Bridgette Kinard remembers the men in the “white suits.” They came to her apartment in the B.W. Cooper housing development in the 1990s, wrapped head to toe in specialized clothing to protect them from hazardous materials. They were testing for lead, a toxic metal once found throughout the city’s public housing complexes.
“It’s five, six, seven, eight people at one time coming into your unit, and they’re all covered up and you’re not and you’re wondering, ‘Am I contaminated? Is there something wrong with me?'”
The lead levels in Kinard’s apartment registered high enough that the Housing Authority of New Orleans decided to relocate her family, including her four young children. But instead of moving them to another part of the city, Kinard said, HANO simply gave them the keys to a different unit in the same complex.
Today, two of her children struggle with upper respiratory issues, stomach ailments, and attention deficit disorder, Kinard said. These are all common symptoms of lead poisoning, according to the Mayo Clinic. “My son is still suffering from it. He can’t keep food down,” she said.
Kinard said she had little hope of receiving financial assistance until 2011, when insurance companies for HANO settled a long-running class action lawsuit over lead poisoning for $67 million. It seemed like a significant victory for thousands of public housing families facing a lifetime of mounting medical bills.
But it didn’t quite work out that way. A NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune review of hundreds of pages of court documents has discovered that the roughly 2,000 eligible victims of lead poisoning in the city’s public housing developments received, on average, no more than $17,000. Meanwhile, three lawyers appointed by the court to help administer the settlement fund were paid, in total, almost $2 million, with one of them making almost half a million dollars for four months of work.
Kinard’s children didn’t receive a dime. Their medical records had been lost during Hurricane Katrina.
“We might as well have just floated away with the water,” Kinard said. “I don’t know what situation my children will face in their life, dealing with what’s inside of them.”
In the coming months, the courts are expected to consider the last of multiple challenges to the settlement, bringing the 21-year-old case to an end. But instead of feeling closure, some public housing residents say they feel cheated and disillusioned with a class action system that lets attorneys make millions of dollars while the real victims walk with barely enough money to pay for a few years of therapy and medical care.
How much lead is in New Orleans water?
Dolfinette Martin, who lived in B.W. Cooper from when she was just a child in 1973 to Hurricane Katrina, said five of her children tested positive for the toxic metal. Her daughter, Theone, suffered the worst. Theone was born prematurely and couldn’t hear or speak until age 6, Martin said. Today, at the age of 20, she can’t read or tell time, all common symptoms of lead poisoning.
“I am so tired of every time there’s something to gain, low-income, public housing residents, we’re the poster child for that cause,” Martin said. “But the minute that money trickles in, that money does not touch the lives of one person (who is) from poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
“To give these children a $17,000 check and say, ‘We did right by you,’ is criminal.”
‘Nobody cares. Nobody worries’
Lead is a heavy metal that, when consumed or inhaled, can cause serious physical and mental problems including brain damage, kidney and liver failure, behavioral and developmental issues and, in some instances, death. It is especially dangerous to children younger than 6.
The health effects can be costly. One of the most common symptoms of lead poisoning is brain damage, which can cause mental impairment. The loss of a single IQ point is equivalent to the loss of $17,815 in future earnings over a lifetime, according to a 2009 study by Environmental Health Perspectives, a research journal published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
In addition, people suffering from lead poisoning can pay, over the course of their lives, tens of thousands of dollars on prescription drugs, doctor visits, hospital stays, therapy and special education classes, according to the study.
The federal government has taken steps to diminish the effects of lead, banning its use in paint since 1978 and gasoline since 1996. In 1987, Congress approved the Housing and Community Development Act, requiring public housing agencies to remove all traces of lead from their properties to protect their tenants.
Eleven years later, however, a Tulane University study found that almost a third of children in New Orleans public housing continued to have dangerously high levels of lead. HANO officials at the time refused to provide Tulane researchers with information on how they were complying with federal regulations to remove lead from their housing complexes.
Omega Ellis, however, said she witnessed firsthand what she described as HANO’s remediation efforts. Like Kinard, Ellis, 36, said the men in hazmat suits came to her family’s apartment in the B.W. Cooper housing development in the early 1990s and determined that it, too, was full of lead.
But unlike Kinard, Ellis said, the agency didn’t offer to relocate her family. Instead, workers shaved some paint off the porch railings, leaving piles of contaminated chips in the dirt. And that was it.
“They feel like poor black kids, that’s what we’re used to growing up in poverty. ‘Why should we help them?'” said Ellis, who added that she suffers from bronchitis and a heart murmur, both symptoms of lead poisoning. “Nobody cares. Nobody worries.”
Lawyers, however, began to take notice. In 1991, HANO settled more than 60 individual lead-poisoning suits for a total of $1 million.
Three years later, a team of attorneys filed a class-action suit against the Housing Authority in Orleans Parish Civil District Court. The case dragged on for years, enduring numerous delays caused by the withdrawal and recusal of multiple judges, the deaths of two defense attorneys and one plaintiffs’ attorney, frequent continuances and Hurricane Katrina, according to court documents.
Finally in 2011, the plaintiffs and their attorneys got the breakthrough they wanted: HANO’s seven insurance companies agreed to settle for $67 million. When deciding how to distribute the money, the presiding judge at the time, Joseph Tiemann, determined that 50 percent of the money would go to the affected families. That’s $33.5 million.
Of the rest, 40 percent would go toward the fees of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, 5 percent to the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ legal expenses, and 5 percent would be reserved for court costs.
Two more years passed without a single check being sent to the affected families. So in 2013, Civil District Court Judge Tiffany Chase took over the case from Tiemann, who had been serving on a temporary basis. One of her primary objectives was to fast-track settlement payments to the lead-poisoning victims.
To that end, Chase looked to appoint someone as special master, to help her oversee and manage the distribution of money. She chose two men she knew for years: Scott Bickford and James Williams.
The special masters
Special masters are typically appointed by judges to resolve disputes and enforce judicial orders in complex, unwieldy lawsuits. They act on behalf of the judge and serve as officers of the court.
Given their pedigrees, Bickford and Williams appeared to be suited for the work.
Bickford is a partner at the Martzell & Bickford law firm, where he has served as counsel in several class-action cases involving asbestos exposure and large oil spills, including the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
In addition to his professional experience, Bickford has ties to Chase. Before she was
elected in 2007, Chase worked for several years as an associate attorney at the Martzell & Bickford firm. Bickford later served as her campaign treasurer from 2007 to 2014. During that time, Bickford and his law firm gave more than $28,000 to Chase’s campaign, including nearly $10,000 from Bickford personally. And Chase paid the firm almost $6,400 for expenses associated with fundraisers, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Louisiana secretary of state’s office.
Williams, at the time of his appointment, was a partner with the Gauthier, Houghtaling and Williams firm, which specializes in “serious business and personal injury claims.” He later joined the Chehardy, Sherman, Williams firm. Williams also briefly served as a judge, appointed temporarily in 2009 by the Louisiana Supreme Court to fill a vacant seat in Civil District Court, where he worked alongside Chase.
His former firm also had financial ties to Chase. At one point, she owed Gauthier, Houghtaling and Williams, almost $22,000 for expenses associated with one of her campaign fundraisers, according to campaign finance reports.
In less than a year as special master in the lead poisoning case, Williams made $503,449.67. To date, Bickford has made $771,391.63. The court paid them with money from the settlement fund, with most of their money coming from the portion set aside for the children.
In comparison, the nine attorneys who represented the public housing residents and secured the $67 million settlement are set to split roughly $27 million for an average of $3 million per lawyer. Several of those attorneys worked on the case for more than two decades.
‘A sweet deal for lawyers’
Ed Sherman, a Tulane University law professor, said that in a relatively small legal community such as New Orleans, it’s common for judges to appoint people they know and trust as special masters. The job requires the dedication of a significant amount of time in addition to a vast wealth of legal knowledge and expertise.
And the appointments of Bickford and Williams appeared to pay off. Five months after they were brought on the case, the court began to send out the first settlement checks to lead-poisoned residents.
But Sherman said such appointments must be made carefully as they can raise questions of impropriety and political pay-offs, especially among the plaintiffs who might feel as if they were treated unfairly. He cited a section of the Louisiana Code of Judicial Conduct that states judges “shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary,” and that judges “shall not allow family, social, political or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment.”
The code also states a “judge should avoid appointments which tend to create the appearance of impropriety. A judge shall not approve the compensation of appointees beyond the fair value of services rendered.”
“These kinds of perks that judges can hand out, like appointing close friends or former law firm members to receiverships, that’s a sweet deal for lawyers,” said Sherman, a student of complex litigation and civil trials. “Those kinds of things are done quite a bit in Louisiana, and it has something to do with the fact that judges are elected and therefore judges do favors for attorneys. They have to raise money for re-elections somehow. It’s certainly troubling.”
Further, “if, ultimately, the payment to the class members is siphoned off with all kinds of fees (given to special masters), then you’re undermining the purpose of the class action,” he said.
In the lead poisoning suit, several plaintiffs’ attorneys filed motions protesting the amount paid to Williams, specifically $221,510 worth of invoices he filed between December 2013 and March 2014. These were for phone calls that Williams said were handled by the staff at his law firm, according to an August 2014 motion filed by plaintiffs’ attorney Peter Sloss.
In one of the invoices, Williams said his staff handled 1,490 calls, each lasting 20 minutes, on a single day, according to Sloss’ motion. That’s 497 hours for which Williams charged $85 per hour, for $42,245.
“To support those numbers, (the law firm) would have had to have 62 staff members using 62 phone lines doing nothing but handling telephone calls for 8 hours,” Sloss stated in the motion. “These numbers are astounding. Whatever the explanation may be, the class is entitled to an explanation.”
Sloss asked that the court audit Williams’ billings. Chase has yet to issue a ruling.
Bickford and Williams would not comment for this story. They cited the pending litigation. Chase did not respond to requests for comment.
‘You need to have a quarterback’
While it is clear that Chase appointed Williams and Bickford, Carolyn Gill-Jefferson’s entry into the lead poisoning case is somewhat mysterious.
Gill-Jefferson was married to the late Bennie Jefferson, brother of former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans. She served as a Civil District Court judge for 12 years. She left the bench in 2006 and was succeeded by Chase.
She went on to practice law. And it was in this capacity that she became involved with the lead poisoning case.
Before the court could disburse the settlement money, it had to create tutorships, or legal guardianships, for about 300 plaintiffs who received more than $10,000 and were still minors. Typically the plaintiffs’ attorneys would have handled the job, but by that point they had splintered. Infighting made it impossible for them to work together on the tutorships, attorney Joe Bruno said in court documents. So at some point, it was suggested that the court hire an outsider to perform the work.
“Our relationship had, by that time, deteriorated to the point where no one could rise and become the leader, and you need to have a quarterback,” Bruno said in court documents.
Gill-Jefferson became that quarterback.
A ‘flat rate bonanza’
On Nov. 13, 2013, Gill-Jefferson started working on the case for her requested payment amount. For a flat fee of $1,500 per child she would complete more than 300 tutorships in 14 days. That’s about $450,000 for two weeks’ work.
Yet no one will say whose idea it was to hire Gill-Jefferson. Several of the plaintiffs’ attorneys said in court documents they thought Chase was responsible. But Chase wrote in a per curiam, or court decision, that she “took no part in this decision” and was under the belief that the attorneys agreed to hire Gill-Jefferson.
Despite the uncertainty, Gill-Jefferson got the job. When it was finished four months later, instead of the two weeks estimated, Chase approved Gill-Jefferson’s requested fee of $463,606.99, which was paid out of the settlement fund from the pot of money set aside for plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees.
Gary Gambel and Jennifer Willis, two of the nine plaintiffs’ attorneys, filed motions objecting to the payment. In addition to the fee being high, they said, Gill-Jefferson mainly sat on the sidelines, providing little more than oversight, while they and other attorneys handled the bulk of the work. Gill-Jefferson did little more than fill out forms with information collected from the plaintiffs by their attorneys, something “any competent secretary could (do) in ten minutes or less, probably more like five minutes,” Willis stated in her motion.
Gambel and Willis estimated that Gill-Jefferson deserved no more than $30,000, according to court documents.
“Those in the middle with unknown motive were pressing for the engagement of Ms. Gill-Jefferson. If Ms. Gill-Jefferson wants more, she should seek it from those who promised it, and they should be liable for the fees, expenses and costs of this objectionable endeavor,” Gamble said. He added that he and “the court were the pawns in this self-interested appointment process perpetrated by others,” describing Gill-Jefferson’s fee as a “flat rate bonanza.”
Gambel didn’t name “those in the middle” or the “others” in his motion.
Bruno, another plaintiffs’ attorney, came to Gill-Jefferson’s defense, calling her fee “reasonable,” according to court records. “Trying to mobilize, organize and get everything done was an enormous undertaking, not the simplistic task that (Gambel and Willis) allege it was.”
On Aug. 4, 2014, the matter went before Chase. She dismissed motions to cancel the payment, saying Gill-Jefferson took on a “herculean” task, and that she “personally observed Ms. Gill-Jefferson, herself, walking over boxes of files for signature.”
Two weeks later, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal reversed the decision, vacated Gill-Jefferson’s payment and sent the case back to Chase. “We find no evidence of reasonable efforts made by trial court to determine the extent of effort expended by Ms. Gill-Jefferson to authenticate such a significant fee,” stated the ruling.
Less than a year later, Chase reduced Gill-Jefferson’s payment by $6,000. In January, the Fourth Circuit upheld Chase’s ruling, stating that “despite the apparently very high legal fee award, we cannot find under the peculiar circumstances of this case that the trial judge abused her discretion.”
Gill-Jefferson’s attorney, Richard Stanley, stated in court documents that “the results achieved by” his client “speak for themselves. In a relatively-short period, she performed over 300 tutorships that the (plaintiffs’ attorneys) had not undertaken for roughly two decades, thus facilitating the timely disbursement of over $5 million in settlement proceeds.”
Gambel appealed Chase’s ruling again. The issue is now before the state Supreme Court.
Gill-Jefferson would not comment for this story. She cited the pending litigation.
‘You get paid, and here I get zero’
“How in the hell (do) you get half a million to hand a person a check?” asked Martin, the former B.W. Cooper resident who raised five children in public housing.
Kinard, who also lived in B. W. Cooper with her four children, raised the same objection, saying she feels victimized twice. First there was HANO, for failing to protect its residents; then came the courts.
“I’m the one … living back here. I’m the one … running back and forth to the doctor with my kids. I’m the one … up all night with my kids,” Kinard said. “You get paid, and here I get zero. Once they get what they want, you’re pushed to the side. You no longer exist, like I’m trash.”
To qualify for money from the settlement fund, families must have:
Lived in or visited public housing before 2001
The children of Martin and Kinard didn’t qualify. Their medical records were lost during Katrina.
“The lady next door to me qualified, her and her children,” Kinard said. “We lived in the same building, in the same courtway. Our kids went to the same school. The only thing we didn’t do is go to the same doctor.”
Ellis, who grew up in B. W. Cooper and now said she suffers from a heart murmur, also didn’t qualify since she was born before 1987.
“I’m angry. I’m upset,” Ellis said. “I feel like the forgotten child.”
Martin said that giving people a few thousand dollars to make up for a lifetime of serious health issues is an insult. But the court never had to worry about most of the public housing residents contesting the amount of their settlement checks, Martin said: “You give a 19-, 20-, 21-year-old a $17,000 check? In this ‘hood? They feel they hit the lottery. Of course they’re going to accept that check. They’ve never seen that amount of money at one time.”
Martin did contest the settlement. Over the course of three weeks in 2014 she said she collected more than 60,000 signatures from former public housing residents who said their families were affected by lead poisoning and were shut out from the lawsuit. She said she wants to use the petition to reopen the case, but that so far she has been unsuccessful.
“I think about the fact that not only did my kids, five of them, not receive any of the settlement money, it’s as if my children don’t even exist,” Martin said. “I don’t know one person (who) received a check who received more than $20,000. And I know at least 20 families personally that didn’t receive a dime who lived in public housing, who raised their children in public housing, who deserved not just the money but to know you were done an injustice.”