Gordon C. Rhea is an accomplished attorney with over 40 years of experience in civil, criminal, and appellate litigation, particularly in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He earned degrees from Indiana University, Harvard University, and Stanford Law School, and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia following training on St. Croix. Early in his legal career, he defended complex criminal cases in Los Angeles before moving to Washington, D.C., where he served as Special Assistant to the Chief Counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities. In that role, he helped investigate and draft key reports on CIA assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and FBI efforts to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. He then spent five years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., taking on leadership roles as Deputy Director of Superior Court Operations and Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney to oversee major local and federal prosecutions.

In 1981, Mr. Rhea relocated to the U.S. Virgin Islands as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, where he prosecuted high-profile economic crimes and murder cases. The following year, he co-founded the St. Croix law firm Alkon and Rhea, which specialized in toxic tort litigation, product liability, environmental contamination, and complex white-collar defense. His firm brought major litigation against the Hess Oil and Martin Marietta refineries for workplace toxic exposure, led suits against major automakers for vehicle design failures, handled aviation disaster cases, and co-counselled in landmark litigation over the contamination of St. Thomas’s Tutu aquifer. Over his career, Mr. Rhea won the largest civil jury verdict ever rendered in the U.S. Virgin Islands in a landmark cigarette-related cancer death case, and he was honored by the Virgin Islands Bar Association with its highest award, the Winston Hodge Award.