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Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad! Two years ago, rich and powerful Texans said lawsuits were ruining the state’s economy and needed to be fairer. Today, thanks to tort reform, they are fairer -- for business. Ordinary people are out of luck. by Mimi Swartz LIKE A LOT OF OLD-FASHIONED TEXANS, Alvin Berry is the kind of man who bears the pain and indignities of life with good grace. At 73, Alvin has never been a rich man, but in his youth he managed to maneuver himself from the rolling plains of Central Texas to the industrialized eastern corner of the state, where he worked his way up to maintenance superintendent at a chemical plant in Texas City. After he retired, he moved to a small ranch near Izoro, in Lampasas County, on property inherited by his wife of almost fifty years, Carla Jean. Despite the twinkle in his eyes and his love of a good story, Alvin is not a frivolous man: He wears his snowy-white hair parted in the middle and brushed back, Depression-era-style, is an elder of his church, votes Republican, and, for most of his life, never dreamed of involving himself in something as crazy as a lawsuit. But Alvin also has, in common with many Texans, a keenly developed sense of fairness, and something happened two years ago that struck him as just plain wrong. He had endured several surgeries: a hip replacement in 1999, which required additional surgery in 2000, and in 2002, a triple bypass, after which he experienced uncontrolled bleeding and heart failure; the doctors had to open him up again right on his hospital bed. Alvin made no complaint; as Carla Jean pointed out, those doctors had saved his life. But then, in 2003, Alvin got some lab tests with disturbing results. He’d been having kidney stones, and now his prostate-specific antigen test showed an elevated score. He didn’t like that; the nurse at the chemical plant had been a stickler for this test, so he knew that a high score could indicate cancer. His family doctor was worried enough to send him to a urologist, and that is when the trouble started. Don’t worry, Alvin recalls the doctor telling him. Kidney stones can elevate your PSA. Go home. Relax. But five months later, in September, Alvin still had stones, and when he took Carla Jean in for her physical, he asked a nurse to check his PSA. It was up again, to 86 from 12.6. He called his urologist, who, a little more brusquely, told him not to worry. But Alvin couldn’t stop worrying. In November he got it checked again; now his level was 166. “ Then he got all excited,” Alvin says of his doctor, who immediately ordered a biopsy. The news wasn’t good: Alvin had prostate cancer, and it had already spread to his bones in twenty places. Right away the doctor put him on daily medication and a $4,000 injection three times a year. The money wasn’t a big problem—Alvin had insurance—but he couldn’t help stewing about his predicament. “If he’d caught it earlier, it wouldn’t have been in my bones,” Alvin says. It bothered him too that the doctor hadn’t looked him in the eye when he’d delivered the bad news and that he’d never said he was sorry, even as he gave Alvin, at best, five years to live. “I’ll tell you what upset me so much,” he says today. “Other than that, I was in pretty good health. We had a ranch out in the country, goats and cattle.” Because Alvin didn’t want his wife to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, they sold the house and part of the ranch and moved into a modest brick home atop a hill in Copperas Cove, outside Killeen. He tried to control his anger, but he felt his final years had been stolen from him: “That doctor thought he was right and the world was wrong. He didn’t give me the opportunity to make the decision of what to do with my life.” Personally, Alvin had always been against lawsuits. He thought there were too many of them, and he didn’t think people should be able to win multimillion-dollar awards for situations they could have prevented, like the smokers who sued tobacco companies. Alvin had voted for Proposition 12 back in 2003, which amended the Texas constitution to limit noneconomic damages (usually pain and suffering) in medical malpractice cases to $250,000. “I think there are too many frivolous lawsuits,” he says. “But you ought to have the right to sue if you’ve been wronged.” Alvin sure didn’t think what had happened to him was frivolous, and he didn’t want to give his doctor the chance to be so arrogantly dismissive of anyone else. So on a sunny Saturday in April 2004, he found himself in a Hillsboro coffee shop with a pretty auburn-haired lawyer named Kelly Reddell. Kelly had good news and bad news. The good news was, in her opinion, that Alvin had definitely been the victim of malpractice. The bad news was that it would probably take up to two years to litigate, and if he won the case, Alvin would take home substantially less than the maximum of $250,000 the state of Texas had decided an injury like his could be worth. “Is this something you are ready to sign on for?” she asked. Alvin was surprised that someone who seemed as sharp as Kelly could be so misinformed. He had paid attention to the campaign for Proposition 12, and supporters said that damages for the likes of pain and suffering were capped at $750,000, not $250,000. “I voted for it,” he said. “You voted for it?” Kelly asked, eyeing him levelly. “Yeah,” Alvin said. He was proud of it. A $750,000 cap struck him as more than fair. His soon-to-be attorney gave him a sad, patient smile. That $750,000 cap he’d seen advertised on TV and in the papers, she explained, was available only when there were multiple defendants whom a plaintiff could sue for $250,000 each, such as a doctor and a couple of hospitals. Otherwise, the cap on noneconomic damages for a retired person with no income amounted to only $250,000. (Medical expenses are not subject to the cap.) Like a lot of lawyers in Texas, Kelly had been turning down plenty of once-good cases because the numbers just didn’t add up. She worked on a contingency basis, her fee usually around 40 percent of the award, which would amount to about $100,000. She also fronted all the expenses of the case: up to $5,000 a day for expert witnesses, money for travel, court costs. If this case worked like an average malpractice case, it would cost somewhere around $50,000 to get to trial and another $25,000 for the trial itself. That would leave Alvin about $75,000 after attorneys’ fees and expenses; other clients, with more-complicated cases, had recovered even less. And with the damages capped, there was little to no incentive for insurance companies to settle. Once upon a time, the purpose of tort law was to make injured people whole. In Texas, victims of medical malpractice or corporate wrongdoing, no matter how poor or powerless, had some redress through the legal system. The Texas constitution plainly states that “all courts shall be open” and that every injured person “shall have remedy by due course of law.” But through the efforts of a small group of wealthy and politically influential businessmen and a legislature slavishly devoted to the organization they founded, Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR), those days are gone, and these rights may disappear across the nation as President Bush pushes his campaign against “greedy trial lawyers” and “frivolous lawsuits.” Here is what can happen to you in Texas today, thanks to tort reformers and the Legislature: If you go to an emergency room with a heart attack and the ER doctor misreads your EKG, you must prove, in order to prevail in a lawsuit, that he was both “wantonly and willfully negligent.” If you took a drug that was later recalled after studies proved it could cause fatal complications, the manufacturer can escape liability for your serious injury or death if the instructions inside the package were approved by the FDA when you took the medicine. If your child is blinded at birth because of medical malpractice, there is a good chance that her only remedy is to receive a few hundred dollars a month for the rest of her life. If a driver hits your old Ford Pinto from behind and burns you beyond recognition, Ford will almost certainly be able to shift the blame from its defective product to the driver of the other car. If you live in an apartment complex that lays off security guards and fails to maintain its locks and you are raped as a result, the apartment owner can still avoid liability. All of the above presumes that you can find a lawyer to take your case; many can no longer afford to do so because tort reform has reduced your odds of winning. And should you by some slim chance win and the defendant appeals, your odds of ultimately prevailing on appeal are 12 percent as of 2004—the paltry rate at which the Texas Supreme Court, which has also been subject to the influence of the tort reformers, has found for the plaintiff in cases involving harm to persons or property, according to Court Watch, an Austin-based public-interests organization. When Alvin Berry heard this news, he felt utterly betrayed. “I felt the whole thing had been misrepresented,” he says now. “We’d voted on something, and we really didn’t know what the facts were.” Alvin decided to go ahead with the suit. But what he’d really like to do, he says, is change his vote, the one that took away his right to a fair fight in court. IT MIGHT SURPRISE ALVIN TO LEARN that the people who led the battle to take his rights away are very much like him: hardworking, churchgoing men of a certain age and experience who believe incontrovertibly that their determination to put an end to the spurious lawsuits supposedly clogging our courts is for the good of all. In fact, the words they like to attach to their efforts are terms like “civic virtue,” “level playing field,” and above all, “fairness.” I first met with the founders of TLR early this past summer in Leo Linbeck Jr.’s soaring home on one of the best streets in River Oaks, sitting down with four men who have created, in a little over ten years, not just the most powerful lobbying organization in Texas but also a social revolution in the way we treat our fellow Texans. Central casting couldn’t have done better. In the sunny, expansive kitchen, which, complete with fireplace, resembled nothing so much as the breakfast room of a small-town country club, here was Linbeck, tall, grandfatherly, and though pale and pained from recent surgery, still chairman, at 73, of the holding company of his eponymous multimillion-dollar construction firm and other enterprises. Whenever he spoke—slowly, in soft, equitable tones—the other men, all middle-aged, listened raptly. Richard Weekley, the chairman of his family development company and vice chairman of Weekley Homes, coiled confidently in a corner, white-haired, tan, and assiduously fit. Richard Trabulsi, dark-eyed, with bountiful salt-and-pepper hair, chose his words with the precision and care befitting the corporate defense attorney he once was at Vinson and Elkins. Finally, there was Hugh Rice Kelly, the retired general counsel of Reliant Energy and the legal strategist and scholar of the group, a man whose stentorian voice, sharp intellect, and dry wit have long made him a respected presence in Houston. As different in personality as the four men may be, all share two crucial characteristics: They are wealthy, and that wealth has been accumulated in businesses—from construction to alcohol—profoundly threatened by lawsuits. The existence of these lawsuits, in their minds, has less to do with corporate failings than with the greed of lawyers and what Linbeck describes as “the disengagement of the average citizen in the formulation of policy.” “We all get busy in our lives,” he explained gravely, his long, tapered fingers splayed open in a gesture simultaneously apologetic and understanding. “For most of us, it’s a day-to-day tussle, living paycheck to paycheck, and esoteric issues like joint and several liability don’t really resonate. As a result, we tend not to be engaged. My concern was and is that issues like this need to be engaged by the average person.” Flaws in the civil justice system, he said, have a “perverse” effect on our lives without our even knowing it. People “didn’t understand why their wages were depressed. They didn’t understand why their job opportunities were fewer. They didn’t understand why the economy was not as robust as it would otherwise be. So I viewed this opportunity as one in which my personal bias and interest in civic virtue could be reflected in a tangible way.” The other men in the kitchen nodded sagely at this cogent analysis, one that explained why the devastation brought about by what TLR likes to call “lawsuit abuse” had been allowed to persist and why Texas law needed to change. But outside this cozy scene, there are those who would strongly disagree. A 1994 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, for example, failed to uncover any decline in the Texas economy that could be attributed to frivolous lawsuits; Texas, in fact, led the nation in the number of new jobs created that year, when TLR was first becoming a force in Texas politics. That same year, Fortune magazine reported that, in the last quarter-century, Texas had enjoyed a 311 percent increase in Fortune 500 companies headquartered here. A national jury verdict survey found that the midpoint verdict for personal-injury cases in Texas was below the national average in every year from 1989 to 1993, including 45 percent below average in the last year of that period. In other words: What litigation crisis? And why has the campaign against trial lawyers been so successful? Here’s how Republican political consultant Frank Luntz explained it a few years ago: “Unlike most complex issues, the problems in our civil justice system come with a ready-made villain: the lawyer. . . . It’s almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers.” Trabulsi put it another way: “A lot of people think we’re not nearly as aggressive as we should be in trying to reform a system that’s out of control.” People who suffer through the emotional and financial drain of lawsuits are very passionate about what they think the solution should be. Leaning forward intently, he added, “We’re looking for fairness, balance, and restoration of litigation to its appropriate role in society,” he insisted. TLR isn’t trying to make sure the justice system favors defendants, as its critics have claimed. The four founders have all been involved in lawsuits; eliminating access, Trabulsi said, would be “bad public policy, and it would be against anybody’s own self-interest.” The distant, high-pitched keening you might hear at this point in the story is the sound of some of Texas’s most successful plaintiff’s lawyers gnashing their teeth, rending their garments, and screaming in frustration. Mark Lanier, fresh from his $253.4 million verdict in the Vioxx case, still sees himself as an advocate for the common man, like many personal-injury lawyers. He has this to say about Linbeck and his three cohorts when I interview him later in his paper-strewn office in north Houston. “TLR includes what some might call a bunch of rich snots,” he sneers, the baby face that was so charming and affable during the jury selection phase of the trial contorted now with icy fury. “They’re entrepreneurial everywhere but the legal system. They don’t have a clue what it’s like to be stepped on by a rich snot.” And there you have it, the two poles of a brutal debate that has been roiling Texas since the late eighties, one that has grown more intense and self-serving with time. “It will be difficult for you to find people in the middle,” TLR’s communications director Ken Hoagland suggested to me, and his was the voice of experience. Even the dean of the University of Texas law school, Bill Powers, declined to comment on the situation on or off the record. In the battle between trial lawyers and tort reformers, each side accuses the other of excessive greed and infinite mendacity; each side is convinced that only its side represents the truth. The middle ground is reserved for the all-too-human collateral damage of a bitter war involving big money and partisan politics, seemingly without end. SYLVIA ANN FULLER’S LIFE ENDED just when she was finally able to savor it. The 68-year-old Tyler widow worked hard all her life, but the tight curls she wore reflected the unseen constraints on her psyche. She gave herself over to teddy bear and cookbook collections and lavished affection on her dachshund, but her ability to love her three grown children and two grandchildren was often eclipsed by inconsolable depressions. Then, in 2003, Sylvia sought treatment for the first time and, with the help of antidepressants, was reborn. A sunny day in August 2004 was one of the happiest of her life: She was picnicking with her whole family in Tyler State Park, the first time in two years they’d all been together. But toward the end of the day, Sylvia started feeling ill, and early the next morning she felt bad enough to call her daughter, Karen Hindman, to ask for a ride to a local hospital. She had been vomiting all night and was frightened. Karen jumped in her car and drove the fifty miles from her home in Winnsboro to take her mother to a quiet emergency room that, she assumed, would give her mother the proper treatment. Through serial workups, including two EKGs to measure her heart function, Sylvia could not stop vomiting, even with the help of medication. The doctor diagnosed food poisoning from the potato salad at the picnic and was not dissuaded when Karen noted that no one else who’d eaten it had fallen ill. He gave Sylvia morphine, to help her rest. The next thing Karen knew, the nurses were saying her mother could go home. She didn’t see how. Sylvia was barely conscious from the drugs. “We will help you get her into the car,” they told her. “After that, you’re on your own.” Karen was reassured when her mother chatted a little during the ride. At home, she said she’d be fine alone; she just wanted to sleep. But when Karen got back to her own house and tried to call her mother, there was no answer. After the night passed with no response, she returned to her mother’s house, in Tyler, and found her collapsed on the floor. She had been there for nine hours, too sick to reach the phone. As soon as Karen helped Sylvia up, thick, grainy blood started pouring out of her nose and mouth. Sylvia Fuller died before the paramedics could arrive. Because there were many things that just didn’t seem right about that visit to the emergency room, Karen and her brother David Fuller began an investigation. They hired a private pathologist to go over their mother’s medical records, which showed that Sylvia’s cardiac enzymes had been irregular (a sign that often necessitates a hospital stay). Two EKGs revealed an irregular heart rate. No one had mentioned either finding to Karen or her mother at the hospital. In written notes, the ER doctor had suggested that the irregular heartbeat was a side effect of digitalis—a drug Sylvia wasn’t taking. Hospital records also stated that Sylvia had walked out of the emergency room on her own, when in fact she had been discharged, heavily medicated, in a wheelchair. Then David discovered that the pathologist who had conducted the autopsy for the hospital had a checkered history; he had left the Harris County medical examiner’s office under a cloud after jeopardizing at least fifteen homicide investigations because he was practicing without a Texas medical license. Like Alvin Berry, Sylvia Ann Fuller’s children had never sued anyone before. But they also felt that their mother had been robbed of her life and didn’t want what had happened to her to happen to anyone else. “If the emergency room had been very crowded and they had been overwhelmed, I could even forgive them,” David told me. “But she was the only patient in there.” One employee had been watching TV, Karen had told him. So, with his sister, David began looking for a lawyer. They saw the first one last December. He explained the realities: The facts of the case looked promising, but because their mother was retired, they would have a hard time getting any lawyer to take the case. It was, essentially, the same story Kelly Reddell had told Alvin Berry: Anyone who didn’t work—the elderly, homemakers, or children—was looking at a cap on noneconomic damages of $250,000. Trying such cases was simply not cost-effective for the lawyer or the client. (“It’s an assault on those who are the most vulnerable,” one plaintiff’s attorney told me. “It’s almost legal malpractice to take those cases.”) David contacted about fifteen lawyers and was turned down by all of them. One letter explained why: “Unfortunately, many of your legal rights have been taken away by state laws proposed and lobbied for by insurance, HMO, and corporate interests,” the lawyer wrote. “You and your family deserve better from the Texas government.” The lawyer suggested that David contact a citizens’ advocacy group and state officials. So that’s what he did. He described his mother’s experience in a letter to Governor Rick Perry and received a form letter from someone in the constituent services office. It described Texas’s great success in limiting frivolous lawsuits and reducing medical malpractice rates. “Please let us know if we may assist you in the future,” the letter ended. The letter made him more determined than ever to find a lawyer. So far, he’s had no luck. “I THINK IT’S IMPORTANT to set the stage for this discussion by talking about what the civil justice system in Texas was like in the eighties and early nineties,” Dick Trabulsi told me earnestly, during our first meeting. The past was a mirror image of today: Trial lawyers, most of whom were Democrats who were generous with their campaign contributions, had lots of loyal friends in key legislative positions, as well as in the governor’s office and throughout the judiciary, from the Texas Supreme Court down to local district courts. They were skilled in the art of “forum shopping”—filing their cases in friendly counties, particularly in South and East Texas—and styled themselves as defenders of the weak while using their money and power to bend the rules in their favor. “Legalized extortion” is the way former lieutenant governor Bill Ratliff—who, as a state senator, wrote most of the 2003 tort reform law—described the situation to me. “If a really mean trial lawyer had a case in the right courtroom, he would break you. Insurance companies would settle anything for higher and higher amounts rather than go to a stacked court.” Because venue laws were so loose in Texas, a case with only the most tenuous connection to the state (or the county) could still be tried in that locale, regardless of where the alleged wrongdoing had occurred. (In a seminal case, workers at a Costa Rica banana plantation who claimed to have been injured by a pesticide manufactured by Dow Chemical and Shell Oil outside the state sued in Texas, where Shell was headquartered—and won.) Public attitudes in those days were more sympathetic to consumers and injured people than to corporate defendants. Texas attorneys made hundreds of millions of dollars in cases involving everything from breast implants (in which the science was debatable) and tobacco (in the celebrated case in which five trial lawyers, including courtroom superstar John O’Quinn, received an arbitrated fee, paid by tobacco companies, of $3.3 billion) to asbestos (in which people who were not sick managed to routinely walk away with very tidy payouts of cash from their former employers). The turning point came in 1987, when famed Houston trial lawyer Joe Jamail allowed himself to be filmed by 60 Minutes as he cozied up to Texas Supreme Court justice Oscar Mauzy and bragged about his $25,000 campaign contributions soon after the court had allowed a $10.5 billion verdict Jamail had won for Pennzoil against Texaco to stand. (“Justice for Sale?” the segment was titled.) The New York Times said that the conduct of Texas’s courts was “reminiscent of what passes for justice in small countries run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses.” Corporate America fought back, decrying a crisis in litigation. Republicans like Vice President Dan Quayle capitalized on the partisan aspects of the issue by attacking the mostly Democratic trial lawyers in speeches as elitists. Advocacy groups sprang up across the nation—the tobacco industry in one year gave $55 million to the American Tort Reform Association—while the conservative Manhattan Institute asserted, loudly but debatably, that abuses of our legal system were costing Americans $300 billion a year. It was in this atmosphere, in 1993, that Dick Weekley decided he had had enough. As he would later write with Hugh Rice Kelly in TLR’s monograph, “Template for Reform,” “The Trials controlled the Legislature, and Austin mandarins dismissed attempts at meaningful reform as wishful thinking.” Weekley began to convene meetings of Houston businessmen and community leaders to discuss the problem, and the people who kept coming back were Leo Linbeck, Trabulsi, and Kelly. They formed Texans for Lawsuit Reform, styling themselves as outsiders, refusing to “go along to get along.” To defeat “the most powerful special-interest group in the country,” they knew that they had to match their opponents “in focus, funding, and tenacity.” IT WAS PROBABLY NOT surprising that the Legislature initially viewed them with derision and contempt—“Dick Weekley is gonna feel like he was f—ed by a bull,” one lobbyist vowed—but they were undaunted. TLR’s chief lobbyist, a former Republican legislator from Houston named Mike Toomey, explained to the group that they would never effect change until they could break up the coalition of Democratic state senators who could prevent tort reform legislation from coming to the floor for a vote. So the group set to work, tattling on legislators who paid lip service to tort reform back home but in Austin remained beholden to the trial lawyers. They raised $600,000 for the 1994 elections and spent about $300,000 on three contests in which novice Republicans were trying to unseat veteran Democrats—and won them all. The new senators TLR helped to elect gave Republicans their first majority in the state Senate in more than a century. Suddenly, the trial lawyers weren’t laughing anymore. There was a new governor too: George W. Bush, who had defeated Ann Richards, in 1994, by sticking to four issues, one of which was tort reform. (By the time he was reelected, in 1998, TLR and similar groups had given more than $4 million to his two campaigns.) Karl Rove told the Washington Post that once Bush took on the trial lawyers, “Business groups flocked to us.” Enron CEO Ken Lay, an early TLR member, warned the newly elected governor in a letter, “Let me finally say that I believe there are few, if any, issues more important to this state than reforming our tort system. It has become the laughing stock of the country and is certainly discouraging companies from moving offices and plants into Texas. Over time it will encourage many of us with large operations in Texas to entertain moving some of these to other states to attempt to reduce our exposure to what has become an extremely capricious legal system.” (Lay did not mention Enron’s long history of pipeline safety violations.) In February Bush responded by declaring tort reform an emergency issue, overriding a rule that prohibited lawmakers from taking up legislation during the first sixty days of a session. Still, there were enough Democrats in high places that TLR didn’t get everything it wanted. Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, who presided over the Senate, forced TLR and other tort reform groups to sit down with the trial lawyers and negotiate a compromise, which they did, near the end of the 1995 session. Punitive damages were contained; instead of being calculated at four times actual damages, they were reduced to twice that amount, plus an amount equal to noneconomic damages (for pain and suffering), up to $750,000. (“Of course, the punitive damages are not what compensates somebody for their loss,” says Weekley. “It’s just pure money.”) The era of soaking the defendant with the deepest pockets came to an end; in the past, if a jury found that the defendant was more negligent than the plaintiff, that defendant could be held liable for the entire amount of a judgment. After 1995, a defendant was on the hook for only his share of the responsibility, a concept defined by TLR as “proportionate liability.” The effect of this was that if, say, an uninsured driver who rear-ended a poorly designed car was found to be 40 percent responsible for the resulting explosion, then the injured plaintiff would have to “eat” that 40 percent—the Legislature having chosen to protect the negligent automaker instead of the innocent victim. The rules covering where a case could be tried in Texas were tightened substantially; defendants could be sued only where negligence had occurred or where they were based. While plaintiff’s lawyers howled that victims would have a much harder time winning cases, it was hard to argue with reforms that probably corrected some of the worst abuses of the legal system. Soon after the session, plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier found himself at a fund-raising lunch for a religious right organization, seated next to then—agriculture commissioner Rick Perry. “What’s this next session gonna do to me?” Lanier asked. “Hey, don’t worry,” Perry told him. “We’ve gone as far as we need to.” That, of course, did not turn out to be accurate. JUST BEFORE HE SIGNED the contract for his house, on New Year’s Day 2002, Brian Zaltsberg looked the KB Home salesman in the eye and gave him a stern warning. “Go ahead and lose the commission if there are going to be problems with the house,” he said. “Because your time will be better spent on someone else. If you screw me, I’m gonna come back on ya.” The salesman for KB, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, promised that the house would be just fine. So Brian and his fiancée, Stephanie, signed the contract and, thrilled, became first-time homeowners. They were just two young kids—27 and 23 years old, respectively—without much education or money to throw around. Brian, tall, wiry, and favoring gimme caps, was determined to finish college while he earned a living developing Web sites and repairing computers. Porcelain-skinned Stephanie had finished high school and was looking forward to life as a homemaker and a mom. Brian felt they had bought, for their hard-earned $140,000, a piece of the American dream. “Happy people,” Brian said of his envisioned future, when the three of us met at his favorite Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth. “Dream home and all that.” The 1,800-square-foot one-story brick house, in a sun-scorched suburb on the northwest side of the city, was far from lavish, but to the Zaltsbergs, it was paradise. “We were so damn excited,” Stephanie told me. But the trouble started even before they moved in. Groundbreaking was delayed, and then construction was erratic. Brian would often find the site littered with trash and once pulled containers from fast-food restaurants from the half-finished walls. But those were small problems compared with the one that took place on moving day. The Zaltsbergs stored many of their belongings in the garage while they set up the house, and as night fell, so did a downpour. Brian stepped outsi
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