The Litigators (Page 55)

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Indeed there was. Big photos of Oscar in the metro sections of both the Tribune and the Sun-Times. In all fairness to the press, how many stories do you get wherein an old lawyer is bunking at his office and shoots an intruder who is carrying a Molotov cocktail designed to burn down the building in retaliation for the firm’s filing of a wage dispute involving undocumented workers who are being abused by a company that, years ago, had links to organized crime? Oscar was being portrayed as a fearless gunslinger from the Southwest Side, and, by the way, one of the country’s leading mass tort specialists in the assault on Varrick Labs and its dreadful drug Krayoxx. The Tribune ran a smaller photo of David, as well as shots of the owner of Cicero Pipe and his lieutenants as they were being hauled into jail.

The entire alphabet was rushing in—FBI, DOL, ICE, INS, OSHA, DHS (Homeland Security), OFCCP (Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs)—and most had something to say to the reporters. The job site was shut down for the second day, and the prime contractor was screaming. Finley & Figg was again besieged by reporters, investigators, Krayoxx hopefuls, and more than the usual riffraff from the street. Oscar, Wally, and Rochelle kept their weapons close. Young David remained blissfully naive.

Two weeks later, Justin Bardall left the hospital in a wheelchair. He and his boss, along with one other, had been indicted on numerous charges by a federal grand jury, and their lawyers were already discussing the possibility of plea bargains. His left fibula was shattered and more surgery would be needed, but his doctors expected a full recovery with time. He had mentioned to his lawyers, his boss, and the police that the shattering of his left fibula had been unnecessary; the shot was taken after he’d been wounded and was no longer a threat, but he found no sympathy. The general reaction could be summed up by a detective who said, “You’re lucky he didn’t blow your head off.”

CHAPTER 30

Jerry Alisandros finally made good on a promise. He was extremely busy organizing the settlement negotiations, and according to the associate Wally spoke to, he, Jerry, simply didn’t have the time to spend on the phone with the dozens of lawyers he was juggling. But in the third week of July, he finally sent in the experts.

The company’s name was meaningless—Allyance Diagnostic Group, or ADG, as it preferred to be called. As best Wally could tell, ADG was an Atlanta-based team of medical technicians who did nothing but travel the country running tests on people who were clamoring to profit from Jerry’s latest mass tort attack. As instructed, Wally rented two thousand square feet in a dingy strip mall, a space that had once housed a low-end pet supply store. He hired a contractor to erect walls and doors and a cleaning service to fix things up. The front windows were covered with brown paper; there was no signage. He rented a few cheap chairs and tables and a desk and installed a phone and a copier. All bills were sent by Wally to an assistant in Jerry’s firm who did nothing but keep the books dealing with the Krayoxx litigation.

When the space was ready, ADG moved in and went to work. Its team consisted of three technicians, all properly attired in aqua surgical scrubs. Each had a stethoscope. They looked so official that even Wally at first figured they were highly skilled and credentialed. They were not, but they had tested thousands of potential plaintiffs. Their leader was Dr. Borzov, a cardiologist from Russia who had made a lot of money diagnosing patients/clients for Jerry Alisandros and a dozen other trial lawyers around the country. Dr. Borzov rarely saw an obese person who wasn’t suffering from a significant medical problem that could be pinned on the mass-tort-drug-of-the-month. He never testified in court—his accent was too thick and his résumé was too thin—but he was worth his weight in gold in the screening rooms.

David, because he was the de facto paralegal for all (now) 430 non-death Krayoxx clients, and Wally, because he had hustled them all together, were both present when ADG began its assembly line. On schedule, three clients arrived at 8:00 a.m. and were greeted with coffee, Wally, and a cute ADG technician in scrubs and white rubber hospital clogs. The paperwork took ten minutes and was primarily designed to ensure that the client had indeed taken Krayoxx for more than six months. The first client was led into another room where ADG had installed its own echocardiogram and two other technicians were waiting. One explained the procedure—“We’re just taking a digital picture of your heart”—while the other helped the client onto an official, heavily fortified hospital bed that ADG hauled around the country, along with the echocardiogram. As they probed the patient’s chest with the sonar, Dr. Borzov entered the room and nodded slightly at the patient. His bedside manner was never reassuring, but then he had no real patients. He wore a full-length white exam coat, had his name stenciled above the left pocket, and had his own stethoscope for good measure and effect, and when he spoke, his accent conveyed a sense of expertise. He studied the screen, frowned because he always frowned, then left the room.

The assault on Krayoxx was fueled by research purporting to show that the drug weakened the seals around the aortic valve, thus causing a decrease in mitral valve regurgitation. The echocardiogram measured aortic sufficiency, and a decrease of 30 percent was excellent news for the lawyers. Dr. Borzov reviewed the graphs immediately, always eager to find another weakened aortic valve.

Each exam took twenty minutes, so they did three per hour, about twenty-five each day, six days a week. Wally had leased the space for a month. ADG billed the Zell & Potter, Finley & Figg litigation account $1,000 for each exam, with the bills going to Jerry in Florida.

Before that stop, ADG and Dr. Borzov had been in Charleston and Buffalo. From Chicago, they were headed to Memphis, then Little Rock. Another ADG unit was covering the West Coast with a Serbian doctor reading the graphs. Another was harvesting gold in Texas. The Zell & Potter Krayoxx web covered forty states, seventy-five lawyers, and almost 80,000 clients.

To avoid the chaos of the office, David hung around the strip mall and chatted with his clients, none of whom he’d ever met. Generally speaking, they were happy to be there, worried about whatever damage the drug had done to their hearts, hopeful of some type of recovery, overweight and terribly out of shape, but pleasant enough. Black, white, old, young, male, female—obesity and high cholesterol ran the gamut. Every client he spoke to had been thrilled with the drug, delighted with its results, and was now anxious about finding a replacement. Gradually, David chatted up the ADG technicians and learned something of their work, though they were fairly closemouthed. Dr. Borzov would hardly speak to him.

After hanging around for three days, David could tell that the ADG team was not pleased with their testing. Their $1,000 exams were producing little evidence of aortic insufficiency, but there were a few potential cases.

On the fourth day, the air-conditioning system crashed, and Wally’s rented space turned into a sweatshop. It was August, temperature above ninety, and when the landlord refused to return calls, the ADG crew threatened to leave. Wally hauled in box fans and ice cream and begged them to stay and finish the screening. They plowed on, the twenty-minute exams becoming fifteen, then ten, with Borzov barely scanning the graphs on the sidewalk while he smoked cigarettes.

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Judge Seawright set the hearing for August 10, the last possible date on any judge’s calendar before the system shut down for summer vacation. There were no motions pending, no fights brewing, all discovery had proceeded with remarkable cooperation. Varrick Labs, so far, had been unduly forthcoming with documents, witnesses, and experts. Nadine Karros had filed only a handful of benign motions, all of which the judge quickly dispensed with. On the plaintiff’s side, the Zell & Potter lawyers had been remarkably efficient with their requests and filings.