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Art imitates life, death, attorney
By Bill Porter, Associated Press writer
BOSTON -- It started as a thin file sitting on a conference table, with names of people Jan Schlichtmann did not know.
They were people with children who were dead or dying. They lived in a town Schlichtmann had never visited. It seemed their lives had been ravaged by chemicals with names that the young lawyer could not pronounce.
Schlichtmann picked up the file and couldn't put it down.
A colleague repeatedly warned him about the Woburn environmental pollution case, telling him to stay away from it. Schlichtmann promised to walk away. But he always returned.
"I felt that if I walked away, I would stop being me," he said in a recent interview. "I would be dead. I couldn't say no to them, and I couldn't walk away."
He nurtured the case out of concern for people, a faith in the law, and equally large doses of his greed and ego. The tiny case grew into a monster, and the monster toyed with Schlichtmann like a cat with a mouse. It gobbled up his money and much of his sanity.
Financially and spiritually bankrupt, Schlichtmann drifted away to Hawaii, where he hiked and swam and began to think that his whole life had been a waste. One day in Hawaii, he went for a swim in the warm, placid water; he swam and swam, and almost didn't turn back.
But he did return, and thus began his long journey home to Massachusetts. "You know when you're home," he said. "It has a cold feel and a hard texture to it."
The monster became a book about Schlichtmann and his war against a tag team of corporate Titans. The award-winning bestseller, "A Civil Action," now becomes a movie, made by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, starring John Travolta as Schlichtmann.
"I met him on the set out in L.A. a few weeks ago," Schlichtmann said. "I saw him doing me. It was very eerie and fascinating."
Part of the movie is being shot on location in Boston, where the case was tried and where Schlichtmann and his adversaries worked.
The story is about a flashy lawyer reduced to poverty and near insanity by a case that he and his clients deserved to win.
It is a feel-good story with an uneasy ending. It has good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are the corporations, Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace, and their attorneys. The companies are being sued by cancer-plagued Woburn families who have accused them of polluting two wells that supply their groundwater.
The good guys are the families -- the dying and dead children and their parents -- and Schlichtmann.
Nobody rode out of town victorious at the end of the trial. It was never proven in court that industrial waste discarded by plant employees caused the cluster of leukemia cases along the Aberjona River in East Woburn.
Beatrice was let off the hook in the suit. W.R. Grace settled with the families partway through the 1986 trial for $8 million, but the company denied any wrongdoing.
Eventually Grace and Beatrice agreed to pay for soil and groundwater cleanup in East Woburn.
"The year before last," Schlichtmann said, "the government concluded ... that there was a connection between the incidence of leukemia and the contaminated water supply."
But when Schlichtmann looks back now, he doesn't see Woburn as a battleground. He sees a murky swamp.
"I know now that the whole thing was a search for the truth," he said. "It took me years to appreciate the Woburn experience, what I learned. We looked for the truth, and we found it."
Even though Schlichtmann still burns with passion over the Woburn case, he is a changed man.
He no longer drives a Porsche; his last one was repossessed toward the end of the trial, at which point he was living in his Milk Street office and acting so crazy that his friends worried about him.
Today he drives a Volvo, is married and lives in the pretty little North Shore coastal community of Beverly. He and his wife, Claudia, have two children, 2-year-old Max and 1-year-old Zak.
Woburn supplies a source of experience and wisdom, while Schlichtmann's love for his family replenishes his soul.
"I didn't have a life before," he said. "All I had was a career. Now I have a life, and because of that I have a much richer career."
Schlichtmann works on environmental cases with one of his colleagues in the Woburn case, Tom Kiley. And he travels around the country giving lectures about the Woburn case. "I am overwhelmed by requests to speak," Schlichtmann said.
One can still see a shadow of the dashing young Schlichtmann portrayed in Jonathan Harr's book -- the tall, thin, mustachioed, witty man with the narrow face, soft eyes and quick feet.
At lunch recently, he glanced at the menu, ordered soup and catfish, and excused himself to take a phone call. When he returned to the cold soup and fish, Schlichtmann explained that the call was from one of Touchstone's people.
"They want me to be in one of the scenes," he said, looking dubiously at his cold fish. A few minutes later, he was off and running again. "Got a hearing," he said between shovelfuls of rice.
Settled into a booth at a coffee shop after the hearing, Schlichtmann said that it was only when he stopped trying to run from Woburn that he finally could see the good that came out of it.
"The case has meaning for so many other communities, because now they can look to Woburn," Schlichtmann said. "Before, in these cases, ignorance was the excuse. And after Woburn, ignorance can no longer be the excuse. Nobody can say, after Woburn, that these chemicals can't cause disease.
"Before, they could say you could never prove this kind of case. And that we'd get the Nobel Prize if we proved it.
"Well, the results are in. We haven't received a Nobel check yet, though."
Just before leaving the coffee shop for a flight to New York, Schlichtmann was approached by a heavyset man.
"Are you Jan Schlichtmann?" the man asked.
The lawyer was perplexed. "Yes." he said.
"I haven't seen you," the man said, "since I repossessed your car."
Photo by The Associated Press Civil lawyer Jan Schlichtmann talks about his non-fiction book, "A Civil Action," in a Dedham coffee shop recently. Schlichtmann is being portrayed by John Travolta in a new movie based on the book, which is currently being filmed in the Boston area. |  |
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