jeff and the team produced together. I am so very proud to have been a part of that work.

Of all of the people I’ve ever worked with, I think Jeff had the driest sense of humor. One time, when I took him to a fancy schmancy Japanese restaurant for lunch, I told him he should try the karaage — little bits of deep-fried chicken. He looked at them and said, “Yeah, they have these at McDonald’s. They’re called Chicken McNuggets.”

Both of us came from a journalism background… As I said, Jeff was at the Las Vegas Sun for 10 years. I was at Channel 8 KLAS-TV for about the same, so with print journalism/broadcast reporting backgrounds…

He had a completely different approach to writing the story… because of his formal education by the Jesuits, he knew punctuation, he knew spelling, he knew grammar, and he was the genuine expert in the style points of AP writing. I, on the other hand, knew ellipses… dot dot dot. That I had down.

We both based our business dealings on what we had learned in our newsrooms. We knew we weren’t going to lie for clients, and that if we did, we would be dead in the eyes of the media.

Jeff was one of the healthiest people I knew. He kept in incredible shape. He never once called in sick in the entire time that we worked together until these last couple of months.

I told everyone I didn’t know that Jeff knew how to be sick.

Then he texted with the news. He was in the emergency room. His answers to the texts came slower.

My team members Kel and Luetta and I went to see him. It was tearful. I told him we loved him and I missed him every minute of every day.

Jeff passed away the following day.

For those of you who got to work with Jeff, you know this was a special man. His work meant something. His life meant something… he helped save people’s freedom.

He kept young men from going to prison for the rest of their lives. They would be in a cell right now.

He helped our team save people’s reputations, and in court, if there was a way to find daylight and help our attorneys prevail, I’m proud to say that Jeff was right there every single step of the way at some of the highest-profile cases in Las Vegas.

I’m so glad — so very proud — that we stood shoulder to shoulder over all these years. I miss it. I miss him every day, every hour of every day.

On Monday mornings, when we are getting ready for our team meetings… I’m going to miss seeing Jeff walk in the door… right about nine thirty-eight, nine forty-five.

We miss you, Jeff.

Mark Fierro began his career as a reporter/anchor at KLAS-TV, the CBS television station in Las Vegas. He worked at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. He served as communications consultant on 24 nine figure IPO global road shows on Wall Street. He provided litigation support for the Michael Jackson death trial.

He is president of Fierro Communications, Inc., which conducts mock juries and focus groups in addition to public relations and marketing. Fierro is the author of several books including “Road Rage: The Senseless Murder of Tammy Meyers.” He has made numerous appearances on national TV news programs.