“To bury a body,” Parker began, “you need to dig a grave six feet down into the earth.” She was referring to the depth that is widely believed to have been set in London during the Great Plague of 1665316, in a futile attempt to limit the spread of the outbreak. “It’s surprising how deep that is,” she continued. “Then, imagine digging another grave, below the first one, and another one, and another one, until you’ve dug seventy graves, one under the other. Then, after you’ve dug down these 420 feet, imagine digging straight out from there, parallel to the ground, for nine miles. Down there it’s deep. It’s dark. It’s wet. It’s cold. And there’s no easy way out. For some, there was no way out at all317.”
Looking out at the crowd, Parker felt a searing sadness wash over her. She had been so focused on the legal challenge of assembling the pieces to the tunnel puzzle that she realized she’d been suppressing the emotional side. Without knowing it, she had come to identify with Billy and Tim, and now she was determined to find justice for them. But what would justice even look like?
The lawyers stood nervously in front of the Hyatt Hotel’s bank of elevators, looking expectant each time the silver doors opened—and disappointed each time they closed without delivering DJ.
“Where is he?” John Prescott asked his law partner, Nina Pelletier, as he paced the lobby. Pelletier could see that Prescott’s usually broad smile was now as absent as their client.
DJ was late for the breakfast meeting they had scheduled to go over last-minute strategy, and he wasn’t answering his phone. The stakes were high for the divers and their families, to say nothing of their lawyers. At the other end of the Hyatt, about seventy attorneys and insurance adjusters were filing into a chandeliered banquet room.
Prescott and Pelletier were involved in the civil lawsuits that had sprung from the case. They were representing DJ in his personal injury case as well as Billy’s parents, Olga and Bill, in their wrongful death claim. Other lawyers were representing Tim’s widow318, Judy, in her death claim and the injury claims by Hoss and Riggs. While the lawyers believed Harald’s conduct had been inexcusable, they felt even greater fault lay with all the powerful parties that had let things deteriorate to the point where they needed to call in someone to engineer a dangerous escape maneuver. Accordingly, they had sued319 the MWRA, the Kiewit joint venture, Kaiser, PB, and Norwesco as well as A-L Compressed Gases, based on the critical role that the Spokane supplier had played in helping Harald design the system. There were slight differences in the lawsuits because of quirks in the law. Hoss, Riggs, and Tim’s widow weren’t able to sue Norwesco because of restrictions in state law against workers filing a claim against their own employers. And Michelle wasn’t able to sue anyone on Billy’s behalf. Even though she and Billy had been buying a house together and had spent four years building their lives around each other, they weren’t married, so Michelle didn’t really exist in the eyes of the law. Filing Billy’s wrongful death claim fell to his parents, who despite being devoted to their son hadn’t seen him in over a year.
Prescott and Pelletier, working closely with Judy’s lawyer, Bob Norton, had spent more than a year building their cases—and, in many ways, running their own investigation. To bring a successful punitive damages claim, the lawyers would need to prove gross negligence, demonstrating that the defendants had shown willful disregard for the divers’ safety. It was a high standard. But the many hours they had logged sifting through boxes upon boxes of project files had produced enough damning memos to give them confidence in their chances.
Over the course of her year working with DJ, Nina Pelletier had come to love his innocent honesty mixed with roguish charm. By now, she considered him her favorite client of all time, even if time was something he often struggled to keep. Pelletier was not much older than DJ and looked considerably younger than her thirty-eight years. But her relationship with him was maternal, drawing on the same nurturing instincts that found her packing peanut butter sandwiches for herself and Prescott to snack on during breaks when they were on a long trial.
Although they were prepared to go to trial in the tunnel case, the lawyers had agreed to meet with the defense attorneys and insurers at the Hyatt on this autumn morning in 2000. The two-day mediation session would determine whether the alphabet soup of defendants would agree to a settlement that the divers and Tim and Billy’s survivors felt was fair, or whether Pelletier would have to start making a lot of peanut butter sandwiches.
While Prescott and Pelletier paced near the elevators, Olga and Bill Juse waited in the hotel restaurant, sitting across from Judy and Hoss. The lawyers had warned their clients that there would be lots of downtime during the mediation session. So the divers and the families had commandeered a table in the restaurant to be their waiting area, with its windows offering views of Boston Harbor and the airplanes taking off from nearby Logan Airport.
The lawyers needed everything to go right. But DJ was AWOL, as was Riggs, and having two of the surviving divers miss the mediation session would be very bad. Eventually Prescott hustled over to the front desk, persuaded the hotel clerk to give him DJ’s room number, and then hopped into the elevator. Standing outside the room, he rapped on the door. Finally, it swung open, and DJ appeared in his underwear, moving in slow motion. He squinted at Prescott, then moaned, “Fucking Riggs.” Prescott peered into the room to see Riggs asleep on the floor.
When the pair made it down to the restaurant for a rushed breakfast, they confessed they’d been out late the night before. Riggs had been crashing with DJ and his mother in Waltham for several weeks. The profanity-averse teetotaler and devoted father, whose Bible Belt sensibilities had driven DJ to distraction before the accident, had been struggling with marital problems. Like Hoss and DJ, he had found himself unable to return to diving since the accident. After many years of sobriety, Riggs was now drinking and cursing heavily, though DJ still managed to outpace him. One late-night escapade had ended with Riggs watching DJ get a large tattoo on his right arm. Because tattoo parlors320 were outlawed in Massachusetts, the inking had taken place in some guy’s basement.
Now DJ sat at the table in the restaurant, guzzling coffee, still a bit dazed. When a young blond waitress with beautiful eastern European features approached, he jolted to attention, turning on the charm. In her accented English, she seemed to respond in kind. After she stepped away, DJ turned to Pelletier, asking his lawyer for one of her business cards. He scribbled his phone number on it and then handed it back to Pelletier, asking her to arrange a date for him with the waitress.
Pelletier knew DJ had been on something of a wild streak since he and his girlfriend Dana broke up, although she hadn’t pressed for details. Rolling her eyes, she refused his request. “DJ, I am your lawyer,” she told him, “but I don’t represent you in all aspects of your life.”
They headed into the banquet room, where the army of lawyers and insurance adjusters sat behind tables hugging the cream-colored walls. The size of the crowd spoke to both the tunnel project’s complexity and the depth of concern among the defendants about their legal and financial exposure. As the surviving divers took their seats, Pelletier worried how they would hold up.
316 (Chapter 14, note 37)
during the Great Plague of 1665: Daniel Defoe,
317 (Chapter 14, note 38)
“there was no way out at all”: Joan Parker, speech at event organized by the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health in belated recognition of Workers’ Memorial Day, delivered at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, May 24, 2000. Text and notes from Parker. Note that she used a depth of 400 feet for the shaft. For consistency with the rest of this book, I substituted the actual depth of 420 feet and corresponding number of six-foot graves.
318 (Chapter 14, note 39)
Other lawyers were representing Tim’s widow: Bob Norton represented Judy Milner; Warren Fitzgerald represented Hoss and Riggs.
319 (Chapter 14, note 40)
Accordingly, they had sued:
320 (Chapter 14, note 41)
Because tattoo parlors: A Massachusetts Superior Court judge had actually lifted the state’s long-standing ban on tattoo parlors just one week before the mediation session, though DJ appears to have gotten inked before the ruling. As it turned out, the ban was reinstated for several months to allow time for the drafting of regulations. “Massachusetts Judge Temporarily Revives Tattoo Ban,” Associated Press, November 21, 2000.