The King of Torts (31 page)

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THE FULL-PAGE ad in the
Larkin Gazette
caused quite a stir in the small town hidden from the world in the mountains of southwest Virginia. Because Larkin had three factories it had slightly more than ten thousand people, a regular population center in the mining country. Ten thousand was the threshold for full-page ads and Skinny Ben screening that Oscar Mulrooney had established. He had studied the advertising and arrived at the opinion that the smaller markets were being overlooked. His research had also revealed that rural women and Appalachian women were heavier than those in cities. Skinny Ben territory!

According to the ad, the screening would take place the following day at a motel north of town and would be conducted by a medical doctor, a real physician. It was free. It was available to any person who had taken benafoxadil, aka Skinny Bens. It was confidential. And it might lead to the recovery of some money from the manufacturer of the drug.

At the bottom of the page, in smaller print, the
name, address, and phone number of the D.C. Law Offices of J. Clay Carter II were given, though by the time most readers got that far they had either quit or were too excited about the screening.

Nora Tackett lived in a mobile home a mile outside Larkin. She did not see the ad because she did not read newspapers. She read nothing. She watched television sixteen hours a day, most of the time while eating. Nora lived with the two stepchildren her ex-husband had left behind when he hit the road two years earlier. They were his kids, not hers, and she was still not sure exactly how she’d come to possess them. But he was gone; not a word, not a dime for child support, not a card or a letter or a phone call to check on the two brats he’d forgotten when he fled. And so she ate.

She became a client of J. Clay Carter when her sister saw the
Larkin Gazette
and arranged to come fetch her for the screening. Nora had taken Skinny Bens for a year, until her doctor had stopped prescribing the drug because it was no longer on the market. If she’d lost any weight with the pills, she couldn’t tell.

Her sister loaded her into a minivan and thrust the full-page ad in front of her. “Read this,” MaryBeth demanded. MaryBeth had started down the road to obesity twenty years earlier, but a stroke at the age of twenty-six had been her wake-up call. She was tired of preaching to Nora; they’d fought for years. And they began fighting as they drove through Larkin and headed for the motel.

The Village Inn had been selected by Oscar Mulrooney’s secretary because it appeared to be the newest
motel in town. It was the only one on the Internet, which hopefully meant something. Oscar had slept there the night before, and as he had an early breakfast in the motel’s dirty café he wondered once again how he’d fallen so far so fast.

Third in his class at Yale Law School! Wined and dined by the blue-chip firms on Wall Street and the heavyweights in Washington. His father was a prominent doctor in Buffalo. His uncle was on the Vermont Supreme Court. His brother was a partner in one of the most lucrative entertainment law firms in Manhattan.

His wife was embarrassed that he was off again in the boondocks chasing cases. And so was he!

His tag-team partner was a Bolivian intern who spoke English but did so with an accent so thick even his “Good Mornings” were hard to understand. He was twenty-five and looked sixteen, even in his green hospital scrubs, which Oscar insisted he wear for credibility. Med school had been on the Caribbean island of Grenada. He’d found Dr. Livan in the want-ads and was paying him the stiff sum of $2,000 a day.

Oscar handled the front and Livan took care of the back. The motel’s only meeting room had a flimsy folding partition that the two of them had fought with to unwrinkle and pull across the room, dividing it roughly in half. When Nora entered the front at eight forty-five, Oscar glanced at his watch, then said, as pleasantly as possible, “Good morning, ma’am.” She was fifteen minutes early, but then they usually showed up before the starting time.

The “ma’am” was something he caught himself
practicing as he drove around D.C. It was not a word he’d been raised with.

Money in the bank, he said to himself as he looked at Nora. At least three hundred pounds and probably pushing four hundred. Sad that he could guess their weight like a huckster at a carnival. Sad that he was actually doing it.

“You the lawyer?” MaryBeth asked, with great suspicion. Oscar had been through it a thousand times already.

“Yes ma’am, the doctor’s in the back. I have some paperwork for you.” He handed over a clipboard with questionnaires designed for the simplest of readers. “If you have any questions, just let me know.”

MaryBeth and Nora backed into folding chairs. Nora fell heavily into hers; she was already sweating. They were soon lost in the forms. All was quiet until the door opened again and another large woman peered in. She immediately locked on to Nora, who was staring back, a deer in headlights. Two fatties caught in their quest for damages.

“Come in,” Oscar said with a warm smile, very much the car salesman now. He coaxed her through the door, shoved the forms into her hands, and led her to the other side of the room. Between two hundred fifty and two hundred seventy-five pounds.

Each test cost $1,000. One out of ten would become a Skinny Ben client. The average case was worth between $150,000 and $200,000. And they were picking up the leftovers because 80 percent of the cases had
already found their way into law offices around the country.

But the leftovers were still worth a fortune. Not Dyloft money, but millions anyway.

When the questions were answered, Nora managed to get to her feet. Oscar took the forms, reviewed them, made sure she’d actually taken Skinny Bens, then signed his name somewhere on the bottom. “Through that door, ma’am, and the doctor is waiting.”

Nora walked through a large slit in the partition; MaryBeth stayed behind where she commenced to chat up the lawyer.

Livan introduced himself to Nora, who understood nothing of what he said. Nor could he understand her either. He took her blood pressure, and shook his head with displeasure—180 over 140. Her pulse was a deadly 130 per minute. He pointed to a set of industrial meat scales, and she reluctantly stepped on—388 pounds.

Forty-four years old. In her condition, she would be lucky to see her fiftieth birthday.

He opened a side door and led her outside where a medical van was parked and waiting. “We do the test in here,” he said. The rear doors of the van were open; two sonographers were waiting, both in white jackets. They helped Nora into the van and arranged her on a bed.

“What’s that?” she asked, terrified, pointing at the nearest device.

“It’s an echocardiogram,” one said, in English she could understand.

“We scan your chest with this,” said the other, a
woman, “and we take a digital picture of your heart. It’ll be over in ten minutes.”

“It’s painless,” added the other.

Nora closed her eyes and prayed that she would survive.

The Skinny Ben litigation was so lucrative because the evidence was so easy. Over time, the drug, which ultimately did little to help lose weight, weakened the aorta. And the damage was permanent. Aortic insufficiency, or mitral valve regurgitation, of at least 20 percent was an automatic lawsuit.

Dr. Livan read Nora’s printout while she was still in prayer, and gave a thumbs-up to the sonographers: 22 percent. He took it up front where Oscar was shuffling paperwork for a whole room full of prospects. Oscar returned with him to the back, where Nora was now seated, looking pale and gulping orange juice. He wanted to say, “Congratulations, Ms. Tackett, your aorta has been sufficiently damaged,” but the congratulations were only for the lawyers. MaryBeth was summoned and Oscar walked them through the litigation scenario, hitting only the high points.

The echocardiogram would be studied by a board-certified cardiologist whose report would be filed with the class-action administrator. The compensation scale had already been approved by the Judge.

“How much?” asked MaryBeth, who seemed more concerned about the money than her sister. Nora appeared to be praying again.

“Based on Nora’s age, somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars,” Oscar said,
omitting, for the moment, that 30 percent would go to the Law Offices of J. Clay Carter II.

Nora, wide awake, said, “A hundred thousand dollars!”

“Yes ma’am.” Like a surgeon before a routine operation, Oscar had learned to lowball his chances of success. Keep their expectations low, that way the shock of the attorneys’ fees wouldn’t be so great.

Nora was thinking about a new double-wide trailer and a new satellite dish. MaryBeth was thinking about a truckload of Ultra Slim-Fast. The paperwork was completed and Oscar thanked them for coming.

“When do we get the money?” MaryBeth asked.

“We?” asked Nora.

“Within sixty days,” Oscar said, leading them out the side door.

Unfortunately, the next seventeen had insufficient aortic damage and Oscar was looking for a drink. But he hit paydirt with number nineteen, a young man who jolted the scales at five hundred fifteen pounds. His echocardiogram was beautiful—40 percent insufficiency. He’d taken Skinny Bens for two years. Because he was twenty-six years old, and, statistically at least, he would live for thirty-one more years with a bad heart, his case was worth at least $500,000.

Late in the afternoon there was an ugly incident. A hefty young lady became incensed when Dr. Livan informed her that her heart was fine. No damage whatsoever. But she’d heard around town that Nora Tackett was getting $100,000, heard it over at the beauty shop in fact, and, though she weighed less than Nora, she too
had taken the pills and was entitled to the same settlement. “I really need the money,” she insisted.

“Sorry,” Dr. Livan kept saying.

Oscar was called for. The young lady became loud and vulgar, and to get her out of the motel he promised to have their cardiologist review her echocardiogram anyway. “We’ll do a second workup and have the Washington doctors review it,” he said, as if he knew what he was talking about. This settled her enough to move her along.

What am I doing here? Oscar kept asking himself. He doubted if anyone in Larkin had ever attended Yale, but he was frightened nonetheless. He’d be ruined if word got out. The money, just think of the money, he repeated over and over.

They tested forty-one Skinny Ben users in Larkin. Three made the cut. Oscar signed them up and left town with the bright prospect of about $200,000 in attorneys’ fees. Not a bad outing. He raced away in his BMW and drove straight to D.C. His next foray into the heartland would be a similar secret trip into West Virginia. He had a dozen planned for the next month.

Just make the money. It’s a racket. It has nothing to do with being a lawyer. Find ’em, sign ’em, settle ’em, take the money and run.

   CHAPTER 30   

On May 1, Rex Crittle left the accounting firm where he’d worked for eighteen years and moved upstairs to become the business manager of JCC. With the offer of a huge increase in salary and benefits, he simply couldn’t say no. The law firm was wildly successful, but in the chaos it was growing so fast its business seemed out of control. Clay gave him broad authority and parked him in an office across the hall from his.

While Crittle certainly appreciated his own large salary, he was skeptical of everyone’s around him. In his opinion, which he kept to himself for the time being, most of the employees were overpaid. The firm now had fourteen lawyers, all making at least $200,000 a year; twenty-one paralegals at $75,000 each; twenty-six secretaries at $50,000 each, with the exception of Miss Glick who earned $60,000; a dozen or so clerks of different varieties, each earning on the average $20,000;
and four office gofers at $15,000 each. A total of seventy-seven, not including Crittle and Clay. Adding in the cost of benefits, the total annual payroll was $8.4 million, and growing almost weekly.

Rent was $72,000 a month. Office expenses—computers, phones, utilities, the list was quite long—were running about $40,000 a month. The Gulfstream, which was the biggest waste of all and the one asset Clay could not live without, was costing the firm $300,000 in monthly mortgage payments and another $30,000 for pilots, maintenance, and hangar fees. The charter revenue Clay was expecting had yet to show up on the books. One reason was that he really didn’t want anyone else using his airplane.

According to figures that Crittle monitored daily, the firm was burning around $1.3 million a month in overhead—$15.6 million a year, give or take. Certainly enough to terrify any accountant, but after the shock of the Dyloft settlement and the enormous fees that had flooded in, he was not in a position to complain. Not yet, anyway. He now met with Clay at least three times a week, and any questionable expenditure was met with the usual, “You gotta spend it to make it.”

And spending they were. If the overhead made Crittle squirm, the advertising and testing gave him ulcers. For Maxatil, the firm had spent $6.2 million in the first four months on newspaper, radio, television, and online advertising. This, he had complained about. “Full speed ahead,” had been Clay’s response. “I want twenty-five thousand cases!” The tally was somewhere
around eighteen thousand, and virtually impossible to monitor because it changed by the hour.

According to one online industry newsletter Crittle peeked at every day, the reason the Carter firm in D.C. was getting so many Maxatil cases was that few other lawyers were aggressively pursuing them. But he kept this gossip to himself.

“Maxatil will be a bigger payday than Dyloft,” Clay said repeatedly around the office, to fire up the troops. And he seemed to truly believe it.

Skinny Ben was costing the firm much less, but the expenses were piling up and the fees were not. As of May 1, they had spent $600,000 on advertising and about that much on medical tests. The firm had 150 clients, and Oscar Mulrooney had floated a memo claiming that each case was worth, on the average, $180,000. At 30 percent, Mulrooney was projecting fees of about $9 million within the next “few months.”