Free Cornered by Peter Pringle Page A

invitations to the White House. His vast office is fitted out to look like an old-fashioned Manhattan ballroom, with leather upholstery and horse paintings. Among his victories, Chesley lists the 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire that killed 165 people in Southgate, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati. There, he put all the plaintiffs together in one class action, which was a novel approach to personal-injury cases at the time, and then he went after every manufacturer and contractor he could find with any liability. He won an out-of-court settlement of $49 million when most people thought he would be lucky to get $2 million because the club itself carried so little insurance. Chesley charged about $3 million—or about $875 an hour for his services. Chesley also has a reputation for rushing his clients into out-of-court deals. One colleague described his deals as “the ultimate grotesque, exaggerated perversion of what it means to be a lawyer.” Chesley shrugs off the criticism. “I’ve learned to understand that goes with the territory.”
    Gauthier pulled in other famous trial lawyers, including Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and John O’Quinn of Houston, who is worth half a billion dollars, according to Fortune magazine. But one of the most important calls Gauthier made was to John Coale in Washington, D.C. If Gauthier’s grand national strategy was to come to anything, he needed a person he could trust in Washington. Though younger than many of the Castano lawyers—Coale was then forty-two—his exploits as a liability lawyer had already landed him in enough controversy to be profiled on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The accounts were not flattering. CBS correspondent Ed Bradley suggested that at the Bhopal chemical disaster in India, Coale was really no more than a vulture who circled in on his victims to pick the bones. “No,” replied Coale, “I pick the bones of the corporation bastards who did it to these people. That’s the bones I’m picking.”
    Born of a large and wealthy Baltimore family—his grandfather was one of the founders of the Baltimore Orioles—Coale had been an errant youth. He was kicked out of private school in the eleventh grade for general misbehavior. After graduating from Baltimore Law School, he made a living as a courthouse hustler representing drunk drivers in Washington. A profile of him in the National Law Journal was headlined “Red Hot Coale” over a front-page picture of his portly frame in rumpled shirt, loose tie, and suspenders. Some of his colleagues despised him so much that they routinely mumbled derogatory remarks at the mention of his name, but Coale shrugged them off. “They’re too self-important and they’re way too complex.”
    Coale’s career was launched with the release of toxic gases in 1984 at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India. A total of 1,861 people died and another 27,000 were injured. Coale was in a Washington, D.C., taxi when he heard the news on the cab radio. He decided to fly immediately to India, a country he had never visited, and search for clients. He called up the one Indian he knew well, his tailor, the man who provided him with his outsize suits. After Coale offered an all-expenses-paid trip to his homeland, the tailor agreed to help. He fixed the visas at the Indian embassy, and four days after the accident, Coale, his tailor, and two assistants were on a flight to Bombay.
    Coale expected the competition to be fierce, and it was. On the day Coale flew to Bombay, Belli filed a $15 billion class-action suit in San Francisco claiming, falsely, that he already had two Bhopal survivors as clients. In the high-stakes game these liability lawyers play, it is crucial to be the first to file because then you get to manage the lawsuit, oversee the pretrial discovery process, and decide when, and if, to enter into settlement talks. The