CHAPTER 32
WORLD ON FIRE
The path to paradise begins in hell.
—Dante Alighieri
With the hog barons hemorrhaging sympathy, the plaintiffs’ team offers them no quarter, no mercy. If the McGowan case was a trial by ordeal, Artis will be a trial by fire.
After Joyce Messick departs, Mike Kaeske calls Wesley Sewell to the witness stand. Sewell is a diamond dredged up by Mark Doby. He is a giant of a man, with florid pink skin, a neck thicker than his head, and a torso the size of a tractor tire. Yet he smiles readily and his eyes sparkle unexpectedly, as if they are accustomed to laugh. His voice, too, doesn’t match his appearance. It has the pitch of a tenor and an unabashed twang.
He lives with his wife on Piney Woods Road, a hundred yards west of Joyce and Willie. A native of Pender County, he spent a lot of years down on the coast before returning home to care for his ailing mother and father-in-law. He’s a retired police officer, a retired assistant fire chief, a former water rescue chief, a rescue diver, a dive master, a firearms instructor, and a first responder. In short, he’s the guy you want with you in a gunfight or a disaster zone. He’s also been on Oprah. A woman he once arrested for drunk driving submitted his name to the show as her guardian angel, someone who changed her life. Oprah brought him on and let him share the story with the world. Sewell is a truth teller. If it needs to be said, he’ll say it. And if he says it, he means it. All of this is evident from the first word he speaks.
Wesley Sewell is bothered by the hog odor. He bought his house after seeing it online and making a couple of visits. He had no idea how close it was to a hog farm. He didn’t realize that until the weather turned. It was a foggy day with a steady wind out of the east. The odor was so pungent that he jumped in his car and traced it to the source. That’s when he saw Dean Hilton’s barns rising over the fields. He can’t sell the house because he’s still looking after his mother and father-in-law. But his wife wants to move as soon as they can.
Mike Kaeske asks him to rate the odor on the spectrum of smells.
“Well,” Sewell says, “I put it probably at number three, as some of the worst things I’ve smelled. I’ve had the misfortune of having to go to a plane crash that caught on fire, and I had to remove burnt bodies. And I’ve had to go in to a house, a trailer, and remove a person that had been dead for about a week on the toilet. Those smelled worse than the hog place smells.”
“Other than that, do you put hog odor at number three?”
“Yes, sir,” Sewell says.
He tells the jury the odor was once so bad that his wife got sick after walking outside. It’s hard for him, too, because he loves the outdoors. He’s an amateur horticulturalist. His backyard looks like a plant nursery. He keeps a bottle of OdoBan around to spray if the odor gets offensive. He also has a massive fly problem. He wears out fly swatters on a regular basis. He’s never understood where the flies come from. He used to buy collard greens from Jimmy Jacobs. “They are the best collards around,” he says. But then he and his wife saw the hog farm spraying waste on the fields near Jimmy’s house, and he stopped buying them.
Kaeske asks him if he has any other complaints about the hog farm, and Sewell says he does. A while back a young attorney from McGuireWoods stopped by his house to chat. He complained to the defense lawyer about water coming in through the back part of the property right after some really heavy rains. “It smelled just like the hog farm,” Sewell recounts, looking at the jury. “And I said something about the possibility that the lagoon overflowed. And he got all irate and threw his hands up and everything. ‘Don’t say that!’ And all this—”
Jim Neale is on his feet. “Objection to the hearsay, Your Honor.”
“Sustained,” says Judge Britt. “You can’t tell what he said.”
Kaeske presses the point, arguing that a statement by a defense attorney is admissible. The judge disagrees, but he allows Sewell to repeat the words he said to the young lawyer.
Sewell complies: “I gave him the color of what it looked like back there, and told him I knew what hog waste smelled like.”
“When he came,” Kaeske says, “did he ever give you any way to lodge further complaints?”
“No, sir. He did not.”
“Did he ever send anyone else out to your house to either test the water in your backyard or ask you whether you have any further complaints?”
“No, sir. He did not.”
“Did anyone from Smithfield in the last however many years it’s been, did anyone ever come back to follow up with you about your complaints?”
“No, sir.”
“And in that time since you’ve complained, have you noticed that it’s gotten any better or any different?”
“It’s the same, depending upon the weather, pretty much.”
Kaeske asks if he’s ever made a complaint to anyone other than the defense lawyer.
“No, sir,” Sewell says. “I didn’t know who to complain to. I know better than to call the sheriff’s department. I wouldn’t want to get laughed at for saying I can smell hog waste. They’d be like, ‘What can we do about it?’ So, no, sir, I never knew who to call, and still don’t know.”
Before Kaeske hands the man over to Jim Neale, he draws out one more feature of Sewell’s character. Not only is he a first responder and a guardian angel with a green thumb, Wesley Sewell is an amateur baker. He bakes pound cakes at Christmas and delivers them to all the neighbors, including Joyce and Willie Messick and Jimmy Jacobs.
If Joyce Messick is Mother Teresa, the former police officer is a cross between Rambo and Santa Claus. His testimony is yet another lit match in a long string of them. By now, the smoke is rising high over the heads of the Murphy men. The air is crisping, and the sky is adance with the flickering glow.
The kingdom is burning.
If Don Butler could rescue Smithfield from the flames, he surely would. But he can’t. In one of the plaintiffs’ team’s more recent forays into the state’s records, they discovered a secret buried in Butler’s past, something so explosive that, if brought to light in the right way, it could shred every last stitch of the man’s credibility with the jury.
Kaeske waits to deploy it until the hog barons’ Cicero once again twists himself into a pretzel to avoid admitting the obvious—that hog odor is a nuisance. Butler’s stance is an artful dodge: “If a farm is properly designed, located, and managed, it’s very unlikely that it would be a problem for neighbors.” Over and over again, Kaeske asks Butler about documents that came from Smithfield’s files, complaints that neighbors had raised with the Murphy men, with local authorities, and with the media. And, over and over again, Butler defends the indefensible. He even denies that the smell readily attaches to people’s clothes.
With the PR man turning on a spit, Kaeske merrily stokes the coals. He takes Butler’s description of a “well-managed farm” and confronts him about Dean Hilton’s graveyard of bones. He shows Butler the pictures from inside the Greenwood barns, all those hogs slathered in shit. Once again, Butler attempts to circumvent common sense. He isn’t sure the black stuff smeared on the animals is feces. “It could be feed,” he speculates. But even if it’s feces, he can’t make a judgment about whether the hog farm is well-managed.
Kaeske then drops the “b” word. “Do you ever have bones inside your hog operations?”
Butler says he doesn’t.
“Do you know where you would get bones inside a hog operation?”
“The only way I can think of is if an animal died in there and the appropriate practices were not followed. That could result in bones. But in my twenty-seven years, I’ve never seen it.”
“That would be bad management, correct?”
“That would be bad management.”
Kaeske shows Butler a letter that Smithfield sent to Dean Hilton in 2016 requesting that he take concrete steps to clean up his Greenwood operations. “It says: ‘During my visit to the farm, we had to euthanize several animals that should have already been euthanized—nineteen total.’ Have you ever had a problem at your operation where nineteen animals that were supposed to have been euthanized haven’t already been euthanized?”
“No,” Butler says.
“That’s an animal welfare issue, not euthanizing—putting out of their misery—animals that are supposed to be?”
Jim Neale lodges a fruitless objection, and Butler is forced to concede the point.
Kaeske circles back to Smithfield’s letter to Dean Hilton: “It says here: ‘During my visit to the farm, large numbers of rotten hogs and bones were left in the barns.’ Did you ever have rotten hogs and bones in your barns?”
Neale objects again, and this time Judge Britt agrees. Butler’s own farm is irrelevant to the present case. Kaeske, however, elicits the admission he is looking for: rotten hogs and bones are unacceptable. Under the rules of evidence, Kaeske isn’t allowed to push Butler further, to force him to admit that Dean Hilton’s mismanagement created a nuisance. That’s not a fact. It’s a legal conclusion. But the jurors are awake. There is no way they miss the point.
With Butler starting to broil, Kaeske offers the jury another history lesson—the uproar over the hog farms that once threatened the Pinehurst golf club, and the drive for a statewide ban on new lagoons and sprayfields. Butler admits what he can’t deny—that, at the time of the moratorium, he believed that the state would soon phase out lagoons and sprayfields. But he qualifies the admission. “I believed then, and I believe now, that a properly designed, constructed, and managed lagoon and sprayfield system is a very good system. No system is perfect, but I know from experience, and lots of other people would agree with me, that when it’s done right, these are very good systems.”
It is here that Kaeske deploys his bombshell. “You say you know from experience. I guess that’s in part your experience of running your own hog operation?”
“That and observation of hundreds of others.”
“And your own hog operation,” Kaeske says, making sure the jury is with him, “your own hog operation was the subject of complaints by your own uncle for the odor, correct?”
Butler’s face turns a soft shade of purple. He had to know the question was coming. Kaeske raised it in each of the previous trials—the record he found buried in the state’s archive. But in neither case did the query land quite like this, after such a thorough drubbing.
“I became aware that my late uncle complained about my farm to somebody,” he allows cagily. “He never came to me to complain about it. He’s now passed away.” Butler takes a breath. “But I think it would be important for context here that my uncle was a nutcase. He hated my father, and I believe that was the basis for his complaint. It had nothing to do with the farm.”
Kaeske, feeling the rush, lowers Butler’s spit toward the flames. “So, I think this is important for context,” he says, overtly mimicking the PR man. “When I first brought this to your attention, you didn’t say anything about your uncle being a nutcase, did you?”
Butler squirms: “Well, I was trying to be polite, but—”
“No,” Kaeske retorts. “The first time I asked you about it, you said honestly that you didn’t know anything about the complaint, right?”
“That was an honest answer,” Butler affirms.
“But in all the time since the first time I asked you until today, you never went and looked at the actual complaint to find—”
Butler tries to interrupt him. “I haven’t—”
“Excuse me, sir,” Kaeske says, then finishes his thought: “—to find out whether it was investigated by the state or not?”
“I can’t react to a complaint that I know nothing about.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Kaeske rejoins, relishing Butler’s discomfort. “My question must not have been very good. It’s now been some four months since I made you aware of the complaint that’s right there in your file kept with the state for your farm, correct?”
“Yes,” Butler concedes.
“You can go look at your own file for your own farm, right?”
Apparently, Butler has had enough of Kaeske’s grilling. To escape the heat, he speaks his mind bluntly, pugnaciously. “I could if I wanted to. My uncle is dead. Problem solved.”
It’s a glorious moment for Mike Kaeske and the trial team, one that will make its way into the hog farm lore and inspire unceasing laughter in the years to come—the moment when the man who was Boss Hog’s public face for three decades eviscerated himself on the stand. Now, whenever anyone at the Kaeske Law Firm or Wallace & Graham mentions Don Butler by name, the refrain comes back:
He’s dead. Problem solved.
By the time Dean Hilton slides into the witness chair on the ninth day of trial, the earth beneath him—and Murphy-Brown—has been scorched. His only task is to avoid lighting any more matches. It should be simple. He’s just the farmer, after all. He’s not the multibillion-dollar corporation. Why shouldn’t the jury sympathize with him? Okay, maybe his Greenwood operations are horrid to look at. But he can clean them up. He’s a handsome young man with a beautiful family. He’s a churchgoer, a successful entrepreneur. All he has to do is be humble, noncombative, mature enough to weather the criticism and promise to improve. Then he can go back to his life, back to his wife and kids, and forget all about this unfortunate spectacle.
But Mike Kaeske has no intention of letting him.
Dean Hilton is not just another contract grower; he’s an aspiring hog baron, a miniature Smithfield, and he has presided over a boneyard, leaving his animals to die and cannibalize each other. His facilities are a putrefying disgrace, yet he’s too busy to tend to them. He’s the picture of entitled privilege. His indifference is without excuse.
The first part of Kaeske’s examination is all about Smithfield—its procedures, its control over the hogs and feed, medicine and transport, even the height of the grass in the sprayfields. After that, he makes surgical inquiries about the Greenwood facilities—how often Hilton visits them, who his managers are, who is around during state inspections, anodyne stuff. For a while, Kaeske doesn’t offer a hint of what is coming. Then, as if flipping a switch, he makes it personal.
He asks Hilton what he knows about his hog operations—about filling out spray reports, about spray schedules and lagoon sludge, about the volume of waste generated by the hogs. It turns out that a man with an ownership stake in twenty hog operations knows very little about an awful lot. He has people who keep track of all that, he says. But problems can arise when one is an absentee owner. During discovery, it came out that the Greenwood facilities had two sets of spray records, and they didn’t add up. Hilton’s farm manager was falsifying documents.
This touches a nerve. The young hog baron is clearly squeamish about the incident. He tries to hide behind the experts, to say that he turned the documents over to the people at Soil & Water and his attorneys and disclosed it to the court. But he’s never actually gone back and investigated the incident himself. That’s Kaeske’s point. Why didn’t the owner of the hog farm, after discovering evidence of fraud, take the time to figure out what happened?
Hilton’s response comes out like a skipping record. “I turned it over to Soil & Water. I turned it over to the experts. I notified the courts. I notified you. To this day, nothing has ever come back that says there was any kind of violation.”
It’s a transparent dodge, a blatant attempt to manufacture deniability. But Kaeske will never get Hilton to admit that. What he can do is play the fraudster’s video deposition to the jury. Hilton’s former manager is utterly incredible. He divulges nothing about the scheme. All he does is plead the Fifth. But his guilty silence offers the jury a lesson almost as useful as the truth—yet another reason to distrust Dean Hilton, the owner of the boneyard.
Switching topics, Kaeske returns to the subject of Hilton’s ignorance. The young hog baron doesn’t know the name of the feed used at his Greenwood farms, or the ingredients in the feed. He doesn’t know which antibiotics are used, or how much. He doesn’t know the breed of the hogs in his barns, or their mortality rate, or about antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He knows next to nothing about the chemicals emitted by his lagoon, or whether hog farms have an effect on the environment. He’s never read anything in the media or the scientific literature about the effects of hog operations on the community. But he does know that hog odor is not pleasant—at least some of the time.
When Kaeske interrogates Hilton about the control that Smithfield exerts over his farm, the young hog baron gets touchy again. He doesn’t like the insinuation that he’s Smithfield’s underling.
“It’s my farm,” he says. “We make the decisions. It’s my waste. We put it out. We try to be good neighbors. I don’t want to be a bad neighbor. We’ve done the best to make efforts to improve that facility and do things correctly. And I think we’ve done that.”
“Sir,” Kaeske says, “I’m asking you a question about your contract. Your contract says that you’ve got to do things the way that Smithfield wants them done, right?”
The grower retorts: “My contract with Smithfield is no different than it would be with Prestage Farms or any other integrator. It’s my farm. It’s my responsibility. It’s my waste.”
At this point, Dean Hilton does something fascinating. He appeals to Judge Britt. “I don’t know how else to answer the question, Your Honor.”
“You might try just answering the question that’s asked of you,” replies the old judge.
After a few more fruitless thrusts and parries, Judge Britt delivers Hilton a stinging rebuke. “Several times I’ve had to try to encourage you to answer the questions that are asked of you. The way this thing works is this lawyer”—he points at Kaeske—“has the opportunity to ask you questions now. You must answer the questions he asks and nothing more. This lawyer”—he points at Jim Neale—“is going to have an opportunity to cross-examine you, and if he wants to bring something out that he thinks should be brought out, he can do that. But you must answer the question, and you don’t dictate the way it goes. You answer the question he asks you.”
“Yes, sir, Your Honor,” says Hilton. “But—”
Judge Britt peers over his glasses. “But what?”
Everyone in the courtroom is still. No one has ever seen a witness contend with a judge.
“I’m just trying to answer the best I can.”
“No, you’re not doing it the way you’re supposed to.”
Dean Hilton isn’t chastened. “I’m just trying to tell the truth.”
By now, Judge Britt has run out of patience. “Young man, you either answer the questions that are asked of you, or I’m going to cite you for contempt of court.”
“Your Honor,” says Jim Neale, stepping in to avert a total meltdown, “the witness replied. Part of that is correct. And the admonition is heard loud and clear. He’s attempting to answer the question, Your Honor. Understood.”
The judge, however, is piqued. “Well, in the Court’s observation, he’s attempting to do his very best to evade the questions.”
Even Neale seems taken aback. Gingerly, as if walking across glass, the defense lawyer asks Judge Britt to move on. The jurors, however, are riveted. They have just watched a jurist as mild-mannered as any who has ever sat on the bench threaten a witness with jail time.
When Jim Neale gets his turn, he labors to rehabilitate Hilton, showing him pictures of his wife and children and asking if they have to wear respirators to visit his hog barns or burn their clothes when they come home. The answers, of course, are no. Neale gives the grower latitude to talk about the pride he takes in growing hogs and contributing to the economy. He asks Hilton if anybody has ever told him they have a problem with odor from his farm.
“I’ve never been made aware or had a complaint filed,” replies the young man.
Sitting at counsel table, Mike Kaeske knows this isn’t true, and he has the documents to prove it. He takes it up on redirect. “Now, you said that you’re very proud of the fact that in two and a half years you’ve had no violations and no complaints. Is that right?”
“I have not had any violation or complaints from my neighbors. No, sir,” Hilton replies.
“Okay.” Kaeske picks up a sheet of paper. “Why don’t you know about this complaint that was made to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, Division of Air Quality, in 2016?”
At first, Hilton tries to claim ignorance. “There was a call in there, but I don’t think they ever found that there was any issue.”
Kaeske doesn’t budge. “Why don’t you know about this complaint?”
“I wasn’t made aware of it,” Hilton concedes.
“Nobody made you aware of it, is that right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Do you know a gentleman by the name of Wesley Sewell?”
“No, sir. I do not.”
“Did anybody from Smithfield ever tell you that a man by the name of Wesley Sewell who lives on Piney Woods Road was complaining about your hog operation?”
“No, sir.”
Kaeske asks Hilton about another neighbor who voiced complaints about his hog farm, a man who lives across the street from Sewell. Hilton repeats his denial. Kaeske throws the name of a third complainant at him, then a fourth, each time eliciting the same stolid response.
With the young hog baron once again sporting an ostrich costume, Kaeske places Hilton’s ignorance in a wider frame: “Smithfield never told you to go talk to your neighbors to find out how people are getting along with Smithfield’s hogs, have they?”
Jim Neale lodges an objection, but Mike Kaeske doesn’t care. He doesn’t need an answer. The question was mostly rhetorical. It has never been Smithfield’s practice to respond to community concerns with a flashlight. The company has always preferred a hatchet.
At last, Kaeske confronts Hilton about the bones. He’s been biding his time, waiting for this moment, imagining the look on the man’s face when he has to explain the skeletal remains. It’s going to be delicious.
“Tell the members of the jury how many times in 2017 did Smithfield tell you that you had a problem with hog bones or carcasses or hides inside the Greenwood operations?”
The young hog baron plays dumb. “I don’t remember any.”
“You don’t remember any?” Kaeske asks.
“No, sir.”
Kaeske holds up the Smithfield letter he showed Don Butler. “Well, this one is in evidence, and it’s from February of 2017. So that’s pretty much a year later, right?”
Hilton is hemmed in. “Yes, sir.”
Kaeske shows him the page. “And it says right here, ‘carcasses, bones, hides not removed within 24 hours from the barn,’ right?”
“That’s what it says.”
Kaeske’s disbelief transmutes to incredulity. “And you don’t know that that’s one of five times in 2017 that on a site audit, the folks came in and said that there was—”
The young hog baron interrupts him testily. “No, sir. I do not.”
“When did you all fire Dale Meyer?” Meyer is the manager who falsified spray records.
“I don’t remember that exact date.”
“Was it before or after this problem?”
“Before,” Hilton concedes.
“So, this is already the new guy and he’s still having problems with bones and hides and carcasses. Is that right?”
Dean Hilton is caught. He has nowhere to run. Yet, like Adam in the Garden, he passes the buck. “You know, you would have to ask Mr. Miller that.”
“You don’t know the answer?”
“I do not know the answer.”
“Sir, you’re involved in some twenty different hog operations, yeah?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How many tens of thousands of Smithfield’s hogs do you grow?”
“Hundred.”
“One hundred thousand Smithfield hogs?”
Hilton nods, as if his mouth has suddenly stopped working.
Kaeske has a final question. It is a riddle with no solution. Either way, Hilton is damned. “And you run every one of those hog operations for Smithfield the same way that you run these, right?”
Hilton looks indignant, but his credibility is beyond repair. With two words, he concedes the field. “No, sir.”
When Judge Britt excuses the young hog baron, he doesn’t just exit the courtroom. He stomps out like a man scorned. His performance is so appalling, so unremittingly dreadful, that Mike and Lisa, Mona and Daniel and Linda will recall it in meticulous detail long after the trial is over. They will also remember the sympathy they feel for the other Hilton in the room: Dean’s wife. She’s sitting on Smithfield’s side of the gallery, her eyes haunted and her face tear-stained.
She looks like she’s been traumatized.