The Runaway Jury (3 page)

“Do you trust these lawyers?” Jankle asked, not for the first time.

“We’ve covered this before,” Fitch answered.

“We can certainly cover it again if I choose.”

“Why are you worried about our lawyers?” Fitch asked.

“Because, well, because they’re from around here.”

“I see. And you think it’d be wise to bring in some New York lawyers to talk to our jury? Maybe some from Boston?”

“No, it’s just that, well, they’ve never defended a tobacco case.”

“There’s never been a tobacco case on the Coast before. Are you complaining?”

“They just worry me, that’s all.”

“We’ve hired the best in this area,” Fitch said.

“Why do they work so cheap?”

“Cheap. Last week you were worried about defense costs. Now our lawyers are not charging enough. Make up your mind.”

“Last year we paid four hundred bucks an hour for Pittsburgh lawyers. These guys work for two hundred. That worries me.”

Fitch frowned at Luther Vandemeer, CEO of Trellco. “Am I missing something here?” he asked. “Is he serious? We’re at five million bucks for this
case, and he’s afraid I’m pinching pennies.” Fitch waved in the direction of Jankle. Vandemeer smiled and took a drink.

“You spent six million in Oklahoma,” Jankle said.

“And we won. I don’t recall any complaints after the verdict came in.”

“I’m not complaining now. I’m just voicing a concern.”

“Great! I’ll go back to the office, gather all the lawyers together, and tell them my clients are upset about the bills. I’ll say, ‘Look, fellas, I know you’re getting rich off us, but that’s not good enough. My clients want you to bill more, okay. Stick it to us. You guys are working too cheap.’ That sound like a good idea?”

“Relax, Martin,” Vandemeer said. “The trial hasn’t started yet. I’m confident we’ll be sick of our own lawyers before we leave here.”

“Yeah, but this trial’s different. We all know that.” Jankle’s words trailed off as he lifted his glass. He had a drinking problem, the only one of the four. His company had quietly dried him out six months ago, but the pressure of the lawsuit was too much. Fitch, a former drunk himself, knew Jankle was in trouble. He would be forced to testify in a few weeks.

As if Fitch didn’t have enough to worry about, he was now saddled with the burden of keeping D. Martin Jankle sober until then. Fitch hated him for his weakness.

“I assume the plaintiff’s lawyers are ready,” asked another CEO.

“Safe assumption,” Fitch said with a shrug. “There are enough of them.”

Eight, at last count. Eight of the largest tort firms
in the country had allegedly put up a million bucks each to finance this showdown with the tobacco industry. They had picked the plaintiff, the widow of a man named Jacob L. Wood. They had picked the forum, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, because the state had beautiful tort laws and because juries in Biloxi could at times be generous. They hadn’t picked the judge, but they couldn’t have been luckier. The Honorable Frederick Harkin had been a plaintiff’s lawyer before a heart attack sent him to the bench.

It was no ordinary tobacco case, and everyone in the room knew it.

“How much have they spent?”

“I’m not privy to that information,” Fitch said. “We’ve heard rumors that their war chest may not be as loaded as advertised, maybe a small problem collecting the up-front money from a few of the lawyers. But they’ve spent millions. And they have a dozen consumer groups hanging around ready to pitch in advice.”

Jankle rattled his ice, then drained the last drop of liquid from his glass. It was his fourth drink. The room was silent for a moment as Fitch stood and waited and the CEO’s watched the carpet.

“How long will it last?” Jankle finally asked.

“Four to six weeks. Jury selection goes fast here. We’ll probably seat a jury by Wednesday.”

“Allentown lasted three months,” Jankle said.

“This ain’t Kansas, Toto. You want a three-month trial?”

“No, I was just, well …” Jankle’s words trailed off sadly.

“How long should we stay in town?” Vandemeer said, instinctively glancing at his watch.

“I don’t care. You can leave now, or you can wait until the jury is picked. You all have those big jets. If I need you, I can find you.” Fitch set his water on the mantel and looked around the room. He was suddenly ready to leave. “Anything else?”

Not a word.

“Good.”

He said something to José as he opened the front door, then he was gone. They stared in silence at the posh carpet, worrying about Monday, worrying about lots of things.

Jankle, his hands quivering slightly, finally lit a cigarette.

WENDALL ROHR made his first fortune in the suing game when two offshore oil workers were burned on a Shell rig in the Gulf. His cut was almost two million, and he quickly considered himself a trial lawyer to be reckoned with. He spread his money around, picked up more, cases, and by the age of forty had an aggressive firm and a decent reputation as a courtroom brawler. Then drugs, a divorce, and some bad investments ruined his life for a while, and at the age of fifty he was checking titles and defending shoplifters like a million other lawyers. When a wave of asbestos litigation swept the Gulf Coast, Wendall was once again in the right place. He made his second fortune, and vowed never to lose it. He built a firm, refurbished a grand suite of offices, even found a young wife. Free of booze and pills, Rohr directed his considerable energies into suing corporate America on behalf of injured people. On his second trip, he rose even quicker in trial lawyer circles. He grew a beard, oiled his hair,
became a radical, and was beloved on the lecture circuit.

Rohr met Celeste Wood, the widow of Jacob Wood, through a young lawyer who had prepared Jacob’s will in anticipation of death. Jacob Wood died at the age of fifty-one after smoking three packs a day for almost thirty years. At the time of his death, he was a production supervisor in a boat factory, earning forty thousand a year.

In the hands of a less ambitious lawyer, the case appeared to be nothing more than a dead smoker, one of countless others. Rohr, though, had networked his way into a circle of acquaintances who were dreaming the grandest dreams ever known to trial lawyers. All were specialists in product liability, all had made millions collecting on breast implants, Dalkon Shields, and asbestos. Now they met several times a year and plotted ways to mine the mother lode of American torts. No legally manufactured product in the history of the world had killed as many people as the cigarette. And their makers had pockets so deep the money had mildewed.

Rohr put up the first million, and was eventually joined by seven others. With no effort, the group quickly recruited help from the Tobacco Task Force, the Coalition for a Smoke Free World, and the Tobacco Liability Fund, plus a handful of other consumer groups and industry watchdogs. A plaintiff’s trial council was organized, not surprisingly with Wendall Rohr as the chairman and designated point man in the courtroom. Amid as much fanfare as it could generate, Rohr’s group had filed suit four years earlier in the Circuit Court of Harrison County, Mississippi.

According to Fitch’s research, the Wood case against Pynex was the fifty-fifth of its kind. Thirty-six had been dismissed for a multitude of reasons. Sixteen had gone to trial and ended with verdicts in favor of the tobacco companies. Two had ended in mistrials. None had been settled. Not one penny had ever been paid to a plaintiff in a cigarette case.

According to Rohr’s theory, none of the other fifty-four had been pushed by so formidable a plaintiff’s group. Never had the plaintiff been represented by lawyers with enough money to level the playing field.

Fitch would admit this.

Rohr’s long-term strategy was simple, and brilliant. There were a hundred million smokers out there, not all with lung cancer but certainly a sufficient number to keep him busy until retirement. Win the first one, then sit back and wait for the stampede. Every main street ham-and-egger with a grieving widow would be calling with lung cancer cases. Rohr and his group could pick and choose.

He operated from a suite of offices which took the top three floors of an old bank building not far from the courthouse. Late Friday night, he opened the door to a dark room and stood along the back wall as Jonathan Kotlack from San Diego operated the projector. Kotlack was in charge of jury research and selection, though Rohr would do most of the questioning. The long table in the center of the room was littered with coffee cups and wadded paper. The people around the table watched bleary-eyed as another face flashed against the wall.

Nelle Robert (pronounced Roh-bair), age forty-six, divorced, once raped, works as a bank teller, doesn’t smoke, very overweight and thus disqualified
under Rohr’s philosophy of jury selection. Never take fat women. He didn’t care what the jury experts would tell him. He didn’t care what Kotlack thought. Rohr never took fat women. Especially single ones. They tended to be tightfisted and unsympathetic.

He had the names and faces memorized, and he couldn’t take any more. He had studied these people until he was sick of them. He eased from the room, rubbed his eyes in the hallway, and walked down the stairs of his opulent offices to the conference room, where the Documents Committee was busy organizing thousands of papers under the supervision of André Durond from New Orleans. At this moment, at almost ten o’clock on Friday night, more than forty people were hard at work in the law offices of Wendall H. Rohr.

He spoke to Durond as they watched the paralegals for a few minutes. He left the room and headed for the next with a quicker pace now. The adrenaline was pumping.

The tobacco lawyers were down the street working just as hard.

Nothing rivaled the thrill of big-time litigation.

Three

T
he main courtroom of the Biloxi courthouse was on the second floor, up the tiled staircase to an atrium where sunlight flooded in. A fresh coat of white paint had just been applied to the walls, and the floors gleamed with new wax.

By eight Monday a crowd was already gathering in the atrium outside the large wooden doors leading to the courtroom. One small group was clustered in a corner, and was comprised of young men in dark suits, all of whom looked remarkably similar. They were well groomed, with oily short hair, and most either wore horn-rimmed glasses or had suspenders showing from under their tailored jackets. They were Wall Street financial analysts, specialists in tobacco stocks, sent South to follow the early developments of
Wood v
.
Pynex
.

Another group, larger and growing by the minute, hung loosely together in the center of the atrium. Each member awkwardly held a piece of paper, a jury summons. Few knew one another, but the papers
labeled them and conversation came easy. A nervous chatter rose quietly outside the courtroom. The dark suits from the first group became still and watched the potential jurors.

The third group wore frowns and uniforms and guarded the doors. No fewer than seven deputies were assigned to keep things secure on opening day. Two fiddled with the metal detector in front of the door. Two more busied themselves with paperwork behind a makeshift desk. They were expecting a full house. The other three sipped coffee from paper cups and watched the crowd grow.

The guards opened the courtroom doors at exactly eight-thirty, checked the summons of each juror, admitted them one by one through the metal detector, and told the rest of the spectators they would have to wait awhile. Same for the analysts and same for the reporters.

With a neat ring of folding chairs in the aisles around the padded benches, the courtroom could seat about three hundred people. Beyond the bar, another thirty or so would soon crowd around the counsel tables. The Circuit Clerk, popularly elected by the people, checked each summons, smiled, and even hugged a few of the jurors she knew, and in a much experienced way herded them into the pews. Her name was Gloria Lane, Circuit Clerk for Harrison County for the past eleven years. She wouldn’t dare miss this opportunity to point and direct, to put faces with names, to shake hands, to politic, to enjoy a brief moment in the spotlight of her most notorious trial yet. She was assisted by three younger women from her office, and by nine the jurors were all properly seated by number and were busy filling out another round of questionnaires.

Only two were missing. Ernest Duly was rumored to have moved to Florida, where he supposedly died, and there was not a clue to the whereabouts of Mrs. Telia Gail Ridehouser, who registered to vote in 1959 but hadn’t visited the polls since Carter beat Ford. Gloria Lane declared the two to be nonexistent. To her left, rows one through twelve held 144 prospective jurors, and to her right, rows thirteen through sixteen held the remaining 50. Gloria consulted with an armed deputy, and pursuant to Judge Harkin’s written edict, forty spectators were admitted and seated in the rear of the courtroom.

The questionnaires were finished quickly, gathered by the assistant clerks, and by ten the first of many lawyers began easing into the courtroom. They came not through the front door, but from somewhere in the back, behind the bench, where two doors led to a maze of small rooms and offices. Without exception they wore dark suits and intelligent frowns, and they all attempted the impossible feat of gawking at the jurors while trying to appear uninterested. Each tried vainly to seem preoccupied with weightier matters as files were examined and whispered conferences took place. They trickled in and took their places around the tables. To the right was the plaintiff’s table. The defense was next to it. Chairs were packed tightly into every possible inch between the tables and the wooden rail which separated them from the spectators.

Row number seventeen was empty, again Harkin’s orders, and in eighteen the boys from Wall Street sat stiffly and studied the backs of the jurors. Behind them were some reporters, then a row of local lawyers and other curious types. Rankin Fitch pretended to read a newspaper in the back row.