Terry M Giles

Born on July 3, 1948, Giles attended 21 schools in a 10-year period, settling in long enough to earn a debate scholarship to the University of California at Fullerton, later earning his law degree from Pepperdine University. He also served with the U.S. Army from 1970 to 1976 during the back half of the Vietnam conflict. Giles went on to establish or acquire 35 businesses, including a large West Coast criminal law firm, Landmark Education and Giles Enterprises, now a holding company for his family’s involvement in everything from banking to computers to travel. The investment firm is located in Houston, Texas. Some of his past businesses associations have ranged from food and entertainment, intellectual property and property development as well as manufacturing. Giles has always managed to attract high-powered clients, especially during his tenure in law, of which he is now retired. Some of those clients have included Richard Pryor, Kenneth Lay, J. Howard, Marshall III and Martin Luther King Jr.’s remaining children during a much-noted familial dispute regarding the corporation set up to control Dr. King’s intellectual property at the King Center. Giles, meanwhile, is not your born-and-bred political operative; he's the man behind the scenes who litigated — and sometimes mitigated — some of the most sensationally nasty celebrity and political dramas of the last several decades. Giles and Ben Carson met in 1994, when both won the Horatio Alger Award, which honors community leadership. Giles, a native of St. Louis, was educated in California, where he built a criminal law practice in the 1970s. He “represented relatively infamous people,” including one of the Hillside Stranglers, who were a pair of Los Angeles-based serial killers. After switching to civil law and business in the early 1980s, Giles' clients got even more fascinating. He represented Howard Marshall III, the son of a wealthy, elderly Texan who had married the late Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith, in an inheritance fight. He represented a school teacher who professed to an affair with a young Monica Lewinsky. He represented victims of abuse at the hands of priests in the Catholic Church. And he was the trustee of Kenneth Lay’s assets amid the Enron collapse. Atlanta attorney John D. Steel even selected Giles to settle ongoing legal squabbles among the children of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Giles, a young man starting off with meager means is now a multi-millionaire, who, with his wife, Kalli O'Malley, lives in Houston, but owns a home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and a French chateau that is well over 1,000 years old. Horatio Alger Award winner (youngest in the history of the award) Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, board of directors The National Cabinet of Guideposts, member Giles Enterprises, owner, chairman and president, 2000-present Landmark Education Corporation chair and director, 2000-2005. Giles & O’Malley, law firm principal, Houston, Texas Pacific Biometrics Inc., director (resigned, 2004) Kast Telecom, director Pepperdine University Board of Regents Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University, Council of Overseers University Cancer Foundation Board of Visitors Anderson Cancer Center Executive Committee of M.D.