37,000 sue city each year

[billyblancoNYC]

Who do you call when someone says `Sue the city'? Meet Michael Cardozo

By LARRY McSHANE
Associated Press Writer

December 19, 2004, 8:55 AM EST

NEW YORK -- Consider the case of the soused spouse.

Shortly after midnight on Nov. 14, 1999, a drunken Jose Ordonez returned to his East Harlem home and demanded dinner. When his wife refused, the 240-pound Ordonez allegedly beat her. Police arrived and arrested Ordonez; as they walked the intoxicated suspect down the stairs, he stumbled, missed a step and broke his ankle.

Ordonez's next step? He called a lawyer and sued the cops.

He wasn't alone. Each year, 37,000 people sue New York City. Some of those cases strain the imagination.

There was the Bronx man, legally blind, who drove his car into a concrete barrier _ and sued. (An underpass where the crash happened should have been lighted better, he argued.)

The guy who bought a stolen SUV in a city airport parking lot for $75 _ and sued. (Wrongful arrest, he argued when released in a technicality.)

The two inmates who shot themselves with a smuggled handgun in their Rikers Island jail cells _ and sued. (A guard was responsible, they argued before a judge kicked out their case.)

Representing the Big Apple in the nation's most litigious city is Michael Cardozo, named in January 2002 as New York City corporation counsel. The city's top legal gun runs an office of 650 lawyers in all five boroughs.

"This is the greatest general counsel job that any lawyer could ever have," said Cardozo, a descendant of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. "The variety of legal issues is just so overwhelming."

Included in Cardozo's annual budget is $560 million to pay off lawsuit judgments or settlements. But the city isn't giving money away: New York's lawyers post a pretty fair 52 percent winning mark in court _ not enough to endure as manager for the Yankees, but a figure comparable with private sector firms.

"New York City is endlessly sued _ sometimes with no basis at all, or a concocted basis," said veteran New York attorney Edward Hayes. "Someone is always trying to rip them off. I think the corporation counsel's office is pretty good."

Ordonez might agree. He sought $6.5 million for his ankle, but wound up with zip from a Manhattan jury.

___

The corporation counsel's office is nearly as old as the city itself, created in 1683 as a New World version of an English position called "the recorder" _ a political/legal counselor.

The job disappeared during the Revolutionary War, but it was an absolute necessity by the start of the 19th century. It wasn't until 1849 that the actual office of corporation counsel was established, with a five-member staff.

The office expanded with the city. It now stands as the third largest law firm in New York, behind only the international powerhouse Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and the citywide Legal Aid Society. Its 17 divisions stretch into virtually every aspect of the city's massive legal machinery:

_ In Family Court, 80 lawyers handle cases ranging from a knife-toting schoolkid to a teen drug mule packed with heroin-filled condoms at Kennedy International Airport.

_ North of the city, in Kingston, a half-dozen city attorneys deal with environmental, real estate and zoning issues involving the city's reservoir.

_ The city signs off on $4 billion worth of contracts annually, and the counsel's office approves each one.

"One better be ready for this job 24/7," said Victor Kovner, corporation counsel during the Dinkins administration. "It's very hectic, very demanding."

The tort division, with 180 lawyers, handles cases of every size and shape and takes a staggering 60 of them to trial every week. The lawsuits often linger for years; a case won by the city last month dated back to 1991.

"The amount each lawyer handles is breathtaking," said Larry Levy, a 14-year veteran of the corporation counsel's office now in private practice.

The bizarre cases make headlines. But the caseload also includes thousands of lawsuits, on everything from police brutality to worker's compensation, filed by legitimate plaintiffs with legitimate complaints.

When a Staten Island ferry crashed in October 2003, killing 11 people and injuring dozens more, Cardozo's office settled more than 50 claims within 13 months.

His lawyers also uncovered one fraud _ a Manhattan man who claimed he was a passenger when the ferry slammed into a concrete pier. An investigation showed he had filed more than 10 previous lawsuits against the city, and was only trying to cash in on the tragedy.

"You get some stories to tell at cocktail parties," said Kate O'Brien Ahlers, communications director for the office.

Michael Hess, corporation counsel during the Giuliani administration, remembers his first week on the job in 1998: It included a $76.4 million jury award to a reputed Bronx gang member left paralyzed by a gunfight with an off-duty police officer. The city argued that the officer only returned fire after the plaintiff shot at him with a Tech-9 submachine gun.

"That jury should have thought, `Where is this money coming from?"' Hess said. "It's taxpayer money. That's something to be thought about."

A legal note: Sixteen years later, the case remains on appeal by the city.

___

There are dozens of similar cases down through the years, part of the lore in the counsel's office. In 1990, in one of the most infamous incidents, a drunken dishwasher lost his left arm when he tumbled in front of an oncoming subway train. He won a $9.3 million award from a Bronx jury.

"God bless America!" proclaimed the plaintiff, Francisco Marino, a Mexican immigrant. Six years later, a state appeals court threw out his would-be windfall.

"There's always those bizarre, frivolous claims," said Kovner, whose watch coincided with the Marino case. "I noted them, and try not to think about them."

For Cardozo, such cases are now part of the routine.

He came to the corporation counsel's job from one of the city's top law firms, Proskauer Rose, where he was a senior partner. He spent four years there as co-chair of the litigation department _ but his move into the public sector provided a different perspective.

His office has established a "risk management" unit to assess the lawsuits, paying off legitimate cases but targeting those that appear shady.

"It's so important to say, `That's a lot of baloney. We've got to defend that case," he said.

After all, potential lawsuits can crop up almost anywhere. Consider the case _ never filed _ of the lumbering lawyer.

Levy recalled one night several years back when he was crossing a wet Greenwich Village street. He suddenly lost his balance and tumbled to the street.

"I slipped," he said with a laugh. "And suddenly there were three strangers on the corner shouting, `Sue the city! Sue the city!"


Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

[Kris]

December 24, 2004

A Legacy of Giuliani Years: Damage Suits Against City

By JIM DWYER

Late Tuesday, a federal magistrate released testimony by Bernard B. Kerik and a former girlfriend in an employment discrimination case, one of the legal tangles from his years as a senior aide to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani that surfaced while his nomination as secretary of homeland security was collapsing.

For the Bloomberg administration, the case was just one more in an unusual collection of city lawsuits that grind along, regardless of national politics: dealing with the civil rights damages people claim to have suffered at the hands of Mr. Giuliani or his senior aides.

In the three years since Michael R. Bloomberg succeeded Mr. Giuliani, the city has spent close to $2 million to settle lawsuits brought by residents and city workers who accused the Giuliani administration of retaliating against them for exercising free speech or other constitutional rights.

Among them is a limousine driver, James Schillaci, who had complained in a newspaper article about a red-light sting set up by the police in the Bronx. The same day, police came to his home to arrest him for a 13-year-old unpaid ticket. The next day, the mayor obtained - illegally, Mr. Schillaci said - the record of his arrests from decades earlier and discussed it, inaccurately, at a news conference. The city settled with him for $290,000 in 2002.

A correction worker charged that he was bypassed for promotion because he supported a political opponent of Mr. Giuliani's and that city investigators videotaped the guests arriving at his home for a political fund-raiser. The city paid him $325,000 this year.

Lawyers for the city say they agreed to pay as a way of making the best deal for the public, not because of wrongdoing by Mr. Giuliani or other officials.

The totals for such claims could grow. Dantae Johnson of the Bronx has charged in a lawsuit that after he was shot by a police officer in May 1999, Mr. Giuliani and the police commissioner, Howard Safir, falsely described him as a criminal to justify the shooting. The officer was convicted of assault. The city has denied responsibility.

Eric H. DeVarin III, an assistant deputy warden in the Correction Department, has claimed in a lawsuit that he was denied promotion because of a dispute with Mr. Kerik's former girlfriend. Mr. Kerik has said that is untrue.

The coming issue of the journal CityLaw reports that a federal magistrate has said that an AIDS housing group can proceed with a suit to recover $35 million in government contracts that it claims to have lost as punishment for protests against Mr. Giuliani's policies. The city lawyers say the Giuliani administration had many sound reasons to stop doing business with the group, called Housing Works.

The Housing Works case is part of "a continuing saga of the policies and litigating tendencies of the Giuliani administration," said Ross Sandler, director of the Center for New York City Law at New York Law School, which publishes CityLaw.

Asked about the mounting total for cases directly involving senior officials in the Giuliani administration, Jeffrey D. Friedlander, the first assistant corporation counsel in the city's Law Department, said, "Decisions to settle cases involve questions of litigation judgment, and should not be taken as an acknowledgement of truth as to the validity of a plaintiff's argument - or the city's acceptance of that argument."

Michael D. Hess, the city's chief lawyer under Mr. Giuliani and now his partner in a private consulting firm, said settlements often were preferable to taking the risk of putting a case in front of jury that could prove to be irrational or biased. Given that the city spends hundreds of millions on lawsuits, Mr. Hess said, "Two million is nothing. Sadly, this is a drop in the bucket."

While the city is sued more than 20,000 times a year, cases have been rarely brought in which a mayor - or top City Hall aides - are accused of personally harming an individual. Even more rarely have they succeeded. Under Mr. Giuliani, the city paid $2 million in 1994 to settle claims by a group of white executives at the Off-Track Betting Corporation, who had accused Hazel Dukes, the president of the corporation appointed by Mayor David N. Dinkins, of discriminating against them; she had claimed that they were incompetent.

Prior to Mr. Giuliani, perhaps the most prominent example involved a lawsuit arising from the Crown Heights riots of 1991. A group of Hasidic residents and organizations charged that Mr. Dinkins and the police commissioner, Lee Brown, ordered police to permit the violence. After statements from 15 high-ranking police officers yielded no evidence of such an order, that portion of the claim was dropped.

The early stages of several cases from the Giuliani era, however, produced very different results, uncovering evidence that might have proved embarrassing at trial if the city had not settled. For example, a Correction Department employee, Lionel Lorquet, charged that he was bypassed for promotion because he supported Mark Green for mayor in 2001, and discovered through his lawsuit that correction investigators had secretly videotaped guests arriving at Mr. Lorquet's home for a fund-raiser held for Mr. Green.

A Law Department spokesman said correction officials had been acting on a complaint of coercion when they conducted the surveillance, not because the department's commissioner supported Mr. Bloomberg in the election. Nevertheless, the city paid Mr. Lorquet $325,000, said his lawyer, Norman Siegel.

A former member of the police Street Crime Unit, Yvette Walton, was fired in 1999 after publicly criticizing the unit's operations. The police commissioner, Mr. Safir, said she was dismissed for abuse of sick leave, but testimony showed that her commander had planned to punish her for that infraction simply by docking one day's vacation. When she began speaking out, the matter was abruptly transferred to the commissioner's office.

Mr. Safir "removed Walton's case from the jurisdiction of her commanding officer, and, without hearing or trial or consideration of her overall performance, dismissed Walton as a police officer," Federal District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled. "I find that Walton's dismissal was in retaliation for the exercise of her First Amendment rights."

Mr. Safir disputed that finding, but in November 2002, the city paid Ms. Walton $327,000 and allowed her to retire with her pension, according to Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented Ms. Walton.

At the Correction Department, Herbert Reed, a supervisor, had tried to discipline a correction officer who was close to Mr. Kerik's former girlfriend. That officer brought charges of sexual harassment against Mr. Reed, which an administrative law judge said were false. "The case raises very serious issues about the governance of the department, and particularly, the Bronx House of Detention," wrote the judge, Ray Fleischhacker. "This includes possible attempts to influence witnesses, to interfere with the administration of justice, and to suborn perjury."

Mr. Reed then sued, saying the incident had cost him a promotion, and records show that the city settled the case for $250,000 in 2003. Lawyers for the city asked that the amount be kept secret, according to Lawrence Solotoff, the lawyer for Mr. Reed.

The city paid $490,000 in February 2002 to Timothy Donovan, a police captain, and promoted him to settle his suit claiming that he was punished by Mr. Safir because he would not rewrite a sexual harassment investigation document to put certain senior chiefs in a more favorable light. "It was a case that Bloomberg quickly cleaned up," said Matthew Brinckerhoff, the lawyer for Mr. Donovan.

In March 2000, after Patrick Dorismond, a Times Square security guard, was shot to death in a confrontation with an undercover police officer, Mr. Giuliani responded to criticism of the shooting by releasing Mr. Dorismond's sealed juvenile record. In a wrongful-death suit against the city, his family cited Mr. Giuliani's release of the criminal records as part of a pattern of smearing people hurt by the police. The city paid $2.25 million to settle the suit in 2002.

Derek Sells, the lawyer who represented the family, could not say precisely what role Mr. Giuliani's release of the juvenile records played in the settlement. "It was an embarrassing issue for the city," Mr. Sells said. "It was very clear that it was a breach in the law."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company