A Civil Action (71 page)

Just as Schlichtmann predicted, Judge Skinner refused to consider Mary Ryan’s affidavit. She had been under an obligation, said the judge, to reveal what she’d known at the previous hearing, three months ago, and she had failed to do so. “No rule of due process that I know of permits an attorney in Ms. Ryan’s position, under an order to make a complete statement, to withhold information until such time as it is to her advantage to reveal it, and then to insist that the court retry the whole matter.” The judge barred Mary Ryan from filing any more pleadings.

Schlichtmann waited for the judge to submit a report to the Court of Appeals. The month of November passed in a series of gray, overcast days, one indistinguishable from the next. With nothing to do but fret, Schlichtmann constantly called Kiley, Nesson, and Neville. Anyone who would talk to him about the case could expect two or three phone calls a day.

On Sunday night, December 11, he went to bed at twelve-thirty and awoke at two-thirty, thrashing wildly and screaming. He had dreamed about the judge’s ruling.

He awoke from a nightmare into a nightmare. At the office that morning, the judge’s clerk called to say that Skinner had just issued his final report to the Court of Appeals. Schlichtmann walked up Milk Street to the courthouse, accompanied by Crowley. “I know I’ll be
enraged when I see it,” he told Crowley. “That arthritic old bastard is going to do something to me.”

Up on the seventh floor, at the office of the civil clerk, Judge Skinner’s clerk handed Schlichtmann a copy of the decision. Schlichtmann flipped quickly through the pages, scanning the judge’s words. Schlichtmann’s investigative files (“a thorough and well-documented inquiry,” wrote the judge) contained “no support whatsoever for the claim of disposal of the complaint chemicals at the tannery site, or by the tannery on the 15 acres.” Judge Skinner concluded that at the start of the case, throughout the entire trial, during the appeal and the misconduct hearings, and up to the present moment, Schlichtmann “knew there was no available competent evidence tending to establish the disposal of the complaint chemicals by the defendant itself, either at the tannery site or on the 15 acres.”

Accordingly, the judge found that Schlichtmann had violated Rule 11 by pursuing a frivolous claim that had no support in fact. This constituted clear misconduct.

But Schlichtmann’s misconduct, continued the judge, was balanced by the misconduct of Mary Ryan in concealing the Yankee report. Thus, concluded Skinner, “in the convoluted context of this case, it is my recommendation that neither party should profit through sanctions from the delinquency of the other, and that should be the sanction for both of them.”

The case had come full circle. It had begun with Rule 11, and now it ended with Rule 11.

“He’s saying
I
should be sanctioned?” cried Schlichtmann, his hand shaking with rage.

“I’m just the messenger,” said the clerk, backing away.

“The man is
demented
!” shouted Schlichtmann in a hoarse, raspy voice. People turned to stare. Crowley took Schlichtmann by the elbow and tried to lead him out to the corridor, to the elevators. “Okay, Jan, let’s go. Let’s get out of here,” said Crowley, looking anxiously around.

Outside in Post Office Square, Schlichtmann stopped, put his head back, and bellowed: “The man is a fucking monster! I know the joy of a madman! He says
I
should be sanctioned!”

The judge’s final report was sent to the Court of Appeals, which issued its ruling on March 26, 1990. It was not their job, stated the court, to
second-guess a trial judge who was intimately familiar with the “checkered history and inner workings of this convoluted case.” Judge Skinner deserved commendation for having “tackled so thankless a task with incisiveness and vigor.” The court upheld all of Judge Skinner’s findings as “sound, well-substantiated, and free from observable legal error,” and endorsed his recommendation for sanctions. “This long safari of a case,” concluded the court, “may at last be brought to a close.”

On the evening of the court’s ruling, the families came into Boston to see Schlichtmann. Only Anne and the Zonas were not among them. They gathered in the conference room for one last time. To them, Schlichtmann appeared like a man in a state of deep despond, dazed and uncertain of his surroundings. He spoke of petitioning the Court of Appeals for a rehearing and, if that failed, filing an appeal with the Supreme Court, but he spoke in a dull, uninflected voice and his despair was evident to everyone in the room.

Kathryn Gamache regarded him with genuine concern. “We’re afraid you’ll end it all by jumping out of the window here,” she said softly to him.

“We don’t want to read something like that in the papers tomorrow,” said Richard Aufiero.

Schlichtmann shook his head and tried to smile. “I love life too much. Don’t worry about that.”

He lived in the office, but he didn’t work on new cases, not with anything like real interest. Crowley settled a big case on his own. When the office got another case involving a cerebral aneurysm, one much like the case Schlichtmann had lost just after Woburn, Schlichtmann didn’t want to work on it. He gave it to Kiley, who took it to trial and won a huge verdict—$10.3 million, more even than the Grace settlement, and Kiley had spent only a few months on this case. Kiley offered Schlichtmann a job working with him, but Schlichtmann turned the offer down. Schlichtmann spoke often of not practicing law anymore.

He petitioned the Court of Appeals for a rehearing. The petition was denied by Judge Stephen Breyer, then chief judge of the Court of Appeals. Schlichtmann filed an action in Massachusetts Superior Court for a bill of discovery and depositions of Mary Ryan and her associates. This, too, was denied. Languishing on his office couch, he spent several months writing a petition for
certiorari
in the U.S. Supreme Court. At times during this labor, he seemed to come fully
alive. But deep down, he knew that he was wasting his time, that no one at the Supreme Court would ever read his brief all the way through. He felt compelled to finish it anyway.

In the end, the Supreme Court also turned him down.

“I’m so alone,” Schlichtmann told an acquaintance one day four years after the Woburn verdict. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m crazy. I have this sense that some people say, ‘Gee, that’s awfully sad, the man’s having a breakdown in front of us.’ I feel like the guy in the last cell of the insane asylum. ‘Don’t go down there,’ they tell everybody. ‘All he talks about is Woburn.’ ”

He took solace from a few comments he’d received from others who’d watched the case from afar. A Superior Court judge stopped him on the street one day and said, “If those guys had been in my courtroom, they’d be in jail now.” But Schlichtmann knew how most other Boston lawyers regarded him—as a sad, quixotic figure. He didn’t care.

He ate most of his meals in restaurants. He had no credit cards and he was always running out of cash. But there were a few establishments that would extend him credit for the sake of old times, from the days when he’d been flush and a handsome tipper. One evening he went to an Italian restaurant called the Trattoria. The owner was a friend. Schlichtmann told him that he had no money in the bank, but he’d pay with a check that would be good next week. He’d been telling the owner for years about the Woburn case. The owner said, “That’s okay, Mr. Schlichtmann.”

Sitting at a table in the back, Schlichtmann caught sight of Teresa. She was dining with another man. Schlichtmann got up and went over to say hello to her. He shook hands with her new man, and then he returned to his own table. An hour later, when Teresa was about to depart, she came to Schlichtmann’s table, hands in her pockets, smiling shyly. Schlichtmann told her she looked beautiful. She blushed. He touched the fabric of her sleeve, a pretext to touch her, and asked, “Is this the new fashion?”

“Don’t you like it?” she said.

“I do like it,” he said.

He asked her about work. She still traveled a lot, she said, and it tired her.

“Did they give you a raise?”

She nodded and then she asked him about the case. He gave a perfunctory answer. Her new boyfriend was awaiting her at the door. “Jan, please take care of yourself,” Teresa said. She put her hand on his shoulder and left it there for a few seconds, long enough to transform the gesture from casual to intimate.

Schlichtmann’s eyes followed her as she walked away, slim and graceful, and he was struck by how lovely she was. He thought about the time that had passed, how much his life had changed, how much he had lost. But the reverie did not last long. In a moment, he started thinking about the case. Facher is at the end of his career, and so am I, thought Schlichtmann at the end of the evening.

7

Seagulls from Boston Harbor wheeled about overhead, in the dull, leaden November sky. It was cold enough to snow, but Schlichtmann had taken off his coat and was working in his shirtsleeves. He and Crowley were at Safe ’N Sound Storage on Morrissey Boulevard, where the firm rented two cinder-block rooms. The rooms were dank and unheated, filled with Woburn documents. Rather than pay another month’s rent, Schlichtmann had decided to clean the rooms out.

Four hundred cartons of documents, the entire archive of the Woburn case, were piled up to the corrugated metal ceilings. Schlichtmann planned to save only the families’ medical records, which he would give to them that evening. Everything else he’d throw out. Threading his way among the stacks of cartons, he couldn’t resist opening a few. He found transcripts of the trial and hearings, of the depositions of the families and the expert witnesses and the Grace and Beatrice employees, medical studies of the families, reports from the EPA and the U.S. Geological Survey. He picked up a large trial exhibit depicting the Aberjona Valley. It was from one of the Beatrice experts. “This guy was a charlatan,” he said with a harsh laugh. “What a joke.” He crushed it under his foot.

Crowley had commandeered a garbage truck, which had backed up to the door of the storage rooms. Moving the heavy cartons was hard physical labor, and both men soon worked up a sweat. Schlichtmann
heaved cartons into the dark, stinking maw of the garbage truck like a man shoveling coal into a furnace. Breathing hard, he paused for a moment and watched the hydraulic machinery crush open the cartons, spilling out thousands of pages.

“All this paper,” said Schlichtmann, more to himself than to Crowley. “It represents nine years of my life. Why did I do it?” He paused for a moment and then answered his own question. “Pride, greed, ambition. Getting rich by doing good.”

Crowley gave a short laugh, more like a grunt.

“I’m thirty-nine years old,” continued Schlichtmann, “and I’ve dug one fucking big hole. A man couldn’t dig a bigger hole.”

Schlichtmann filed for bankruptcy. He had hoped to pay off his debts, but in the end he could not. He found himself unable to work on cases anymore. He decided to quit the practice of law and go to Hawaii. In the Chapter 7 papers filed in bankruptcy court in Boston, he listed his assets as fourteen dollars in a checking account, a fifty-dollar cassette radio, one hundred dollars in cash, and five hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. (The expensive suits, after all, were no longer new.) He owed his creditors $1,231,542, of which state and federal taxes accounted for almost two thirds.

In Woburn the EPA announced a plan for cleaning up the Aberjona aquifer. The agency had filed suit against both W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods to recover the costs of the cleanup project. Grace had agreed to pay its share, but new lawyers for Beatrice challenged the EPA’s lawsuit, citing the verdict and Judge Skinner’s findings in the Woburn civil action. The EPA brushed this aside. Its studies all proved that Beatrice’s land was responsible for contaminating the aquifer. In the end, Beatrice also consented to pay its share of the cleanup costs.

In a public presentation to the citizens of Woburn, the EPA unveiled a reclamation plan that would take fifty years to complete and would cost an estimated $69.4 million, the largest and most costly environmental cleanup in New England.

The
Boston Herald
called Schlichtmann for a comment. “It’s about time,” Schlichtmann was quoted as saying.

W. R. Grace was indicted by the U.S. Attorney for lying in its statements to the EPA, lies that Schlichtmann had brought to the Justice
Department’s attention because of Al Love’s willingness to come forward. Grace pleaded guilty to two felony counts and was assessed the maximum fine, which at the time amounted to ten thousand dollars. Shortly after, W. R. Grace announced that it would close its Woburn plant, where ninety-five workers were employed. Most workers were offered jobs elsewhere. “It’s also possible that there will be some layoffs,” said a Grace spokesman.

Kiley lent Schlichtmann the price of a round-trip plane ticket to Hawaii, and also gave him a little spending money. For a week or so Schlichtmann stayed in a grimy, dilapidated motel, twenty-seven dollars a night with the bathroom down the hall. Then he bought a backpack and a sleeping bag and set off hiking on the western island of Kauai. He walked over a mountain pass to a remote valley named Kalalau.

He spent several days camping on the white sand beach, completely alone. He cooked over campfires. He swam and lay in the sun. He told himself that he was purging his mind, but in truth he kept wondering how one would know if one had wasted one’s life. He was afraid of finding the answer. He wasn’t sure from one moment to the next just what he intended to do. On his third day at the beach, right around dusk, he stripped off all his clothes and swam out into the open ocean. The sea was as smooth as glass, with only the gentlest of swells. He swam westward, toward the setting sun, for a long time, and when he finally turned to look back the island of Kauai was little more than a blur on the horizon. The water was warm and he was naked, and he felt completely at peace. He treaded water for a while, gazing back at the island. He thought of swimming on until he could no longer see land.

But then this thought turned on itself, and he began swimming slowly back.