by Ira Glass
Kaiser’s solution created enormous pressure to settle the case for money rather than adjudicate it for truth. If those first seventeen plaintiffs raked in an enormous settlement, then GE, Evr-Gard Coating, the state of California, and all the other dumpers could look forward to two hundred years of writing checks. And so from 1984 to 1993, as depositions were taken, motions were filed, and potential jurors were called (over two thousand of them), the assembled legal minds were behind closed doors, performing an elaborate minuet of settlement negotiation. A group of small dumpers caved in first, settling in 1989 for a million dollars. In 1990, Weyerhaeuser settled for the same amount. In November 1991, J. B. Stringfellow himself kicked in $8 million, and GE coughed up $5 million. By the time the first trial began, in January 1993, ninety-seven defendants had settled, for a total of $48 million. A month into the trial, another ten bought their way out, for a combined $44 million. Only two defendants remained—the state of California and a small die-casting company called Rainbow Canyon Manufacturing.
After a nine-month trial, the jury reached its verdict. Despite claims by the plaintiffs’ lawyers that they won a moral victory, the decision could not have been encouraging to the people of Glen Avon: eight of the seventeen plaintiffs were awarded nothing at all, Rainbow Canyon Manufacturing was found blameless, and the state of California was ordered to pay the nine remaining plaintiffs a meager $159,147 in damages.
Nevertheless, under Kaiser’s arrangement there would soon be another trial, with seventeen new plaintiffs, and then another, and another, until all four thousand had received justice. Meanwhile, in a federal courthouse in Los Angeles, an entirely separate case, to decide the pits’ future, was under way. In this case, there were no plaintiffs: the hundred dumpers, along with old man Stringfellow and the state of California, were consuming hundreds of millions in legal fees battling among their many selves as to who would foot the estimated billion-dollar tab for the Stringfellow cleanup. In this dispute there is no resolution in sight.2
Stringfellow has but one precedent: Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the famously unknowable and unending lawsuit in Bleak House. “The little plaintiff or defendant,” wrote Dickens, “who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.” Jarndyce was the author’s metaphor for an ebbing empire consumed in furious, aimless argumentation. “This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time,” he wrote, “become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means.”
The gorgeous convolutions of Stringfellow, of course, were what landed me in Riverside County, excited and ready, as Judge Kaiser began the preliminary hearings for trial two. But no one in the case could quite believe I had come. “There’s nothing for you here,” they said. By that, they meant that the case has no pizzazz, no O.J. True, the lawyers do not strut for the media; the witnesses do not have great hair; the crime is bloodless; Court TV will never broadcast the proceedings. Yet despite its turgid legalities, Stringfellow as a whole possesses a rare postmodern clarity. It is the platonic essence of a modern lawsuit: a mountain of money piled atop a tiny nugget of fear. Stringfellow needs no dream team. Stringfellow is the dream.
Judge Kaiser presided over Newman v. Stringfellow in a courtroom in the county seat of Riverside. Because of the complexities of the case, no municipal courthouse could contain the trial—during the early hearings, there were hundreds of defendants, which meant hundreds and hundreds of lawyers. To accommodate all the attorneys, the county appropriated a defunct, roomy beauty salon two blocks from the municipal building and rebuilt it into what is known, still, as the Stringfellow Courtroom.
My guide to the courtroom was Kira Morgan, the county’s exhibits clerk. As she led me inside, she pointed out items of historical interest. The old plumbing for the salon’s hair-washing sinks, she said, remained embedded in the low partitions that divided the room into four quadrants—jury, public, lawyers, judge. The lawyers, she said, sat at one of eight banquet tables arrayed on a raked stage facing the judge. On any given day during the trial, as many as forty lawyers, often pulling small carts crammed with their paperwork, packed themselves into the courtroom, outnumbering the jury and the public galleries combined.
As evidence clerk, though, Kira was anxious to tell me about the paper and props associated with the trial. “Usually all that’s needed for the evidence in a case is just a box on a shelf,” she said. “The closest thing I got to Stringfellow is probably a death penalty—I got one with a big trunk, a mannequin about five foot five, and a laundry bag with dirty clothes in it.” Stringfellow, she explained, doesn’t have an evidence box, or even an evidence shelf. She led me to a door in the corner of the courtroom. “Stringfellow,” Kira said, “has its own room.”
She pushed open the door. Boxes lined both walls, leaving a narrow alley. A thicket of picture boards—some monstrously large, seven by seven feet—leaned against a wall. Scattered throughout the room were soil-sample tubes and other pieces of evidence. Kira nodded at the floor, where a collection of large boulders lay quietly—evidence, apparently, of something.
“Boulders,” she said.
Yet the overwhelming majority of what the jury saw was not in this room, Kira explained, but was stored in digital form. Multicolored computer graphics were presented via the most complex video system ever used in a courtroom: eighteen television monitors, two laser-disc players, three Telestrators (the machine John Madden uses to “draw” on the television screen during football games), an Elmo (a high-tech overhead projector), a videotape player, a video printer, and assorted laser-disc changers.
Because the matrix of causality in the case involved such a bewildering variety of dumpers, chemicals, and plaintiffs, much of the case was argued in the hypothetical realm of computer modeling. The plaintiffs hired a company with the Dickensian name of Failure Analysis Associates to reconfigure the evidence for the television screen. One computerized re-creation of this intricate chemical intrusion made assumptions involving more than fifteen thousand variables.
The complexity of Stringfellow had other unique manifestations. Take the plaintiffs: despite their lack of common ailments or history, they still had to devise a way to speak with one voice. So they wrote a full constitution, complete with checks and balances. The charter is divided into six articles—only one fewer than the U.S. Constitution. Article II delimits the powers of the Steering Committee and enumerates the duties of the Business, Property, Health, and Guardian ad Litem subcommittees. There are definitions of a quorum, methods for the conduct of business, and bylaws regarding the election of officers. Article VI details the proceedings for impeachment.
Some of the legal processes involved in the case are practically unknowable. When the stampede of settlements began, the lawyers had to devise a procedure allowing for possible protest from each of the four thousand plaintiffs. A few days after my tour of the courthouse, the two main plaintiffs’ lawyers—Doug Welebir and John Grasberger—invited me to sit down with them at the enormous conference table in Welebir’s San Bernardino office and discuss these intricate procedures.
Welebir described how the Glen Avon plaintiffs, via their own constitutional mechanism, had to approve each settlement offer; then, he explained, a separate judge—not Kaiser—had to decide whether the offer was fair to both sides.
“I’m not so sure about that,” interrupted Grasberger.
“No, because then we had the challenge—” said Welebir.
“—Vis-à-vis the plaintiffs,” said Grasberger.
“And vis-à-vis each other,” Welebir said.
“No, no, no, no, no,” said Grasberger.
“The state objected to our settlement,” Welebir reminded his colleague.
“Well, yes, but that was a different track from the track I’m talking about,” said Grasberger.
“Oh. Okay,” Welebir said. He turned to me and smiled. “There’s a lot of different tracks.”
&n
bsp; And each track, of course, had its own judge. Not only were sitting judges called upon but also retired judges, hired part-time, and even “special masters”—freelance judges, each of whom was assigned to take charge of one issue or aspect of the case. Asked to enumerate the case’s pantheon of judges, Welebir and Grasberger grew nostalgic, joshing and tossing out catty memories. They ticked off the names—Trotter, Garst, Fields, Marceli, Irving—until they reached the most remote cul-de-sac of the process. They couldn’t remember all the names. They said they’d get back to me.
The next day, I drove to Glen Avon itself. After my tour along the brightly bannered boulevards of Riverside, the off-ramp at Glen Avon opened onto wide, curbless thoroughfares. They seemed to match the distant russet hills—a scrub fire in search of a spark. The reason Riverside County located the dump here was still obvious. It is a poor town with hard, beaten dirt paths for sidewalks and dilapidated shops with misspelled signs. Judging from the billboards I saw—¡Gatorade: Quita la Sed!—the town is home to a sizable population of Mexican immigrants. The telephone poles were ancient T-bars, shredded by repairmen’s cleats. Nailed to them were handwritten signs advertising the sale of Railroad Ties and Dirt. Down a side street I passed Dumpsters crammed with ruined sofas and flaccid mattresses. A murder of crows, fat and shiny, tried to stare me down. At the approach of my car, they lumbered off onto the dirt paths rather than take flight.
I stopped at a well-kept house with a trim lawn, the home of Penny Newman, the executive director of Concerned Neighbors in Action, and the namesake of Newman v. Stringfellow. She appeared at her door barefoot, in a cheerful yellow suit. We sat in her breakfast nook looking into her spic-and-span living room. As we chatted, she scrunched her toes into the warm cozy thickness of her brown carpet.
When I asked her to recall her first involvement with the case, she said it all began amid the lying and confusion that surrounded the events of 1978. The flood “galvanized the community to look at what was going on,” she said. “Everybody was going off in their own direction and seeing things their own way. What Concerned Neighbors did was bring people together and focus on this one problem. It was a coalition of different groups that coordinated actions toward Stringfellow—the PTA, the Junior Women’s Club, the Babysitting Cooperative. Women who were running the Scouts or Little League or organizing carnivals were all of a sudden dealing with this stuff.
“When you look back at it,” she said, “you see how naive you were. You didn’t associate everything that happened in the community with the site. It took a while before it all came together.” During that time, Newman said, she didn’t bother much with the science. Instead, she relied on common sense.
“We knew that lead is something that you shouldn’t be exposed to. DDT had been banned. So it was on a very common-sense level, not on a very technical level” that Newman began to realize something was wrong at Stringfellow. “Then I got ahold of reports and started reading things. Once you decipher what they mean by different terms, they become real easy to read. It’s just a bunch of bullshit. It’s not really that hard. That’s part of the trick used by government agencies and individuals to make it seem that it’s more difficult than it is. It discourages people. If you know the secrets, then you become the expert and you can dictate what happens.”
Newman wasn’t interested in discussing her own ailments or those of her children, and just as her lawyers had done, she refused to let me speak to any of the other plaintiffs. The reason for their coyness, I surmised, was again the complexity of Stringfellow. Concerned Neighbors was not contending, as was argued in the classic dump narrative of Love Canal, that a single chemical caused a distinct disease. Instead they offered a new, untested argument. In Newman’s own words: “We know that a high exposure to toxic chemicals can create a lot of problems. But what happens when you have a lower level of exposure over a longer period of time? What can we expect? Again, it was common sense. You just looked at the information.”
But what, I wondered, was that information? Penny Newman’s dependence on common sense, it was becoming apparent, amounted to a simple faith in unseen dangers, born out of a conviction that science is the government’s handmaiden and that the government always lies. “They found this one chemical, PCBSA—they don’t even have a standard protocol for testing it,” she said. “They don’t even know the health impacts. Basically they have no information on this thing.” For Penny, no news was bad news—if it was in the dump, then it had injured them. “It doesn’t seem to be a carcinogen,” she told me, “but there are significant health impacts. There’s a lot of information in Russia. They’ve dealt with it quite a lot there.”
Russia? That sounded frightening. “What,” I asked, “were the symptoms?”
“Things like rashes. But we can’t know because there isn’t that much information about it. After a while,” she explained patiently, “you reach a point where you don’t need to know. You reach a point where you can just say, ‘It’s bad. Stop worrying about how many more particulates per whatever—it’s bad.’ ”
Of the hundred corporations that rushed into settlement with Newman’s group, only one firm stood its ground—Rainbow Canyon Manufacturing. The company, it turned out, was a mom-and-pop, the caster that had long ago gotten out of the business. The owners were in a retirement home, and any settlement money would come out of their daily bread. So they hired an attorney, a man named Robert Kelly.
I called him at his office. “You don’t want to do this story,” he growled into the phone. “This is fucking Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.” But he agreed to talk with me anyway, and instructed me to meet him the next day at E2, a hot new bar in Santa Monica, a couple of blocks from the Pacific Ocean.
Kelly is a fireplug of a guy, a densely muscled man who arrived on a Yamaha motorcycle. He unzipped his bug-covered jumpsuit to reveal a crisp Savile Row suit. His opening prattle was pure Goodfellas, liberally sprinkled with “sumbitch” and “muthafucka.” He shared with me the observation that one of the special masters on the case didn’t have “the guts to slam a guy’s dick in the door.” We ordered beers, which arrived in tony eighteen-inch steins.
“Stringfellow was definitely a lawyer’s full-employment policy,” he said, pounding his hand on the table. He listed the excesses: fifteen lawyers showing up for a single deposition; xeroxing charges of twenty-eight cents a page over millions of pages; ridiculous negotiation fees. From an insider, Kelly had learned that one law firm charged its corporate client twelve million dollars to negotiate a six million-dollar settlement. According to Kelly’s calculations, the lawyers’ fees and expenses in the state case alone total roughly half a billion dollars, a figure that dwarfs even the most optimistic estimates of how much Glen Avon residents will receive.3
“The reason the corporations settled is because they hired corporate lawyers, and that’s what corporate lawyers do—settle,” he said with scorn. “Those law firms cut pretty good deals for themselves and fucked everybody else. A hundred corporations got screwed because they hired attorneys who were afraid to try a lawsuit. I was the only trial attorney! The plaintiffs are getting screwed, too, but then they should get screwed, because they aren’t injured!”
At first, I assumed that Kelly was just engaging in good-old-boy hyperbole. But as I wrote down that last quotation, he went on railing at the plaintiffs. Slowly the words sunk in: the plaintiffs were not injured. Kelly’s assertion, if true, explained why Penny Newman was so eager to cite the hunches of her common sense rather than the facts of science. It also explained why I was kept away from the plaintiffs. It also explained why everyone was so circumspect about their ailments. Could it be that a lawsuit always described in superlatives—largest, most complex, costliest, densest, hardest—was constructed on nothing more than fear? Could the folks of Glen Avon have built a castle in the air and then moved in?
Kelly admitted that the dump is a mess, but he pointed out that it is a mile and a half away from the plaintiffs’ homes. He cited a
three-year UCLA study of Glen Avon presented by the state of California during the trial. Its finding was unambiguous: Glen Avon residents had no medical problems out of proportion with any other town. The cause of Glen Avon’s distress, according to Kelly, lay elsewhere. “This case,” he said, “was propelled by chemical hysteria.”
Kelly explained his own client’s case. Rainbow was charged with illegally dumping chromium, which, according to the computer modeling by Failure Analysis, evaporated into the air and floated into people’s homes. Kelly happily recalled for me the moment that, he said, clinched his case. “The plaintiffs put an expert on the stand to testify to the amount of chromium that could have got out of the dump. To put it into perspective for the jury, I made him add up all the exposure to the most heavily exposed person in town, a guy named Asher. Then I had him compare it to the amount of chromium in one vitamin supplement pill. Mr. Asher, over seven years, was exposed to twenty-four and a half micrograms. Each pill has twenty-five micrograms. The jury couldn’t believe it.”
He ordered another beer.
“Stringfellow is like Jarndyce because everyone who touched it got corrupted, except me. It just became an all-encompassing thing. Stringfellow was a dump that didn’t threaten anybody. That’s what’s so amazing. People got involved in this lawsuit and then the lawsuit became what they did. Stringfellow was their life, and they did more and more useless work to further their belief.”
After the disappointingly small award for the first seventeen plaintiffs (eight of them, you will recall, received not a dime; the best-compensated, John Longden, who actually played in the overflowing lagoons as a boy, was awarded only fifty thousand dollars), the plaintiffs lost some of their enthusiasm for pursuing the remaining 234 trials. While I was in Glen Avon, preparations were under way for the second trial (which would feature, Penny Newman assured me, a much more convincing hatch of seventeen plaintiffs). By this time, though, the state of California was the only defendant left—Rainbow had been cleared, and the rest of the polluters had bought their way out. Not long after I left, the state’s lawyers offered $13.5 million to settle the case. And the plaintiffs, who had reportedly requested a settlement of $500 million, agreed. One head of the hydra had been cauterized.
