Ex-Worker Wins $36.5 Million From Company That Hid Asbestos Damage
On all levels of life, individually, in groups, corporations, religions and even countries, abuses are perpetrated against others. The question is, why this is the case? One can only think its because the perpetrators believe they can get away with it
Surely if people believed that it was not possible to do so, they would not go there in the first place. They would reconsider! They would live and let live! They would turn the other cheek, they would leave that person alone and move on.
Wouldn’t they???
I mean that if they knew that their scheme to get away with something that harmed others was doomed from the start to fail, they wouldn’t do it, right?
Well, that message did not get through in the case of this upsetting tale. However, just as the Sackler family has been revealed for the evil they have perpetrated, just as Madoff and Epstein were so unveiled, the light now shines on this horror-show of human duplicity.
The thing is, like many of us they were not properly taught that there is a “ Law of Cause & Effect” in operation in nature and our lives that takes note and responds accordingly!
Every part of nature and every branch of science is explained by this Law. As part of nature, human beings are also subject to The Law of Cause and Effect, which states that every cause (thought, word, action) has an effect and that for every effect (outcome), there is a cause to be found.
The trickiest part of this idea of cause and effect is the timing. For example, how much time can go by before the “Effect” shows up? Also, what if a perpetrator dies before being revealed as a perpetrator? Does it mean they’ve gotten away with it? There are answers for them, but they are not yet rock solid. Like all areas of life and physics, such knowledge advances at it’s own pace.
That is why Nobel prizes are awarded, because someone figures something out we did not previously understand. Will this head stumper ever be figured out? Of course, but when? I’ll be sure to let you know!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/us/asbestos-libby-montana.html?smid=em-share
Ex-Worker Wins $36.5 Million From Company That Hid Asbestos Damage
The verdict was the first of hundreds of cases pending against the company hired to oversee medical care and safety for workers at a mine and mill in Libby, Mont.
HELENA, Mont. — For years, workers employed by W.R. Grace & Company in the mountain town of Libby, Mont., worked in a dust-choked vermiculite mine and mill, not knowing that the raw material for insulation they were mining also contained deadly asbestos fibers.
The company, however, did know. Senior managers made the decision to keep the workers in the dark, according to evidence presented in court over the past several weeks, even as the workers gradually lost their ability to breathe.
The plan, documents and witnesses suggested, kept employees from knowing about early signs of lung scarring that would lead to asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma — until they retired and could no longer make costly workers’ compensation claims.
Last week, a jury in State District Court in Great Falls, Mont., awarded a former laborer $36.5 million in damages, agreeing that the mining company’s workers’ compensation insurer, which also consulted on safety and medical issues for W.R. Grace, had failed to warn workers that they were at risk of deadly illness. Hundreds more cases against the insurer, Maryland Casualty Company, which is now part of Zurich Insurance, are still awaiting trial.
Many former workers and their families have died of asbestos-related illnesses, and others say they have been living with the possibility of a painful death for years based on their exposure during the 1960s and early 1970s.
“It scares me,” the plaintiff in the current case, Ralph Hutt, said in a video deposition from his home in Roseburg, Ore. He said that he had faced increasing difficulty breathing and that there was no cure. “That’s one way I don’t want to go,” he said. “Let someone shoot me. I don’t want to be dunked underwater or strangled. That’s what it feels like.”
Asbestos poisoning is the subject of the nation’s longest-running mass tort litigation and one of the most expensive. The Environmental Working Group estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 people die from asbestos-related disease each year.
The first cases in Libby, a town of 2,700 people about 200 miles northwest of Missoula, were filed in the mid-1990s. W.R. Grace paid out about several million dollars in claims before declaring bankruptcy in 2001.
But previous awards were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; no one had received anything close to the recent verdict. The difference with the recent lawsuit and others to come against Maryland Casualty is that the company’s safety and medical professionals had a duty to protect the workers’ health, yet failed to warn them of the hazards, or in some cases that their lungs showed early signs of damage, said Allan McGarvey, a lawyer in Kalispell, Mont., who has represented Mr. Hutt and many other workers over the past 30 years.
“It was a scheme to cheat these workers,” he said. “They wanted to keep them on the job until retirement to preclude the high cost of workmen’s compensation payouts and didn’t tell them.”
Zurich Insurance declined to comment on the verdict, but in court the company argued that it had strongly recommended reducing the levels of toxic dust at the site but W.R. Grace had failed to do so. It also said the insurers had no way of knowing that workers were not always wearing respirators that might protect them from asbestos fibers.
A key issue was whether the statute of limitations had run out on claims like Mr. Hutt’s — an issue decided in favor of the plaintiff.
It took years for workers to begin to understand the extent of their exposure and the risk to their health, Mr. McGarvey said.
“The workers couldn’t smell it, they couldn’t taste it, it didn’t burn,” he said. “There was no indication it was anything more than plain old dust.” But medical studies undertaken by Libby physicians in the 1960s showed that 37 percent of all workers had the beginning of hidden disease. In long-term workers, 92 percent had asbestos-related illness.
Maryland Casualty doctors and technicians took annual X-rays of the workers’ lungs and could see the scarring, but they withheld that information from the workers, according to evidence presented at trial. This included a 1967 memo from a Maryland Casualty lawyer, S. Y. Larrick, in which he urged settling with a worker who had filed a workers’ compensation claim rather than taking the case to a hearing. “I would very much like to avoid having evidence presented by the opposing party which would reveal the extent and severity of the problem with which we are concerned,” he wrote.
Mr. Hutt worked for W.R. Grace for 18 months in 1968 and 1969 and was diagnosed with asbestosis in 2002. When he went to work there in the dry mill at the age of 27, he said in his deposition, his boss handed him “a broom and a snow shovel and put him to work sweeping.” Workers did not wear masks, he said, because they got clogged up too quickly.
At least 400 deaths have been documented from asbestos-related causes in Libby and more than 2,400 people have been diagnosed with asbestos-related illnesses at the Center for Asbestos Related Disease clinic established to treat people in the town.
The contamination affected far more than the workers. The U.S. government in 2009 called it “the worst case of industrial poisoning of a whole community in American history.”
W.R. Grace began mining a deposit of vermiculite on a forested peak called Zonolite Mountain near Libby in the 1960s. The relatively harmless mineral, known commercially as Zonolite, was used in attic insulation until the 1980s. But a naturally occurring type of deadly asbestos was found in the same deposit.
The mine produced seven to nine tons of dust a day for 10 years during the time Maryland Casualty was part of the operations, and asbestos sometimes made up 60 to 80 percent of the airborne dust. Dust not only billowed everywhere at the mine and mill, but toxic levels filled the air over much of the small town.
W.R. Grace and Maryland Casualty kept that fact hidden from workers, according to the lawsuit. In 1990, the mine closed. Illness, however, continued to spread.
Few outside Libby knew what was occurring until 1998, when a resident named Gayla Benefield sued W.R. Grace after her mother, Margaret Vatland, died of what community residents had come to call “take home” asbestosis — her father, Perley Vatland, had brought asbestos home on his work clothes and contaminated his wife and children, including Ms. Benefield. “Miners went to work at the mine and came home dusty,” Ms. Benefield said in an interview. “It was a badge of honor.”
Ms. Benefield won her case, and in 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency began investigating the impacts of toxic asbestos pollution. Three years later, the agency placed Libby on its National Priorities List as a Superfund site, and in 2009 it declared a public health emergency to allow residents to receive federal funds for health care, the first such designation in E.P.A. history.
Government workers who were called in for remediation found asbestos almost everywhere: in the lungs of the workers and their families; in tailings piles around town; on the baseball field and high school running tracks where the company had donated material for ground cover. “They polluted the whole damn town,” Ms. Benefield said.
The painful effects continue to unfold slowly — it takes decades for asbestos illnesses to show up, and children who played baseball or ran on tracks with asbestos in the air are only now becoming ill.
Ms. Benefield was diagnosed with asbestosis and has been on supplemental oxygen full-time since 2015, though she still golfs and bowls, she says. “All my aunts and uncles died from this,” she said. “Four of five of my children have been diagnosed.”
W.R. Grace and three of its officers were tried in criminal court in 2009 for knowingly contaminating the small town and then conspiring to keep it under wraps. They were acquitted after the company argued that its executives had engaged not in a cover-up, but a good-faith effort that went on for years to make the mine safer.
But in an opinion in 2020 clearing the way for Mr. Hutt’s case to go to trial, the Montana Supreme Court found that Grace’s workers’ compensation insurer “engaged in affirmative actions to conceal the asbestos exposure risk and worker injuries” in order to avoid liability, knowing that it could take years for the illnesses to become apparent.
Facing tens of thousands of lawsuits, W.R. Grace declared bankruptcy in 2001 and set up a trust to evaluate claims and settle them for pennies on the dollar. Maryland Casualty initially claimed it was covered under the bankruptcy, but a court ruled that the company had to face the lawsuits independently. The case last week established the parameters for the rest of the cases to follow.
The company has not said whether it will appeal the verdict.
Libby is still a Superfund site. Since cleanup began in 2000, more than 2,600 contaminated locations — yards, tailings piles and parks — have been dug up, with clean soil brought in and contaminants hauled away.
The amount of asbestos fibers in the air in downtown Libby, the E.P.A. reported recently, “is now nearly 100,000 times lower than when the vermiculite mine and mill were operating.”
But Mr. McGarvey said the town already had paid the price. “For the last 20 years as I have been fighting this,” he said, “I get an obituary notice about one of my clients just about every month.”
Kirkus Reviews, the gold-standard for independent & accurate reviews, has this to say about
What Goes Around Comes Around:
A stable, positive, non preachy, objective voice makes the book stand apart from others in the genre. A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.
~ Kirkus Reviews
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
Ex-Worker Wins $36.5 Million From Company That Hid Asbestos Damage
Ex-Worker Wins $36.5 Million From Company That Hid Asbestos Damage
Here’s a head scratcher that I’m of two minds about as it relates to the subject in question, though either way it is a great, multiple illustration of “Cause & Effect” in action. On the one hand it is somewhat poetic that Jeff Zucker would have to fire Chris Cuomo for the “brother Andrew” matter, while he himself was hiding his own “peccadillo,” only to have that indiscretion revealed and have to “walk the plank” himself!
However, a rule is a rule is a rule and guess what? Yup! “What Goes Around Comes Around!”
One nuance of the situation for Jeff Zucker, was whether the fact that he was carrying around his own secret may be why he didn’t act more decisively on the Cuomo situation? Not to imply that it means he deserved the firing squad if it was true. But he had signed on to follow the rules and lead by example, which he was abusing at the same time that Chris was understating his role to help Andrew. But still, did he equivocate on Cuomo because in his own mind it seemed hypocritical? In the end, it is a small matter but interesting to contemplate nonetheless.
Colombo Family Crime Boss and 12 Others Are Arrested, Prosecutors Say
An indictment unsealed on Tuesday accuses the organization of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort a labor union.
For two decades, the leadership of the Colombo crime family extorted a Queens labor union, federal prosecutors said — an effort that continued unabated even as members of the mob clan cycled through prison, the family’s notorious longtime boss died, and as federal law enforcement closed in.
Over time, what began as a Colombo captain’s shakedown of a union leader, complete with expletive-laced threats of violence, expanded into a cottage industry, prosecutors said, as the Colombo organization assumed control of contracting and union business, with side operations in phony construction certificates, marijuana trafficking and loan-sharking.
On Tuesday, 11 reputed members and associates of the Colombo crime family, including the mob clan’s entire leadership, were charged in a labor racketeering case brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
All but two of the men were arrested Tuesday morning across New York and New Jersey, prosecutors said. Another was surrendered to the authorities on Tuesday; another defendant, identified as the family consigliere, remained at large, prosecutors said.
The indictment accuses the Colombo family of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort an unnamed labor union that represented construction workers, using threats of violence to secure payments and arrange contracts that would benefit the crime family.
The charges are an ambitious effort by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take down one of the city’s five Mafia families. In addition to the union extortion scheme, which is the heart of the racketeering charge, the indictment charges several misdeeds often associated with the mob, including drug trafficking, money laundering, loan-sharking and falsifying federal labor safety paperwork.
Detention hearings for the defendants in Brooklyn federal court continued into the evening Tuesday, as they entered not-guilty pleas to the charges; prosecutors had asked the court to keep 10 of the defendants in custody.
“Everything we allege in this investigation proves history does indeed repeat itself,” Michael J. Driscoll, F.B.I. assistant director-in-charge, said in a statement. “The underbelly of the crime families in New York City is alive and well.”
Around 2001, prosecutors said, Vincent Ricciardo — a reported captain in the family, also known as “Vinny Unions” — began to demand a portion of a senior labor union official’s salary. When Mr. Ricciardo was convicted and imprisoned on federal racketeering charges in the mid-2000s, prosecutors said, his cousin continued to collect those payments.
Starting in late 2019, prosecutors said, the senior leadership of the Colombo family became directly involved in the shakedown, which extended to broader efforts to siphon money from the union: for example, manipulating the selection of union health fund vendors to contract with entities connected to the family, and diverting more than $10,000 each month from the fund to the family.
Andrew Russo, 87, who prosecutors describe as the family boss, is accused of taking part in those efforts, as well as a money-laundering scheme to send the proceeds of the union extortion through intermediaries to Colombo associates. He was among nine defendants charged with racketeering.
Mr. Russo appeared in court virtually from the hospital Tuesday; he is set to be detained upon his release, pending a future bail hearing.
The family’s infamous longtime boss, Carmine J. Persico, died in federal custody in North Carolina in March 2019.
Federal law enforcement learned of the extortion scheme about a year ago, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Tuesday; investigators gathered thousands of hours of wiretapped calls and conversations recorded by a confidential witness, wrote the prosecutors, who also described law-enforcement surveillance of meetings among the accused conspirators.
The authorities said they repeatedly captured Mr. Ricciardo and his associates threatening to kill the union official. “I’ll put him in the ground right in front of his wife and kids,” Mr. Ricciardo was recorded saying in June.
On another occasion cited by prosecutors in the memo seeking his detention, Mr. Ricciardo directed the union official to hire a consultant selected by the Colombo family, saying: “It’s my union and that’s it.” Prosecutors said his activities were overseen by a Colombo soldier and the consigliere who remains at large.
Much of the activity outlined in the indictment took place while the defendants were either in prison or on supervised release for prior federal mob-related convictions. Theodore Persico Jr., described as a family captain and soldier, was released from federal prison in 2020 and, despite a directive not to associate with members of organized crime, “directed much of the labor racketeering scheme,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Persico, 58, is set to inherit the role of boss after Mr. Russo, prosecutors wrote.
Several of the defendants were named in what prosecutors described as a fraudulent safety training scheme, in which they falsified state and federal paperwork that is required for construction workers to show they have completed safety training courses.
One of the defendants, John Ragano — whom prosecutors say is a soldier in the Bonanno crime family — is accused of setting up phony occupational safety training schools in New York, which prosecutors said were “mills” that provided fraudulent safety training certificates to hundreds of people.
In October 2020, prosecutors said, an undercover law enforcement officer visited one of the schools in Ozone Park, Queens, and received, from Mr. Ricciardo’s cousin, a blank test form and an answer sheet; weeks later, the agent returned to pick up his federal safety card and paid $500.
The purported schools were also used for meetings with members of La Cosa Nostra — the group of crime families commonly known as the Mafia — and to store illegal drugs and fireworks, according to the indictment.
Mr. Ragano wasn’t charged on the racketeering count, although prosecutors also sought his detention pending trial. In addition to the racketeering count, several defendants, including Mr. Ricciardo and his cousin, were charged with extortion, conspiracy, fraud and conspiracy to make false statements.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people identified in an indictment as members of the Colombo crime family. It is 11, not more than a dozen.