A Civil Action

by Jonathan Harr

  Since Anne knew most of the families, Reverend Young gave her the job of calling them to meet with the lawyer. The task made Anne uncomfortable. She wasn’t certain how some of the people might react to the idea of hiring a lawyer. She wrote down what she wanted to say and rehearsed it a few times: “We thought it might be a good idea to meet with an attorney to see what the possibilities are.”

  One woman whose son had died recently said coldly, “That was never on my mind.” The woman’s tone seemed to accuse Anne of attempting to turn a child’s terrible misfortune into profit. And a few families whose children were doing well in treatment declined the invitation. Anne thought perhaps they were superstitiously afraid, as if going to the law would cause their children to have relapses. But most of the families with leukemia in their households seemed interested.

  The meeting with Mulligan took place late in August at the church. Mulligan introduced himself and talked a little about his firm and the sort of cases he had handled. For the most part he listened to the families tell their stories. The big question was whom to blame for the contamination of Wells G and H. Most people thought the old Woburn tanneries were probably responsible. One person suggested they could sue the city or the state. Certainly the city had been warned, time and again, about the water quality, yet the officials had paid no heed. Another man, the owner of a supermarket in town whose daughter had died two years earlier, vehemently opposed that idea. He feared his customers would disapprove of a lawsuit against the city, especially if it resulted in raising taxes to pay the cost of a judgment.

  Someone asked Mulligan how much they would have to pay for his services. Mulligan explained that they would sign a standard contingency fee contract, which would entitle him to receive one third of any recovery, plus expenses he incurred in developing the case. The families had no obligation to pay him unless he settled the case or won a judgment in court.

  Mulligan made a good impression on most of the families. They liked his confidence and assurance, and the way he listened to their comments and observations. He hadn’t made any grand promises, but he had mentioned in passing some of the cases he had worked on, and he seemed like an able lawyer.

  At a second meeting some weeks later, in September, Mulligan asked those families interested in signing on with him to call at his office and arrange for an appointment. Five of the families—Anderson, Robbins, Zona, Kane, and Toomey—decided to have Mulligan represent them. That autumn, they drove into Boston to complete the paperwork and sign the standard personal injury contract forms.

  9

  Charles Anderson had been offered a promotion that required him to move to Toronto. He told Anne that he wanted to accept the offer, and he wanted her and the children to come with him.

  Anne replied that moving now would be unfair to Jimmy.

  “Toronto is not the end of the earth,” said Charles. “They have good doctors there, too.”

  In the summer of 1980, after nineteen years together, Anne and Charles separated. Anne remained in Woburn with the children.

  Jimmy was now eleven years old. He was small and frail, and he attended school fitfully, but since his relapse five years ago his blood counts had remained stable. Anne believed that he would, in time, be completely cured of the disease.

  Late that summer, however, Dr. Truman noted that the boy’s platelet count and white-blood-cell count were both falling. A bone marrow biopsy revealed immature cells with irregular nuclei. Although the cells were not typical of lymphoblastic leukemia, Dr. Truman feared the leukemia was recurring. He did two more bone marrow biopsies. The results were inconclusive. In November he discovered that the total number of cells in Jimmy’s bone marrow was decreasing rapidly, a condition known as aplastic anemia. The boy did not have leukemia, but without a functioning bone marrow, he would die just as certainly as if he did.

  Truman had never encountered this development before and it puzzled him. He stopped chemotherapy immediately. He tried to stimulate Jimmy’s bone marrow into producing platelets and white blood cells by administering anabolic steroids. That had no effect. Jimmy’s condition worsened. Truman tried a more experimental form of treatment with a compound known as ATG. “That, too, was unsuccessful,” recalled Truman at his deposition. “Bleeding worsened. His normal protective white blood cells vanished. Infections worsened.”

  On December 22, 1980, Anne called the Woburn fire department and asked for an ambulance to take her son to Massachusetts General. Jimmy was bleeding steadily and profusely from his nose and his mouth, and his urine was grossly bloody. As the ambulance crew loaded the boy onto a stretcher, one of the firemen asked Anne, “Is your son a patient of John Truman’s?”

  Anne, surprised, said, “How did you know?”

  “My son had leukemia, too. Dr. Truman was his doctor.”

  Anne had not seen the man at any of the meetings. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “John Lilley,” said the fireman.

  Anne knew the name. She remembered that day almost six years ago, during Jimmy’s first relapse, when a distraught older woman had told her in the hospital corridor that a boy named Michael Lilley had just died.

  Jimmy Anderson’s bleeding was controlled, although never completely arrested, by massive transfusions of platelets. He was twelve years old, and he knew his fate. “I’m going to die,” he told his mother angrily on the eighth day of his last hospitalization. “It’s not fair. I’ll never get out of here.”

  The pain, which had always been present in recent months, became unremitting. He shook with chills, bled from the nose and mouth, had ringing in his ears and blurred vision. He complained especially about the pain in his stomach. When pain medication was not immediately forthcoming, he demanded it. “Don’t you understand?” he shouted at a nurse. “I really need it.”

  The following day he became despondent. The nurses tried to coax him out of bed, but all he said was “I’ll never be able to go home.” Anne rarely left the hospital. On occasion she went to the cafeteria to eat, but most of her time was spent on the children’s cancer ward. Charles Anderson returned from Toronto to be with his son and to keep Anne company. By mid-January, the boy had reached a nadir. “Saga of intermittent fever goes on,” noted one of the nurses. “Mother has been here constantly and they both appear exhausted. Jim asking: Why me?”

  Jimmy died on Sunday morning, January 18, 1981. Five days later, the Centers for Disease Control and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health jointly released a report entitled Woburn: Cancer Incidence and Environmental Hazards. The report was based on the investigation that had started with Dr. Truman’s phone call to Clark Heath at the CDC more than a year earlier.

  The report confirmed that an unusual number of leukemia cases did indeed exist in east Woburn. It read, in part: “Analysis of residence at the time of diagnosis reveals a significant concentration of cases in the eastern part of Woburn, where the incidence of disease was at least seven times greater than expected. The incidence of childhood leukemia for the rest of Woburn was not significantly elevated compared to national rates.”

  The authors of the report said they could not establish a definite link between the contaminated drinking water and childhood leukemia. But they saw reason for suspicion: “Although the contaminants in wells G and H are not known to cause leukemia, the fact that organic contaminants were found in the water supply must be emphasized.” The report pointed out that the wells had been “on line during the presumed critical exposure period of the childhood leukemia cases and they served primarily the eastern part of Woburn.”

  The authors noted that the source of the contamination of the wells was still unknown. The Environmental Protection Agency was attempting to trace the contaminants back to the point of origin, but that task, time-consuming and costly, would take at least another year, and probably longer.

  The Lawyer

  1

  It was the Friday evening of Memorial Day weekend and the mood at Jason’s, a fashiona
ble bar in Boston’s Back Bay, was festive. Teresa Padro, a young woman who worked as a clothing buyer for a chain of national discount stores, sat at the bar waiting for a friend to arrive. Teresa’s job required that she travel a lot. She stayed in motels, worked late, and often had to fend off the advances of middle-aged male clients after business dinners. She was thirty-one years old. She had thick, dark brown hair that fell to her shoulders, almond-colored skin, and a body slim from regular exercise.

  Two men at the bar were trying to strike up a conversation with her. On the road, this would have been an annoyance. At home, in Boston, she felt mildly flirtatious. One of the men was making his pitch when she happened to glance at the door and met the eyes of a man who had just walked in. He was tall and lanky, and he wore (her expert eye could tell even at a distance) an expensive suit. She thought he looked “interesting,” as she later recalled, but just then one of the men beside her asked her to dance. She declined. Then his friend asked her, and she rejected him, too. A voice behind her said, “I’m the pinch hitter, since everyone else struck out.”

  She turned and saw the well-dressed man who had just walked in. He told her his name was Jan Schlichtmann, and then he asked if she’d ever heard of him.

  She thought that was a most audacious question. “Why? Are you famous?” she asked in a droll voice.

  He said he was a lawyer. He’d just settled the Copley Plaza Hotel fire case for $2.5 million. “The biggest wrongful death settlement in Massachusetts history!” he exclaimed. His picture had been in the Boston Herald. Hadn’t she seen it?

  “What kind of lawyer are you?” she asked.

  “I represent people who’ve been injured.”

  “Oh. An ambulance chaser.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I represent victims.”

  “You probably sue doctors,” she said. “You wouldn’t fit into my life. My mother and my father and my brother are all doctors.”

  He asked her what she was doing that weekend.

  “I’m going to the Cape,” she said.

  “Really? I’m going there, too.”

  “Are you driving?” she asked.

  “No, I’m taking the plane.”

  “Don’t you have a car?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I just bought a Porsche.”

  He was so unabashedly egotistical that she had to laugh. He was tall, six feet three inches, with a lean, narrow face and a prominent Semitic nose. He wore a thick but neatly trimmed mustache, perhaps to fill out his face. His suit was expensive—handmade, she could tell at a glance. But the tailoring could not hide the fact that he was as gangly as a boy. Even the collar of his hand-tailored shirt did not quite fit around a neck as spindly as his. The most attractive thing about him, she thought, were his brown eyes, which seemed warm and gentle. When she commented on his eyes some days later, he laughed and told her his father used to tease him by calling him Spaniel Eyes. That night, he did Irish and Italian accents for her and told jokes until finally, despite herself, she was laughing.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked him.

  No, he said, shaking his head, he didn’t. She could tell by the smile just creasing his lips that he thought he was finally getting somewhere with her.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  He said he wasn’t.

  She shrugged. “What’s so great about you, then?”

  When Teresa’s friend Alma arrived, he danced with both of them. He was not, she had to admit, a very good dancer, too loose-limbed for grace, but he was enthusiastic and not self-conscious.

  They spent most of that weekend together, in Boston. He lived on the top floor of an old and elegant nineteenth-century building on Beacon Hill. From his balcony he had a sweeping view of the Charles River and the Esplanade. He had more suits than any man she’d ever met, but she soon learned that he really knew very little about clothes. “He buys labels,” she explained, after several years with him. “He’s the type to buy Baccarat china because it’s Baccarat. He doesn’t have the self-assurance to believe it’ll look good if it doesn’t have a label.” She began educating him about clothes. She bought him ties as gifts. After he won a big case wearing her ties, he became superstitious and would never appear in front of a jury without one she had selected.

  He would take Teresa and her two best friends out on the town and entertain them the entire evening, laughing and dancing with each in turn. She thought he was astute about people. He could tell if she or one of her friends was having a problem of some kind. He’d ask about it and listen carefully to the answer. She became friends with the people who worked in his office, especially with his secretary, Kathy Boyer, who had worked for him since he started practicing law. When he won or settled a case, everyone in the office got a big bonus. He’d take the entire staff out for drinks and dinner whenever someone had a birthday. Sometimes he’d invite them all out for no reason at all. He always picked up the tab. When he prepared an opening or closing argument for a trial, he insisted that everyone in the office, even the receptionist and the filing clerks, listen and offer their opinions. During an actual trial, the entire office staff would come to the courthouse and sit in the gallery to watch him at work.

  At first Teresa thought he was simply self-centered, a flaw he himself seemed to recognize in his character. “He’s also very generous,” said Teresa, “because he knows he’s self-centered and he feels guilty about it.”

  • • •

  Lawyers in America have never been well liked. One of the first lawyers to arrive in the New World was an Englishman named Thomas Morton, who landed at Plymouth Colony in 1625, four years after the Pilgrims. Two years later he was jailed for trading firearms to the Indians and then expelled from the colony. In Massachusetts, fifteen lawyers practiced the profession in 1740, collecting debts and litigating disputes among merchants. By the time of the Revolution, that number had grown to seventy. For some citizens, lawyers had become “cursed hungry Caterpillars” whose fees “eat out the very Bowels of our Commonwealth.” Two hundred years later the basic complaint remains the same. “We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts,” said Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1977.

  As a youth, Jan Schlichtmann had not thought highly of the legal profession. He was born in Framingham, a working-class city dominated by a General Motors auto plant. His father, a traveling salesman, had always told his three sons that they should work for themselves. At the dinner table, he saw in his second son, Jan, a gift for argument. The boy had a passionate desire to persuade others to his own point of view, and he was unrelenting in his efforts. Irksome as this was in an adolescent, his father thought he saw in it the makings of a successful lawyer, and he urged Jan to consider the profession.

  At the University of Massachusetts, Schlichtmann studied philosophy. To him, the legal profession did not seem any more independent or exalted than the plumbing trade. That was the analogy that occurred to him when he thought about becoming a lawyer. People hired you to fix things in their lives—wills, divorces, collecting on bad debts—the same way they’d hire a plumber to fix clogged pipes and leaky faucets in their houses. Working in a big law firm would be even worse. You’d do the dirty work of the rich and powerful.

  When he graduated from college, in 1972, he married a fellow student. They moved to Rhode Island, where his wife entered graduate school. Schlichtmann, with a degree in philosophy, could not find a job that suited him. For want of anything better, he started selling life insurance to graduate students. In six months, he sold nearly a million dollars of insurance, but he despised the work. His marriage was unhappy. One day in the spring of 1973, he stopped selling insurance and started watching the Watergate hearings on television. For three months he sat at home, engrossed in the drama. His wife accused him of indolence. When the hearings ended, he knew he could never go back to selling insurance. He told himself he wanted to do something useful, something to benefit society, but he could not f
igure out what. He combed through the newspapers looking for a job. Finally he found an ad that read: “National Social Service Organization opening Rhode Island Branch. Looking for young, dynamic person as Executive Director. $8,500 salary.” He applied and discovered that the organization was the American Civil Liberties Union. One evening, he heard on the local television news that the ACLU had just opened its Rhode Island branch. Its new director, said the newscaster, was named Jan Schlichtmann.

  His first case at the ACLU involved a group of nuns and welfare mothers who had gathered in the State House rotunda to protest the governor’s cuts in welfare aid. The group convened at the State House once a week on Wednesday afternoons for half an hour. After a short prayer they’d sing, “Wake up, my people, wake up to the needs of all who suffer sorrow.… All across the nation, hungry people are starving.” On the third Wednesday, the governor had them ejected, claiming they were disrupting State House business. When they returned the following week, the governor threatened to arrest them.

  Schlichtmann looked for a lawyer among the ACLU’s membership who would take on the case, and then, full of zeal and impatience, he began working on it himself. He discovered that after the governor had ejected the nuns and welfare mothers, a theatrical troupe, invited by the governor’s wife, had performed in the rotunda for several hundred schoolchildren. Earlier that same week, the General Assembly had celebrated St. Joseph’s Day in the rotunda with a feast of Italian food and music. No one had protested these activities or claimed that they had disrupted State House business.

  Working on this case, Schlichtmann experienced a profound revelation. The concept of a system of justice—laws and courts that permitted welfare mothers to challenge governors!—seemed to unfold gloriously before him. He suddenly saw that lawyering wasn’t just wills, divorces, and sordid criminal matters, the leaky faucets and clogged pipes of society. The law, he decided, was perhaps the highest calling a man could aspire to. On behalf of the nuns and welfare mothers, he drafted a complaint and held a press conference on the State House steps, surrounded by his clients. Camera crews and reporters came to interview him. He saw himself on television for the first time that night. He would have liked to argue the case himself in federal court, but he was not a member of the bar. He recruited a young lawyer just out of night law school and sat with him at the counsel table in Judge Raymond Pettine’s courtroom, orchestrating the presentation of witnesses and evidence.