D.C. lawyer John W. Stewart Jr. asked local real-estate investors to trust him. They did.

Stewart, 45, is Liberian. During the civil war that tore the country apart in the 1980s, Stewart came to the United States. He did his B.A. at Thiel College in Greenville, Pa., and he got his J.D. at New York Law School. Liberia, however, is the first place he was licensed to practice; his mother is a lawyer there, too.

He started out working admiralty cases with the Liberian Bureau of Maritime Affairs. In 1998 he was admitted to practice in New York state, and he joined a law firm in Rochester with two Liberian colleagues: Charles Brumskine and Jonathan Koffa. Each of these men wanted better for their wounded homeland, and they had a plan: Brumskine was running for the presidency in the country’s 2004 elections. He was a former Liberian senator who had once been close to dictator Charles Taylor; he told people that he had rushed out of the country by night when he learned Taylor wanted him dead.

Brumskine also had a practice in D.C., the practice Stewart took over. As Stewart worked his friend’s cases, he also promoted his campaign, reaching out to Liberian expatriates in the metro area. This was not a small task. Stewart was doing a lot for a cause that meant everything to the people involved. Cummins remembers seeing his colleague one night at a Liberian political seminar at a hotel in Maryland. Among the excitement, the enthusiastic talk, and the debates, it could have been a DNC meeting.

Liberian politics had great effect on the professional life of each lawyer. Brumskine had to leave work unfinished stateside so he could campaign in his homeland. (He came in third in the election.) Koffa embezzled from clients in North Carolina and slipped the money to projects that he thought would help Brumskine win, according to The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. Now he’s in a federal cell in Kentucky.