Bearing Witness

by Michael A. Kahn

  I pressed the buzzer. After a moment, it crackled and a voice said, “Who is it?”

  I leaned toward the voice box. “Rachel Gold and Professor Goldberg.”

  I looked over at Benny and winked. Might as well milk that title for all it was worth, although today he looked less like a professor of law than an aging roadie for Neil Young. He was wearing his Portland Beavers baseball cap turned backward, green mirrored wraparound shades, a black sweatshirt with a ZZ Top logo, baggy olive army pants, and red Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops. In fairness, though, he wasn’t the only one dressed for comfort: I had on my faded Levi’s, a Chicago Blackhawks jersey, and my old pair of Nike Windrunners. No sense putting on office clothes to sort through dusty boxes of old documents.

  The buzzer sounded and I pulled open the door. Ahead of us was a steep wooden stairway carpeted in a shabby brown runner. The stairs creaked as we climbed them toward the exposed fluorescent ceiling lights at the top of the landing. We’d been told that we’d be met by Willie, and as we reached the landing a man stepped into view with a security badge that read WILLIE TURNER.

  I suppose that because this was the South, I assumed Willie would be Eagle Engineering’s version of Boxcar Willie. But this was no Hee-Haw rent-a-cop in overalls and clodhoppers chewing on a stem of hay. No, this Willie was a dignified, middle-aged black man with chiseled features and hard eyes, dressed in sharply pressed security guard blues. Then again, we probably didn’t fit his images of a Yankee attorney and law school professor, although you’d never know it from his deadpan expression.

  “Mr. Turner, my name is Rachel Gold, and this is Professor Goldberg.”

  We shook hands and he instructed us to follow him. He led us down a narrow corridor toward the back of what was clearly a functioning warehouse operation—we passed several small offices where men or women were typing at computer terminals or talking on the telephone. We took a stairway down and into a large open area two stories tall that was crowded with rows of materials stacked on pallets on the concrete floor. Off to the right were several loading docks. I saw a forklift with a bale of barrels heading toward an open sliding door on one of the docks.

  We followed Willie to a door marked EXIT against the back wall and stepped into a narrow alley behind the warehouse. Across the way was the redbrick exterior of the back side of another warehouse. There were three gray metal doors, each about thirty yards apart. Willie walked to the one on the far right and unlocked the door. Stepping into the darkness, he slid his hand along the wall until he found the light switch and flipped it on.

  “We put a table in here for you,” he said, “and some folding chairs. If you need to use the facilities or have any questions, just come across the alley and ring the back doorbell. Someone will open it.” He paused and nodded stiffly. “Good luck, folks.” He crossed the alley, unlocked the back door to the main warehouse, and disappeared inside.

  “Argh,” Benny groaned.

  We were standing in a dimly lit space about the size of a basketball half-court—roughly forty feet by forty feet. The room was illuminated by a half dozen naked lightbulbs hanging by cords from the ceiling. Two folding chairs and a rickety wooden table were in the center of the room, positioned directly beneath one of the bulbs. A network of pipes crisscrossed the plaster ceiling, which was water-stained in some places and crumbling in others. The concrete floor was littered with cigarette butts and rat droppings. The walls were hidden behind boxes. Stacks of boxes. Boxes of different sizes and shapes. Easily more than one hundred of them. Piled in uneven heaps all along the walls.

  Benny stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips surveying the piles of boxes. After a moment, he walked over to the mound of boxes stacked along the back wall. He studied the label on the top box and then lifted the lid to peer inside. He let the lid drop down and turned to scan the room again. Looking toward me, he shook his head as his shoulders sagged.

  “Shit,” he groaned.

  ***

  Shit,” he groaned.

  I patted him on the back. “Come on, champ,” I said. “We’ve been to the shrine, we’ve seen the King’s tomb, we’ve eaten more barbecue, and best of all, we’re at least halfway through. What could be bad?”

  Benny gave me a dubious look and trudged over to the next pile of unopened boxes.

  It was ten minutes after three in the afternoon. We’d reviewed documents for four and a half hours that morning. At twelve-thirty, bleary-eyed and hungry, we’d staggered out of the warehouse, climbed into the car, and drove to a place called Neely’s, where we had two more plates of excellent barbecue. (Last night it had been a joint called Interstate.) After lunch it was south on Elvis Presley Boulevard to Graceland for the grand tour. I watched Benny go gaga in the Jungle Room, which looked like what you’d get if you gave LSD to a hillbilly decorator and set him loose in a Pier 1 Imports warehouse. In the Meditation Garden out back, Benny stood at the foot of Elvis’s grave for a long time staring silently at the words engraved on the slab of marble covering the grave. The Christmas season had arrived at Graceland, and the grave was surrounded with floral arrangements and long-stemmed red roses and wreaths and Teddy bears and little Santas and kneeling porcelain angels. The only thing missing was the Velvet Elvis.

  By the time we got back to the Eagle Engineering warehouse, we’d both forgotten how miserable our morning had been. It came rushing back, though, the moment Willie unlocked the door to our document dungeon. Although we were now more than halfway through—specifically, sixty-five boxes reviewed, including all of the ones along the left wall and two-thirds of the ones along the back wall—our progress was deceptive. We’d found nothing of value and very little that was even colorably relevant. Just thousands and thousands of seemingly irrelevant documents—boxes of reports by structural engineers, of drawings by architects, of inventory lists and reconciliations going all the way back to the 1950s, of change orders on unrelated construction jobs. Mainly old junk. Boxes and boxes and boxes of it. The only startling thing we’d found that morning was a dead rat in a box of invoices and subcontractor bills on a wastewater treatment plant built during the 1970s near the town of Newport, Tennessee.

  We’d brought along dozens of packs of those yellow Post-its with the idea of sticking a note on each document we wanted copied. In all sixty-five boxes reviewed during the morning, we’d stickered exactly seventeen documents, and none was significant—a few organizational charts, a couple of corporate franchise tax filings, a handful of financial statements.

  Benny lifted the top box off the pile and lugged it over to the table in the middle of the room. He looked down at the box and then looked up at me with a scowl. “This sucks.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “Big time.”

  “Bigger than big.” He looked down at the box and shook his head. “This is a colossal suck.” He pulled off the lid and stared at the jumble of documents. “A black hole suck.”

  Ninety minutes later, Benny broke the silence. “Aw, no.”

  I looked up from my box, which was on the table. Benny was standing along the side wall, where he had just lifted a box lid and peered in.

  “What?”

  He turned to me with a look of disgust. “Expense reports. I hate expense reports.”

  “Whose?” I asked.

  He leafed through a few pages. “Some guy named Kruppa. Oh, Jeez, these things date back to the sixties, for chrissake.”

  “We need to review them.”

  He turned to me with an dubious expression. “What do you mean ‘we,’ Keemosabe?”

  I sighed. “Okay, Tonto, bring me the box.”

  He carried it over and dropped it on the table behind the one I was looking through.

  Forty minutes later, he broke the silence, this time with a question. “San Carlos de Bariloche?”

  I looked up from the expense reports. “Who?”


  Benny was holding up a thick file he’d pulled out of one of the boxes. “Some town.”

  “Where?”

  He paged through a few documents. “Beats me.”

  “What about it?”

  “These guys did some sort of a groundwater treatment plant for the town of San Carlos de Bariloche.”

  I shrugged. “They did a lot of big groundwater treatment jobs.”

  “Yeah, but this one’s outside the country.” He was studying the document. “Somewhere down in South America.”

  I mulled it over. “Well, outside the country is probably outside the lawsuit.”

  “Maybe, but this was a joint venture.” He looked up from the documents with puzzled expression. “With Beckman Engineering.”

  “No kidding?” I stood up. “What’s the name of that place?”

  “San Carlos de Bariloche.”

  I brought over a legal pad. “How recent was this job?”

  “Not too: 1958.”

  I looked at one of the documents with the town’s name on it and copied the name onto the legal pad. “’Fifty-eight,” I mused. “That’s a long time ago.”

  “But it’s evidence of dealings between these two companies.”

  I mulled it over as I returned to the table. “Evidence of a joint venture in another country? Not exactly killer evidence.”

  “You never know.” He pointed toward the packs of Post-its on the table. “Toss me one of those doohickeys. Might as well copy the file.”

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, I looked up. “Benny.”

  “You rang?” He was over by the wall, sorting through the contents of one of the boxes.

  I held up a stapled packet of documents, my eyes wide. “Bingo.”

  He came over. “Bingo?”

  I handed him the set of documents. The cover page was an Eagle Engineering travel expense form. Stapled to it were about a dozen receipts, including hotel, rental car, and restaurants.

  Benny studied the cover page. “A two-day trip to Chicago, eh? Back in late March of 1983.” He glanced down at me. “Who’d you say this Max Kruppa was?”

  “The founder of Eagle.”

  Benny glanced down the entries on the cover page. “‘Business purpose,’” he read, “‘meet with suppliers and others.’”

  “Look at the American Express receipt,” I said. “The one for dinner in a private room at Morton’s.”

  Benny found it. “More than five hundred bucks, eh? That was a lot of dough back then.” He looked at me. “So what’s the punch line?”

  “Turn it over.”

  Because the receipts were stapled together, he had to turn the documents around and fold them back to read the reverse side of the American Express receipt, which is where the cardholder writes down a description of the expense.

  Benny squinted as he read Max Kruppa’s barely legible handwriting. When he finished, he looked down at me with his eyes wide. “Holy shit.”

  I nodded.

  Scrawled on the back of the receipt was the following “business purpose”:

  Meet w/Koll, Muller, Beckman, Beek & Eicken to divide up pending federal IFBs.

  An IFB is contractor shorthand for an “invitation for bid,” which is what Eagle Engineering’s people would have called the notices of federal government procurement invitations that appeared each day in Commerce Business Daily. Koll, Muller, Beckman, Beek, and Eicken were, of course, the heads of the other five companies back then. Thus, according to the American Express receipt, on March 26, 1983, the presidents of the six companies involved in the alleged bid-rigging conspiracy met in a private room at Morton’s steakhouse in Chicago for the purpose of dividing up the pending federal contracts, which is a slightly oblique way of saying that these six men met in secret one night to decide who would submit the winning bid on each of the pending federal contracts.

  Benny turned the receipt over. “March of ’eighty-three.” He looked at me. “Beyond the statute of limitations.”

  “That’s okay. It’s still evidence.”

  He chuckled as he waved the packet of receipts. “You better believe it, woman.”

  Although that meeting occurred outside the time period covered by my lawsuit, I would argue for its admissibility at trial under the theory that bid-rigging meetings are like cockroaches: when you stumble across one, you can be fairly certain there’s more where that one came from.

  I pulled the next stapled expense report out of the box. “Keep your fingers crossed,” I said. “Maybe there’s another needle in this haystack.”

  ***

  There wasn’t, but we did find some other things worth copying. For example, the Eagle Engineering federal contract bid documents we located fit the pattern we’d seen with the Beckman bid documents: thick files on the bids they’d won, thin ones—or just empty file folders—on the others, all of which tended to suggest that Eagle Engineering knew in advance which jobs it was going to win, and thus which jobs were worth the time and effort necessary to make an accurate assessment of the likely costs of the project.

  In addition, the documents revealed that the groundwater treatment plant in San Carlos de Bariloche was not Eagle’s only joint venture down there. In 1968, Eagle and one of the other alleged co-conspirators, Beek Contracting, built a floodwater-control system on Lake Nahuel Huapí, which appeared to be on the outskirts of San Carlos de Bariloche.

  Although I found no additional incriminating American Express receipts, there were two boxes filled with Max Kruppa’s appointment calendars and personal papers. The calendars covered the period 1956 through 1993. (Kruppa died in 1994.) Although I didn’t have time to go through each one, I spotted a few cryptic entries that suggested illegal meetings among the co-conspirators.

  Even more tantalizing was a collection of yellowed carbon copies of typed correspondence dating back to the company’s founding in 1938. The letters covered the period 1938 through 1945. Although they were addressed to people in the United States, five of them were written in what appeared to be German. One of the letters was addressed to Otto Koll in Chicago, and another was addressed to Conrad Beckman in St. Louis. Although the letters were far outside the statute of limitations, if the topic was bid-rigging, they could be even more valuable than the American Express receipt or the calendar entries. Much the way adults will spell certain words or use a secret code when discussing certain topics around their children, perhaps Max Kruppa was less circumspect when communicating with his co-conspirators in a language he may have assumed most law enforcement officers would not understand.

  I’d already made arrangements with a Memphis copy service that, according to Kenny Randall, specialized in big copy jobs. Two of the copy guys met us at the Eagle warehouse at five-thirty that evening. I showed them the various documents I wanted copied. They promised to have them delivered to St. Louis at least an hour before the start of my deposition of Conrad Beckman tomorrow afternoon.

  The delivery deadline was important. My two-hour deposition would be my only shot at him before trial. I might just decide to spice up those two hours with a few surprises from Memphis.

  Chapter Ten

  Precisely at three.

  Just another example of the petty oneupmanship that the Roth & Bowles litigators had cultivated to a high art—or a low farce. So long as I was there by three o’clock, the one thing that definitely would not begin on time was the deposition of Conrad Beckman. Instead, I’d be kept waiting whatever length of time they deemed necessary to score another point in the silly power game that only they were keeping score in. Nonetheless, I had to play along, for if I showed up at, say, 3:10 p.m., they would all be waiting for me in the conference room and Kimberly Howard would imperiously announce that I’d already used up ten minutes of my allotted two hours.

  Accordingly, at 2:52 p.m. on Friday afternoon I got off th
e elevator on the fifty-first floor. The words “Roth & Bowles” were engraved in the slab of gray marble over the portal. I stepped into the pretentious wood-paneled reception area. The prim receptionist with the British accent announced me to Kimberly Howard’s secretary and directed me toward the waiting area behind her, where my court reporter, Jan, was already seated. They let us cool our heels until 3:15 p.m., and then Kimberly’s secretary arrived to lead us down the hall, around the corner, and down another hall. She opened the door to a huge conference room. It had a mahogany conference table as long as a bowling lane and a state-of-the-art panel of video screens and teleconferencing equipment along the far wall. The side wall along the length of the conference table was solid floor-to-ceiling windows with a dramatic view of the St. Louis riverfront.

  We were alone in the huge room. God forbid Kimberly and her entourage should have to wait for us. Jan set up her shorthand equipment at the far end of the table, and I arranged my stuff next to her along the side of the table. No doubt, Kimberly and Beckman would set up camp across from me. After a few minutes of idly clicking my nails on the tabletop, I stood and turned to look out the window. From fifty-one stories up, the Arch was a silver croquet wicket below. I checked my watch—3:21 p.m. I took a seat with my back to the windows and waited.

  And waited.

  At 3:43 p.m., the conference-room door swung open and in marched the forces of darkness in single file. Kimberly Howard was in the lead. Behind her came Laurence Browning, the obsequious senior associate, and behind Laurence came one of the two younger male associates who had flanked her at the status conference in Judge Wagner’s chambers. And finally, striding into the room behind the others but towering over them all at six foot three, was Conrad Beckman. He wore a dark blue suit, crisp white shirt, and a gray-and-navy-striped tie. With his silver hair combed straight back, thin lips, strong jaw, and steely blue eyes, he looked every inch the intimidating chairman of the board. Although he was now in his early seventies, he radiated a strength that was athletic and surprisingly rugged. This was no elegant, white-haired fencer with épée and black tights. No, this was an aging bare-knuckles boxer who’d knock you on your butt if your attention wavered for just an instant.