CHAPTER 25
BLOODSPORT
No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.
—Theodore Roosevelt
The McKiver trial lasts three weeks from opening statement to closing argument. It’s a forced march of exhausting days and near-sleepless nights. The adrenaline and endorphins, the tightrope nerves and tumbleweed emotions, and the trove of common memories forge a bond among the plaintiffs’ team that will endure for years afterward, perhaps forever.
So does living together. Instead of booking rooms at a downtown hotel, Mike and Mona rent four apartments in a building miles away from the city center. It’s a more comfortable living arrangement, given the length of time they’re going to be in town, and it affords them an additional layer of security. When they aren’t at the courthouse, no one outside the team knows where to find them—not the media, and definitely not the allies of Smithfield.
In all of Mike Kaeske’s career, he’s never lived in such proximity to his trial team. The apartments feel like a terrarium, a self-contained universe sealed off from the world. The three-bedroom unit he shares with Haven, his goldendoodle, Tük, and Sophie Flynn doubles as the team’s “war room.” It is their psychic center of gravity, where Kaeske expurgates his doubts every morning before the trip to the courthouse, with aid from Haven, Lisa, Sophie, and Daniel, and where he battens down every evening with Mona and the crew to debrief, share a takeout dinner, and draw up the next day’s battle plan.
A trial, in its performative shape, is a cross between Broadway theater and North Hollywood improv. The production is scripted, yet everything is subject to last-minute change. Since Mike prefers to try cases on his own rather than share the workload with other lawyers, he has to ponder every question himself from all points on the compass. He has to wrestle through every contingency and know the order of proof like his own life story. If he falters, if the defense team catches him by surprise, the jury will see it and notch a demerit on their mental scorecard.
He vows never to be caught by surprise.
In the war room, he thinks out loud in a stream of consciousness, bouncing ideas off Sophie and the other team members like Roger Federer warming up before a match at the U.S. Open. His intensity is at the red line; his criticism is frequent and unsparing. If an idea doesn’t work, he scraps it and moves on. If a concept is solid but out of sequence, someone writes it on a sticky note and pastes it on the wall. As the days give way to weeks, the wall turns into a pink-and-yellow checkerboard of words and phrases, themes and concepts, that are constantly being reorganized and replaced. Though some of the team members find it enervating—even, at times, a cause for wounded feelings—Kaeske thrives on the intellectual combat. He needs it to keep his mind sharp, to maintain his edge, and to stay ahead of Smithfield.
To handle the stress, the team develops a culture of playfulness. Humor is an unofficial currency, and inside jokes proliferate. The welcome mat outside Mike’s apartment bears the inscription Welcome to the Shitshow. It’s his philosophy of trial practice—that everything that can go sideways will go sideways, and if it doesn’t this time around, it will next time. Karma is an unforgiving bitch, so it’s best to see her coming. Lisa Blue adds to the laconic atmosphere a dash of her own snark, handing out mugs emblazoned with the silhouette of two hogs locked in coitus, with the epigram Makin’ Bacon. As caustic as he can be in a sparring contest, Kaeske has a capacious sense of humor and is always ready for a laugh.
He is also a fitness fanatic, as is Lisa. Every morning at six o’clock, they meet in the gym for half an hour on the elliptical. Daniel Wallace joins them. Since Mike is a light switch, and at trial he is always “on,” he focuses on the case as soon as the cobwebs clear. After working up a sweat, the three of them shower and dress and gather again in the war room. Haven—who is a saint by unanimous attestation—has Kaeske’s shirt ironed and his ensemble ready to go as soon as he returns from the gym. A creature of extreme habit, Mike wears only one brand of shirt (Tom Ford), and only one color of suit (blue). In fact, just about everything in his closet back home—jeans, T-shirts, ski jackets, hats, backpacks—is some shade of sea or sky.
If humor and exercise are Kaeske’s relief valves, music is his therapy. He’s a huge fan of Mumford & Sons. He can sing every word of Citizen Cope. His latest crush is the Revivalists. He’s a compulsive concertgoer. The only thing better than listening to the right song is seeing it performed live. When the Revivalists play the Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh, he will be there, singing “Wish I Knew You” with David Shaw and the band, as will half the trial team.
As a musician himself, Shane Rogers shares Kaeske’s devotion. It’s one of the many commonalities that fire their friendship. After Shane endures a grueling two-and-a-half-day ordeal on the stand, Mike texts him a note of thanks along with a song: “She Sells Sanctuary” by The Cult. It’s a blast from the past for Shane, something he listened to as a young man. After Shane testifies in a later trial, Kaeske will send him “Age of Consent” by New Order, another old favorite. Kaeske’s song selections are spot on. It’s as if he is in Shane’s head.
Music is a salve for John Hughes, too. As the designated scrivener, he spends almost no time in Raleigh. Rather, while Mike is examining witnesses, and Mona is passing him ideas from the chair, and Sophie is managing the storehouse of exhibits, and Lisa is watching the jury, and Whitney, Daniel, and Mark Doby are scribbling notes, and Linda Wike and Rene Davis are handling logistics for the clients (hotel reservations, wardrobe issues, lunch orders, etc.), the professor’s son is camped out in his makeshift home office in Salisbury. He eats junk food like a teenager, never changes his clothes, and keeps bizarre hours, working through the night and sleeping in short bursts during the day. For eighteen or nineteen hours at a time, he is glued to his laptop, fingers pecking away. He listens to music as he writes—everything from Led Zeppelin to sitar arrangements from half a world away.
The whole scene drives his wife, Jenny, crazy. She understands the obsession of his craft. She’s a writer, too. But she hates the toll it is taking on him, the roller coaster of emotions and the friction that arises between John and Mike, who has to argue John’s motions before Judge Britt. She dislikes the cloying funk in the air. She’s disgusted by his dorm-room diet. Most of all, she loathes the fact that John is always distracted, that even on weekends he’s lost in the law, that when their little dachshund dies in the middle of the trial, he barely takes a moment to grieve. But she’s a patient woman. She knew the man she was marrying, and she gives him the space he needs. As a writer, at least, she’s glad to see him pouring his soul onto the page.
Of the sixteen days that the McKiver case is on the docket, the plaintiffs use ten days to meet their burden of proof. Their first two witnesses are Steve Wing, testifying posthumously by video, and Shane Rogers. As a one-two combination, the scientists are devastating.
Wing communicates to the jury with almost priestly authority. In the courtroom, the last words of a dying man ring like a celestial pronouncement. That he agreed to testify at such a late stage out of the goodness of his heart and not for money gilds his words in gold leaf. All doubts about his credibility—if any once existed—are dispelled.
Then Shane Rogers takes the stand. With painstaking clarity and detail, he describes his findings from Joyce McKiver’s neighborhood. While he is discussing the Pig2Bac marker—the inevitable companion of hog feces—Kaeske plays for the jury a gorgeously produced animation of Pig2Bac-bearing particles rising from the hog barns, wafting on the wind, and coming to rest on the neighbors’ homes. In describing his visit to Kinlaw’s hog operation, Shane shows the jury photos and videos of Smithfield’s filth-stained hogs and of himself in a small boat, dressed in a hazmat suit, floating on the morass of a pink-brown lagoon. He underscores the visuals with his own hog odor story: the rancid eyeglasses that dogged him for weeks.
As a visual aid to Shane’s testimony, Mike Kaeske trots out a life-sized display model of a three-hundred-pound market hog that Lisa purchased online and the team caked in mud. Mark Anderson, as if hoping to diminish the grossness of the reproduction, christens the pig “Wilbur.” But the giant hog bears no resemblance to Charlotte’s friend. It looks like a manure-covered monstrosity.
By the time Shane vacates the stand, he has left the jury with a smorgasbord of vivid impressions, chief among them that Smithfield, along with being king of the hog kings, is also the undisputed king of shit. One can almost hear the jurors’ vomit reflex engaging.
After framing the case with his experts, Mike Kaeske weaves the rest of his witnesses like threads on a loom. The plaintiffs, almost all of them kin to Joyce McKiver, are at once nervous and eager to testify. They have been a constant presence at the trial, their countenances lending gravitas to the testimony of the experts. Now, at last, they have a chance to speak. One by one, they take their turns in the witness chair, trying their best to conceal the trembling in their hands.
While each of the plaintiffs contributes a unique splash of color, Daphne McKoy, the youngest of Joyce McKiver’s children, distills her family’s pain to its purest essence. A social worker and single mother of two teenagers, she is a cherubic woman with eyes that exude kindness, shoulder-length hair embellished with a wavy beach curl, and horn-rimmed glasses that lend her soft features a distinguished touch. She was born in the neighborhood and has lived there most of her life. She lays out the story in detail—the flies, the trucks, the buzzards, and the hogs. She is on the stand for three hours. It is a nerve-racking experience, but her summation lands like a thunderclap.
“My father was a sharecropper. We didn’t have a lot, and what he did leave to his family was that little piece of land. They gave that land to me, and I grew up there. Now that my kids are growing up there, they don’t have the same upbringing I had. All they’ve known is trying to play outside, having to cut it short because it stinks. Or they’re getting ready to go to school, and I’m like, ‘Oh, it stinks so bad out here.’ So they’re not getting the sentimental value that I got out of the land. I would like for you to know how helpless I feel as a mother to hear them complain about how the kids say, ‘Your house smells—’ ” Daphne chokes up. “ ‘Your house smells like a trash dump,’ or ‘You don’t want to have your friends over because of the smell.’ I just want you to know how hopeless and helpless it feels. So I’m here now, and it’s been a long process. It’s been years. I’m just hoping that there is a change.”
When she steps down from the stand, the entire courtroom is silent. Her words are pennies cast into a fountain, the wishes and prayers of her family for dignity, for surcease.
In time, Kaeske summons a quartet of company men, surrounding them with Daphne’s neighbors to create a kind of mural of the hog kingdom’s tyranny. He calls Kraig Westerbeek and John Sargent by proxy, playing the jury compilations from their video depositions. But Don Butler, the industry’s leading front man, now retired, and Gregg Schmidt, the president of Murphy-Brown, he subpoenas to testify live, as adverse witnesses.
A public relations guru and multi-tour veteran of the hog wars, Butler is a smooth operator on the stand. He is calm and composed, his voice measured, his words carefully chosen. Over the next day and a half, Mike Kaeske unravels him. In Kaeske’s view, Butler is not just a partisan but a propagandist. He’s been around the industry longer than any of his colleagues. He knows that what the neighbors are saying is true, yet he persists in denying it. Indeed, he spent his career as the industry’s leading mercenary, fighting at every level of government to deprive the neighbors of justice. It’s Butler’s hidebound recalcitrance, his bad-faith denial of reality, and his role in wielding the industry’s axe, that Kaeske wants to highlight for the jury.
Like a swordsman, Kaeske keeps his distance at first, circling Butler almost lazily and tossing out uncontroversial queries about Smithfield, its corporate structure, and the Shuanghui buyout in 2013. He waits for his moment, then makes a swift cut. The subject is one of Wendell Murphy’s pet laws, which stripped localities of their power to use zoning laws to regulate the hog industry. Butler, who was running public affairs for Carroll’s Foods at the time, was one of the chief exponents and enforcers of this law. Yet when Kaeske asks about Carroll’s use of litigation to bring the counties to heel, Butler flatly denies that he was involved.
Until Kaeske shows him a letter he sent to the Bladen County Board of Health, threatening to sue if they required a health inspection for hog operations. And a memo Butler sent to Carroll’s president, Sonny Faison, recommending that they take Robeson County to court over new hog farm regulations. Impeached by his own words, Butler’s memory suddenly improves.
Kaeske’s next cut is even deeper. He shows the PR man a newspaper clipping from Butler’s own Bladen County back in 1995, in which a neighbor complained that the hog odor wasn’t just an outdoor nuisance; it had gotten into his home. Kaeske asks Butler if he believes that odor from an industrial hog operation can seep into a neighbor’s home.
“Inside their home?” Butler asks. “No, I don’t believe that.”
“So this man,” Kaeske replies, holding up the article, “when he said, ‘I have smelled it in my home twice this week,’ you don’t believe he was telling the truth?”
Butler tries an evasive maneuver. “I can only answer that, sir, in the experience of my life. I’ve been close to hog farms a lot. I’ve never smelled it inside my home.”
“Well, to be fair,” Kaeske says, “you don’t smell at all, correct?”
Butler’s face, well-tanned from the sun, turns a shade of purple that Kaeske has never seen on a human being. The color suffuses his head and neck. “I do smell,” he retorts. “I have a diminished sense of smell that occurred several years ago, approximately six or seven years ago due to a medical event. But prior to that I had a normal sense of smell.”
This is a point that Kaeske hammered in Butler’s deposition. Butler claimed that he lost much of his olfactory sensitivity after a seasonal cold. As a medical explanation, it is plausible. Some viruses can impede one’s sense of smell. Yet given Butler’s occupation, it is hardly the only possible culprit. At his deposition, Kaeske inquired whether his constant proximity to hog farms, with their dust, chemicals, and pathogens, might have impacted his nose. Butler denied it. At trial, Kaeske doesn’t belabor the details. Instead, he allows the fact of Butler’s departed sense of smell to linger in the air, casting doubt upon the man’s entire testimony.
Returning to the article, Kaeske shows Butler where neighbors complained that the hog odor prevented their children from playing outside. “Do you believe that industrial hog operations like Smithfield’s Kinlaw industrial hog operation have the ability to release odors into the neighborhoods strong enough that children would be unable to play outside because they don’t like the hog farm odor?” he asks.
Butler is unmoved. “No, I do not believe that.”
Staying light on his feet, Kaeske wears the PR man down with papers from Smithfield’s archive, papers that document the work of activists and the findings from industry-sponsored focus groups, and media articles from the height of the hog wars. Butler fights back vigorously, admitting what he must admit—that odor increases on humid days and that a thousand hogs in a barn produce a smell—but denying the premise that an industrial hog operation could ever be a nuisance. It’s his view that only a small group of neighbors were doing all the complaining, that the media is biased against the industry, constantly recycling dated stories with a negative bent, and that when Smithfield received legitimate complaints, it responded to them.
“If my neighbors ever came to me and complained about a problem, I would fix it,” he assures the jury. “And that’s been the position of the company I’ve worked with for my entire career.”
Kaeske senses the man’s overreach and puts his weight into a countering thrust. “Has Smithfield or any of its related companies ever eliminated the lagoon and sprayfield system in North Carolina due to the complaints from neighbors?”
“Have we ever closed…?” Butler says, struggling to recover. “Is that what you’re asking me? Have we ever closed a farm due to the complaint from a neighbor?”
“No.” Kaeske shakes his head. “I don’t want to close any farms. No. Has Smithfield ever eliminated the lagoon and sprayfield system in response to complaints from neighbors?”
“No, because that would be the same thing as closing the farm.”
Kaeske allows a trace of umbrage into his voice. “No, it wouldn’t. There are methods that can be used to eliminate the lagoon and sprayfield system, aren’t there.”
Backed into a corner, Butler purples again. “No,” he replies forcefully.
Kaeske presses harder. “You know that there’s technology that will eliminate the lagoon and sprayfield system, correct?”
Butler doubles down. “No, I don’t.”
This is another mistake. It exposes Butler’s flank in a way that Kaeske will exploit later on. For now, though, Kaeske has other priorities.
He asks: If Smithfield were genuinely committed to addressing the concerns of the neighbors, why didn’t it take the opportunity to do so after it got sued? Lawsuits are complaints, aren’t they? That word is literally the title of the document. Butler takes cover behind his lawyers. He did nothing, he claims, on the advice of his counsel. Mark Anderson lodges a vehement objection, which Judge Britt sustains.
But the point remains: Butler did nothing.
If Smithfield really wants to hear the neighbors’ opinions, Kaeske continues, has it created a hotline and posted it on its hundreds of trucks to make people aware that if they have a problem, they can complain? Butler admits the company has never done that. But there’s a toll-free number on the Smithfield signs outside every farm.
“It is not difficult to get in touch with Smithfield Foods in southeastern North Carolina,” Butler says. “If you want to get in touch with Smithfield Foods, it’s not difficult.”
This is yet another miscue, and Kaeske takes advantage of it. “Now, let’s say it’s Saturday and my clients are trying to have a barbecue, and they get the smell of the hog odor so bad that they don’t want to be outside anymore, what are you saying they should do?”
Butler fumbles for a response. “Well, that’s a dilemma. I don’t know.” He goes on to say that Smithfield has instructed its hog farmers to avoid spraying when they know their neighbors have planned an event. But that’s not Kaeske’s question. He’s asking about a spontaneous gathering. Who are the neighbors supposed to contact? Suddenly, Butler recalls that Smithfield has a 24/7 complaint line listed on its website.
“Anybody can call it,” he explains. “They can leave an anonymous complaint about whatever they want related to Smithfield.”
“And tell the members of the jury when that went into effect,” Kaeske says.
“I don’t know the exact date.”
“You do know that didn’t go into effect until after this lawsuit was filed, correct?”
Anderson objects, but Butler answers anyway: “I don’t remember the date.”
Kaeske refuses to let this go. “You know as recently as two years ago there was no phone number anywhere on the Smithfield website for complaints?”
“Objection!” says Anderson.
“Overruled,” replies Judge Britt. “If he knows.”
“I don’t know,” Butler admits.
Another strike of the blade, another splotch of blood. But Kaeske won’t be satisfied until he exposes this “complaint” system as a sham. So he puts it in context, presses the hypothetical about the Saturday barbecue. With Butler’s reluctant help, he establishes that even if a neighbor tried to complain, the best the company would do is send someone from environmental compliance out to inspect the farm and talk to the hog farmer. But by then the barbecue would almost certainly be over, and the smell might very well be gone. If Smithfield really wanted to combat the odor, it could require its hog farmers to measure the odor. But it’s never done that, as Butler attests. Finding his back once again against the wall, the PR man passes the buck to the state. The neighbor, he says, should call the Division of Air Quality, which has regulatory authority over hog farms and can investigate odor complaints and impose fines.
“You just told us you’d fix it,” counters Kaeske.
“I said we’d do everything in our power to fix it,” Butler rejoins.
This is the shape of Butler’s charade: Deny until cornered, feign concern, then offer half-baked solutions that fall apart on inspection.
Kaeske takes Butler back to the late nineties. After the legislature imposed a moratorium on new hog farms, it decided to enact odor regulations in response to neighborhood complaints. The committee tasked with writing the regulations asked the regulators at the Division of Air Quality for help with the drafting. The hog barons, however, were not content to watch from the sidelines. They created a “producers working group” and offered their own comments to the drafters. In the view of DAQ, there were a variety of possible methods to measure objectionable hog odor—odor panels, scentometers, electric noses, and citizen complaints, with a complaint system being the least efficient. Unsurprisingly, the hog industry signaled its strong preference for a complaint system, and Don Butler, more than anyone else, made that public case.
Kaeske ramps up the attack. “You understand that if it’s based on complaints, that’s putting the burden on the people who are getting interfered with to figure out how to complain, right? It’s putting the burden on the people who have to smell the odor, right?”
Again, Butler ducks, saying the complaint process was meant to empower the citizens and give them a chance to be heard. “Problems that we don’t know about can’t be addressed.”
“You know that hog operations create hog odor that leaves the property,” Kaeske retorts. “You wanted a system that required people to go figure out how to complain.”
Mark Anderson rises to his feet. “Objection!”
“That’s what you wanted, correct?” Kaeske demands.
At last, Judge Britt puts his hands between them: “Sustained.”
There’s one final area of inquiry that Kaeske wants to make before he releases Butler, one last series of cuts and strikes before he lays down his sword. He isn’t aiming for a death blow. He wants to leave the man staggering, weeping blood. He wants the jury to feel no pity for him as he retreats down the aisle. He wants them to remember him as the living, breathing face of an industry that has shown no mercy, that has rigged the economic and political systems of an entire state to enrich and protect itself, and that has denied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mostly Black landowners their human rights, denying Daphne McKoy’s children a homeplace that they can be proud of, that they might return to one day, like their mother did.
“In 1999,” says Mike Kaeske, “there came a time when the governor of the state of North Carolina decided because of the problems, including odor, associated with the lagoon and sprayfield system that the system needed to be eliminated in the state, correct?”
“I think that was his belief,” Butler concedes.
Kaeske shows the PR man the press release from Governor Hunt’s office in which he called for a ten-year conversion of hog lagoons to new technology. He asks Butler whether the governor was right to consider hog lagoons a source of air and water pollution.
Butler doesn’t budge. “That was the governor’s opinion.”
“But was it true?”
Hemmed in yet again, Butler gives an inch. “There might have been some instances of that, but it was not widespread.”
“So you disagree?”
“I do.”
Kaeske then presents him with the Smithfield Agreement. He offers the jury a primer on the agreement’s terms, by way of admissions from Butler. Under the agreement, Smithfield—not the state—would pay to install on all of its hog farms any new waste-management technology that the NC State researchers found to be environmentally superior to lagoons and sprayfields, and also operationally and economically feasible. The company could not offload the cost of upgrading its contract farms onto the growers.
Kaeske puts his next question bluntly: “Technology was found that solves all these problems both technically and operationally, correct?”
Butler is savvy enough not to hide. “The designee did identify a couple of technologies that met these requirements.” Super Soils was one of them. But, he adds, the technologies only met the specifications necessary to be implemented on new farms, not existing farms.
Kaeske keeps Butler focused on Super Soils. “If I want to go build a new hog operation right now, this process determined that Super Soils is operationally, technically, and economically feasible, and it would be permitted by the State of North Carolina, correct?”
“For new or expanded farms,” Butler affirms.
“All right,” says Kaeske, pivoting quickly. “Now, back to conversion of existing farms. The only outstanding issue was money, correct? It was technically feasible. It was operationally feasible. The only issue was money. If you wanted to pay for it, you could do it, right?”
Butler admits this. But under subsequent questioning, he denies the premise—that Smithfield could, if it chose to spend the money, implement Super Soils on all of its existing farms, its company-owned farms and its contract farms alike. “We’re not going to put in technology or ask our growers to, if we know it’s going to put them out of business.”
This is the sticking point. It’s been Smithfield’s mantra for a decade now. Kaeske knows he won’t convince Butler to abandon it. But he can force the PR man to admit that the findings of the economic subcommittee were skewed by industry influence. Out of eleven members, five were industry insiders: Bart Ellis, from Smithfield Foods; Dave Townsend, from Premium Standard Farms; Bundy Lane, from Frontline Farmers; Richard Eason, from Cape Fear Farm Credit; and Dennis Dipietre, an economic advisor to PSF. And all of them banded together to advance a feasibility standard that ruled out Super Soils and everything else.
“Their opinion,” says Kaeske, “was that we’re not willing to pay one dollar more, correct?”
“That was their conclusion,” Butler concedes.
“There is no doubt that if Smithfield wanted to use Super Soils on its contract grower operations, it could afford the money to pay for it, correct?”
Butler avoids the trap. “Smithfield is bound by the terms of the agreement and is still good for those commitments. We didn’t make any commitments beyond the agreement itself.”
“Sir, you didn’t answer my question. Set the agreement aside. The technology exists in the world. Do you agree that Smithfield should be socially responsible?”
Butler’s skin takes on its purple sheen. “Yes, I do.”
“You agree that Smithfield should be environmentally responsible?”
“I do.”
“You agree that Smithfield should be a good neighbor?”
“I do.”
“This technology exists, and if Smithfield wanted to use it at any one of its corporate farms or at one of its contract grower farms, Smithfield can certainly afford the money to use it.”
Again, Butler tries to dodge, claiming that he visited the test sites for the new technology and that none of them made a significant difference in the odor level. Kaeske asks the question about affordability yet again, forcing Butler to answer.
“Not if it’s going to drive us out of business, no,” he says.
The trap closes. Ever the professional, Kaeske doesn’t allow his glee to register. But he has Butler by the throat. “How much did Smithfield make in profit last year?”
Mark Anderson tries to intercede, but Judge Britt overrules him.
“I don’t know,” Butler says.
“Approximately $2 billion, correct?”
Again, Anderson objects, but the judge declines to intervene.
Kaeske uses the opportunity to underline the number: “Profit of $2 billion, correct?”
If any of the jurors were drifting before, they’re definitely paying attention now. The mention of $2 billion—that’s “billion” with a “b”—echoes in the chamber like a secret chord. No wonder Smithfield’s trial counsel wanted to prevent Mike Kaeske from saying the words.
“I think that’s approximately correct,” Butler allows.
“Okay. So if Smithfield wanted to take some of that profit and use it to implement this technology that was determined to be technically and operationally feasible and was determined to substantially eliminate the odor created by the lagoon and sprayfield system, Smithfield could afford to do that with its $2 billion in profit, correct?”
The answer is self-evident, but Don Butler still says, “No.”
The point scored, the wound suppurating, Kaeske leaves it there. “Mr. Butler, I have one more document that I want to show you and the members of the jury.” It’s a memorandum dated February 1, 1999, written by Butler himself. “Mr. Butler, have you ever heard anyone say, ‘I believe it is a foregone conclusion that we will be forced to transition to different waste-treatment technology over the next few years’?”
“Yes,” says Butler, looking weary and miserable.
“You’ve said that, correct?”
“I did.”
“It’s now been nineteen years since you said that, correct?”
“It was written in 1999.”
“And you’ve postponed the elimination of the lagoon and sprayfield system that creates those problems for nineteen years, correct?”
Butler’s face is fuchsia. “Because technologies have not been identified that were…that met the criteria for conversion.” When Kaeske hits him with the $2 billion again, he tries on a last-ditch excuse: “If we had known about a technology that we believed was truly better and would allow farmers to remain in business, we would have adopted it and implemented it.”
If ever a string of words rang hollow in a courtroom, these do.
“One last thing,” says Kaeske. “When you say ‘allow farmers to remain in business,’ there is absolutely nothing about your relationship with Mr. Kinlaw or any one of the other contract growers that prohibits you from paying for that technology to be used on his operation, so that he doesn’t have to pay for it, correct?”
“Correct.”
“And, as a matter of fact, your contract with the contract growers actually gives you the right to dictate the facilities of the grower, correct?”
Butler tries to push back, but Kaeske doesn’t care. He’s sick of the PR man’s sanctimonious bullshit, and if his instinct is right, so is the jury. Mark Anderson can try to rehabilitate him, to bind up his wounds and conceal the blood, but no amount of bandaging can undo the damage. The truth is obvious to anyone with a functioning conscience.
Kaeske turns away and catches Sophie’s eye, then Mona’s. He looks up at Judge Britt, who is peering at him over his eyeglasses. Kaeske’s lips spread into a smile.
“Your Honor, I pass the witness,” he says.