Personal injuries kc-5

by Scott Turow

  In almost every personal injury suit, the real defendant is an insurance company. You may sue the neighbor whose tree fell on your house, but it's his insurance company who'll pay the damages and hire the defense attorneys, and which often feels antagonized by the lawyer on the other side. I realized that, in all likelihood, it was one of the checks Moreland had issued over the years to Feaver amp; Dinnerstein that had been trailed to the partners' secret bank account. Unfortunately, though, Moreland's records had revealed more than that.

  "Your guy's a tough opponent," Stan said. "Somehow, every time Moreland has a big case against these fellas, the company just can't win a ruling. By now they've learned to settle. Especially since any lawsuit where your guy is looking at a six-figure fee always ends up in front of one of a handful of judges. And guess what? We crawled through the records in the courthouse and it turns out the pattern holds for other companies. Whenever Feaver amp; Dinnerstein has a big payday coming, it's the same deal: bad rulings, big settlements. And the same four distinguished jurists on their cases, George-even though there are nineteen judges sitting in the Common Law Claims Division, all of whom are supposed to be assigned to matters at random." Sennett issued a stiff look. "Know now where I'm thinking the cash is going, George?"

  I knew. Rumors of funny business had lingered like some untraceable foundation odor in the Kindle County courthouses since I'd arrived here for law school. But no one had ever proved it. The judges who took were said to be carefully insulated. There were bagmen and code words. And the lawyers who paid told no tales. It was, by report, a small faction, a secret society whose alliances were fierce and ancient, going back decades to high schools, churches, to the Prosecuting Attorney's Office in its bad old days, to union halls, or, even, mob connects. And always the bonds were fired in the overheated politics of the Party.

  These grumpy suspicions were often repeated by the losers in Kindle County's courtrooms. But in my more innocent moments, I liked to discount them, believing that cronyism, not cash, explained the obvious favoritism I, like every other lawyer, had witnessed on occasion over the years. For my client's sake, I was skeptical now.

  "I'll tell you what clinches it for me," Stan replied. "Morton Dinnerstein's uncle is Brendan Tuohey." Sennett took a beat to let the portent of the name gather. "Brendan's older sister is Mort Dinnerstein's mother. She raised Brendan after their mom kicked the bucket. Devoted to her, he is. And to her son. Looks to me like Tuohey's given nephew Morty a real helping hand."

  As Stan expected, he'd caught me by surprise. When I'd arrived in Kindle County in the late 1960s, a Tuohey marrying a Dinnerstein was still thought of as miscegenation. More to the point, Brendan Tuohey now was the Presiding Judge of the Common Law Claims Division, where all personal injury cases were heard. A former cop and ex-deputy Prosecuting Attorney, Brendan was celebrated for his intricate political connections, his general Celtic amity, and his occasional bare-knuckles meanness. In most quarters, among reporters, for example, he was renowned as able and tough but fair. Tuohey's name was the one most often mentioned when people speculated about who would eventually replace old Judge Mumphrey and wield the vast powers of the Chief of the entire Kindle County Superior Court. I'd had my ears scratched by Brendan during my year as Bar President. But both Stan and I could recall Tuohey's tenure long ago in the Felony Division, when there were persistent rumors that he was often visited in chambers by Toots Nuccio, a reputed fixer. I asked, mildly, if Stan thought it was fair to condemn Robbie Feaver because of his partner's relatives, but by now Sennett had lost patience with my temporizing.

  "Just do your job, George. And I'll do mine. Talk to your guy. There's something there. We can both see that. If he gets religion, we'll cut him a break. If he sees no evil and speaks no evil, he's going to the penitentiary for evasion. For as long as I can send him. And with these kinds of dollars, we're talking several years. He's got his chance now. If he doesn't take it, don't come groveling in six months, strumming your lyre about the poor wife and her miserable condition."

  Stan set his chin against his chest and eyed me gravely, having become the Stan Sennett few people liked, or could even deal with. Behind him, out the window, a boom swung on an immense construction crane a block away, carrying a beam and some daredevil ironworker riding on it. In this town, they were all American Indians, who, reputedly, knew no fear. I envied them that. Somehow my father's death had sharpened my lifelong concern about my lack of daring.

  In the meantime, Stan took my silence for crusty disdain. It was one of the occasional rewards of our friendship that he was vulnerable to my opinion of him, perhaps because he knew so much of it was favorable.

  "Did I offend you?" he asked.

  No more than usual, I assured him.

  He rumpled his lips and stood. I thought he was going to show me out. Stan was famous for that, for abruptly announcing a meeting was over. But instead he perched on his long mahogany desk's front comer. I remembered yet again that I had always wanted to ask how he got to four-thirty in the afternoon with his white shirt unwrinkled. But the moment, as usual, wasn't right.

  "Listen," he said. "I want to tell you a story. Do you mind? This is a real chest-thumper, so get ready. Did you ever hear the one about when I knew I was going to be a prosecutor?"

  I didn't believe I had.

  "Well, I don't tell it often. But I'm going to tell it now. It has to do with my father's brother, Petros, Peter the kids called him. Uncle Peter was the black sheep. He ran a newspaper stand instead of a restaurant." That was meant to be a joke, and Stan briefly permitted himself a less constricted smile. "You want to talk about hard work-I listen to young lawyers around here pull all-nighters and complain about hard work-that, my friend, that was hard work. Up at 4 a.m. Standing in this little corner shack in the worst kind of weather. Bitter cold. Rain, sleet. Always there. Handing out papers and collecting nickels. He did that twenty years. Finally, near the age of forty, Petros was ready to make his move. Guys he knew had a gas station down here on Duhaney and Plum. Right in Center City. Place was a gold mine. And they were getting out. And Petros bought it. He took every nickel he had, all that he'd saved from twenty years of humping. And then of course it turned out there were a few things Uncle Peter didn't know. Like the fact that the corner, the whole damn block actually, was scheduled for condemnation under the new Center City Plan, which was announced only two or three days after Uncle Peter closed. I mean, it was a flat-out no-good, dirty Kindle County fraud. And every drachma the guy had was gone.

  "I was only a kid, but hell, I'd read my civics book. I said to him, Uncle Petros, why don't you go to court, sue? And he looked at me and he laughed. He said, `A poor man like me? I can't afford to buy a judge.' Not `I can't afford a lawyer.' Although he couldn't. But he realized that anybody who knew in advance what the Center City Plan provided couldn't be beaten in the Kindle County Superior Courthouse.

  "And I decided then I was going to be a prosecutor. Not just an attorney. A prosecutor. I knew suddenly it was the most important thing I could do, to make sure that the Petroses of the universe stopped getting screwed. I'd catch the corrupt judges and the lawyers who paid them, and all the other bad guys who made the world so lousy and unfair. That's what I told myself when I was thirteen years old."

  Sennett paused to regather himself, absently fingering the braiding carved beneath the lip of the desk. This was Stan at his best and he knew he was impressive.

  "Now, this crap has gone on too long in this county. Too many good people have looked the other way, hoping to persuade themselves it's not true. But it is. Or telling themselves that it's better than the bad old days. Which is no kind of excuse." Somewhere in there, as he had bent closer for emphasis, my heart had squirmed. But it was ardor that energized him, not any kind of rebuke.

  "And so I've been watching. And waiting. And now I've got my chance. Augie Bolcarro is dead and this stuff is going to die with him. Hear this carefully, because I'll get that son of a bitch Tuoh
ey and his whole nasty cohort, or flame out trying. I'm not going to send a couple of low-level schmoes to the joint and let Tuohey become head of the court in a year and do it all again, on a bigger scale, which is how it's always gone around here.

  "And I know how people talk about me. And I know what they think. But it's not for the greater glory of Stan Sennett. You know the saying? `If you shoot at the king, you better kill the king'?"

  A paraphrase, I told him, of Machiavelli. Stan tossed that around a second, not certain he liked the comparison.

  "Well, if I shoot at Tuohey and miss-if I miss, George-I'll have to leave town when I step down from this job. I know that. No law firm in its right mind will go near me. Because neither I nor they will be able to set foot in state court.

  "But I'm going to do it anyway. Because I'm not going to have this go on unchallenged. Not on my watch. You will forgive me, George. You will please forgive me. But it's what I owe my Uncle Petros and all the other people of this county and this district. George," he said, "it's what's goddamned right."

  CHAPTER 3

  "How this started," Robbie Feaver said, "is not what you think. Morty and I didn't go to Brendan and say, Take care of us. We didn't have anything to take care of, not to start with. Mort and I had been bumping along on workmen's comp and slip-and-fall cases. Then about ten years ago, even before Brendan was appointed Presiding Judge over there, we got our first real chance to score. It was a bad-baby case. Doc with a forceps treated the kid's head like a walnut. And it's the usual warfare. I got a demand of 2.2 million, which brings in the umbrella insurer, so they're underwriting the defense. And they know I'm not Peter Neucriss. They're making us spend money like there's a tree in the backyard. I've got to get medical experts. Not one. Four. O.B. Anesthesia. Pedes. Neurology. And courtroom blowups. We've got $125,000 in expenses, way more than we can afford. We're into the bank for the money, Mort and me, with seconds on both our houses."

  I had heard the story several times now. This rendition was for Sennett's benefit, a proffer, an off-the-record session in which Stan had the chance to evaluate Robbie for himself. It was a week after I'd visited Stan in his office and we sat amid the plummy brocades of a room in the Dulcimer House hotel, booked in the name of Petros Corporation. Sennett had brought along a bland-seeming fellow named Jim, slightly moonfaced but pleasant, whom I marked as an FBI agent, even before Stan introduced him, because he wore a tie on Sunday afternoon. They leaned forward intently on their fancy medallion-backed armchairs as Robbie held forth beside me on the sofa.

  "The judge we're assigned is Homer Guerfoyle. Now, Homer, I don't know if you remember Homer. He's long gone. But he was a plain, old-fashioned Kindle County alley cat, a ward-heeling son of a bootlegger, so crooked that when they buried him they had to screw him in the ground. But when he finally maneuvers his way onto the bench, all the sudden he thinks he's a peer of the realm. I'm not kidding. It always felt like he'd prefer 'Your Lordship' to `Your Honor.' His wife had died and he hooked up with some socialite a few years older than him. He grew a fussy little mustache and started going to the opera and walking down the street in the summer in a straw boater.

  "Now, on the other side of my case is Carter Franch, a real white-shoe number, Groton and Yale, and Guerfoyle treats him like an icon. Exactly the man Homer would like to be. He just about sits up and begs whenever he hears Franch's malarkey.

  "So one day Mort and I, we have breakfast with Brendan, and we start drying our eyes on his sleeve, about this trial coming up, what a great case it is and how we're gonna get manhandled and end up homeless. We're just young pups sharing our troubles with Morty's wise old uncle. `Well, I know Homer for years,' says Brendan. `He used to run precincts for us in the Boylan organization. Homer's all right. I'm sure he'll give you boys a fair trial.'

  "Nice that he thinks so," said Robbie. Feaver looked up and we all offered the homage of humoring smiles to induce him to continue. "Our case goes in pretty good. No bumps. Right before we put on our final expert, who'll testify about what constitutes reasonable care in a forceps delivery, I call the doc, the defendant, as an adverse witness, just to establish a couple things about the procedure. Last thing, I ask the usual jackpot question, `Would you do it again?' `Not given the result,' he says. Fair enough. We finish up, and before the defense begins, both sides make the standard motions for a directed verdict, and, strike me dead, Guerfoyle grants mine. Robbie wins liability by TKO! The doc's to blame, Homer says, he admitted he didn't employ reasonable care when he said he wouldn't use the forceps again. Even I hadn't suggested anything like that. Franch just about pulls his heart out of his chest, but since the only issue now is damages, he has no choice but to settle. 1.4 mil. So it's nearly 500,000 for Morty and me.

  "Two days later, I'm before Guerfoyle on a motion in another case, and he takes me back to his chambers for a second. `Say, that's a wonderful result, Mr. Feaver.' Yadda yadda yadda. And I've got no more brains than a tree stump. I don't get it. I really don't. I'm like, Thanks, Judge, thanks so much, I really appreciate it, we worked that file hard. `Well, I'll be seeing you, Mr. Feaver.'

  "Next weekend, Brendan's guy, Kosic, gets Morty in the corner at some family shindig and it's like, `What'd you boys do to piss off Homer Guerfoyle? We have a lot of respect for Homer. I made sure he knows you're Brendan's nephew. It embarrasses us when you guys don't show respect.' Monday, Mort and I are back in the office staring at each other. No comprende. `Piss off'? `Respect'?

  "Guess what happens next? I come in with the dismissal order on the settlement and Guerfoyle won't sign. He says he's been pondering the case. On his own again. He's been thinking maybe he should have let the jury decide whether the doc had admitted liability. Even Franch is astonished, because at trial the judge was acting like he was deaf when Franch had argued exactly the same point. So we set the case over for more briefing. And as I'm leaving, the bailiff, a pretty good sod by the name of Ray Zahn, is just shaking his head at me.

  "So like two goofs from East Bumblefuck, Mort and I put all the pieces together. Gee, Mort, do you think he wants money? Yeah, Rob, I think he wants some money. Somebody had to finance Homer's new lifestyle, right?

  "We sit on that for about a day. Finally, Morty comes back to me and says, No. That's it: No. No way. Nohow. He didn't sleep. He hurled three times. He broke out in a rash. Prison would be a relief compared to this.

  "That's Morty. Nerves of spaghetti. The guy fainted dead away the first time he went to court. Which puts the load on Robbie. But you tell me, what was I supposed to do? And don't quote the sayings of Confucius. Tell me real-world. Was I supposed to walk away from a fee of four hundred ninety-some thousand dollars and just go home and start packing? Was I supposed to tell this family, that's got this gorked-out kid, Sorry for these false hopes, that million bucks we said you got, we must have been on LSD? How many hours do you think it would be before they got themselves a lawyer whose word they could trust? You think I should have called the FBI, right then? What the hell's that mean for Morty's uncle? And what about us? In this town, nobody likes a beefer.

  "So, Morty or not, there's only one answer. And it's like tipping in Europe. How much is enough? And where do you get it? It's comical, really. Where's that college course in bribery when you really need it? So I go to the bank and cash a check for nine thousand, because over ten thousand they report it to the feds. And I put it in an envelope with our new brief and I take it over to the bailiff, Ray. And man, my mouth's so dry I couldn't lick a stamp. What the hell do I say if I've read this wrong? 'Oops, that was my bank deposit'? I've put so much tape on this envelope he'll have to open it with a hand grenade, and I say, `Please be sure Judge Guerfoyle gets this, tell him I'm sorry for the miscommunication.'

  "I go to a status call in another courtroom, and as I'm coming out the bailiff, Ray Zahn, is waiting for me in the corridor, and there's one damn serious look in his eye. He strolls me a hundred feet and, honest to God, you can hear my socks squish. Finally, h
e throws his arm over my shoulder and whispers, `Next time, don't forget somethin for me.' And then he hands me an order Homer's signed, accepting the settlement and dismissing the case." A decade later, Feaver tossed about his elaborate hairdo, which overflowed his collar in indigo waves, the relief still live in his memory.

  "So that was it. I spun Morty a yarn about how Guerfoyle had seemed to realize that we'd turn him over on appeal and had backed off. Then I went and bowed down before Brendan's honor guard, his two sidekicks, Rollo Kosic and Sig Milacki. As I'm leaving, Sig says, `You ever got a special case like this, gimme a call.' So I just kind of kept on from there." He shrugged at the inevitability of the bad-acting that followed and looked around again to see how he'd been received. I suggested he go down for coffee. Sennett was rolling his eyes before Robbie got out the door.

  "That's a fairy tale about Mort," he said.

  I nearly batted my lashes in my efforts to feign surprise, but naturally I'd given my client a good shaking in private. Nonetheless Feaver swore that for a decade Dinnerstein had remained unknowing, which was just the way that Brendan Tuohey, as a doting uncle, liked it. Through the partnership, Mort received half the windfall derived from the corruption Tuohey engineered, but bore none of the risk. Robbie alone delivered the payoffs to the judges.

  Feaver claimed Mort was even misled about the nature of the secret bank account at River National. There are people in many occupations-nurses, funeral parlor directors, cops-who often are in a position to recommend an attorney to someone who's had a serious injury. Ethical rules forbid the attorney from sharing the legal fees he or she then earns with non-lawyers, but the nurse or the cop who'd handed out Robbie's card might well ask anyway, and Robbie was not the first personal injury practitioner to decide it was better to pay than have anybody forget his phone number. That was where Robbie told Mort the cash they were generating from the River National account was going (as indeed some portion of it was). Bar Admissions and Discipline, the agency that licenses attorneys, might go after Mort for aiding in these shenanigans if they ever learned about them, but Robbie's explanation protected Dinnerstein against criminal prosecution, at least in our state. Even the tax violations did not meet prosecution guidelines, since Robbie had, in his version, led Mort to believe that the income they weren't reporting was fully offset by these unsavory business expenses. It was all too convenient for Stan.