“We want these sort of accoutrements,” Bernhoft explained. “Particularly for clients out here.”

The Bobs met in 1998 at University of Wisconsin Law School. Ten years later, they function as two halves of an argumentative whole. Bernhoft will say something macho—something like “If you want to see Uncle Sam come at you with all he’s worth and make you the nexus of his multiple afflictions, fuck with the money”—and Barnes will nod and repeat the word precisely at least twice before explaining that “a law abhorrent to its people is no law at all.”

Their résumés don’t seem to point to a future in Hollywood. Born and raised in the middle-class Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa, Bernhoft was a piano prodigy who dropped out of college to tour for five years with a Doors cover band. After several years in telemarketing, he went back to school and got involved in the Constitution Party, whose ideas about what he calls “a tax police state” rang true to him.

Soon, he and a friend started selling materials (for $1,000 a pop) that explain how to remove oneself from the tax rolls. “We thought we’d feed a virus into the system and see what would happen,” Bernhoft said. Then, in 1997, the Justice Department sued him. Bernhoft represented himself while still in law school; in 1999, the case was dismissed with prejudice after he was barred by a court order from selling antitax programs ever again. He was admitted to the bar in 2001 at the age of 41.

Bernhoft stands 6 foot 6 and wears designer pinstripe suits and a gold pinky ring. His fastidious mustache and sculpted hair give him an assertive, if foppish, mien. At 34, Barnes is 13 years younger, five inches shorter, and a lot balder. Prone to wearing sweaters and blue jeans, he’s a Chattanooga, Tennessee, native whose father died when he was 11, leaving his mom with six kids and no money.

Later, when he was at Yale on a scholarship, he and his friends formed a group called PAY (Poor at Yale) to protest a proposal to do away with needs-blind admissions. When the administration asked him to sit on a committee to study the issue, Barnes instead transferred to the University of Tennessee. “I would have become part of the system,” he explained. “Dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change; he changes you.”

Barnes can quote Patrick Henry and David Mamet with equal ease. He also loses his cell phone several times a year. Barnes is the firm’s absentminded professor; Bernhoft, its taskmaster. Yet the Bobs share a love of political philosophy, very expensive bourbon, and challenging how things work. For them, the Snipes trial was a chance to exercise all of these passions. It was also what Barnes calls their “entrez vous” to Hollywood.

Snipes’ trial was held in Florida, where he has a home, in the U.S. District Court in Ocala, a city of about 52,000. While seeking a change of venue, the Bobs had argued—unsuccessfully—that a rich black man from the Bronx would have trouble getting a fair trial in a rural, mostly white community whose median household income was less than $31,000.