Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  She wasn’t going to get it. There wasn’t any money for it. Solomon and Schoenberger—who, as the executive in charge of HR, dealt with benefits—knew this was not the time for a fight, or even for an attempt to explain the difference between a plant worker and a bank employee, or that the company wasn’t really owned by banks but by other finance players, or how something she might have read about a big American bank restoring 401(k)s didn’t apply anyway. Instead, they said they understood. Their hope was to make them all whole from the concessions the workers had given up to save their jobs in 2014.

  Both of them were sincere, but both of them, and especially Solomon, were motivated as much by the need to keep labor peace as by any sense of justice. Solomon had long ago honed his ability to divide his mind between the business-game strategist and the kid who had spent time in tobacco fields.

  Schoenberger was still learning. She hadn’t yet reconciled her upbringing as the daughter of a minister and a socially conscious schoolteacher with the corporate attorney she’d become. She wanted to believe that, even in the modern business landscape, and in light of everything she’d experienced since arriving in Lancaster, it was possible to blend them, to do good by doing well.

  “I just feel compelled to stay and fight, somehow,” she told me. When EveryWare went south, she could have returned to her glass-tower law firm in downtown Columbus, had clients come and go, and made a very nice living. “This somehow seems more meaningful.” The money that awaited her if the company could be sold for $300 million or more was also a powerful lure—she didn’t claim to be a saint. But she knew there was a “giant system” around her, The System Brian hated. She understood she was “a cog in the whole thing.” But she hoped she could tilt the scales of that system, just a little, toward the good. “I do want to do better, for them,” she said of the employees, “and if there’s things we can do better, move faster than we are … Unfortunately, none of it’s going to, you know, it’s hard to overcome twenty years.”

  * * *

  As I drove west on Main Street to Lloyd’s pretrial hearing, I passed Mark walking in the same direction. He was hunched with his little fedora on his head, puffing a cigarette like it was the last cigarette in the world. I pulled over to say hello.

  Mark leaned into the passenger window, jumpy with agitation. His probation officer had told Mark he’d seen him out one night past his curfew, and that he had not been attending NA or AA meetings, as ordered by the court for his ILC. “He says I’m going to jail!

  “I haven’t been out past ten. All I do is work. I’ve never failed a drug test. I did sixteen hours of community service recently. That oughta make this fucker happy!”

  “You’re shaking,” I said.

  “I’ve been chain-smoking all day!”

  His probation officer told a different story. He reported that Mark had tested positive for morphine on August 13. Mark was also not attending regular meetings, the parole officer claimed. Mark insisted he was, but that AA wasn’t doing him any good anyway, since half the people there were using.

  When I pulled up to the courthouse, I spotted Ashley’s Ford, with its Hello Kitty license-plate frames, parked across the street. There was a new addition to the back window: a big sticker with script lettering that read, BITCHMOBILE. She was waiting for her children, she said—it was time for her visitation. She’d moved out of the trailer and into a rental house on the east side, near East School. She received a rent subsidy to help her afford it. The house and neighborhood would provide a better environment for her children, and she hoped she might regain custody soon.

  Moments later, I saw Lloyd in Berens’s courtroom. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken into his skull. The tattoos on his neck and his Vandyke beard looked like they belonged to some other, younger guy from some other, different time. We said hello, then Lloyd listened to the counts. There were six in all. The prosecution offered to remove permitting and possession charges if Lloyd would plead guilty to two trafficking counts and a tampering-with-evidence charge—the running toilet with the diamond rings in his bathroom. Lloyd’s lawyer, the same man who’d loaned him money and been paid back in full, said Lloyd would consider it.

  The next day, Mark was booked into the Fairfield County Jail. He’d bunk with Jason Roach.

  FOURTEEN

  Falling Out

  October 2015

  She was tall, and about fifteen years old, with a strong, fine-featured face and long brown hair. If she’d grown up in Encino, California, she might have been standing on a San Fernando Valley sound stage, working on a Disney Channel set. She’d have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. But she grew up in Fairfield County, Ohio, so she stood ankle-deep in sawdust inside the round cattle barn, a landmark built in 1906. She wore white jeans, a white shirt, and rubber farm boots. An enormous dairy cow—black and white, almost five feet tall from head to hoof—stood next to her, in a line with five other teenagers and five other cows, ready for the Senior Division dairy judging. She’d raised hers from a newborn calf—fed it, brushed it, nursed it. And now, suddenly, just as the judging began, the cow acted up. It tossed its head, bumped her, pulled against the chain she held. This was a very annoyed cow, and the 110-pound girl could do little to get the 1,500 pounds of it under control. She was tough, so she tried—but failed—to hide her mortification. Her father half-jogged into the arena and helped her muscle the cow away, out of the line. He put his arm around her shoulders, and as the two of them walked the disobedient animal back to its stall, her tears flowed.

  The county fair was the one constant. For 165 years, it was the one event everybody—rich or poor, liberal or conservative—attended. The Civil War World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II couldn’t stop it. The fair was as unchanging as the sandstone monolith of Mount Pleasant, overlooking the grounds. People who’d left town for college, found jobs and established their lives in cities, from New York to San Francisco, returned for the fair. Passing through the gates was like stepping into a time machine that hurtled them back to their childhoods, when the most important thing in the world was tossing a wooden ring around the top of a bamboo cane or winning a blue ribbon for raising the best Holstein in the county. The fair was still a place where controversy could erupt over whether or not the Amanda-Clearcreek school’s chicken noodle soup had been made with store-bought noodles. How had it lasted so long in an America bedazzled by digital pop culture, where five minutes ago might as well be five years ago, where everything is show biz and everybody a brand?

  Dave Benson believed the fair’s unchanging focus on animals, dirt, and what people could do with the stuff that grew out of the dirt had saved it. To him, the fair was a living ode. “We have a lot of pride in Fairfield County,” he said. “That person who baked that pie wants to let people know she is the best cherry pie maker in Fairfield County. That quilter wants others to know how talented she is, how imaginative she is. The man with his collection of antiques wants people to know how interested he is in preserving items that are no longer here. People bring in something from a 1950s fair—a little banner, or Anchor Hocking glass—they want to show people they have pride in those items. People displaying their apples want others to know how bright and shiny they are. The hog farmer showing hogs has pride in his hogs.”

  The fair, he said, was about “cooperation, smiling, and community. And reminiscing.” Benson was the fair manager. He’d run it for the past twenty-four years. He calculated the budget in his small office, with Peggy Cummins looking over his shoulder from the Green Grass of Wyoming poster on the wall. He made schedules. He helped clean the restrooms. His walkie-talkie chirped constantly between 5:00 a.m. and midnight. Just the other day, some people from Medina, Ohio, had come to the fair, found Benson, and commended him on how clean and tidy the grounds looked. He lived for such moments.

  Benson had spent thirty-three years working for the Ohio Department of Transportation, but he was raised on a farm just outside of town: three hundred
acres of dairy cows, hogs, corn, wheat, and a few chickens. There weren’t many farms that small anymore. The land that hadn’t been subdivided into tract houses had been consolidated into spreads of over a thousand acres. You couldn’t make a living working three hundred acres, raising a little of this and a little of that. In a globalized world where soybean prices in Brazil affected import markets in China, you needed computerized combines, crop specialization, and the economy of scale to make it in agriculture. You had to be big.

  Benson’s father and mother both exhibited at the county fair in the 1920s. He exhibited in the 1950s. His children exhibited. And, while he didn’t make a career of farming, he held a tight grip on his nostalgia for what the fair had given him and his family. That’s why, though he was officially only a part-time employee of the fair board—he always laughed when he said “part-time”—he worked sixteen-hour days. He was seventy-six years old. “I do it to give back to the community,” he said, “for what it gave me as a child. And because I love to do it.”

  Whenever he got the chance, Benson told local politicians that the county fair was the cherry on top of Lancaster’s fudge sundae. He didn’t mean to imply that the fair was an economic boon. Money was never the point: Though it pumped a little into the town, the fair, with a budget of about $900,000, operated as a break-even event. He meant that the fair gave individuals a way to define themselves as members of the community at a time when there were few other ways to do so.

  Anchor Hocking and Lancaster’s other industries were once as much a part of the fair as they were a part of every other aspect of life in town. Anchor Hocking provided thousands of glass items at big discounts to the Eagle-Gazette so the paper could give them away to fairgoers who signed up for subscriptions at the paper’s fair booth. During a 1962 strike, the paper announced that the annual tradition would be suspended “to avoid any potential controversy or illusion of ‘taking sides.’” New subscribers would receive a voucher, their glass delivered after the strike was settled. Anchor had its own big booth every year.

  Benson missed Anchor’s presence, and Lancaster Glass’s presence, and all the others, but he’d adjusted. “We lost a lot of industry in this town,” he said. “But we didn’t lose the fair.”

  * * *

  At 8:15 on the morning of Wednesday, October 14, as Benson was helping set up a big tent where those attending the animal auctions could relax, an Anchor Hocking employee arrived at work and opened an e-mail. As she read the few terse sentences, her face sank and she began to cry.

  The e-mail had been sent at 6:00 a.m. under Erika Schoenberger’s name: “I am writing you today to inform you that Sam Solomon and the Board of Directors have decided to go in different directions.” Schoenberger offered no explanation, no reasons, no context. Sean Gumbs, a consultant from FTI—the firm board member Brian Kushner worked for—had already taken over as an interim CEO.

  Merger, IPO, shutdowns, a WARN notice, bankruptcy, a revolving C-suite door: The employee had had enough. She sniffled and said, “I don’t know how I can get through this.” The company was in the middle of the pre-Christmas-season rush, a time when her work was at its most hectic. Some people were quitting. She managed a quick little laugh, saying she’d checked her 401(k) balance. She wasn’t old enough to leave, but she was too old to try another career. She broke down. “I just wanted to believe in something again,” she sputtered.

  Schoenberger wasn’t in much better shape. She sat in her office, her eyes red and swollen. Like the girl in the show ring, she tried to muster her professional composure. The past few days had been among the most difficult of her tumultuous tenure at EveryWare Global. Over the weekend, the board had looped her into its discussions about Solomon—who’d become her friend and mentor. As the company’s general counsel, she could say nothing to anyone. On Monday, the board chairman had phoned to inform her of its decision to fire Solomon. When her phone rang, she was at a veterinarian’s office having the family dog put down.

  Now she had to submerge the person she was with the reality of her new corporate life. She defaulted to automatic, falling back on off-the-shelf press release bromides about no one person being indispensable, about moving the company forward—all of it belied by the distress on her face.

  Her turmoil wasn’t just about Solomon’s fate. He’d drilled into his whole team that consultants could offer nothing but bills and expense account charges, and now a consultant—a turnaround consultant—had arrived as a temporary CEO. She’d taken Gumbs out to dinner at the Cherry Street Pub on Tuesday night, when he arrived in town. He seemed nice enough, and he didn’t say anything alarming. But she believed his presence had to be bad news.

  “I just see value here,” she said, over and over. By “value” she meant what Solomon had meant, combined with her own lingering social concern.

  Solomon saw value through a business lens, first and foremost. “So maybe we won’t maintain it quite as well,” he’d once said of a hypothetical private equity owner of an old industrial business like Anchor Hocking. “Maybe that’s capital we don’t have to spend. And maybe I’ll turn that cash into a multiple. And so, again, the interesting thing for me is that, in order for that value to be extracted, someone had to create it. Someone had to create it! And clearly, this company spent decade after decade building that value position, and it takes a fraction of that time to completely erode it.” To him, long-term value building was a better business play. Social good naturally followed.

  To Schoenberger, value in the business sense and value in the social sense walked side by side. She hadn’t quite figured out exactly how to integrate the two, only that they should be integrated.

  Now she was forced to confront the truth that the fate of EveryWare Global, of the Anchor Hocking and Oneida employees, and of the towns where they lived barely registered on the new owner group’s radar. Such topics were abstractions to it, and they always would be to faraway people convinced that they were the smartest people in the room, whose loftiest goal was making the most money in the shortest time.

  The official word was that Solomon had resigned, but that, of course, was a convenient fiction. Weinstein had walked into Solomon’s office on Tuesday morning and informed him of the board’s decision.

  Solomon knew it was coming. He’d received an e-mail on Monday that alerted him to a special board meeting to be held in Lancaster the next day. That was news to him. A regular meeting had been slated for the following week. No pressing matters had arisen to prompt an earlier one. His own job had to be the reason for it.

  He was angry. He’d always been privately contemptuous of the board. In his judgment, by the time you were in late middle age, if you were sitting on the board of a company like EveryWare, you were a second-stringer. Every time the board refused to acknowledge the company’s real situation, and its possible future under his strategic plan, they confirmed that judgment. For its part, the board obviously didn’t believe that Solomon was the guy who could increase the value of the company for the equity owners they represented. They’d been talking past each other for three months. Irritation from the August meeting had spilled over into a subsequent September meeting in the New York offices of the company’s law firm, international giant Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy.

  “Everybody is pissed off,” Solomon had told me after that September meeting. “They are pissed we are stupid, and we are pissed they are stupid.” At that meeting, the board talked of cuts and more SKU reductions. “We disabused them of that,” Solomon said. “Cuts aren’t the answer. We have to grow our way out.” He and the board had spent almost no time talking about EveryWare Global’s actual performance, which Solomon believed was good, considering its starting point. The company had just beaten the budget for the third quarter.

  But he was still being haunted by Monomoy and that $51.1 million EBITDA figure reported for the 2013 year. From Solomon’s point of view, the board was fixated on it, partly because the equity owners had lent money based on it. T
he board members, hired by the equity owners, seemed to believe it was their mission to get EveryWare performing to at least that level—maybe better, and sooner rather than later—so they could sell, recoup the money, maybe even make a little profit for their owner-bosses.

  Solomon thought equity wasn’t paying attention. EveryWare Global was a small line item to them. If they could visualize his billion-dollar dream, they’d buy into it, but they didn’t care enough to look. He also harbored another galling thought. Some people within the company suggested that the board didn’t want “to listen to what a black man had to say.”

  That was a rare comment from Solomon. He was plenty race-conscious: You don’t grow up the son of a former North Carolina field hand, and you don’t become a black CEO in corporate America, without having spent a lot of time navigating racial minefields. But though he sometimes cracked wise, he usually kept thoughts about the possible racial motivations of others to himself.

  As it happened, Sean Gumbs, the FTI consultant the board had just hired, was black, and Solomon was surprised to learn that. And when he heard about it, he was dismissive. “He is being told what to do,” Solomon said. “There’ll be a bazillion calls a day” between the CEO’s office and the board chairman. “He’s not creating anything; he’ll be taking directions.”

  Much like Solomon, Gumbs was a quintessential high achiever. But he’d followed a straighter path by checking every box required to reach the top of the ivy-covered Great American Meritocracy: the son of immigrants from the Caribbean, a graduate of the ultracompetitive Stuyvesant High School, in New York City, of the University of Pennsylvania, of Harvard, where he earned an M.B.A. He and Solomon had been members of the same African American fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, though they’d never met. He’d married a professional woman, and lived in a pricey Manhattan apartment, his kids attending the most rigorous New York schools.