The Runaway Jury

He hated them, and he spat on the sidewalk. He lit a cigarette, squeezing it tightly between his thick fingers.

Jose pulled to the curb in a shiny, rented Suburban with dark windows. Fitch took his customary place in the front seat. Jose too looked up at the enemy lawyers’ office as they drove past, but he said nothing because his boss did not suffer small talk. They drove past the Biloxi courthouse, and past a semi-abandoned dime store where Fitch and associates maintained a hidden suite of offices with fresh plywood dust on the floor and cheap rented furniture.

They turned west on Highway 90 at the beach and limped through heavy traffic. It was Friday night, and the casinos were packed with people gambling away grocery money with big plans to win it back tomorrow. They slowly made it out of Biloxi, through Gulfport, Long Beach, and Pass Christian. Then they left the coastline, and were soon passing through a security checkpoint near a lagoon.

Chapter Two

The beach house was modern and sprawling and built without the benefit of a beach. A whiteboard pier disappeared into the still and weedy waters of the bay, but the nearest sand was two miles away. A twenty-foot fishing boat was moored at the pier. The house had been leased from an oil man in New Orleans-three months, cash, no questions. It was being temporarily used as a retreat, a hiding place, a sleep-over for some very important people.

On a deck high above the water, four gentlemen enjoyed drinks and managed small talk while waiting for a visitor. Though their businesses normally required them to be bitter enemies, they had played eighteen holes of golf this afternoon, then eaten shrimp and oysters off the grill. Now they drank and looked into the black waters below them. They loathed the fact that they were on the Gulf Coast, on Friday night, far away from their homes.

But business was at hand, crucial affairs that necessitated a truce and made the golf almost pleas-ant. Each of the four was the CEO of a large public corporation. Each corporation was in the Fortune 500, each was traded on the NYSE. The smallest had sales last year of six hundred million, the largest, four billion. Each had record profits, large dividends, happy stockholders, and CEO’s who earned millions for their performances.

Each was a conglomerate of sorts with different divisions and a multitude of products, fat ad budgets, and insipid names such as Trellco and Smith Greer, names designed to deflect attention from the fact that at the core they were little more than tobacco companies. Each of the four, the Big Four as they were known in financial circles, could easily trace its roots to nineteenth-century tobacco brokers in the Carolinas and Virginia. They manufactured cigarettes-together, ninety-eight percent of all cigarettes sold in the United States and Canada. They also manufactured such things as crowbars and corn chips and hair dye, but dig just below the surface and you’d find that their profits came from cigarettes. There had been mergers and name changes and various efforts at preening for the public, but the Big Four had been thoroughly isolated and vilified by consumer groups, doctors, even politicians.

And now the lawyers were after them. The survivors of dead people out there were actually suing and asking for huge sums of money because cigarettes cause lung cancer, they claimed. Sixteen trials so far, and Big Tobacco had won them all, but the pressure was mounting. And the first time a jury handed out a few million to a widow, then all hell would break loose. The trial lawyers would go berserk with their nonstop advertising, begging smokers and the survivors of smokers to sign up now and sue while the suing was good.

As a rule, the men talked of other matters when they were alone, but the liquor loosened their tongues. The bitterness began to ooze forth. They leaned on the railing of the deck, stared at the water, and began to curse lawyers and the American tort system. Each of their companies spent millions in Washington on various groups trying to reform tort laws so that responsible companies like themselves could be protected from litigation. They needed a shield from such senseless attacks by alleged victims. But, it seemed, nothing was working. Here they were somewhere in the backwaters of Mississippi sweating out yet another trial.

In response to the growing assault from the courts, the Big Four had created a pool of money known simply as The Fund. It had no limits, left no trail. It did not exist. The Fund was used for hardball tactics in lawsuits; to hire the best and meanest defense lawyers, the smoothest experts, the most sophisticated jury consultants. No restrictions were placed on what The Fund could do. After sixteen victories, they sometimes asked, among themselves, if there was anything The Fund couldn’t do. Each company siphoned off three million a year and routed the cash circuitously until it landed in The Fund. No bean counter, no auditor, no regulator had ever caught wind of the slush money.

The Fund was administered by Rankin Fitch, a man they collectively despised but nonetheless listened to and even obeyed when necessary. And they waited for him. They gathered when he said to gather. They dispersed and returned at his command. They tolerated being at his beck and call as long as he was winning. Fitch had directed eight trials without a loss. He’d also engineered two mistrials, but of course there was no proof of this.

An assistant stepped onto the deck with a tray of fresh drinks, each mixed to exact specifications. The drinks were being lifted from the tray when someone said, "Fitch is here." In unison the drinks shot upward then downward as the four knocked back a stiff belt.

They quickly stepped into the den while Fitch was parking Jose just outside the front door. An assistant handed him a mineral water, no ice. He never drank, though in an earlier life he’d consumed enough to float a barge. He didn’t say thanks to the assistant, didn’t acknowledge his presence, but moved to the faux fireplace and waited for the four to gather around him on the sofas. Another assistant ventured forth with a platter of leftover shrimp and oysters, but Fitch waved him off. There was a rumor that he sometimes ate, but he’d never been caught in the process. The evidence was there, the thick chest and ample waistline, the fleshy roll under his goatee, the general squattiness of his frame. But he wore dark suits and kept the jackets buttoned, and did a fine job of carrying his bulk with importance.

"A brief update," he said when he felt he’d waited long enough for the honchos to settle in. "At this moment, the entire defense team is working nonstop, and this will continue through the weekend. Jury research is on schedule. Trial counsel are ready. All witnesses are prepped, all experts are already in town. Nothing unusual has yet to be encountered."

There was a pause, just a little gap as they waited long enough to make sure Fitch had finished for a bit.

"What about those jurors?" asked D. Martin Jankle, the most nervous of the bunch. He ran U-Tab, as it was formerly known, an abbreviation for an old company which for years was called Union Tobacco but after a marketing cleansing was now traded as Pynex. The lawsuit at hand was Wood v. Pynex, so the roulette wheel had placed Jankle on the hot seat. Pynex was number three in size with sales of almost two billion last year. It also happened to possess, as of the last quarter, the largest cash reserves of any of the four. The timing of this trial was lousy. With a bit of bad luck, the jury might soon be shown blowups of Pynex’s financials, nice neat columns which would indicate in excess of eight hundred million in cash.

"We’re working on them," Fitch said. "We have soft data on eight. Four of whom might either be dead or gone. The other four are alive and expected to be in court Monday."

"One rogue juror can be poison," Jankle said. He’d been a corporate lawyer in Louisville before joining U-Tab, and he always insisted on reminding Fitch that he knew more about the law than the other three.