Bearing Witness

by Michael A. Kahn

  To move from an employment discrimination plaintiff to a qui tam relator was the equivalent of moving from church-basement bingo to Monte Carlo. Beckman Engineering had submitted bids on a hundred forty-eight relevant federal water-control projects over the past ten years. If—and it was still a huge if—we could prove an illegal bid-rigging scheme, then each of those bids constituted a separately punishable act of “false negotiation” under the Federal False Claims Act. Given the size of the contracts involved, the potential recovery was staggering. As an age discrimination plaintiff, Ruth’s best-case scenario was an award of roughly $100,000—the difference between her “early retirement severance package” and the regular salary she could have earned through age seventy. As a qui tam relator, Ruth’s share of the bounty could exceed $10 million.

  All of which explained why Ruth and I were now the featured items on a Jurassic Park Blue Plate Special.

  This was the first qui tam claim I’d ever handled.

  It was also the last.

  I’d long since taken that vow.

  ***

  Unfortunately, identifying the universe of one hundred forty-eight bids was just the starting point, and we were still a long way from the finish line. Indeed, there was no way to determine from the bid documents we’d reviewed which of Beckman Engineering’s one hundred forty-eight bids had been successful; nor was there any way to determine who else submitted a bid on that project, who won, and what the winning bid had been. Those were crucial facts, since the other winners could be Beckman’s co-conspirators.

  But the task of identifying the winning bids for those projects seemed even bigger and more tedious than the document review we’d just completed. The crucial information was buried within ten years of back issues of the Commerce Business Daily. I’d taken several issues with me to the restaurant and passed them out to Benny, Jacki, and the law students during lunch. I explained my next project: finding out who won each of the one hundred forty-eight bids. I waited as they leafed through the publication, watching as the enormity of the project began to dawn on them.

  The CBD, as it’s known to its readers, is a daily bulletin listing every U.S. government procurement invitation and contract award over $25,000. Printed on flimsy yellow paper by the U.S. Government Printing Office, each edition is 40 to 70 pages long and contains anywhere from 500 to 1,000 notices. The first two-thirds of every issue lists projects open for bids, that is, “U.S. Government procurement invitations.” Each invitation is set out in a dense, eye-glazing block of small type, ten to twenty invitations per page, thirty or more pages worth per issue—everything from an invitation for a bid to construct a new pier at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Surfside, Texas, to an invitation for a bid to conduct a study of krill demographics in Antarctica for the National Marine Fisheries Service. At the back end of each issue are ten or so pages of winners, or “Contract Awards.” These were set out in even smaller clumps of type, thirty to forty announcements per page.

  To make matters worse for us, there was no connection between the procurement invitations at the front of the issue and the contracts awarded at the back. Indeed, the bids submitted in response to one of those invitations would not be awarded (and reported) until months later. And as a final maddening twist, there was no cumulative index, and thus no way to correlate the contract announced as open for bid in, say, the August 12 issue with the contract award announced two or four or six months later.

  Frankly, I felt guilty even mentioning the project. After all, my volunteers had already saved me hours and hours of monotonous work. The next task—essentially searching for one hundred forty-eight needles in a humongous haystack of back issues—would involve far more hours of mind-numbing tedium. It was the equivalent of handing them ten years’ worth of Manhattan telephone directories and a list of one hundred forty-eight telephone numbers (just numbers, no names), each of which appeared only twice over the ten years, and asking them to find the match for each number.

  “Damn,” Benny said, shaking his head, “this could take weeks.”

  “Not necessarily,” Josh said, studying the small print on the cover page of one issue.

  If the information reported in the Commerce Business Daily, he explained, was also available in a computer database on the Internet, they might be able to do the search far quicker than it would take to do manually. By way of analogy, the full text of the plays of William Shakespeare is available in an Internet database. To find the exact location of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in the “hard copy,” you’d need to leaf through the play, page by page, skimming the dialogue in each scene. To find that same text in a computer database, you’d type “To be or not to be,” press Search, and in seconds your screen would light up with the entire soliloquy from Act III, Scene 1.

  Perhaps, Josh explained, they could conduct the same type of search through the Commerce Business Daily database. By entering the contract number, they might be able to pull up the original procurement invitation and the subsequent contract award for each of the one hundred forty-eight bids without having to look through any documents.

  ***

  The phone rang.

  It was Zack calling from the library to fill me in on their progress. When I hung up, I turned toward Benny and said, “These kids are terrific.”

  He looked up from an issue of Commerce Business Daily and beamed. “Of course they are. I picked them. What’s the word?”

  “They’re on a computer over at Wash U, and they found a Web site covering almost forty years of issues. He says they’ll have the result no later than tomorrow.”

  “Whoa.” Benny raised his eyebrows, impressed.

  I gave him a thumbs-up. “If that works, Kayla has an idea for another search. They’ll bring all the results to my mom’s house tomorrow night.”

  Jacki came in with the typed list of one hundred forty-eight bids fresh off the printer. “That’s it,” she said as she handed it to me. She checked her watch. “I’m outta here.”

  “Thanks, Jacki,” I said, standing up. “Have a good time.”

  She inhaled deeply and nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Hey, Jacki,” Benny said, “where you off to?”

  She blushed. “Oh, just…out. Probably dinner.”

  Benny grinned. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  Jacki shrugged awkwardly. “Just someone from my civil procedure class.”

  Benny winked. “Sic him, tiger.”

  She turned to me, trying to regain her poise. “You need me to come in tomorrow?”

  “Sunday?” I shook my head. “No, I won’t be in, either. I’m going with Jonathan tomorrow morning to hear that Nazi creep give a sermon, and then we’re driving up to Springfield to talk to the skinheads they arrested for Gloria’s murder.”

  She shook her head in disgust. “Those animals.”

  I followed her to the outer door. “Wait,” I whispered, glancing back to see if Benny was listening. He wasn’t. I turned to her. “Let me see.”

  Uncertainly, she moved toward me. “Do I look okay?”

  I smiled. “Extraordinary.” Then again, at six foot three and two hundred thirty-five pounds, it’d be hard for her to look anything else.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Definitely.” We both kept our voices low. “I love the hair. Is it new?”

  She nodded. “I bought it last weekend.” She touched the side curls doubtfully. “You’re sure the permed look isn’t too much?”

  “Oh, no,” I told her. It was a big improvement over her last night-on-the-town wig, a platinum beehive that looked stiff enough to drive railroad spikes.

  I turned back again. Benny was engrossed in an issue of Commerce Business Daily, oblivious to us. “Let’s see,” I whispered as I reached over and unbuttoned the top button of her blouse. I stood back, studied her a moment, and nodded in approval. “Perfect.”

&
nbsp; She took a deep breath. “Thanks.”

  “See you on Monday. Have fun.”

  When I came back into my office, Benny looked up from the CBD and asked, “How tall is her date?”

  I shrugged. “She said he works days at an insurance company.”

  “Does he—you know?”

  I looked at him wearily. “Does he what?”

  “Does he know about the magic surprise she’s hiding under that skirt? Does he know that Jacki is everything you always wanted in a girl—and more?”

  I tried to keep a straight face as I took a seat behind my desk. “That’s none of our business.” I picked up the list of bids that Jacki had prepared and tried to focus. After a moment, I glanced over at Benny, who was grinning at me. I raised my eyebrows. “Oy, I sure hope he does.”

  Benny chuckled. “Oh, man,” he said, shaking his head in amusement. “What an image, eh?”

  I settled back in my chair with the list of bids. Reaching behind me to the credenza, I flipped on the radio. I was just in time to hear the opening chords of the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”

  “Mmmm,” I sighed, transported back to the summer before my sophomore year of high school and a cute junior on the varsity football team named Chuck Nathan—back to a time when “cute” and “varsity letter” equaled Mr. Right. Chuck was the love of my life for six whole weeks, and I wore his letter sweater with pride on even the hottest nights that August.

  “So what’s next?” Benny asked.

  I reached for the list of bids. “Depends on what the students find on the Internet.” I frowned at the entries. “In fact, the rest of this case depends on that.”

  “How so?”

  I leaned across the desk and turned the list toward him. “If there really is a conspiracy, we ought to be able to see a pattern from the winners. First of all, there ought to be a fairly small group, but large enough to divide up all those jobs—I’d guess somewhere between five and ten. More than ten, I don’t see how they could run a conspiracy—too many players, too many variables. So, the first hurdle is the number of winners.”

  “And then what?” Benny asked.

  “A comparison of the winning bids to the cost estimates.”

  “What cost estimates?” Benny asked.

  I showed how each bid invitation in the CBD included an estimated cost range for the project—$3 to $6 million for one, $5 to $8 million for another. Since the central goal of a bid-rigging conspiracy is to allow each conspirator to “win” one contract with a higher-than-competitive bid, the bad guys have to decide in advance what the winning bid will be so that the rest of them can be sure to submit higher bids. How did they decide how high to go with the winning bid? On government projects, Uncle Sam is kind enough to provide that answer with its cost estimates.

  “You see?” I said. “If the government’s cost estimate for a particular project is four to seven million, and if there really is a bid-rigging conspiracy, which end of the cost estimate would you expect the so-called low bid to be closer to?”

  He looked at me and nodded. “Good thinking.”

  “We’ll see if that happened here.” I leaned back in my chair. “If so, we still have a case.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed,” Benny said.

  “I guess so.” I stared up at the ceiling and sighed. “If we still have a case, that means I’ve got at least two miserable months of trial preparation ahead of me.” I shook my head glumly. “Sometimes I wish someone would drive a stake through the heart of this lawsuit.”

  Chapter Six

  For more than thirty years, the good burghers of South St. Louis have made the Reavis Banquet Center the place of choice to celebrate their weddings, confirmations, high school graduations, and other special occasions. As such, it’s normally a place for merrymaking—drinks flow, buffet tables groan, and big bands play top tunes from decades ago.

  But not this Sunday morning.

  Today, the main hall of the Reavis Banquet Center felt more like a chapel. Gone were the steam trays and portable bars and banquet tables. In their place were about fifteen rows of folding chairs, sixteen chairs per row, all facing the elevated stage at the head of the room where the big bands normally set up. The stage was empty except for a podium in the center, a flagpole in the right corner, and a large white cross on a stand in the other corner. Taped organ music played softly over the speakers. Every chair was taken.

  Jonathan and I were in the back row. I gazed around the room, trying to gauge the audience. It was a white, working-class crowd—mostly blue collar, with a few shopkeepers and bank tellers scattered in the mix. The men looked uncomfortable in their sports jackets. I saw a few adjust their ties or run a finger around the inside of their buttoned collars. The older women looked dowdy; the younger ones favored bleached hair and chewing gum. At first glance there was a Norman Rockwell feel to it, but after a few minutes you sensed the slightly harder edge to this crowd. Any doubts, of course, were dispelled by the presence of all those uniformed cops. I counted a dozen St. Louis police officers positioned along the walls around the room. There was a similar number of state troopers outside, spread around the perimeter of the building, their walkie-talkies crackling. Several had nodded at Jonathan as we walked in.

  On our drive down, I had jokingly told Jonathan that we’d probably be the first Jews in the building since it opened in 1957. The irony seemed amusing then. It sure didn’t now. Although the crowd was obviously gathered for a Sunday morning sermon, this would be no ordinary religious event. For today we were going to hear from Bishop Kurt Robb, former Green Beret and high school driver’s ed instructor, currently the spiritual leader of the Church of the Aryan Jesus and the Grand Commandant of Spider.

  Bishop Robb was also the main target of Jonathan’s criminal investigation. That was why we were here. Although several of his sermons were available in printed form and on cassettes—through his own mail-order operation for the true believers, in the evidence files of the Attorney General’s office for the investigators—Jonathan had yet to observe a live performance. Since he’d soon be observing another type of live performance, namely, Bishop Robb’s command appearance before the grand jury to answer Jonathan’s questions, he decided to check him out here first.

  When Jonathan had mentioned where he was going Sunday morning before our drive to Springfield, I asked to join him. After witnessing Gloria’s murder, I was more than a little curious to see one of the skinheads’ spiritual leaders in action.

  Bishop Robb’s followers had rented Reavis Banquet Center for the morning so that he’d have an opportunity to bring his message to the city folk. It was part of his grand plan—to establish a viable neo-Nazi organization near where he believed his true constituents were located: in the larger cities and suburbs. As he was fond of saying, “You can’t run a national revolution from a kooky commune in Montana.”

  Stepping onto the stage was a stout, middle-aged man with thinning, slicked-back hair, wire-rim glasses, and a pencil mustache. The taped organ music ended abruptly as he approached the podium and cleared his throat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a surprisingly high-pitched voice, “welcome to our special morning with our very special guest. In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, our guest has asked that we not applaud.” He paused and looked toward the side, where the door had opened. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to present Bishop Kurt Robb.”

  Through the side door filed eight men in their twenties and thirties, moving at a stride somewhere between a march and a swagger. All wore jeans, dark boots, and what looked like black-and-gold high school letter jackets without the letters. All had buzz cuts and all wore aviator sunglasses. They took up positions along the floor in front of the stage and turned in unison to face the audience, their hands clasped behind their backs, their legs at shoulder width.

  There was a moment of tens
e silence, and then a tall man in a white robe entered from the side. It was Bishop Kurt Robb. You could almost feel a shiver run through the crowd as he stepped onto the stage. He was wearing tinted horn-rims and his trademark green beret. He paused to shake the hand of the man who had introduced him. It was a solemn handshake. The man nodded deferentially and quickly stepped down from the stage.

  Robb was now the sole figure on the stage. He stared at the audience. Below him, his security guards stood motionless. Robb’s straight brown hair was brushed at an angle across his forehead in a creepy echo of his hero. All that was missing was black hair dye and the brush mustache.

  After a moment, he nodded somberly. “Good morning, my friends.”

  “Good morning,” they murmured back at him.

  “I have come here this morning, good people, to bring you news, to tell you that what happened in Germany many years ago is happening today in this country.” He had a deep, modulated voice with a hint of hickory in the accent and honey in the timbre. It was the smooth voice of a folksy radio personality.

  “The Jews are grabbing control of everything they can lay their greasy hands on. My friends, this is a replay of Germany in the early decades of this century. But there, as we all remember, the Aryan people had the courage and the character to rise up in indignation to reclaim their birthright, to reclaim their legacy.” He paused, his eyes sweeping slowly around the room. “That, too, will happen here, my friends. The Lord Jesus teaches us that it is God’s will, and God’s will is inexorable.”