by Steve Coll
“You would agree, sir, that you all at Exxon had the economic wherewithal to replace the [alarm system] in one day if you wanted to do it across the country? You had the money to do it?” Snyder asked John Greco, an ExxonMobil manager in charge of gas station construction around the United States.
“I can’t speak to that, no.”
“Is it not a fact, sir,” Snyder demanded, “that this was the system that continuously alarmed, 99 percent of the time, for reasons other than a leak, and it just wasn’t trusted by you all at Exxon?”
“I would disagree with that statement.”
“And is it not a fact, sir, that you all at Exxon knew, you knew that the leak detector had alarmed [at Jacksonville]—you knew it at Exxon, and you all ignored it?”
“That’s incorrect.”
Exxon’s defense turned on its assertion that however many false alarms the EECO 3000 might emit, the detector still found leaks accurately. It had done so in Jacksonville on the January morning in question, James Sanders told the courtroom. The contractor fixing the station’s submersible pump on January 12 had unknowingly drilled a hole in one of the gas lines; the alarm had sounded as it was supposed to do; and a second contractor had arrived to resolve the leak issue.
This second contractor thought he had fixed a false alarm problem by replacing a motor in the leak detector system, but in fact, he had missed the real trouble, the gasoline leak, and then, compounding his error, in resetting the alarm he had inadvertently calibrated the EECO 3000 improperly, so that it would no longer sound as gasoline spilled into the ground in the days to come. That might not have mattered so much if Andrea Loiero had conducted her daily inventory checks properly and noticed the missing and leaking gasoline within a day or two, but she, too, had failed. Like many industrial accidents involving complex systems and human beings, the Jacksonville spill had arisen from small errors compounding one upon the other, ExxonMobil argued. But there was no fraud: The leak detector had sounded its alarm; it was the human beings involved who failed to diagnose the alarm correctly. Therefore, there was no gross corporate negligence involved.
Snyder called some of his clients, the local homeowners, to take the stand to speak about their emotional experiences—their anxiety about not knowing if the water they had been drinking might leave them with cancer in later years, and the distress of lost wealth as news of their contaminated property spread and home values fell. Some of the witnesses wept. Some spoke of their fears for their children and grandchildren. Almost all of them expressed anger about the inflexibility and arrogance they said they experienced when they dealt with ExxonMobil public affairs and legal officials after the accident.
Ricci DePasquale, the owner of a local pizza parlor, told the jurors about his children: “At one time the youngest gulped down a little bit of the water in the bathtub and asked his mother if he was going to die because he drank contaminated water. No child should ever have to say something like that.”
Snyder bore in on Exxon’s strategy of apology and appeasement. “In this case, you have heard Mr. Sanders apologize on behalf of ExxonMobil. . . . How do you believe that Exxon has handled this entire situation?”
“Exxon has handled this for Exxon, not for the people of the community of Jacksonville,” DePasquale answered. “They have taken care of themselves, not us. . . . My neighbors shouldn’t be up here spilling their heart out. They should have been taken care of. . . . We should never have to come to this and go through this.”
“As an affected resident in this community, do you accept Exxon’s apology?”
“I pray for Exxon; I don’t accept their apology.”17
My small law firm from Baltimore County took on the world’s largest corporation,” Snyder declared when closing arguments finally arrived. Speaking of his homeowner clients, he continued, “I was sort of floored by what I saw in this courtroom. . . . I heard people’s hearts pouring out. People breaking down on the witness stand, and I can be pretty tough, but there were times when I had to hold back the tears.”
At ExxonMobil, “they do not have their priorities in order. Hopefully, you’ll correct that. . . . You heard their stories. They cried out to you. This is their avenue for change. This is their opportunity for justice.”
James Sanders spoke gently. He appealed to the jurors’ sense of responsibility, after they had invested so many days and hours in their roles as citizen-judges: “Here we are,” he said, “a big Texas corporation, international, profits that you have read about, all this other stuff—how do you treat us the same way that you treat people sitting out here in the audience? Man, that’s tough. But you have to. That’s what is really hard about this. You have to treat us fairly as you have been treating me during this trial.” If they felt sympathy for him as ExxonMobil’s lawyer, if they liked and trusted him, they should apply that trust to their verdict and reject the fraud charge.
ExxonMobil’s vulnerability in the trial—its potential billion-dollar problem—lay with Snyder’s emotive performance, his efforts to pull the jury into a change-the-world mind-set, from where they could unleash their pent-up anger at Big Oil. Sanders therefore aligned himself with those in the jury who might admire Snyder’s passion—and then he turned this sympathy for his opponent around.
“I like Mr. Snyder,” Sanders said. “I am fond of him. I respect his abilities, which are considerable. He is quite a character. . . . He is an absolute handful, but you have to love him. But I don’t agree with how he mangles the facts. . . . In my wildest imagination, I would never have been able to come up with some of the theories that he has come up with in this case. . . . It is ingenious. It is brilliant. It is wrong, but it is brilliant.”18
The jurors filed into Courtroom 2 after twelve days of deliberations. They announced their verdict: $150 million in actual damages and zero dollars in punitive damages. The verdict for actual damages was high: The jury awarded all of Snyder’s clients 100 percent of the appraised value of their homes, even though some of them had sold their homes for hundreds of thousands of dollars and none of the homes was appraised as worthless. Of the $150 million, $71 million was for emotional distress, $61 million for property loss, and the rest for the costs of future medical monitoring.
Snyder was still looking for his first billion-dollar case. The jury’s decision showed that proving “intentional malice is an extremely uphill climb,” he explained.
James Sanders had told the jurors repeatedly during the trial that ExxonMobil would pay whatever they thought was fair by way of actual damages. Nonetheless, once the verdict was in, ExxonMobil rejected the jury’s decision and declared it would appeal. This was ultimately Rex Tillerson’s decision; he followed the legal strategies and policies bequeathed to him by Lee Raymond, and before Raymond, by corporate lawyers dating back to Standard Oil’s defiance of antitrust reformers. “Compensatory damages should not be so high as to essentially be punitive instead of truly compensating for actual harm caused by the spill,” the corporation said in a statement.19 Judge Baldwin upheld the verdict on initial review, but ExxonMobil said it would appeal again. It would be years before the families around Jacksonville Exxon would see a dollar from the corporation, if ever. “Don’t mess with Texas” remained the ExxonMobil law department’s ethos, and the corporation’s strategists believed that if they made exceptions for one set of accident or tort victims, they would only be challenged and exploited by others—whether in Baltimore County or Aceh, Indonesia.
Eighteen
“We Will Need Witnesses”
The Supply Chain Building in Cluster I of ExxonMobil’s gas fields in Aceh, Indonesia, stood on cleared land ringed by palm trees that rustled in ocean winds. The facility contained a processing plant for cement and chemicals used for cleaning pipes in the Arun gas fields. Grasses and rubbery, purple-tinted shrubs encroached on the chain-link fences and partially obscured from view a dozen or so beige storage tanks; not even ExxonMobil’s disciplined tree-trimming systems could keep Aceh’s
littoral forests at bay. Farmers from nearby Mee village often wandered along the fence line, as did their cows and goats.
By the spring of 2007, villagers no longer had to endure the occasional crack of a rifle shot or the risk of arbitrary detention by Indonesian army soldiers or the Acehnese separatist rebels known as the G.A.M. On August 15, 2005, in Helsinki, Finland, Hasan di Tiro and his comrades in the rebel leadership had signed a peace accord with the government of Indonesia. Afterward, G.A.M. disarmed its cadres and reorganized to enter peaceful democratic politics. The Indonesian army, or T.N.I., withdrew most of its troops from Aceh. All that remained of the war were its ghosts, the missing and unaccounted dead.
Years earlier, ExxonMobil had benefited from the Bush administration’s intervention against G.A.M., when the administration quietly urged the guerrillas to stop targeting the corporation. The violence had subsided, but ExxonMobil’s reliance on the administration for protection persisted. The venue had now shifted from Aceh’s jungle to Washington courtrooms. At issue was whether America’s largest private corporation bore any responsibility for the Aceh conflict’s legacy of death, injury, and torture.
The peace deal between G.A.M. and Indonesia’s weak, nascent democratic government had produced no serious investigations of the war’s abuses. About a thousand young Acehnese men remained missing. For the most part their relatives accepted that they were dead, but many ached to bury their sons or husbands on family compounds. Occasionally farmers and villagers stumbled over human remains in the places where the T.N.I. had previously established interrogation centers, such as along the perimeter of ExxonMobil’s gas fields. In December 2005, for example, some villagers living near the corporation’s Cluster II gas fields found human bones and decomposed clothing in a sack buried in the ground. The sack contained a wallet with an identity card inside: The victim, a young G.A.M. volunteer named Kaharuddin, had been arrested at his home in 2003. His widow reburied her husband’s remains in their tree-shaded yard. When new bones were discovered in this way, the word spread, and families of the missing traveled to the informal excavation sites, seeking evidence that might bring their own searches to a close.1
During the third week of June 2007, an Acehnese civilian discovered bones inside a safety tank within the ExxonMobil facility at Cluster I, near Mee. Exactly how the discovery was made and how the searcher got inside the fence was never made clear. A survivor of T.N.I. detention had publicly identified the Supply Chain Building as a place where soldiers in camouflage uniforms had interrogated him and his brother; the brother was among Aceh’s disappeared. By June 20, news of the bone find had circulated. Crowds gathered at ExxonMobil’s chain-link gate and demanded to be let inside. The corporation’s unarmed guards, some of them Acehnese, yielded. The villagers spread the excavated bones on a warehouse floor and took photographs. The ExxonMobil security guards established a police line to protect the evidence. The crowd was excited and agitated. Some of them noticed a mound of rubble and dirt outside that looked as if it might be a makeshift grave. They demanded that the ExxonMobil guards dig up the mounds, but the guards refused. They instead summoned the police; a deputy commissioner arrived and announced to the villagers that they must control themselves. He said they would need a forensic team as well as permits from ExxonMobil before they could dig. The crowd of villagers and farmers decamped to the North Aceh police station and obtained an audience with the police chief, who promised to investigate. “We will need witnesses because what we will dig up [on ExxonMobil property] is someone else’s house,” he said.2
Later the police suggested that the villagers had been mistaken and that what they had found in the storage tanks were the remains of animals. Photographs of the bone fragments, to an amateur eye, were ambiguous; there was nothing as obvious as either a human’s skull or a cow’s jawbone. In any event, the Indonesian army had no intention of allowing a serious investigation to proceed. General Bambang Darmono, who had commanded Indonesian military operations in Aceh between 2002 and the final peace agreement, explained to an interviewer: “If we keep digging up the past, the problem in Aceh will never be resolved. Everyone violated human rights laws. It wasn’t only the Indonesian armed forces, [but] the cops, the government, the G.A.M. . . . Do we want to keep talking about that? If we do, we will always talk about violence and there will be no peace. But if we want to have peace, we have to bury everything.”3
After the Bush administration intimidated G.A.M. into ceasing its direct attacks on ExxonMobil’s gas fields in Aceh in 2001, which allowed the corporation’s operations in the province to resume, the war had turned even more brutal.4 President Megawati’s military-aligned government in Jakarta imposed martial law. To destroy G.A.M., she deployed about 22,000 T.N.I. soldiers, 12,000 paramilitary police, and authorized the recruitment of 10,000 militiamen. She curtailed civil liberties and banned or restricted international aid and human rights groups in Aceh. Shielded from scrutiny, the Indonesian military detained, tortured, and executed hundreds of young Acehnese men after 2001.5
Baharuddin, a young farmer whose family lands lay in the vicinity of ExxonMobil’s gas fields, recounted a story that was emblematic of widespread testimony about the abuses. One afternoon in December 2003, Baharuddin walked, with a friend named Noordin, to an old mosque elevated on stilts and overlooking rice paddies near the Pipeline Road. He intended to have his hair cut at one of the informal stalls beside the mosque. T.N.I. soldiers on foot patrol walked by. They approached and asked, “What are you doing here? Are you a member of G.A.M.?”
“No, I’m just a villager,” Baharuddin answered.
“You’re lying. You just came down from the mountains.” They hit him. Then they force-marched him and his friend across the rice fields to an interrogation center in the battalion commander’s post, a little farther down the Pipeline Road. Interrogators showed Baharuddin the wallet of a man named Ismail and accused him of extorting money from him. “Just confess,” one of his interviewers, an Acehnese, said gently. “You’ll be fine. If not, they’ll beat you up.”
“I’d rather be beaten—I didn’t do anything,” he answered.
About eight soldiers came upstairs. They carried two iron bars, a razor blade, salt, and the delicacy known as star fruit. First they drew bloody lines on his chest with the blade. Then they sliced open his ears. They sprinkled salt and fruit juice on the wounds. Baharuddin thought, he recalled, “If I confess, it won’t mean the beating will stop.” The T.N.I. were notorious among local villagers for continuing with their punishments no matter what their detainees said. He worried, too, he said later, that someone else might get into trouble because of any confession he made. The soldiers cut off sections of his ears. They beat him in shifts. They forced him to lie down, put a wooden board on his back, and then walked over him two at a time.
After about five days, they gave him a cigarette to smoke and invited him to speak with the battalion commander. The commander leafed through a thick book of G.A.M. suspects. “You have an hour” to confess, he announced.
“Why don’t you shoot me now,” Baharuddin recalled answering.
“Okay, dig a hole,” the commander finally said. They went outside and dug a trench between the interrogation post and a nearby electric pylon.
“You can invoke your God and tell him to release you,” the commander told him. Baharuddin did so.
Rather than shoot him, however, the soldiers took him back inside, tied him up, and locked him upstairs again.
A soldier named Reza, who was being punished, was imprisoned alongside him that evening, perhaps as a ruse. “This is your last night,” he advised, as Baharuddin recalled. “If you confess, they’ll release you.” Baharuddin doubted this. Reza fell asleep, and Baharuddin found the strength to untie himself. He crawled slowly down the stairs in the early hours of the morning, slipped outside, crossed over to the Pipeline Road, and ran. He hid in a small brick factory as the sun rose, stopped a passerby, and sent a messenger to his family. They b
rought him to a unit of G.A.M. guerrillas. He enlisted in the rebellion immediately. His mutilated ears provided him credibility with his peers.6
His story was one among hundreds from 2003 and 2004. Throughout, ExxonMobil operated the Arun gas fields and the liquefied natural gas conversion factory without interruption. In Jakarta, Bill Cummings, who ran the corporation’s public affairs office under country manager Ron Wilson, recruited some local specialists in community relations and dispatched them to Aceh to try to win enough favor from the local population to avoid a repetition of 2001, when G.A.M. had attacked ExxonMobil repeatedly because of its alliance with the T.N.I. The corporation’s operations in the midst of the conflict were precarious, but G.A.M. had pulled back for the most part from striking at ExxonMobil or its employees. The corporation routinely engaged in community relations efforts where it extracted oil and gas; in Aceh, a creative engagement could also be protective.
ExxonMobil’s campaign in Aceh was prescribed in Texas, however; it had to follow the worldwide corporate manual approved in Irving. Under the corporation’s Operations Integrity Management System, or O.I.M.S., the comprehensive instruction book and guidelines adapted after the Exxon Valdez wreck, the same community relations strategies employed in Colorado had to be employed in the conflict zone. To handle complaints, for example, the public affairs department set up a voice mail number where Acehnese citizens could leave messages, although relatively few of them had phones at the time. Then the ExxonMobil managers were to take down the messages and respond within a set period of time prescribed by the manual. Corporate managers also attended events around the province and handed out ExxonMobil hats to Acehnese villagers.
