The more Al Love thought about it, the angrier he got at the way Cheeseman and especially Frederico had acted when Schlichtmann had asked about the health of his family. On a morning a week after his deposition he sat at his desk contemplating the telephone. Finally he dialed Cheeseman’s number. He felt nervous and his words came awkwardly. “I’ve been thinking about this situation,” he told Cheeseman. “I feel like I’m betwixt and between. I don’t know which side I should be on, but I don’t think everything that went on around here is getting told.”
Cheeseman said he was planning to come out to the plant the next day. “Why don’t we talk?”
The following afternoon Cheeseman appeared at the door of the receiving office. He suggested to Love that they go to the conference room, where they could talk in private. “Tell me what’s bothering you, Al,” said Cheeseman as he closed the door.
Love said that he was concerned about the health of his family. “I’m wondering if I should get a lawyer for my children’s sake,” he said.
“I can’t advise you one way or the other about getting a lawyer,” replied Cheeseman. “That’s something you’ve got to decide for yourself.” Cheeseman paused, and then he added: “As a practical matter, I don’t believe those chemicals in the water made anyone sick.”
“What about the leukemia cluster? That’s been documented.”
“No one knows what causes leukemia,” explained Cheeseman. “And no one knows what caused this cluster. I personally think it’s just a matter of chance. If you took a hundred pennies and threw them in the air, half would land heads and the other half would land tails. If you looked around carefully, you’d probably be able to find some heads grouped together in a cluster. But it’s purely a matter of chance. No one can explain it.”
Love thought about that for a moment. He shook his head slowly and said, “I can’t buy it. I know that water was contaminated. And I know from people around here that barrels have been buried and things have been dumped. I wasn’t the one who did it, but I know it happened.”
“Al, this is very important,” said Cheeseman. “I want you to tell me the names of those people.”
Love did not want to become an informer. He had already named Barbas and Meola at his deposition, but he’d been under oath then. He and Tommy Barbas had known each other almost their entire lives. When Barbas had started work at the plant, fresh out of high school, Love had taken it upon himself to look after the younger man. At the company Christmas parties, Love and his wife, Evelyn, always sat at the same table with Tommy and his wife. They’d had the Barbases over to dinner at their house. Love wasn’t about to cause any more trouble for Barbas. If Tommy had anything to tell the lawyers, he himself should be the one to do it. “I can’t do that,” Love told Cheeseman, shaking his head.
“Can you speak to these people and ask them to come to me?”
Love said, “Let me think about that.”
“It’s very important that we learn about everything that went on around here,” said Cheeseman.
Listening to Cheeseman speak, it suddenly dawned on Love that perhaps the lawyer really did not know what had happened at the plant. Certainly Vin Forte, the plant manager, knew everything. If Cheeseman was in the dark, then Forte must have lied to the lawyers to protect himself. And Tommy Barbas must have lied, too.
“We need the information so we can disclose it to the appropriate officials,” continued Cheeseman. “We need it so we can get the Environmental Protection Agency in, so we can clean up everything that might be in the ground.”
Love shook his head.
Word spread quickly around the plant that day that Cheeseman had come to see Love. Some people whispered that Al had gotten himself into a predicament of some sort with the lawyers. Love had not risen far in the plant hierarchy, but he had a quiet authority that had led others to respect him and his word. When one of Love’s friends, Cy Witmer, who worked in the sheet metal shop, heard the rumors, he took a break and came to see Love. “What’s going on, Al?” Witmer asked.
“I do believe I’m on the wrong side of this whole thing,” Love said.
During the next week, Love slept poorly. He could barely eat. His wife, Evelyn, worried about him. At night, after dinner, while Evelyn cleaned the dishes, they talked about whether he should go over to see Anne Anderson. She lived just around the corner, on Orange Street, a two-minute walk. Although they had been neighbors for fifteen years, the Loves did not know Anne well. Al had seen an ambulance come to her house on more than one occasion when her son had been ill, and he knew that she and her husband had separated. When the Woburn leukemias began to attract media attention, Al had thought Anne was “a fruitcake,” as he put it, a sad case who’d broken under the strain of the tragedies that had befallen her. But lately he’d begun to reconsider. He wondered how Anne would receive him if he went over and knocked on her door. It occurred to him that since he worked for Grace she might blame him for what had happened to her son.
Evelyn had always told Al that someone in Grace management would surely come forward with the truth, somebody whose responsibility it was. But now, witnessing the turmoil that Al was in, she told him he should go speak to Anne and tell her what he knew. They tried to weigh the consequences of such an act, whether Al would lose his job if it came out. But to Evelyn, losing a job now seemed less important than doing what Al thought was right, and what would set his mind at rest.
On Wednesday evening, the first of May, three weeks after his deposition, Al Love walked over to Anne’s house and knocked on the door. Anne invited him in, offered him coffee, and they sat at her kitchen table. He told her that he’d thought about coming to see her for some time, but he’d been afraid she might not want to talk to him because he worked for W. R. Grace. He said he cared about what had happened in the city and to her son, and he was angry about the way the company was handling itself.
Anne put her hand on his arm and said, “You have no idea how much this means to me.” She had tears in her eyes, and she apologized for crying. Love said he was worried about the health of his own family. He’d heard rumors at the plant about many drums being buried. “Fifty or more drums,” he said. “There’s a lot that’s not coming out.”
He and Anne talked for almost two hours. Love remembered feeling clearheaded and calm for the first time in weeks. As he was about to leave, Anne asked if he would be willing to speak to Schlichtmann, to tell him what he had told her.
Yes, Love said, he would talk to Schlichtmann.
Schlichtmann arrived by invitation at the Loves’ house the next evening. He and Al sat in the living room, talking for two hours about the Grace plant. Al told him about the rumors of fifty or more drums being buried under an addition that had been added onto the plant in the early 1970s. Schlichtmann had brought along the deposition transcripts of Tom Barbas and Paul Shalline, and he asked Love to read them as soon as he could.
A few days later, after Love finished reading the lengthy transcripts, he and Schlichtmann met again. Love, shaking his head ruefully, said that Tommy Barbas had not told the truth at his deposition. Love recalled how he’d sat in the cafeteria at work three years ago with Barbas and a supervisor named Frank Kelly, listening to the two men talk about the drums of toxic waste buried out back behind the plant. He remembered how Kelly, laughing, had pointed at Barbas. “Tommy knows all about it,” Kelly had said. The other workers at the table had laughed, too, and even Barbas had smiled. Everyone had treated it like a big joke, Love told Schlichtmann.
Nearly every day for the next two weeks, Schlichtmann or Conway or someone else from the office called or stopped by Love’s house. One night Schlichtmann arrived with a thick stack of aerial photographs of the Grace plant dating back to 1960. Schlichtmann spread these on the dining room table and had Love study them with a magnifying glass, trying to identify the areas where he’d seen the pits and where Barbas and Meola had emptied their buckets of solvent and the degreasing machine. Schlichtmann went over ev
ery detail four, five, six times, probing for more, and Love answered patiently. They worked until late in the evening, the lights in the house blazing, the windows open in the soft spring air, people from Schlichtmann’s firm arriving and departing as if Love’s house had become its Woburn office.
Schlichtmann wanted the names of former Grace workers who might know more about the buried drums. Love mentioned Robert Pasqueriella, an electrician who used to work at the plant. Schlichtmann asked if he would call Pasqueriella right then, and Love did so.
Pasqueriella had not worked at Grace for six years, and he had to think a minute before it came back to him. Then he remembered a conversation he’d had with Frank Kelly. “Sure,” Pasqueriella said to Love. “Frank told me about those barrels.”
Half an hour later, Pasqueriella was in Love’s living room. Schlichtmann liked the man immediately. He was short and rotund, in his late forties, and he spoke in a rapid, staccato manner, often repeating a phrase several times. “I threw stuff back there myself,” he told Schlichtmann. “Yep, threw it there myself. Eddie Orazine, the assembly foreman, he told me to throw stuff out in the gully there. Nothing will grow there. I didn’t know at the time the stuff was toxic. My hands used to get white from it. I used to wash down the belts with the stuff, I don’t know what it’s called, I’m no chemist.”
“Trichloroethylene?” asked Schlichtmann.
“Yeah, that’s it. I’d work on the machine, drain out the old motor oil in the gearbox, put new oil in, let it run for a while to make sure it worked okay. If it was real dirty, I’d turn the gearbox on the side and put the solvent into it and swish it around. Then I’d dump it out back. In the machine shop, there used to be cutting oil, white like milk. Every once in a while Joe Meola used to drain the stuff out and go back and dump it in the gully. No one took it upon themselves to do anything on their own. None of the stuff was ever done without the permission of Paul Shalline and Eddie Orazine.”
“What about Tom Barbas?”
“Tommy, he would dump his paint thinner and other stuff in the ditch.”
“Barbas said he never did that.”
Pasqueriella snorted. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I seen Tommy with my own eyes throw his stuff into that ditch. I stood right beside him while he did it. It was just routine. He was doing it for many years that I know of.”
Schlichtmann asked Pasqueriella if he’d call Barbas and talk to him.
“Right now?” said Pasqueriella. “Why not? Sure.”
Schlichtmann hoped that Barbas might even come over to Love’s house, as Pasqueriella had. He knew he’d get much more out of Barbas sitting with him in Love’s living room than he would at a deposition with Cheeseman present.
Pasqueriella dialed Barbas’s number and spoke for several minutes. In the living room, Schlichtmann listened to Pasqueriella’s end of the conversation. “Tommy, you handled that stuff,” he heard Pasqueriella say. “So did I. Remember, I used to dump out in the back, too. I stood there talking to you while you did it.” Pasqueriella listened for a minute. “You know exactly what’s going on. If you’re smart, you’ll tell the truth. Everything you know, you better tell. You don’t want to take the rap for Vin Forte.”
Pasqueriella paused for a moment, and then he said: “Listen, Tommy, if they ask me, I’m going to tell the truth. I ain’t lying for no one.”
Pasqueriella hung up the phone. “He says he doesn’t know anything about it. He was hemming and hawing. I know Tommy, and I can tell when he’s nervous.”
These revelations—especially the rumors of fifty or more drums being buried behind the plant—delighted Schlichtmann. It was clear to him that Barbas had lied under oath at his deposition. It was also clear that W. R. Grace had not told the EPA the whole truth about how much TCE the plant had really used, and what it had buried in the backyard.
But Schlichtmann wanted hard evidence. He had to squeeze information out of Grace and its employees. One way of doing that would be to get the assistant U.S. attorney for environmental affairs interested in the case. A criminal investigation by the Justice Department, carrying with it the threat of heavy fines, perhaps even jail sentences for some Grace employees and executives, could break the case wide open. Months earlier, Schlichtmann had gone to see the assistant U.S. attorney and urged him to investigate Grace. “They lied to the EPA, I’m sure of it,” Schlichtmann had said. “Why aren’t you investigating?”
“Give me facts, give me evidence, give me witnesses,” the government lawyer had replied. “I can’t do anything without evidence, and I’m not going to start an investigation just to help your case.”
Now, with information from Love and Pasqueriella, Schlichtmann felt he had enough to interest the U.S. attorney. He persuaded Love to speak with the government authorities, and he arranged a meeting on a day that Love had already planned to take off work. Love’s youngest son, who was sixteen years old and had experienced seizures since he was seven, had an appointment with a specialist at Children’s Hospital in Boston.
After their son’s appointment, Al and Evelyn Love went with Schlichtmann and Conway up to the seventh floor of the federal courthouse. The assistant U.S. attorney and two senior EPA officials interviewed Al for nearly three hours that afternoon. Evelyn sat next to her husband through it all. The demeanor of the assistant U.S. attorney unnerved her. He stared intently at Al, eyes narrowed, the entire time. But Al appeared to handle it well. He spoke forthrightly and never seemed intimidated. He drew maps and told the government lawyers exactly what he’d told Schlichtmann about the pits and the rumors of fifty drums being buried under the addition to the plant.
Afterward, the assistant U.S. attorney took Schlichtmann aside and said that he would begin an investigation. He planned to issue subpoenas to Grace employees, commanding them to testify before a grand jury.
Schlichtmann had not managed to get Barbas over to Love’s house, but he got the next best thing. One week after Love’s visit to the assistant U.S. attorney, Barbas called Cheeseman to say that he had suddenly remembered something. He remembered now that he had been involved in dumping the drums into the pit.
Cheeseman, seated at his desk, had the sensation of “going suddenly cold,” he recalled later. He stood and looked out the window to the courthouse as he listened to Barbas. He felt himself getting angry.
Barbas, his words coming in a rush, told him in detail about everything he had suddenly “remembered.” The painter spoke about a red flatbed truck carrying barrels to the edge of a pit, opening the bung caps, Joe Meola helping him empty the barrels. To Cheeseman, it seemed as if Barbas believed that the more quickly he spoke, the less damaging his previous testimony would become. Cheeseman listened for a while, and then he started asking questions.
Cheeseman thought he understood. For twenty-four years Barbas had done what he’d been told. Barbas probably thought he’d go to jail for dumping toxic wastes on the ground, and this fear, perhaps, had led him to perjure himself.
That afternoon Cheeseman called Schlichtmann and said, “I won’t object if you want to depose Barbas again.”
“Tell me what’s going on, Bill,” said Schlichtmann, just as if he didn’t know.
Cheeseman explained that Barbas had called him that morning. “He says he remembers emptying the drums into the pit.”
• • •
“Mr. Barbas, you’ve had time to think about things since your first deposition?”
“Yes.”
They were back in Schlichtmann’s office. There were more lawyers in the conference room now. Cheeseman was there, of course, and one of Facher’s associates, and also two criminal lawyers, hired and paid by Grace to represent Barbas in the federal investigation.
“Mr. Barbas,” said Schlichtmann, “would you please tell me what you remember about your participation in the pouring of drums into a pit on W. R. Grace’s property?”
“That I was a participant,” said Barbas.
“Do you remember anything
else?”
“Helping at the time was Joe Meola. And Frank Kelly.”
“You’ve had time to think about who ordered you to dump those barrels, is that right?”
“Yes. Paul Shalline asked me if I would mind pouring the contents of the barrels into the pit.”
“And what did you say?”
“Well, I asked him—all this time we were saving the material to have it sent out to a legal disposing firm. He said it was not hazardous, we could pour it.”
“Now, Mr. Barbas, you poured waste solvents into the trench throughout the 1960s, didn’t you?”
“I think I stated I only did it during 1961.”
“I know what you stated. I want you to think about the question very carefully. You understand you’re under oath?”
“Yes.”
“You understand that the statement you’re giving is under the pains and penalties of perjury?”
Barbas nodded.
“You know that Mr. Meola would on occasion pour waste material into the trench?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You saw him do that.”
“Yes.”
“For what period of time did you see Mr. Meola do that?”
“He was always doing it.”
Cheeseman interrupted and said to Barbas: “He’s now asking for your direct observation.”
Schlichtmann turned angrily at Cheeseman. “I’m speaking English, Bill. He’s not Portuguese. He doesn’t need an interpreter.” Schlichtmann turned back to Barbas: “Did you ever assist Mr. Meola?”
“No,” said Barbas.
Schlichtmann stared at Barbas. “Did you ever assist Joe Meola in pouring waste solvent onto the ground?”
This time Barbas nodded his head yes.
“You can’t just nod your head,” said Cheeseman.
“I used to bring it out on some occasions, if it was wet, and pour it on the ground.”
“How often would you do that?”
A Civil Action Page 19
