The Asbestos Gospel of Baseball's St. Peter
FELTEN, ERIC
The Asbestos Gospel of Baseball's St. Peter By Eric Felten When the baseball players' strike threatened to scuttle two seasons' worth of ball, the whole sordid battle between petulant millionaire...
...And now there is a move to build a football stadium for the Washington Redskins in D.C.'s Maryland suburbs...
...By the 1980s, according to the Washington Post, Angelos was taking home more than $1 million a year-well short of the staggering riches needed to buy a major league baseball franchise...
...To do it, he needs the state to build a new football stadium next door to Camden Yards...
...Stone is not the only state senator in Annapolis officially on the Angelos payroll, a fact that brings us back to the matter of baseball...
...He has said he will do whatever it takes to reserve the money for a Baltimore stadium-a potent threat from a senator willing to use his filibuster...
...It's a curious argument, given that Angelos had no intention of fielding a strike-breaking team...
...And a lucky thing it was, too...
...The result of Pica's bill was to relieve the Orioles of the risk of a breach of contract...
...True enough, Angelos was sent an abundance of clients...
...After losing a bid to become mayor some seven years later, Angelos turned his copious energies to the law, building a practice that made him very, very rich...
...It takes significant resources to be a folk hero...
...Pica can afford to be unrepentant because of the legislature's notorious laxity...
...An Owner Who Won't Play Ball With the Other Boys" was the Newsweek headline...
...Pica is unrepentant about his outburst-indeed, he seems to relish his reputation as a hothead...
...Now I'm doing mostly medical negligence cases," Pica says...
...Peter By Eric Felten When the baseball players' strike threatened to scuttle two seasons' worth of ball, the whole sordid battle between petulant millionaire infielders and petulant millionaire owners produced only one hero in the public consciousness-Peter Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, the owner who refused to field a team of replacement players...
...But in lawyer-friendly Maryland, contingency fees of up to 50 percent are allowed...
...A furious Pica stormed from the Senate to the House and charged at the first Republican he could find, minority whip Richard La Vay "Pica comes flying onto the floor and gets within a snot's length of my nose, saying he would beat the living crap out of me," La Vay says...
...Indeed, the lawyer says that to receive the free examination, Baltimore union members signed forms authorizing the locals' business offices to hand their cases over to the unions' attorney-Angelos...
...The stand Angelos took against replacement players has made for boffo box office (with an undeniable assist from Cal Ripken...
...I didn't want to do asbestos litigation because I knew it would be all-consuming," Angelos told the Washington Post...
...That left it to Angelos to divvy up the winnings among his clients, an arrangement that advocates of asbestos victims say shortchanged the few who were really sick...
...Primarily one includes family members of union officials as plaintiffs...
...Having won the hearts and minds of sports-crazed Baltimore by keeping the Orioles in the city, Angelos has set out to solidify his place as "Mr...
...Two of the 47 senators in the Maryland state capitol work for Angelos: In addition to Stone, Angelos four years ago hired another experienced lawmaker, Democratic Senator John Pica, Jr...
...Medical personnel were always accompanied by a lawyer from the law offices of Peter Angelos...
...Angelos is a profile-writer's dream, the working-class kid made good, the son of Greek immigrants who never forgot his Baltimore roots...
...According to one lawyer involved in the Baltimore asbestos cases, the exams performed by the doctors at MRM were largely paid for under union health plans...
...These are facts the profile writers might want to keep in mind next time they are looking for the new Mr...
...Eric Felten is an editorial writer for the Washington Times...
...Most appalling to Brickman, Addis, and a host of others, however, is not the issue of how the plaintiff's share was divided, but the question of how much of the booty was reserved for the lawyers...
...John Pica...
...Interestingly, though remaining in the Maryland Senate, Stone has since gone to work for the Law Offices of Peter Angelos...
...Pica had satisfied Maryland's ethics requirements by filing a simple form disclosing that the legislation he had proposed would affect his boss...
...Who knows how many other owners would have liked to make the same stand but didn't have Angelos's legislative bullpen...
...Then again, Pica maintains there were no millions of dollars at stake: "It wouldn't have made a penny for Mr...
...The "asbestos lung disease" sufferers would not have won much money if their cases had gone to trial individually...
...The bill was greased," Flanagan says...
...Asked whether his political actions don't make it look like he's wallowing in egregious conflicts of interest, Pica is as arrogant as he is terse: "Too bad...
...Angelos likes to claim that his union friends came to him and begged that he take on the asbestos companies...
...Instead, most of Angelos's clients suffered from little more than what are known as pleural plaques, tiny scars on the lungs that neither lead to cancer nor inhibit breathing...
...But the disease accounted for only a small number of the 8,500 clients that Angelos ultimately recruited...
...Those cases alone were not where the money was, and so Angelos built a solid personal injury practice as well, litigating claims of medical malpractice and negligence, auto accident injuries and the like...
...If you're not a union guy, you have to advertise...
...Doctors providing expert testimony for the plaintiffs gave these scars a menacing name: "asbestos lung disease...
...Angelos shrugs off such criticism...
...The Ethics Committee did not hold up the baseball bill, didn't chide Pica for pushing legislation favorable to his employer, and ignored his threat to pummel fellow lawmakers...
...But Angelos didn't just wait for clients to show up at his door...
...Angelos pushed for legislation introduced by a senior state senator, Democrat Norman Stone, that extended the statute of limitations in asbestos cases to seven years after death...
...I regretted that I didn't do more...
...The American League might have tried to seize the Orioles from him, fielding a team of the league's choosing in Baltimore's ballpark...
...The cancer is aggressive and deadly, and is held up as the reason that companies trafficking in asbestos should be punished...
...Suspicions abound that among those with dubious health claims who nonetheless received settlements were family and friends of the some of the union officials who helped guarantee the client stream...
...But the avalanche of cases produced by the Angelos-union connection led the city of Baltimore to consolidate over 9,000 asbestos claims in one colossal class-action lawsuit...
...But most of the companies Angelos sued chose to settle rather than gamble on being bankrupted with punitive damages...
...Not only was Angelos one of the pioneers of mass litigation- and thus in a position to help set precedent for acceptable legal fees in those peculiar circumstances-he has been an active lobbyist in Maryland's capitol, winning changes to state law that helped keep his mammoth class action alive...
...I know of several ways in which that is done...
...The fees that the lawyers have taken are horrendous," says Addis...
...To date, all of these attempts to get hold of the football fund have been blocked by Pica...
...But it was neither a surprise nor an imposition: Angelos arranged for local unions to send their members through his asbestos litigation mill...
...The son of an old-school Baltimore politician, Pica first took a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1979...
...Missing from these valentines, however, was any description of the shady political moves that facilitated Angelos's noble posture...
...Angelos was able to solicit clients at union meetings and soon had officials of the locals sending their members to his expanding number of law offices-offices located next door to union halls...
...Nor is he looking for any conciliation with Flanagan...
...A mobile medical van plastered with the MRM logo went on fishing expeditions at union halls outside of Baltimore, from Cumberland, Md., to Pennsylvania...
...He would have been fined if he had fielded a team...
...his main client was the local steelworkers union...
...Angelos gets most of his cases by referral from the unions...
...That wealth was not far off, however, thanks to a fortuitous convergence of Angelos's main lines of business...
...The ruling would have purged Angelos's class action of many of its most compelling individual cases: deadly mesotheliomas...
...I just got sent the cases...
...Most of the asbestos lawyers are deeply associated with the unions," says Albert Parnell, who gives seminars for the Defense Research Institute on how to fight asbestos cases...
...He's much too modest," says Brickman...
...Baltimore" by bringing a National Football League team to the city that lost the Colts in 1984...
...I don't regret it at all," Pica says when asked about his confrontation with La Vay...
...But Angelos has not been able to lock it up yet because he hasn't been able to get his hands on an NFL team...
...Angelos did not return repeated phone calls and faxes...
...Adjacent to those offices were clinics called Medical Resources Management, shops that catered almost exclusively to the pre-trial needs of Angelos's potential clients...
...The most serious-and undisputed-disease caused by asbestos is mesothelioma, a cancer caused exclusively by asbestos fibers in the lungs...
...When he first started with Angelos, Pica was put on the asbestos litigation team, which even after the mass settlements still has about 2,000 cases pending...
...Pica's place on the Angelos roster helps his boss with more than just baseball...
...That would have allowed him to pay litigator Ron Motley, who actually argued the cases in court, a cool $100 million while still pocketing over $200 million for himself...
...The sponsor of the law...
...Co-sponsor...
...Even then, the meritorious cases might have been sifted from the frivolous: There were supposed to be individual "mini-trials" to evaluate solitary claims after the single main trial had established who was liable for what...
...Flanagan calculates that such a breach would have cost Angelos $5 or $6 million...
...A Maryland Court of Appeals ruling in 1987 would have blocked Angelos from bringing claims on behalf of people who had been dead for more than three years...
...he handled mostly a mundane stream of workman's compensation...
...The whole situation has been horrible...
...Since everyone was lumped together, personal circumstances were not considered," says Deborah Addis, who worked for years with the Asbestos Victims' Campaign of Massachusetts...
...Many believe that Angelos extracted something in the range of 40 percent of the settlement...
...I told him he had the wrong guy...
...Norman Stone...
...As a young man, he worked at the steel mill for a dollar an hour, and pulled the tap at his father's tavern...
...With those cases excluded, the vast body of dubious "asbestos lung disease" cases would probably have lost in court...
...The law office of Peter Angelos was a modest affair to begin with...
...The seed money is there, about $10 million in the Maryland Stadium Authority's football fund...
...With his dubious fortune, he bought more than just a baseball team...
...He combined his labor and personal injury experience to mine one of the richest shafts ever prospected by the plaintiff's bar: asbestos...
...News & World Report waxed a bit more messianic: "Everyone wants to hear [Angelos's] answers to baseball's problems, as if the words of one honorable, outspoken man might wipe out decades of avarice and mismanagement...
...In the last several years, Angelos has acquired legislators for his legal team much the same way he has bought up expensive free agents for the Orioles...
...It would have cost him money...
...He's still trying, but in the meantime those millions have become a tempting pot of cash in fiscally strapped Maryland...
...Angelos got rich with a savvy, modern take on a hoary legal tradition: ambulance chasing...
...A local boy, he graduated from the University of Baltimore's law school in 1960...
...Take Senate Bill 719, emergency legislation passed by the Maryland legislature in late March and immediately signed into law by Governor Parris Glendening...
...Efforts have been made to use the money to build schools and prisons...
...By the time word made it to Pica that Flanagan was challenging him and the baseball bill, Flanagan had already left the chamber...
...That doesn't mean that Angelos hasn't got his money's worth out of Pica...
...Presumably he rewards the union folk, which is traditional," says Lester Brickman, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York and an expert on asbestos litigation...
...Had Angelos only lined up clients with serious asbestos ailments, all of this elaborate recruitment would have been unnecessary and over-burdensome...
...He's an a-hole," Pica declares...
...Titled "An Act concerning Professional Baseball-Camden Yards," the law made it illegal to play replacement players at the Orioles' stadium of the same name...
...Angelos has never said exactly how much of the $750 million settlement actually went to his 8,500 clients...
...He did not have to say how it would affect Angelos, and did not: notably absent was any mention of the millions of dollars at stake...
...Deeds to come to town...
...Attendance at major league ball games has been in a well-deserved slump almost everywhere except Baltimore...
...Though Angelos is the sole partner of his firm, he has more than 60 attorneys working for him as associates, enough to handle the client load whether a given employee, such as Pica, is able to devote himself to the job or not...
...Concerned about a "sweetheart deal," Flanagan took to the floor of the House of Delegates on a Monday night in March to ask that the emergency bill speeding through the legislature be held up for a few weeks to give the Ethics Committee time to investigate...
...Because of his obligations as a state senator, he didn't have time to keep up with the asbestos work load...
...since 1983 he has been a state senator...
...Angelos," he says...
...Peter Angelos may have played hardball with the other owners, but he went to the plate with a corked bat...
...At least one Republican lawmaker, Delegate Bob Flanagan, took the trouble to question the ethics of this cozy arrangement, and nearly received a beating for it...
...And if Angelos fell afoul of the league, it would have meant defaulting on the terms of his lease at the stadium, which requires Angelos to "maintain the Baltimore Orioles as an American League baseball team in good standing...
...The obvious question is why a notoriously tough boss like Angelos would hire and retain an associate who doesn't have the time to do the job he was hired for...
...It wasn't the sort of legal work that makes one wealthy...
...Default could have made him liable for millions in damages...
...Many who have tangled with Pica in Annapolis think the answer is simple: While the legislature is in session, Pica may not be working at Angelos's Baltimore offices, but he may be working for Angelos just the same...
...Breaking with the owners was good public relations for Angelos, both personally and professionally...
...The conservative estimate of the lawyers' cut is $250 million-the standard one-third contingency fee...
...This was averted by the emergency baseball act: As long as it was illegal to play replacements, the American League couldn't bring in its own team, and Angelos couldn't be held liable for not fielding a team...
...Perhaps there are other ways of fulfilling obligations, too: In the last several years, Angelos has hired a number of union officials to work for his firm...
...Had the strike worn on into the regular baseball season, Angelos would have faced a number of unpleasant consequences from his celebrated refusal to hire non-union ballplayers...
...People are getting screwed...
...Asked about his huge fees by the Washington Post, his answer was as simple as it was coy: "I didn't invent the system...
Vol. 1 • September 1995 • No. 1
