Jack specialized as a litigator in labor and employment law. At first, he represented big corporations, which made up the bulk of Bronson’s clients, in disputes with their employees. Like many a young law firm associate in major cities across the country, Jack was working long hours. He was learning, working hard, and climbing the ladder. He lived in a bachelor apartment down by the San Francisco waterfront, in the Marina neighborhood.
One day, around Father’s Day 1986, he was set up on a blind date with Carol Kingsley. She, too, was an associate at a San Francisco law firm. They met for brunch at a place near Union Square. “I remember not having any particular expectation in mind,” she said. “I came from the swimming pool and threw on a sundress, and I still remember having partially wet hair.” Jack was wearing a button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and a sweater-vest—one of his typical uniforms. Carol thought he was both “appropriately” and “nattily” dressed. “It certainly took me aback a little bit, thinking, Oh gee, I should have done a little better for this guy.” They spent the whole day together. After brunch, they walked up and down Union Street. They stopped at a toy store and played with some toys. “I could see the playful side of him, which was delightful,” she said. They shared a Dove bar—she still has the stick—because they were still full from their enormous brunch. “I felt totally comfortable with him,” she continued. They stopped by his apartment, which was nearby. “He had this big vase of beautiful irises on his coffee table,” she said. Carol was impressed by it, even if his apartment was never again kept so neatly. “It was just a wonderful afternoon,” she continued. He sent a handwritten note afterward to her office saying how much he enjoyed meeting and that he looked forward to seeing her again. It was “more of an East Coast thing,” she said, “but something I truly appreciated, this very pitch-perfect note.”
From that day on, Jack and Carol were virtually inseparable. They saw each other at least twice a week while they were dating and that increased over time until they moved in together, a year before they were married. “There was no gap in the relationship from the time we met each other until we got married,” she explained. “We were always together.”
She is not exactly sure why whoever fixed them up thought the match between a Catholic woman from the Midwest and the son of Holocaust survivors from rural Connecticut would work, but it did. Though he did not come right out and say so, it would be important to Jack for Carol to convert to Judaism, which she did about a month before they were married in 1990. By then, while he celebrated Shabbat on occasion and the High Holy Days—Passover, in particular, was a favorite holiday—he did not keep kosher. He remained devoted to Jewish culture and the faith, but in a different way.
In 1987, three years after Jack moved to San Francisco, he orchestrated his parents’ move to a nearby retirement community in Walnut Creek. The Bermans sold the farmhouse and its sixty acres for around $300,000—a substantial profit above the $12,000 they had paid for it—and then wrote a check for the condo in Walnut Creek. Jack helped them get settled and navigate the new surroundings, and he and Carol visited them regularly.
Carol recalled the first time she met Jack’s parents. Some six months after they had started dating, but before they were living together, Carol invited Misha and Bluma over to her tiny apartment for Shabbat dinner. “I talked to Jewish friends of mine, including an ex-boyfriend who is Jewish, around what I should serve,” Carol said. “[I] went out and bought cookbooks. I made two enormous challahs, one poppy and one sesame, and made kreplach from scratch, the whole nine yards.”
The first problem Carol confronted when Jack’s parents arrived was the fact that she had a Siamese cat, which came right up to Bluma and rubbed against her. “Bluma, I could tell that she didn’t care for the cat being inside,” Carol said. “Jack later explained, ‘Well, they lived on a farm.’” When Carol offered them something to eat—this was meant to be Shabbat dinner after all—Bluma surprised her by saying, “Well, we’ve already eaten. But we’ll eat a little bit of the fruit.” Carol was stunned. “I’d taken off the day at work to make this meal, which had gone into considerable planning, but they already ate,” she said. “I thought, Oh dear, this isn’t going to go very far in terms of the culinary part of it. Jack, of course, was Jack. He’s very good-spirited and just rolling with it, and chatting.”
At one point, Bluma had to go to the bathroom, which required her to go through the small apartment’s small kitchen. “On her way,” Carol continued, “she saw the challah sitting on the table and she just shrieked. I didn’t know what the shrieking was all about and I thought she had slipped or hit something. So I ran the few yards to get in there because she said ‘Misha! Come! Come! Look at this!’ Misha came in and he broke out in a smile as she’s pointing to the challah, and she said, ‘Where did you get these amazing challah?’” Carol said she’d made them. She continued, “She looked at me just with astonishment and she said, ‘You made it?’” From that day on, Bluma made challah—challah rolls actually—from Carol’s recipe, and everything seemed to be just fine, even though she could sense that the Bermans would have preferred that Jack had found a nice Jewish girl. On the other hand, Carol had agreed to convert, so there was that.
On August 5, 1990, Jack and Carol were married at the elegant Beaulieu Vineyards in the wine country northeast of San Francisco. It was a bittersweet day. Carol’s mother had died years earlier. Carol’s father did not attend the ceremony because Carol had converted to Judaism, and Carol’s sister and her two young daughters decided not to be in the wedding party so as not to offend their father, although they did attend the wedding itself. “This was very hurtful for me, and Jack, too,” she said. Other than that, it was a joyous occasion. Allen Bennett, the first openly gay rabbi in the United States, officiated. They knew each other because Jack was on the board of the Northern Pacific regional office of the American Jewish Congress when Bennett was its newly appointed executive director. “What I think made him tick was that he was, in every sense of the term, driven,” Rabbi Bennett said. “He was not I think ever content to be just as good as he could be. I think he was really driven to be the best that there was, and probably I would say more often than not he was successful in that effort.”
Eventually, it was time for children. “To him getting married was the green light for starting a family,” Carol said. When she shared the results of a positive pregnancy test with Jack, he was ecstatic. “His whole face turned from this tired kind of slouched-in-the-chair to literally beaming!” Carol said. “Sitting up straight, wide-eyed, huge beaming smile, eyes lighting up.”
Zack Berman was born on March 31, 1992. Carol has a memory of Jack being by her side as she was giving birth, and watching him as he ate one Wheat Thin after another. “Those Wheat Thins were going in really fast and it made me laugh,” she recalled. “It was just so Jack in so many ways. He was undoubtedly starving.” Soon enough, both Jack and Carol were back at work and Zack was in a regular child-care program. There were the family trips together: Carol remembers when she and Jack decided to drive with his parents from San Francisco down to San Diego in Carol’s small German-made BMW. The car was packed. Jack did most of the driving. A nine-month-old Zack was in his car seat in the back between his grandparents, who had barely survived the Holocaust. It was a twelve-hour drive. They stayed for a week in an apartment on the grounds of the Hotel del Coronado. “We all had a terrific time,” Carol said. “They had a barbecue area there and Jack cooked on the barbecue. His parents really loved being part of all this. They loved being with the baby.”
* * *
IN 1991, JACK BECAME A PARTNER AT BRONSON. After several years of defending corporations in employment lawsuits, he began to think the time had come for Bronson to develop a practice representing the plaintiffs in these suits—the people who thought the big corporations had screwed them. The idea was in perfect keeping with Jack’s desire to comfort the afflicted. But getting his relatively staid corporate law firm to agree to allo
w him to start a practice representing plaintiffs in employee matters was not easy.
Ilyse Levine-Kanji worked for Jack on the new endeavor. “I was nervous at first because traditionally Bronson had represented companies and did the employment defense work, and I’m politically very liberal and so I wasn’t sure I was going to like that,” she said. “But very soon after I joined the firm, Jack became a partner and his plan was to bring in a lot of plaintiff-side employment discrimination cases.… It was a huge change of mind-set for Bronson and the other people in the employment department. I know it was something that he obviously had been thinking about for a while.” She said it was a testament to how deeply the firm respected Jack that it allowed him to start the plaintiff’s practice, even though the payoff was not immediate. Change is always hard for people, and this was a big change for Bronson. “Jack was definitely very well respected in the law firm,” she continued. “He worked very hard, worked a number of late hours, but also [was] just smart and very, very professional. Very collegial, had a good sense of humor. He was easygoing and very easy to talk to.”
One case they worked on together involved Jody Jones Sposato’s sexual discrimination claim against her employer, Electronic Data Systems, then owned by the flamboyant billionaire entrepreneur and presidential candidate Ross Perot. In February 1992, EDS fired Sposato from her software sales job, after months of making her professional life nearly intolerable. She hired Jack to sue EDS, alleging that the company had sexually discriminated against her.
A deposition for Sposato was set for June 30, 1993, at the law firm of Pettit & Martin, EDS’s outside counsel for the case. Pettit’s offices were in downtown San Francisco, at 101 California Street, a typical nondescript forty-eight-story glass-and-granite skyscraper the likes of which had started popping up in cities across the country in the late 1970s. This particular structure was built in 1982; its only distinguishing feature—although not a flattering one—was an odd entryway with a glass atrium protruding at a forty-five-degree angle. Sposato’s deposition ran long; a second day was scheduled for July 1.
That morning Carol got up and went to work very early at her new law firm, Bancroft & McAlister. She was in eat what you kill mode there, trying to get a contract drafted. She didn’t have any help at that point so she got up at 4 a.m. and quickly headed out the door to the Muni train, which took her downtown in ten minutes. Misha and Bluma happened to have stayed over at their home the night before. Before he headed downtown to 101 California, Jack had to get them to the Muni train, which would take them to the BART and then back home. He also had to drop Zack at his playdate at a nearby park, where Leona, the nanny he shared with another toddler, would watch him during the day.
The plan was for Jack to take Carol’s BMW, drop off his parents and his son, then park the car downtown. After the deposition with Jody, he had to go to the airport for an afternoon flight to Los Angeles, where he had more depositions to take for a different case. At some point during the day, he needed to call Carol and tell her where he had parked her car so that she could then pick it up and pick Zack up from the park or wherever he and Leona had ended up. Carol said, “What was nice about this morning is that his parents were here. He was able to hug and kiss them goodbye. He was able to see his son that morning, hug and kiss him goodbye.” In a half daze that morning, he had also kissed and hugged Carol.
At some point during the afternoon, Carol became aware that she had not heard from Jack about where he had parked her car. “I thought, Well … I was so busy, though, with this transaction that I was working, that I really didn’t have time at that time,” she said, and then told herself, “He’s in a deposition, so he’ll call me when he’s not in a deposition or not traveling. You know he’ll call. But I was just conscious that I didn’t have a call or a message from him.” By midafternoon, Carol had finished her work and decided to head to the Bay Club, a gym she belonged to, before picking up Zack. “I didn’t know where the car was anyway and I put in a message to Jack on his voice mail saying, ‘Please let me know where the car is,’” Carol recalled. “I thought that by the time I get back, I’ll have a message from him telling me where the car is.”
* * *
A YEAR OR SO EARLIER, Gian Luigi Ferri, a fifty-five-year-old struggling businessman, had begun to show an interest in guns and gun shows. Ferri had been living since 1992 in a one-bedroom apartment in Woodland Hills, thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles. He owned ADF Mortgage, Inc., a mortgage brokerage he founded in 1987, with offices on the second floor of a strip mall in Woodland Hills.
By all accounts, Ferri had had a difficult life, filled mostly with disappointment. At twenty, he started working as an engineer, and at twenty-seven he emigrated to the United States from Bari, Italy, settling briefly in Boston. Shortly thereafter, he moved to San Francisco. He was peripatetic, living all over the peninsula, Sonoma County, and Santa Cruz. He worked as a draftsman for Stanford Oil Co., then a counselor at Sunny Hills children’s center in San Anselmo, then an instructor at Sonoma State University. In 1969, he enrolled at University of California–Santa Cruz, where he received a degree in biology and psychology. That same year, he married Donna Jean Benedetti, a mental health worker, and became a naturalized citizen. They moved to Marin County, where Ferri worked as a mental health counselor for the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services. He ran a psychodrama group, where attendees acted out various family situations. He also received a master’s degree from Sonoma State.
In 1977, he and Benedetti divorced and Ferri began volunteering for the Reverend Terry Cole-Whittaker, a former Miss California turned television evangelist and proselytizer for the power of positive thinking. She coined the phrase Prosperity, Your Divine Right. Ferri seemed to take the aphorism to heart but didn’t have much success in business. He lived between Las Vegas and the Bay Area and tried to make real estate deals in California and Las Vegas; most were unsuccessful and resulted in lawsuits. His bookkeeper in Las Vegas could not recall that he ever completed a deal.
In 1981, Ferri hired Pettit & Martin to help him arrange an $8 million deal he was trying to put together with a group of Italian investors to buy three mobile home parks in Indiana and Kentucky. He was able to borrow $6 million and used another $1.9 million, mostly from his investors, to make a down payment, which was subsequently lost when the deal fell apart due to problems that developed because the mobile home parks were on a floodplain. Ferri’s investors sued him and Ferri in turn sued the seller, Marcus & Millichap, a realty firm. He claimed the seller had misrepresented the property. In 1982, Peter Russell, a Pettit & Martin attorney, flew to Indianapolis to find Ferri a local attorney to help him resolve the litigation over the soured deal. In the end, the lawyer was successful, winning Ferri a settlement of $1 million—$223,000 in cash, which he used to cover other debts, and the balance as part of the restructuring of the $6 million loan. But Ferri still lost himself and his investors $2 million in the deal.
Around this time, Pettit & Martin also advised Ferri in a land deal involving a residential development in Leadville, California. But this deal, too, ended badly: Ferri lost $300,000 when he was not allowed to build on the land. Some eighteen months before moving to Woodland Hills, he ran a real estate investment firm in Larkspur, in Marin County. One acquaintance there told the Los Angeles Times that Ferri was a “wheeler-dealer.” He was a defendant in a lawsuit that accused him of taking $480,000 from investors but failing to return any of the profits from the investment to them. Eventually, the investors dropped the suit because they decided it would cost too much to try to unravel Ferri’s complex legal and financial machinations surrounding the deal. “He didn’t seem like a bad guy,” explained attorney Fredrica Greene, who represented the investors, “but I definitely had a feeling that he might be of less-than-sterling character.”
Once he moved to Woodland Hills in February 1992, he rented an apartment and set up his mortgage business. He demanded two months’ free rent from the landlord,
who described him as “an aggressive person.” He quickly ran into more financial difficulties. In October 1992, he spoke with bankruptcy attorneys in Irvine about the possibility of filing for personal bankruptcy. “He was very gentle, very friendly, a chubby little guy,” recalled Elias Francisco, the bankruptcy attorney Ferri consulted. “I got the feeling he had a lot of money at one time.” But he no longer did, and he could not even pay the $1,100 bankruptcy-filing fee. It turned out he owed $8.7 million to investors and business creditors, and owed more than $100,000 on his personal credit cards. He was also two months behind on his $800-a-month rent and had been threatened with eviction, twice. He had a state tax lien against him, for back taxes owed, for $3,500. He was two months behind on the payments for his five-year-old white Cadillac. “We liked him and took pity on him,” said Azar Torabi, an insurance broker who worked in an office near Ferri’s in Woodland Hills. “He was very much a loner.”
But he also possessed a vicious temper and was simply odd. He appeared to have no close friends, and his few acquaintances described him as “a loner who was given to mood swings, unprovoked fits of rage [and] long periods of seething anger.” A former secretary described him as being “kind and gentle one moment” and then, without warning, “becoming very upset, sometimes fuming for several days” before recovering. She said he was very hard to work for because his mood swings were unpredictable. “He was really a strange man,” said Diane Mohler, manager of the Business Center of Las Vegas, which, for $140 per month, had received calls and collected mail for Ferri’s ADF Mortgage, Inc. “You couldn’t get anything out of him. He was really secretive.”
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